At somepoint Congress needs to offer some small tax incentive and companies will slowly confert with that business justification. (Like the Electric Vehicle credit for network hardware - come on Cisco lobbyists get on that!)
Los Angeles is actually a much better place to live now for people in tech than the bay area. All the young people want to live in overpriced SF and the ones with families want to live in the south bay.
In LA the thriving tech community is all in west Los Angeles, where Venice is the hip San Francisco (but waaay cheaper) and Santa Monica / West LA has great homes (also much cheaper than say Palo Alto [if you exclude beach front]). And these 2 neighborhoods are 10-15 minute commute, very different than the hour commute between most of the south bay and SF.
I agree. scheduled tweets is to Hootsuite what filters is to Instagram. Turns out practically every person that does anykind of marketing with social media in the world wants it
It would be fun to have hackathon to design a better 911 system - I'd bet 24 hours worth of work would produce some amazing stuff (probably not super-ultra reliable production ready, but some cool stuff that could save lives)
Pretty cool. Only comment would be to add in something that takes into account Estimated Revenue or Valuation (no way Airbnb can be considered 7th).
I'm not sure of an easy data source for that so you might be able to use the Crunchbase api for Total Funding as a first order approximation.(Kind of surprised Crunchbase doesn't have latest valuation / revenue numbers, rumored or real)
Pinterest is in a great spot. Everybody pins products - they'll be able to monetize. I'm betting this'll be a decent investment. I see why Tapiture is doing the same thing for the men's market here in LA http://wp.me/p1fNUP-gK
Color was a completely reasonable investment, great team, ceo, vision. The failure wasn't the fact that they invested, its the check size. The guys at Sequoia should have said, great - love the idea, here's a $1M seed, make it happen. Produce a product we'll follow on with $5M, show traction, then you get the big round to scale.
A big round up front has the appeal to avoid the need to waste a product ceo's time of fundraising round after round. I think the big learning from the color investment is that a big round sets expectations unreasonably high. The press made a field day out of it as a sign of a bubble. The hindsight learning is big upfront rounds don't make sense, iterative investment that maps to the iterative learning of the company makes the most sense.
There's usually an easier way to check if a username exists - skip the login form and try the signup form. If you can't sign up with that name because its taken, then it exists :)