Sunday, February 25, 2007

Challenge of Predicting Winners

I just read a bit on the payout to YouTube from the Google Acquisition (Internet News, CNN). Part of the discussion around this is the talk about the founder who only got $83M (as compared to $3xxM for the other founders) who bailed out early and choose to go back to school. The poor guy. What a bad $200M decision.

At the same time, when I saw an old colleague at an event at UCLA a few weeks back, we both were discussing how hard we felt it was to predict success in this kind of venture. Why did YouTube win? Why did MySpace win? Certainly MySpace's tie-in with music was a genius move. But even if you came to me with that idea, I'm not sure I would have bought it.

As I look at more and more start-ups predicated on viral growth, and at the use of social marketing, it's becoming simultaneously easier to understand some aspects of viral growth and still a gap in understanding what's going to be that "hook" that will grab people at the end of the day.

No comments: