New York Times and slide.com
New york times does a piece on Max Levchin and slide.com. I’ve met Max and I think you could toss him into any startup and he could make it work. Its a good article on what it takes to start company after company.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/business/28invent.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
November 1, 2007 at 2:22 am
Hehe, ur a next billionaire:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/plentyoffish_one_billion.php
or you could just wish you were…. LOL
November 2, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Wonder how he can sell slide for more 1.5 billion $. Seems like utopia to me. And what happens if Max never will make it worth that amount?
November 2, 2007 at 4:19 pm
lol, this one from Levchin is gOOOOOd…
“Okay, but how does Levchin eexpect to make money? There are no traditional ads on Slide today. But there is nothing stopping marketers from creating their own slideshows. And about 80 or 90 of these are featured on the site’s directory and the desktop software, where they function essentially as visual catalogs. But in order to work as advertising, they must work first as content because no one is forced to watch them. Once people who are looking for them do find them, reports Levchin:
The odds of you actually buying something from one of these after you choose to go to it is 9 out of 10. By the time you find the Zappos shoe catalog you are probably in the mood to buy shoes. ”
!!!!!The odds of you actually buying something from one of these after you choose to go to it is 9 out of 10.!!!!! ROTFLMAO
http://tinyurl.com/2povmy
Maybe in the actual brick&mortar store yes, but online… it’s pure speculation..
Any way currently i see slide.com as a pretty large pit without bottom.. that is no bottom for investors money.. does anyone even know how they produce money excerpt by venture funds?
November 12, 2007 at 4:06 am
I saw the piece before seeing this post and thought 1. this guy is good. 2. it’s too bad he can only feel useful in the world by the size of company he’s running and how much money it will make. 3. I honestly felt badly for him - he sounded kind of miserable! Am I alone in seeing that?
November 12, 2007 at 10:29 am
Coming from the ancient world (over 40’s plus a lot more
) I am totally bemused by the comments people make today.
I remember getting a frontpage write-up as the “overnight” youngest self-made millionaire in the country of Oz (and I actually made things in my biz.) I was 24.
It was all real. Capital shy, so colossal hard work was involved, but very high profits. All innovation and sales effort combined with luck and timing.
I guess in today’s dollars it *was* like 100 million.
I think the malaise that afflicts virtually all of the extremely young unbelievably rich *overnight* successes of today is exactly the same as the Rock Star Disease:
They didn’t really do anything. They were just “there” at the right time.
They feel/know that they didn’t “earn” it. They are right. The numbers make no sense at all, at all.
The key to a real Life is quite simple: Do your best every day and enjoy every day based solely on that and never judge yourself by the perceived results of others.
On my daily beach stroll today, I watched a young boy KiteSurfing for about half an hour. Never in my wildest dreams of youth could I have mastered his skill with wind and wave (and in my youth I DID fancy myself in physical skills). He was poetry in motion. A natural. Could not have been more than sixteen. Hasn’t even been alive long enough to have learned to do it that well…..
Requisat en pacem,
November 12, 2007 at 10:46 am
A special comment for Markus re the Max Levchin piece.
Actually, Markus, it is extremely rare for someone to “recover” from his experience and do anything like it again.
People who experience the “flashbulb” of success are more like the old-fashioned camera flashbulb. Extremely bright, but one-shot.
I offhand can’t think of a single young person who “flared” twice. Not since Marc Andreeson and the epic waste of the Netscape potential.
AND that includes having all that “new” money to throw behind the next wild chance.
It isn’t real. It has to be treated like winning the lottery from a present ticket from your old Aunt. It needs to be enjoyed. It needs to be secured and put to work in the real world of real production of honest worth. THEN you can go and try to win the lottery again. It could happen. But it can’t be the same thrill ever again.
Pacem en Terra.
November 12, 2007 at 3:43 pm
2dot0 yes Levchin sound quite miserable, but alas it is his reality and things that make him happy maybe don’t make him happy. He sounds like a workaholic. BTW the Slide thing is pretty lame, he has some cool other projects like Yelp. The whole point of making money is enjoying life and not trying to build some meaningless company, and yes the Slide.com is MEANINGLESS!! instead of investing in some R&D tech/biotech company he invested time and money in Flickr clone…
Himagain, i agree to lottery thing partially. The thing today is that you have to prove making money from scratch, something that Markus and others less known did. There will always be bubble millionaires but they lack experience strength just like the most continental trees lack strength to survive strong winds vs. harsh wind sea area trees have. The tree that is exposed to wind gusts of over 60 mph most of the times vs. the trees that never experienced it stay intact while the others go to shatters. Same like houses by the sea here in Croatia, we have wind gusts of over 60 mph often and it does not happen nothing extraordinary while if it happens in continental area the wind of same degree there you can see the people who get literally without their roof. It is just the experience that differers from being intact vs. having your whole life end up-side-down.
November 12, 2007 at 3:44 pm
hehe “things that make him happy maybe don’t make him happy.” LOL
things that make us happy maybe don’t make him happy