Here’s a video of star VC John Doerr reciting his 10 tips for start-ups to follow in the economic downturn, dispensed at a VentureBeat roundtable event on the downturn yesterday.
And the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers VC didn’t need a massive, noisy PowerPoint like Sequoia Capital to make his quick and clear points, which he delivered in four minutes flat.
Tomorrow, BoomTown is trying to find a silver lining from a group of entrepreneurs at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn” roundtable event.
Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic will join Max Levchin of Slide, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, O’Melveny & Myers’ Sam Zucker, and Nirav Tolia of Web 1.0’s Epinions.
Along with my group, for whom I am planning all sorts of verbal tortures (”Exactly how much do you make?”), there is also a star-studded investors panel.
Here’s one certainty in the hubbub that has resulted in the wake of the departure of high-profile exec Ben Ling from Facebook last week: COO Sheryl Sandberg is definitely not responsible for the melting of the polar ice caps.
That’s the joking question–Was global warming Sandberg’s fault too?–that was asked at a staff meeting at the social networking start-up last Friday afternoon, after the news of Ling’s departure, on the heels of some other previous employee exits, suddenly morphed into a series of increasingly vituperative posts on the Valleywag tech gossip site that all centered on what blogger Owen Thomas called Sandberg’s “reign of terror” at Facebook.
The truth of the situation, though, is actually a lot more interesting.
It looks like Facebook will definitely be moving from its funky multi-building setup in downtown Palo Alto, Ca. to a centralized campus in Silicon Valley, said several sources.
The high-profile social networking company–which has been undergoing a major managerial shift of late as it matures from its startup status to that of a more established Web player–has been growing quickly to almost 600 employees today from a couple hundred last year.
In a move BoomTown is still trying to noodle over, longtime Facebook exec Matt Cohler (pictured here) will be leaving the social networking site to become a general partner at Benchmark Capital.
Cohler, who is currently Facebook’s VP of Product Management, was one of its earliest hires and, as I wrote once, seemed to me like “the Yoda figure at Facebook to me.”
He will not leave the prominent social networking company for the venture capital firm until the fall, though.
And, after he goes, Cohler will remain as a “special advisor” to Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and senior management.
While it is not yet clear exactly what kind of business case study Facebook will turn out to be in the end–a raging success or a raging something else entirely–that has not stopped Harvard from feting the hot and hyped social networking site.
That would be the Harvard Business School Association of Northern California, which will bestow upon Facebook its 30th Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award on June 17 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport.
Dear Sheryl,
First off, I hope you had a nice first day at Facebook as the new COO, or, as BoomTown is going to call you forthwith: Where-The-Buck-Now-Stops.
Now that you have been issued your official social-networking company flip-flops and gotten your arms around the Beacon issue (here’s a Cliff Note on that debacle for you: AVOID!), I am here at the head of the complaints line, ready to start yammering on.
And today’s yammer? For the love of SuperPokes, please fix Facebook’s mail!
Here’s a video I did about the first day of DLD–Digital, Life, Design–put on my Hubert Burda Media in Munich this week.
The three-day conference focuses on digital innovation, science and culture. It is chaired by publisher Hubert Burda and serial Israeli investor Joseph Vardi and hosted by Stephanie Czerny and Marcel Reichart.
I was here to [...]
I am now at the DLD conference in Munich, which is put on by Hubert Burda Media, a gathering that has become one of Europe’s most interesting in recent years.
The three-day DLD–which stands for Digital, Life, Design–focuses on digital innovation, science and culture and has the most cosmopolitan audience of any conference out there.
It is [...]
Since we are refraining from writing about the current deals being mulled over by Facebook (see this post and also this disclosure)–one for its international ad business with rivals Google and Microsoft vying for the privilege of losing money in a guaranteed revenue deal and another to complete a mega-round of funding that will value [...]
Do you need me to draw you the bright straight line from Skype to Facebook or can you see it all by yourself?
Ok, for those who refuse to live in a little place I like to call reality, let’s review the news coming out of eBay yesterday regarding their 2005 acquisition of Skype for the then unheard of price of $2.6 billion.
The Internet auction giant declared the purchase of the once hot online telephone startup a dud Monday, taking an asset-impairment charge of $1.43 billion for the deal.
In addition, Skype founder and CEO Niklas Zennström was out. The move, said eBay in a filing, represented “updated long-term financial outlook for Skype.”
Quickie translation: Major buyer’s remorse.
While everyone has been focusing on the management roundelays at Yahoo this week, with President Sue Decker’s announcement of changes in the company’s ranks (here is my translation of her memo), the good folks over at Facebook have been quietly fine-tuning their titles.
So we are all up to date, here is the new–and much more helpful–Facebook page on top management.
And it seems now that all the executives at the hotter-than-ever social-networking company have become simple vice presidents (although some get extra titles, too).
Yesterday, I posted on the management shifts at Facebook, most particularly the changing of COO Owen Van Natta’s title to chief revenue officer and vice president of operations.
I also gave a rundown of all the top execs at the fast-growing social networking company and their duties (there are an awful lot of vice presidents with operations in their title, which I shall leave to another post to parse).
But, silly me, this is Facebook after all and I forgot the photos of each of the members of co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s brain trust, who will presumably make the popular site hugely profitable and an inevitable part of every man, woman and child’s life on the planet.
Right, boys? (Because there are no ladies in this group.)
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
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