I have been thinking a great deal about what the Facebook IPO means. While
reading many posts up at Hacker News about whether we are in a bubble,
lamenting Zynga, or skewering Groupon, I am left wondering what will really
become of Facebook.
The tl;dr version is that I can’t sign up for Facebook at this price. I
have many friends there, and I am happy for them, but I find the valuation a
bit too rich to be comfortable investing.
I started off using Bing Finance to use their stock screener to see if I
could paint an interesting picture of how Facebook compares to other public
companies.
First I started with valuation. Setting a minimum valuation of $74B (which
is the low end of the Facebook filing range) yields 95 companies. Notable
in that list is my current employer at $101B. Other notables –
Anheuser-Busch ($120B), Apple ($532B), ATT ($193B), Chevron ($203B)... (more)
It seems I can’t have any discussions with entrepreneurs without the topic
of Instagram coming up. They all think that now is their time to strike the
iron since the valuations are going to the stratosphere.
I want to be very specific and clear on this point. Facebook bought
Instagram. Instagram was not sold to Facebook. That’s an important
distinction, and lends well to the conclusion of this discussion.
Before we get there, for all the entrepreneurs out there, I wanted to share
some experience on the topic of road shows. The very first road show in
which I participated was... (more)
I was reading an article about how Google is going to change their algorithms
to penalize sites that are overly optimized for SEO. It’s no surprise to
arrive at an end state where rules of a system are gamed when pecuniary gains
are available. The entire SEO industry has grown up around trying to figure
out how to optimize sites for Google’s black box. To ensure an improved
customer experience, this action was inevitable.
Paul Graham recently wrote that building a search engine was a frighteningly
ambitious startup idea. He accurately points out that the once spartan
design of... (more)
I got asked by a young local entrepreneur to be his mentor. He was looking
for help in how to think about his most recent pivot, and how to take his
newest creation to market. As I started asking some questions about what he
was doing and why, I found myself wandering into racing metaphors. They
made sense at the time, so I wanted to share them here.
Two Stroke
Do you require constant fiddling? Are you extremely temperamental? Likely
to just up and quit because the conditions are not just right? These are
the hallmarks of the two stroke engine. They have more power for thei... (more)
The title is a bit misleading as I have been in role for close to two years,
but Windows Phone has been in market for a year. During the course of the
past year, I learned quite a few things, and have been asked a number of
questions from the community. I wanted to take this time to share some of
those learnings, and answer a variant of the most common question I get (both
internally and externally): “how are you guys doing this?”
Upon starting in role, the person who recruited me for the position (Charlie
Kindel) walked me through what he calls the 5Ps. This served as a very ... (more)
Brandon Watson is Director for Windows Phone 7. He specifically focuses on developers and the developer platform. He rejoined Microsoft in 2008 after nearly a decade on Wall Street and running successful start-ups. He has both an engineering degree and an economics degree from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as an MBA from The Wharton School of Business, and blogs at 
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