Billion Dollar Lessons from A VC Investor in GeoCities

Yahoo is closing GeoCities. This prompted VC Fred Wilson to reminisce about his old venture capital firm Flatiron Partners' hundredfold return on GC:

"I learned a lot from that deal. I learned that the Internet is all about people expressing themselves on pages they own and control. I learned that a business deal made over dinner and a handshake can turn into hundreds of millions of dollars, I learned that good partners are worth every penny of returns you give up to get them, and I learned that selling too soon is not too painful as long as you don't sell too much. And most of all I learned that you can make 100 times your investment every once in a while. And when you do, it's something special."

Source: Gawker

Google Should Become a Hedge Fund!

Google's Next Multi-Billion Dollar Business

Google's AdWords and AdSense cash-cow businesses are breathtaking in their scale. But where to find the next multi-billion dollar business? So what should be the next engine for growth? Google should become a hedge fund, muses this post!

Why?

"Well, consider that, by virtue of its ubiquitous search products, Google has real-time access to the intentions of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. That seems like data that could be valuable for investing purposes..."

Interesting thought, that.

$100 Billion Security Industry a Booming Market for Job Seekers

Homeland security, corporate security, cyber security, critical infrastructure security, retail and healthcare security - you get the idea. Security management is a vital, global industry - in excess of $100 billion - according to ASIS International, a leading association of security professionals...

More from here

The Man Who Is Creating a World Without Poverty - The Banker to the Poor

The Man Who Is Creating a World Without Poverty - The Banker to the Poor
Thursday, January 10, 2008

By Richard Appelbaum, The Santa Barbara Independent

The idea for microcredit began in the early ’70s, when Muhammad Yunus — an economist from Bangladesh’s Chittagong University — led his students on a field trip to a poor village, where they interviewed a woman who made bamboo stools. Yunus learned that she had to borrow money at rates as high as 10 percent per week for the bamboo she used — a cost that left her with only two pennies a day as her total income. Had she been able to borrow under fair conditions, she would have been able to amass an economic cushion and rise above a subsistence level.

Realizing there must have been something terribly wrong with the economics he was teaching, Yunus took matters into his own hands. Yunus some of the usury victims with loans out of his own pocket. The sum total of his investment was the equivalent of 27 U.S. dollars. This modest experiment succeeded in putting the women on a self-sustaining cycle of business growth, lifting them out of poverty. It was also an epiphany for Yunus, who realized that tiny loans could make a huge difference in the lives of people trying to eke out a livelihood with small business ventures.

In this interview from December 2007, UCSB Professor Richard Appelbaum and Professor Yunus discuss the origins and reasons for the success of the Grameen Bank, as well as Yunus’s call (in his latest book, Creating a World Without Poverty) for the creation of “social businesses” where profits would go not to investors but for poverty reduction.

Read the entire interview from here

Ten 2008 Predictions for the US - from VC Cheap Seats

Ten 2008 Predictions from the VC Cheap Seats…

Michael A. Greeley 1/10/08

2008 will be a big year in the exponential economy — will we have a recession? Will oil stay above $100 a barrel? Republican or Democrat? Patriots, Celtics, and Red Sox all in one year? While all of these issues are of the utmost importance, Michael offers up a set of predictions about issues that will have a big impact on the US economy. More from this post

Next Billion $ Idea More Likely from Existing Technologies

The bulk of innovation is low-amplitude and takes place over a long period. Companies should focus on refining existing technologies as much as on creation, says this interesting post @ BusinessWeek

So the next billion dollar idea is more likely to come from innovative use of existing technologies rather than from absolutely new technologies...that reminds me of Google, who did not invent search - not by a long shot - but refined something that had existed for half a decade and built a multi-multi-billion $ enterprise

$100 Years to $1Billion in 10 Years - Impossible? Think Again

"What if you'd had the crystal-clear foresight (provided only by a crystal ball) that would have allowed you to invest everything in one of the top-performing stocks, each and every year, for 10 years running? The answer -- and it's no exaggeration -- is that an investor who played the game perfectly, beginning with a mere $100 in 1997, would now be a billionaire."

So says this post, interesting, and well, just about possible!