All Things Digital

Oh, Max!

I just got through telling someone who asked me that I thought you, Slide founder Max Levchin, was one of the smarter Web 2.0 characters.

Then, of course, you get to be on the cover of Portfolio magazine for its “Brilliant” issue this month. Apparently, Max, you are Silicon Valley’s new “It” Boy.

But for all your apparently massive amount of brain cells, which should be on display at your keynote today at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, how can you be so dumb as to stumble into that same old rabbit hole as so many other Internet hotshots?

Yes, Max: The goofy photo.

In your case, you look good in the coat-and-tie get-up. But please tell me why, oh, why are you balancing a giant lightbulb on the top of your head, as seen here?

It just ain’t dignified!

(Levchin revealed to me via email last night that he actually balanced the monster bulb on his head–but I remain unimpressed.)

Still, you can be comforted to know, though, that you join a legion of other legendarily goony tech figures in the continued march of egregiously wacky pictures.

Such as:

Microsoft’s Bill Gates and his prom date, a PC:

That lovely couple, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, and those irksome colorful exercise balls (not that there is anything wrong with that):

Digg’s Kevin Rose channels Wayne’s World:

Former Netscaper Marc Andreessen as Le Dauphin of France:

And, my personal choice for goofy-de-tutti-goofball photos–Amazon’s Jeff Bezos with his noggin in a box:

Here is a video of me and Silicon Alley Insider’s Henry Blodget on Yahoo’s Tech Ticker, discussing the DNA of the Google (GOOG) founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and the impact on the company’s recent stock meltdown.

Our diagnosis: Not crazy, but iconoclastic.

Here’s the video:

Last night, Walt Mossberg and I co-hosted our annual holiday gadget fest for the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley.

Now in its fifth year, it was called “Making a List: The Fifth Annual What’s Hot and What’s Not in Personal Technology” and took place in Palo Alto, Calif. Our guest were Marissa Mayer of Google and tech consultant Greg Harper.

Walt and I typically show off several devices we think are interesting and try to identify some important trends.

Here’s a video of Walt, Greg and Marissa at the event:

(I still am having problems with the Brightcove player, so I uploaded the video to YouTube.)

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With yesterday’s lofty (some would say overly windy) announcement from Google that it is going to invest a bundle to try to make clean energy cheaper than coal use, we thought it was the perfect time to post this very funny video about a trio of roomies battling over how to go green, with one named Green turning into the Norman Bates of energy efficiency.

(It’s written and directed by Clea DuVall, whom you might have seen as an FBI agent on “Heroes,” who stars in it with Leisha Hailey of “The L Word” and Carla Gallo.)

My favorite line from Green about not contributing to paying the electric bill, which Larry Page might have said to Sergey Brin: “Oh, yeah, I’m not going to be able to cover your mass consumption of energy.”

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

So I paid a visit a few weeks ago to the new offices of 23andMe, a start-up that has gotten a lot of attention for its unusual aim of joining together DNA research and social networking.

It’s an arena sure to be interesting, so here’s a video I made of my tour of 23andMe:

The service, which rolls out today with the launch of its Web site, bills itself as a “Personal Genome Service” and its motto is “Genetics Just Got Personal.”

And, indeed, the company–as well as several others (such as also Silicon Valley-based Navigenics)–hope a lot of people want to learn about their genes and what that information means, all in an attempt to carve out a lucrative new Web space by making DNA consumer-friendly.

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Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Good god, Google at $2,000 a share?

Oh, it’s just that Web sprite Henry Blodget (pictured here), at it again, over at his blog on his site Silicon Alley Insider.

The former Wall Street analyst enjoyed brief fame in the last Internet mania for predicting that Amazon stock would go to $400 a share (and it did–but not for long!). Then later, he got investigated for touting stocks publicly that he disdained privately and, thus, was barred from the securities industry for life.

Yesterday, the can’t-help-himself Blodget wrote a much-noticed post arguing that the search giant’s stock could go nuclear.

Wrote Blodget:

Remember a couple years back when some analyst floated the idea that Google could eventually be worth $2,000 a share–and was ridiculed from coast to coast? Well, first it’s worth noting that Google is now almost a third of the way there. Second, it’s worth noting that $2,000 a share would mean a market cap of about $750 billion, which–given a reasonable time horizon–just isn’t that far-fetched.”

Um, Henry, it is far-fetched, as to be borderline fanciful. So, please stop taking all those cold medicines that make you all fuzzy-headed, because your theory even makes Facebook at $15 billion seem reasonable.

