Golden hunting season

Via Benchmark Capitals hemsida sprang jag på denna artikel, ursprungligen från Time Magazine. Läsvärd. Några intressanta passager nedan:

* "...If an idea seemed as if it might make money someday (remember Pets.com?) that was good enough. Today's upstarts are more fully formed and are often led by wealthy veterans of the first boom. They know Google's not the only shopper. Yahoo! has spent close to $100 million for start-ups Flickr and Jumpcut, among others. Facebook may be next, with Yahoo! said to be mulling a $1 billion offer. With investors on track to inject $500 million into new Net firms this year--twice last year's total, according to a Dow Jones VentureOne report--this may be the start of a golden hunting season."

* "...One challenge is knowing when to sell. MySpace was sold last year to News Corp. for $580 million, a figure a MySpace founder who no longer had control of the company recently called "one of the largest merger-and-acquisition scandals in U.S. history." MySpace might be worth more than $3 billion today.

* DO SOMETHING UNIQUE
- Farecast.com
- Kayak.com

* AMASS AN AUDIENCE
- Zillow.com, offers free, instant valuations of 67 million U.S. homes.

* COMMUNITY=CASH
- Yelp.com
- "Yelp's founders say they were inspired by their frustration in trying to find good doctor recommendations online. Their idea was to improve on existing tools like Citysearch, which Yelp's founders call the old dog."

* TAKE ON THE TITANS
- "Remember the last company to take on Google? It was a little video start-up called YouTube, which out-cooled Google Video, grabbing 46% of the online video market to Google's paltry 10%."