Thursday, October 19, 2006

James McNair video

Awesome video of James McNair, a 3-time prison escapee in the USA, bamboozling a policeman who has stopped him running along railroad tracks shortly after escaping from a maximum-security prison. Fantastic article about this guy in the New Yorker... I sense a biopic in the making.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

PayPal

Great article reprinted below from today's New York Times about PayPal and its network of former employees who have spawned (inter alia) YouTube, LinkedIn and various others ... I remember when Ben and Tony met with x.com in Palo Alto during the boom, back before it morphed into PayPal. So many companies bombed, I'm always fascinated by the stories of the ones that made it.


It Pays to Have Pals in Silicon Valley


Published: October 17, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 16 — Every now and then, a group of former PayPal employees get together to catch up on life and work. It might be at a backyard barbecue, a birthday celebration at a classy San Francisco restaurant or a simple late-night reunion at someone’s house.

Almost inevitably, the conversation turns to business, and soon enough, a new start-up is born or has found a financial backer. This is what happened last year with YouTube, the Web video company that Google has agreed to acquire for $1.65 billion. It also happened the year before with Yelp, whose Web site lets users review doctors, dry cleaners and other local services.

Since 2002, when dozens of employees left PayPal after it was bought by eBay for $1.5 billion, those workers have gone on to start or join a new generation of Internet companies and other ventures. They have remained a tight-knit group, attending each other’s parties, helping to shape each other’s business plans, backing each other’s companies and recruiting each other for new projects.

Silicon Valley was largely built by networks of people and companies whose interlocking relationships help to spawn new start-ups. But the PayPal alumni have been unusually prolific, especially given the company’s modest size compared to Internet giants like Netscape, eBay and Yahoo.

“PayPal may have the highest ratio of individuals going off to start or finance new start-ups in the Valley,” said Scott Dettmer, a founding partner of Gunderson Dettmer, who has been providing legal advice to venture capitalists, start-ups and entrepreneurs since the 1980’s.

None of the PayPal network’s other offspring is anywhere near to matching the success of YouTube. But the PayPal alumni have started a number of promising ventures, mostly revolving around the Internet.

Among them is LinkedIn, the largest business-oriented social networking site, which was started by Reid Hoffman, a former PayPal executive vice president. It received funding from, among others, Peter Thiel, PayPal’s co-founder and former chief executive. Mr. Thiel himself started a hedge fund, Clarium Capital, which he said has grown from $11 million in assets to more than $2.3 billion in four years. He also runs a small venture firm with other PayPal alumni.

Another new Internet venture is Slide, a company started by Max Levchin, a PayPal co-founder, that makes it easy to publish, find and view slide shows on the Web. A handful of other start-ups are in earlier stages of development.

David O. Sacks, the former chief operating officer of PayPal, started a movie production company called Room 9 Entertainment. Its first film, “Thank You for Smoking,” a satire about the tobacco industry, has grossed more than $24 million at the box office. Mr. Thiel, Mr. Levchin and Elon Musk, another PayPal founder, all helped finance Room 9. Mr. Sacks said he had other film projects in the works, but he is also in the process of starting a new Internet company, for which Mr. Thiel provided some funding.

Mr. Musk started a company called Space Explorations Technology, or SpaceX, that is developing relatively low-cost rockets and is backed with $100 million of his own money.

YouTube was hatched by Chad Hurley, Steven Chen and Jawed Karim, all PayPal alumni, early last year. At a backyard barbecue last summer, Mr. Karim showed the site to a friend, Keith Rabois, a former PayPal executive who now works at LinkedIn. Mr. Rabois later told PayPal’s former chief financial officer, Roelof Botha, who is a partner at Sequoia Capital, the venture firm that has backed Apple, Google and Yahoo, among other big names. After meeting with YouTube’s founders, Mr. Botha got Sequoia to invest in it.