Given my obvious link to Google (see my disclosure here again, if you did not click at the top), it might surprise you that I think the current price for Google–zeroing in on $600 a share–is moderately insane.

But it’s fueled by the fact that there is not a whole lot out there to invest in if you want to be in the Internet market. Yahoo? Maybe after that 100 days is up. eBay? Skyped! Microsoft? Zzzz. Amazon? Still, in the end, a retailer.

Thus, search behemoth Google, which keeps gobbling up share right in the middle of the boom in the search-ad business, wins the beauty pageant and the faux diamond tiara.

For now. While Google is a real star in its core business (and what a business it is–it’s like having the water franchise in the Mojave desert), there are a lot of obvious issues the company will be facing as it moves forward.

Not today maybe, but three or four years hence–and the seeds of trouble are already planted.

You could go on about the lack of stunning success in its diversification efforts–admirable as some of them are. You could wonder, whither YouTube? You could worry about that DoubleClick deal getting slowed down or even stopped by the government.

You could focus on too-high development and employee costs. A downturn in the economy and the ad market is a recessionary nightmare all around and especially for Google. And did we mention the potential power of social networking?

Or that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin might soon have to return to the alien planet from whence they came, taking with them those big-brained, bike-riding, solar-power-generating Googlers and leaving all us small-brains to flail around once again on the Web?

But while we can all have a good long giggle at Henry’s cheek, I think I have to side solidly with TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington on this issue (and, those who follow stupid tech blogging insider stuff, you know it’s not my first or even second impulse).

Except for the too-aggressive suggestion that someone “muzzle” Blodget, Arrington (pictured here in a disturbingly Blodgety pose) wrote a passionate and most excellent post on Blodget’s latest prediction.

He is entirely right that even if Blodget was not being serious, such outlandish statements are not helpful.

Writes Arrington persuasively:

Henry Blodget made his name by predicting outlandish price increases for Internet stocks in the late nineties. A lot of people lost a lot of money (or, all their money) by listening to his recommendations. The government charged him with securities fraud in 2003 and he was subsequently banned from the securities industry for life.

“But Blodget is a bit of a one-trick pony, and he likes to stay in the headlines. So he continues to build cases for big valuations of Internet companies. The only difference is he publishes these thoughts on his blogs. And people still listen to what he has to say.

“He isn’t always bullish (he’s recently trashed Yahoo and eBay). But he can’t seem to contain his regular predictive outbursts that such-and-such stock is worth massively more than it is now.

“When he’s talking about Facebook being worth $6 billion to $20 billion that’s OK, because it isn’t a public stock and no one is going to go out and throw away their life savings. But when he builds a case for Google’s stock to go to $2,000/share, he’s crossing a line.”

I agree wholeheartedly.

And, admirably, Arrington also points out criticism he himself gets for being “overly optimistic about young start-ups.”

He is, but he’s right that it does not matter nearly as much–who really cares that much if another venture capitalist doesn’t get his gold-plated wings–as much as those companies in the public market where regular people can lose hard-earned money trusting faulty advice.

I was always offended back in the last dot-com frenzy, when Wall Street analysts were giddily recommending stocks in companies they knew full well were not up to snuff and then walking away with bags of money from mutant initial public offerings they engineered.

The press, including myself at times, were bad enough by not being as tough as we should have been, but the double-dealing and “friends-of” stock roundelays were indeed sickening to watch.

At one point, in a story I tell a lot, when an investment banker said to me that he was about to take a company that was “pre-revenue” public, I asked if perhaps it wasn’t easier just to go mug some old lady on the street and grab the money in her purse to speed things along.

This should not happen again. This new round of Internet innovation–and, yes, bubble–has much more significant and useful and terrific companies in it and many deserve to grow in a healthy environment.

And there’s already enough hype without writers like Blodget piling on, especially since he is (and always was) such an excellent and convincing writer.

It wasn’t always thus for Blodget in regards to Google, by the way. He was a bear on it as recently as January 2006, as reported by Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski, back when he was writing for “Good Morning Silicon Valley.”

So let’s return to that little oasis of sanity and not wallow in mania and heedless speculation.

In the name of safety of old ladies everywhere (and I am veering in on that demographic all too soon), we all can do better than that.

It’s time for Vanity Fair’s annual ranking of 100 powerful business moguls, the 2007 New Establishment list, which always make me feel a little oily after reading it for reasons I cannot quite grasp.

Nonetheless, we press on, as it has become filled with earnest billionaire techies in recent years, rather than those scary media barons of yore.

Still, and no surprise, AllThingD.com’s uber-boss Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. leads the list for his audacious $5 billion grab of Dow Jones.

