Tidbits

WalMart takes a bunch of magazines out of its stores.

Google video on the secret history of silicon valley:

More Junk for Thursday

Excuses people give to the cops when they are busted for speeding. I was once in a car with someone who was doing about 90 mph in a 65 mph zone and when she got pulled over she was shocked. She thought people didn't get pulled over unless they were going 100 mph or faster. She told the cop this. He gave her a ticket.

Count Bismarck died the way I hope to die (and almost did in the past).

And finally! Someone puts a name to something I've been experiencing for years. Phantom vibration of your cell phone. Via Valleywag.

Also from Valleywag, some insight on the Facebook/Microsoft/insane-valuation stuff. Pretty good insight, at that.

And an utterly bizarre and random video of some girl in the 80s doing a really bad job of playing Star Wars on the trumpet. Much funnier than it sounds. Or, not really, actually.

Financial Modelling for Start-ups

Guy Kawasaki's blog has some info from a guy at Redfin on how they did the financial modeling for their startup. Back when I was an Apple junkie I loved Guy Kawasaki. But regardless of that, this is a very interesting and informative article.

This is what my company did not do:

At least in the financial model, give yourself as much time to grow as you can.

Or this:

Since there's a natural limit on growth, be ready for the question: "What would your market-share be in year five?" If it's over 20%, take the jillion-dollar projection down a notch. Even a hit like iPod doesn't have 20% market-share. You'll be lucky to come close to 20% of any market.

But we just might do this, although revenues don't necessarily mean profit:

Hit $100 million in revenues within five years.

VCs are living in the 90s

Someone else agrees with me that VCs these days are not making very good investments and they are still living in 1999. It seems like the easy money web 2.0 bubble may be coming to a close, though not as disastrous a close as the last bubble. Hedge funds and Private Equity firms are not doing so well this year and valuations are going up without revenues to justify them.

I don't think we are going to have a crash but I think this round of easy money being available to any entrepreneur with a half-baked idea is coming to a close. Which is unfortunate because I have a lot of half-baked ideas and haven't raised any money yet.