YairR
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Great stuff from a great team - looking forward to more to come.
"There’s been a stigma for a long time that LA companies start fast but don’t finishing (sic) strong." Interesting - I've been working w/ startups and internet companies in LA for nearly 5 years and have never heard this before. Applied Semantics is now Google AdSense, which is a pretty damn strong finish if you ask me. LowerMyBills, PriceGrabber, and Shopzilla have combined for billions of dollars worth of exits and these exits were 5+ years ago in the lead generation space where exits in the billions are extremely rare and thus, incredibly impressive. There are even firms like ReachLocal (ok, perhaps not as 'sexy' as 'Silicon Beach' startups by the beach) based in Woodland Hills that have generated significant long term growth - in this case in local business ads market. Michael, I think it's the nature of the beast to go on the wild rides that startups experience - the highs and the lows - but I don't think it's unique to Los Angeles or anything to be worried about at all. We have some big winners here, just as they do up north, and just as they do in NYC, and some diamonds in the rough too.
Interesting startup and Nice UI. Looking forward to seeing how it works out. Erin - you come to your senses in the last 2 paragraphs despite the ludicrous title [that - to be fair, hooked me, so well done w/ the bait].
As you say, Linkedin is "a huge business that’s not exactly experiencing a slow in growth." Linkedin is valuable to recruiters as a sourcing platform precisely because it has 161 million users. Sure, as a "social network," it may have weaknesses - especially in comparison with Twitter and FB when it comes to time on site, page views, and interaction, but the sheer volume of [updated] professional profiles and it's sourcing offering for recruiters is the gold standard in the industry. There are other very important components of recruiting - from branding to distribution to targeting, but as a sourcing tool LinkedIn seems, by all accounts, pretty 'useful.'
I would add a 5th element to Ben's key reasons to hiring an MBA today: Meeting other high-caliber people & developing relationships. It's nice that Mark Leslie and Andy Rachleff at Stanford now teach key lessons in building enterprise sales channels and Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao at Stanford teach novel approaches to incentives. Sounds like a massive improvement over the criticisms of MBA programs in the '80s and '90s. And even though it's so obvious, you can't pen a contrarian view and support MBAs who have been ridiculed in the startup world without at least mentioning the omnipresent (past, present, future) power of the network - Ambitious peers and potential co-founders, faculty, entrepreneurs, etc. I see many brilliant technical founders & non-technical founders out there looking to hire a team, or raise capital, or partner in a biz dev deal - and it's much easier to do those things with a strong professional network - one of the byproducts of a competitive MBA program.
"YouTube, on the other hand is a clusterfuck of poorly labeled, limited-value content. The majority of the Web suffers the same problem." - Spot on. The opportunity is massive, here, obviously and the creation of true subject matter / content experts [Chill's roots in creating and recognizing influential experts from it's Namesake days] is one that also shouldn't go unmentioned.