Paul Graham did a post recently, "The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups", which offer basic but valuable advice on a range of issues. Graham, however, does make one major mistake when it comes to Mistake #2: Bad Location. Here's what he says:
"Startups prosper in some places and not others. Silicon Valley dominates, then Boston, then Seattle, Austin, Denver and New York. After that, there's not much. Even in New York, the number of startups per capita is probably a 20th of what it is in Silicon Valley. In towns like Houston and Chicago and Detroit, it's too small to measure."
I'm hoping Graham is just talking about the U.S. given there are plenty of other places around the world nurturing exciting start-ups. In Toronto, for example, the start-up community has really started to flourish over the past year, although it would be nice to see more start-up capital. I'd hazard a guess that Jason Fried (37 Signals) would have something to say about Graham dissing Chicago. While there are certainly advantages to being in Silicon Valley (money, connections, suppliers, etc.), there are other places that have attractive features. A start-up in India, for example, would have a defnite cost advantage over Silicon Valley, while you could argue Chicago has far more cultural appeal than Mountain View or Cuperinto. Then, you have Vancouver, which is not only beautiful but also the home of some very exciting start-ups such as DabbleDB and NowPublic. Stowe Boyd has some thoughts about some of Graham's incongruities, as does Jeffrey McManus and The Fish.
More evidence of the Google Juggernaut comes from an eMarketer report that the search behemoth will account for 25%, or $4-billion, of the U.S. online ad market this year. That's truly impressive and explains why Google sports a market capitalization of $128-billion. Another way to look at the eMarketer report is there will be $12-billion of non-Google ad revenue this year for the rest of us. In the scheme of things that's a lot of money, and that total will climb as companies allocate more of their ad budgets to the Web. The key question is where this money will be spent. Google will clearly get more than its fair share, while portals such as Yahoo, AOL and MSN will thrive as well. While I'm now clearly biased after joining b5media but you have to believe blogging/new media content networks will also emerge as viable advertising vehicles. The market received a nice vote of confidence earlier this week amid reports Sequoia Capital (those VCs who invested in YouTube) is putting $5-million in Sugar Publishing, which operates four blogs. This comes on the heels of b5 raising $2-million from J.L. Albright and Brightspark. Bottom line: if you believe in the theory a rising tide lifts all ships, Google's success is a positive development if puts the spotlight on the online ad market and encourage more companies to spend more.
In the beginning, blogrolls served a few purposes: they gave blog writers the opportunity to highlight other blogs, they offered readers a way to discover new blogs, and they served as a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" tool to boost your blogosphere profile and/or Technorati rating. Today, the blogroll has become a bit of an anachronism. Sure, there are people who continue to add new blogs from time to time but I would argue many blogrolls are either collecting dust or have become outdated. For people still keen on growing their blogrolls, the problem is the larger they become, the harder they are to navigate. Truth be told, blogrolls have become an increasingly less relevant discovery tool for me. In many cases, I find new blogs through links provided on other peoples' posts. So perhaps it's time for the traditional blogroll to go the way of the dinosaur. Maybe it's time for new discovery tools to replace the blogroll. One example is TheGoodBlogs (disclaimer: I'm an advisor), which has developed a customizable widget that constantly highlights new blogs. Since I installed it two months ago, it has proved to be a valuable and useful tool. Another blogroll alternative is Dave Winer's Share Your OPML, which allows people to share their blogrolls. And then there's RSS readers, which are replacing blogrolls as the way for people to track the blogs they like. So the ultimate question is when will blogrolls disappear? In my case, I'm not ready to get rid of it completely but I am beginning to believe my blogroll needs to be smaller and used to highlight the blogs I really like and new ones that I find interesting.
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