But No. 2 and No. 3 are Silicon Valley stars Steve Jobs of Apple and those separated-at-birth Google twins (Larry Page and Sergey Brin). Reasons: Duh, iPhone for Jobs and the twins’ sheer do-no-evil evil plot to take over the known world and now, apparently, space.

But after these, it’s more of a parade of scarier investment types (except for folksy-but-probably-scary Warren Buffett at No. 5), flashy pols (Bill Clinton, Michael Bloomberg) and the usual coterie of Hollywood and media types (Steven Spielberg, of course, as well as Dick Parsons of Time Warner).

In any case, here’s the number rundown for digital types:

No. 10: Bill and Melinda Gates (for their philanthropy)

No. 15: Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg (him for Net stuff; her for renewed fashion empire)

No. 17: Howard Stringer (Sony struggles, but who doesn’t like Sir Howard?)

No. 23 Jeff Bezos (he managed to lose the Amazon.bomb moniker)

No. 56: Mike Moritz (new entry on the list for the clever VC)

No. 61: Jeff Skoll (but for media and not for Web stuff)

No. 62: Vinod Khosla (another new VC entry!)

No. 71: Paul Allen (just because!)

No. 83: Jonathan Ive (more iPhone mania)

No. 98: Arianna Huffington (Daaaarling, we’re thrilled)

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Given all the management upheaval at Yahoo, it is nice that The Wall Street Journal’s Kevin Delaney focused his attention on what might someday come for the current leader, Google, which gets to be the can-do-no-wrong company of the moment, a status Yahoo used to own.

In a story appearing today, Delaney writes about what I have seen happen to every Web company I have covered as they grow larger and ever more powerful: More people leave for start-ups in search of more money, more exciting opportunities and, most important, more impact.

Giving several examples of young entrepreneurs who have bugged out from Google on their own or to even hotter companies like Facebook, Delaney pens a classic tale of Silicon Valley, where restlessness is like breathing.

That’s one of the things that makes the industry so vibrant, and also a bit unstable.

Google execs pointed out to Delaney that the company’s attrition had stayed steady at under 5%, has a 90% acceptance rate of its job offers and is on track to get 2 million resumes this year.

But sheer numbers and the attraction to other companies of picking off a Googler, as well as many employees now vesting their options, means it looks more like the vaunted cafeteria there (and the raft of other almost ridiculous perks) will not be exerting as big a pull as it used to.

Google now has about 12,000 employees, compared to when I met co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page many years ago.

While Google still had really great food then, there were only a hundred or so employees and it was the company that poached from the shooting stars, like Netscape, Sun and others.

And, of course, the then-hot Yahoo.

I recall one lunch where Page–always more of a worrywart than the laid-back Brin–mused about how to make the Google experience even more attractive and give employees more leeway, especially if the company decided not to do a public offering.

Now, of course, as one young techie in the Journal article noted about the image the company is developing with some engineers: “They just assume Google is now ‘the Borg,’ now ‘the Man…’ ”

That’s just wrong. Actually, it’s the Goog.

Can I resist?

Nope!

So here’s a link to a lovely movie of Google founder Larry Page arrving at Foo Camp this weekend via helicopter. The video and also these photos of the helicopter and Page (and former Googler and Blogger founder Evan Williams) were taken by Scott Beale of Laughing Squid (how does a squid laugh?), a site that says it is dedicated to “art, culture and technology from San Francisco and beyond.”

I wrote a post and did a video yesterday about the annual alpha-geek confab, run by tech publisher Tim O’Reilly, where hundreds come to kibitz about the outer reaches of the future of technology and also, well, camp in tents.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

This BoomTown column was first published in The Wall Street Journal on January 21, 2002. All rights reserved.

You’d be forgiven for thinking someone has forgotten to clue this leading Web-search firm in on the new reality of the tech universe, where fun has been declared illegal and the few remaining West Coast online companies are laboring to look buttoned-down dull; where profligate spending is over; and where vision statements are now limited to “we offer well-defined, fee-based premium services,” “we believe in cost controls” and, most of all, “we’re profitable.”

But Google’s still alive and kicking precisely because, underneath its goofy decor, it has always hewed to the conservative business approach that is now gospel. Since its founding in 1998, the start-up was best defined by what it didn’t do: It didn’t go public prematurely, didn’t raise or spend too much venture funding, and didn’t initiate 23 businesses at once. In short, it didn’t participate in the cesspool of greed and excess that the rest of Silicon Valley dove into with abandon.

That’s allowed Google today to expand its work force, stabilize its advertising base, contemplate new projects, add customers and breathe pretty easy in the dour atmosphere of the tech world.

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