I was watching a video of Mike Butcher, he said something along the lines of he likes recessions because they clear away the people who are out for easy money and leaves those who want to build something worthwhile. Thus while the clickmango’s and boo’s perish the Betfair’s carry on.
I’m not too sure about whether we are going into a recession, if so it seems quite mild to me (especially when the sun is shining like on Monday). Maybe its because I’m a startup founder and thus an incorrigible optimist but things don’t seem to bad. I was a little concerned the last time I rang my bank for a new loan, but, lo, they stumped up the cash without much sweat. Credit crunch indeed, it sounds like a new Arrington blog on finance.
Underpants gnomes
Nevertheless even the appearance of a recession does have its effects. Editechial wrote a good post about VCs starting to focus on business models and are being a little harder on the 1. Get users 2. ??? 3. Profit! approach much beloved of South Park’s Underpants Gnomes and web 2.0 startups. The NY Times also reports that VCs are finding both the public market and acquisition route drying up leading to some soul searching on Wall Street. Even the mighty facebook is getting the jitters as unnamed investors and employees rush around looking for a cut price exit.
I agree with Butcher. Slowdowns are a better time for good ideas as they reduce the background noise. Alongside our music product our developers are about to break ground on a new advertising product. Now I don’t want to get into specifics at this stage because it won’t be ready for launch until the end of the summer at the earliest. We are very excited about it as we think we have found the equivalent of AdWords for social networks. A big claim but stick around and you’ll get to judge for yourself in a couple of months when we release the app.
Pic: Archi3d