“What happened at PayPal is pretty unusual in that the PayPal alumni have ended up founding some pretty impressive teams and companies,” said Ron Conway, an “angel” or early-stage investor who has backed more than 400 start-ups.

Mr. Thiel added: “We had an incredible team at PayPal. Four years after the fact, I think it is far more incredible than we realized at the time.” He said only 200 of PayPal’s 900 employees at the time of the sale were engineers or managers.

The story of engineers and executives leaving a company to start new ones is as old as Silicon Valley itself. AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on the region’s professional networks, traces the phenomenon back to the late 1950’s, when eight engineers left Shockley Semiconductor to start a competitor, Fairchild Semiconductor. A decade later, two of those engineers, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, left Fairchild to start Intel, one of Silicon Valley’s earliest companies.

But the network of PayPal alumni is unusual in that it operates a bit like a microcosm of Silicon Valley itself, and its achievements help to explain one of the enduring paradoxes of the Internet age. Even as the global network, in theory, makes it easier for innovation to happen anywhere, most blockbuster Internet successes continue to be born and bred in Silicon Valley.

The effectiveness of the PayPal network stems, in part, from the fact that it includes all the elements needed to put together a start-up: Talented engineers and entrepreneurs with innovative ideas and a love of the start-up life; experienced managers who can turn ideas into businesses; and financiers, most notably Mr. Thiel and Mr. Botha, but also Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Levchin and others, who have used their PayPal money to become angel investors. The fact that most key PayPal employees were in their 20’s and 30’s, and not ready for retirement, helped too.

The long hours, sleepless nights and intense pressure of life inside a start-up often create strong bonds among its employees. In its early years, PayPal was all about pressure and the struggle for survival. The company was losing millions each month. It was besieged by hackers who used technological trickery to siphon off huge sums from the company’s coffers. And it faced blistering competition from, among others, eBay, which eventually admitted defeat when it shut down its own online payment service and bought PayPal.

Mr. Levchin said the pace at PayPal was so intense that employees had little time for much else. “We all became each other’s social life,” he said. “Because of that, we formed really deep connections.”

Many of those bonds were already in place, and life at PayPal merely strengthened them. From the beginning, PayPal hired people whom its founders or other early employees already knew.

Mr. Thiel tapped his network of friends from Stanford, many of whom had worked at the Stanford Review, a libertarian magazine that Mr. Thiel co-founded in 1987. They populated PayPal’s business ranks. Mr. Levchin, for his part, hired engineers in large part from his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which had earlier been home to the team that developed the software that would be the basis for Netscape’s Web browser.

One of the first engineers Mr. Levchin hired at PayPal, for example, was Russel Simmons, who went on to become a co-founder of Yelp. Mr. Simmons, in turn, helped convince another engineer, Yu Pan, to join PayPal. Mr. Pan went on to become one of the first people hired at YouTube. Other University of Illinois recruits included Mr. Chen and Mr. Karim, two-thirds of YouTube’s founding troika. “YouTube is like a PayPal reunion,” Mr. Levchin said. A YouTube spokeswoman declined to make Mr. Hurley and Mr. Chen available for this story.

The long-standing bonds created an atmosphere of openness and trust, which not only helped PayPal succeed, but also made it easier for members of the network to embrace each other’s post-PayPal projects.

The founding of Yelp in the summer of 2004 is a prime example. It happened after a lunch celebrating Mr. Levchin’s 29th birthday at the Slanted Door, an upscale Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco’s Ferry Building. There were about 16 people at the lunch, a majority of them ex-PayPal employees, Mr. Levchin said. At one point, the conversation turned to how hard it was to find, say, a good dentist. That got Mr. Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman, PayPal’s former vice president of engineering, talking about a Web site where people could review local services.

On the walk back from the restaurant to their offices — an incubator for start-up companies run by Mr. Levchin — Mr. Stoppelman and Mr. Simmons discussed the idea further. “We were bubbling with excitement,” Mr. Stoppelman said. “As soon as we got back to the office, we pulled Max aside and pitched him the idea.” Mr. Levchin liked it, and the next day he agreed to back the project with $1 million.

