Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• The Innovation Bubble: Copycats and “me too” startups

  When I talked earlier about why it might be better to start a tech company outside of Silicon Valley , perhaps the biggest point was avoiding the echo chamber. The fact that Yammer, a Twitter clone for the enterprise, had won the TechCrunch 50 conference, reinforces this point. Therese Poletti had a great column in Marketwatch that discussed this a little. Product features and improvements are important to keep technology evolving, but some of these seemed like incremental extensions to existing products and ideas, and not really "new, new things," to quote the popular Michael Lewis book of the same title. She goes on to question whether these are sustainable businesses by themselves. So the variety of startups I saw makes me wonder: are many of these companies long-term horizon plays that are not yet obvious winners? Or are many just flash-in-the-pan startups, looking for a quick exit via an acquisition by a larger company, since the initial public offering market is pretty much... Posted Sep 23 2008, 08:44 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Venture Capital

• Innovation, Disruption and The Economics of Free

  Hank Williams managed to stir up quite the controversy with his recent post lamenting the rise of free and blaming the VCs . His assertion is that the venture capitalists have made free, ad-supported businesses the norm and effectively "ruined it for everyone else" (my words). I believe it should be possible to start a small business and to have a small number of profitable customers, and to earn a living. From there, it should be possible to work hard, and to grow your business into something substantial. Until recently, this was the American way, and it applied to technology as much as to any other business. But no more. In today’s “free” world, in most online business categories, it is inherently impossible to start a small self-sustaining business and to grow it. This is because in the digital world, advertising, the only real revenue stream, cannot support a small digital business. If businesses were based on the idea that people paid for services then small... Posted Apr 08 2008, 10:41 PM by Tim with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: Rants, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Venture Capital, NextNY, Notches