Howdy, I'm MG Siegler. I’m a general partner at Google Ventures and a columnist for TechCrunch. This is where I collect things.
Selected works. Some haikus. Some investments. Ask away. Archive.
Showing 82 posts tagged startups
So you're trying to compare this little iPad drawing app, which you've obviously invested in hence the plug here, to something as game changing as Photoshop? You must have just got back from the bar.
Asked by Anonymous
No investment in Paper, just a fan.
Also, your comment is basically the same one that has been made about every “game changer” before it became big. Hence the term “game changing”.
Also, I was actually at a bar.
A great run by a good friend. Ryan probably had one of the most under-appreciated roles in the startup ecosystem these past few years: managing developer relationships and expectations for a company constantly shifting their feelings on those relationships.
We’re probably the last big website. As far as I know, we’re the last startup to become high-profile on the Web.
Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp in an interview with Liz Gannes.
He might be right, because everything now seems to be mobile-first or mobile-only.
Meg Graham on the rise of Cards Against Humanity, and the eight Chicago-based friends behind it:
While would-be entrepreneurs chase venture capital funding and dot-com riches at incubators and startup boot camps around the city, the Cards team rejects investors, refuses to sell the game to retailers or license it to other manufacturers, and hasn’t bothered to appoint a CEO, let alone create a management structure. Their business plan has the sophistication of a lemonade stand.
And just as refreshing, actually.
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My DJ Face.
Steven Johnson responding to a New Yorker column by George Packer:
Sure, companies went public or sold for staggering sums, but companies have been going public or selling out for generations without creating tens of thousands of millionaires along the way. The defining difference between Silicon Valley companies and almost every other industry in the U.S. is the virtually universal practice among tech companies of distributing meaningful equity (usually in the form of stock options) to ordinary employees. Before companies like Fairchild and Hewlett-Packard began the practice fifty years ago, distributing stock options to anyone other than top management was virtually unheard of. But the engineering tradition that spawned Silicon Valley was much more egalitarian than traditional corporate culture.
Many great points here.
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“Spaceflight finale: To some this may look like a sunset. But it’s a new dawn.” – Col. Chris Hadfield
Appropriate.
To all of you complaining…why?
Not me. I really think this is a great move for all parties involved. Congrats to the entire Tumblr team.
I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr!
We promise not to screw it up. Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO. The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve. Yahoo! will help Tumblr get even better, faster.
They really executed this announcement well — right down to the GIFs.
As always, everything that Tumblr is, we owe to this unbelievable community. We won’t let you down. Fuck yeah, David
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Tumblr: still shipping through the madness. Fuck yeah.
Allison Fass reporting on Peter Thiel’s talk at SXSW this year where he recounted the time in 2006 that Mark Zuckerberg turned down Yahoo’s $1 billion offer to buy Facebook:
His only partial rationalization at the time was that in the history of Yahoo, it had made two $1 billion offers that were also turned down. And those were to eBay and Google. “At least I could actually make a pseudo-scientific argument that in every case Yahoo offered $1 billion and it was rejected, it was the correct thing to do,” said Thiel.
I should say that I know absolutely nothing about any sort of talks/deals between Tumblr and Yahoo. And I’m not sharing this to suggest that Tumblr should turn down such a supposed offer (my initial gut feeling is actually that such a partnership would make a lot of sense). I just found it fascinating given how closely the reported number is to the key number repeated in Thiel’s story.