When Mr. Stoppelman and Mr. Simmons were ready to look for venture capital, Mr. Rabois helped them put together a presentation. Mr. Hoffman has frequently offered guidance to the company. And Mr. Thiel also gives Mr. Stoppelman business advice, sometimes when the two jog together along the San Francisco waterfront.

The support that members of the network give each other can happen in more informal ways. Mr. Hurley, the chief executive of YouTube who was once a Web designer at PayPal, for instance, sketched the logo for Room 9 Entertainment, according to Mr. Sacks. And when YouTube was starting out, Mr. Rabois and Mr. Hoffman made space for their former colleagues at the Palo Alto offices of LinkedIn. Those offices were once home to PayPal.

Of course, not everything that members of the PayPal network touch is guaranteed to be a hit. The financial success of Yelp, Slide and even LinkedIn remains far from assured. And although it is not strictly a product of the PayPal network, Epoch Innovations, a company that offered a product designed to improve the reading skills of those who suffer from dyslexia, has already folded. Mr. Rabois worked at Epoch and Mr. Thiel invested millions in it.

Still, former PayPal employees say the intense struggles that defined PayPal’s short life as an independent company proved to be good preparation for a new generation of serial entrepreneurs. “Nothing focuses your attention quite like losing money and the sense that you are going to die soon.” Mr. Hoffman said.

Mr. Thiel added: “It was a successful company, but the success didn’t come too easily. People learned not to be too pessimistic and they learned that you have to do a lot of things right.”

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Grindhouse





I've been a Rose McGowan fan ever since Doom Generation.

Sniffle + youtube/google

A busy - and hayfever-intensive - in Melbourne... in the Magistrates Court Mon, Tue, Wed and Fri (for little things) and otherwise busy on (overdue) paperwork and on preparing for Court next week.

Fascinated by the google/youtube deal. Can we call the top of the market, or is this simply a temporary high-water mark for the wave? The easy answer is "great deal for google - it bought youtube for $1.6b and its shares immediately popped $4b+". But this is not the right answer - the merit of the purchase will become clear over months and years and a short-term increase in GOOG's share price is simply noise.

It is simply impossible to say at this stage whether youtube is a commercially viable model, based on a $1.6b purchase price. And also impossible to say whether youtube's legal problems are real (and if so, how serious?).

For my money, youtube would appear to have plenty of legal issues to consider. Yes we've all watched emmalina do yoga, some guy play his guitar and some fat kid imitate star wars. But we've also all watched music videos, funny ads and that cool scene from the OC when Summer dressed up like Wonder Woman. - presumably all uploaded in breach of copyright.

Sunday, October 08, 2006

rachel bilson in pyjamas


rachelbilsonpyjama
Originally uploaded by larafan21.
The next season of the OC starts soon...

Atomic County


Atomic County Signed Poster
Originally uploaded by nikescream.
How cool is this? Poster from Atomic County.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

ie7

Am trying out Internet Explorer 7...

It's certainly a huge improvement from the previous version - not that this is such an achievement, as I think I heard that the Beatles played the launch party for ie6. Obviously the tabbed browsing (ripped off from Firefox) is good, and the user interface seems better (though IMHO it is likely to date badly). Oh - and there's the (Firefox-ripoff) search window in the top-right corner.

There is absolutely no doubt it remains slower than Firefox, however - and this is a biggie. For me to use a slower browser I would need to see some compelling new features - and I don't see any. At best, it seems to catch up with the current Firefox. But slower.

Monday, October 02, 2006

A few films I'm really really looking forward to



The Science of Sleep

Little Miss Sunshine

I'm A Cyborg but That's OK - the new Park Chan-Wook (thanks for the tip lucas)

The Boss of It All - the new Lars Von Trier (but taking a trip back to his old, funny days)