My knowledge of hurricanes is limited, mostly, to watching Anderson Cooper on CNN standing in the wind and rain. It never seems all that bad.

But as I sit here at SFO waiting for my much delayed flight to The Lobby conference being held near Puerto Vallarta this week, I can’t help but notice that Hurrican Jova is expected to become a “Category 4 hurricane” (no idea what that means exactly), with winds reaching 131 mph. And it’s touching down at…Puerto Vallarta:

Hotel employees were taping up windows, cleaning out water channels to avoid flooding and were planning to pull in all beach furniture later today as Jova gets closer.

The hotel’s approximately 90 employees are planning to take shelter in an interior ballroom if things get ugly.

Organizer David Hornik says everything’s going to be fine. My former boss Heather Harde, who’s already there, says not to even think about getting on a flight: “definitely don’t fly…no rain or winds here yet, but the sky is completely overcast and rather ominous looking.”

Screw it. Let’s do this.

What happens to Apple now that Steve Jobs is gone? Check out this 2009 post from Chris Dixon that compares Apple and Steve Jobs to Sony and Akio Morita titled MAN AND SUPERMAN.

Akio was famous for slamming focus groups, instead focusing on building things that consumers didn’t know that they want until it already exists. Steve Jobs felt the same way. Few consumer electronics companies have that kind of courage.

Reprinted in full below, with his permission:

MAN AND SUPERMAN

There are two broad philosophical approaches to explaining the forces that drive world events. The first one is sometimes called the Great man theory, neatly summarized by the quote ”the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” This view was famously espoused by the philosopher Hegel and later Nietzche, who called such great people Ubermenchen (“supermen”).

The alternative view argues that history is largely determined by a complex series of societal, political, institutional, technological and other forces. This view argues that great people are more a product of their time than the times are a product of them.

You can apply these theories to companies, in particular to the founders of technology companies who keep their companies great long after their “natural” life cycle. Most successful companies start with one great product and ride its growth but fail to pull off a second act.

The companies that defy this natural cycle are invariable run by “supermen” (or women). Akio Morita founded Sony in 1946 and was a very active CEO until 1994. At the time he left, Sony had a $40B market cap. Today it is valued at $28B. Akio had an incredible run of hit products: the first transistor radio, the first transistor television, the Walkman, the first video cassette recorder, and the compact disc. Akio ran Sony based on his intuitions. For example, he ignored focus groups that hated the Walkman, saying:

“We don’t ask consumers what they want. They don’t know. Instead we apply our brain power to what they need, and will want, and make sure we’re there, ready”

Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976. He was pushed out in in May 1985 when the company was valued at about $2.2B. He returned in 1996 when Apple was worth $3B. Today it is worth $169B. Jobs famously micromanages every product detail and like Akio makes decisions based on intuitions.

Bill Gates was the co-founder and CEO of Microsoft, building it to an astounding $470B market cap. Under him, Microsoft had multiple acts, among them: DOS, Windows, Office, and enterprise server software. Since Steve Ballmer became CEO, the company’s value has declined to $223B. I’m sure Steve Ballmer is a smart and passionate guy, but he’s no superman.

Some observers like the author Jim Collins think great companies are all about culture, not a singularly great leader. Collin’s “built to last” case study companies included Circuit City and Fannie Mae, both of which have been catastrophic failures. His “portfolio” has underperformed to S&P.

It is convenient to think you can take greatness and bottle it up and sell it in a book. In fact, life is unfair: there are geniuses and then there are the rest of us. When great leaders go away, so does the greatness of their companies.

TechCrunch Disrupt champion Shaker, an Israeli virtual world startup, has closed a $15 million round of financing. The round was led by Shervin Pishevar at Menlo Ventures. CrunchFund was already an investor in Shaker, and participated in this new round as well.

Other investors in this round include Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Troy Carter and Rami Beracha from Pitango.

Here’s the TechCrunch post about Shaker winning Disrupt last month, and here’s their launch post and demo video.

The company was founded in Israel but recently opened a San Francisco office, which will be the new company headquarters. Shaker was founded by Ofer Rundstein, Yonatan Maor and Gad Maor.

Pishevar has a serious crush on the company. I asked him to tell me why he invested, and how he first met the team. In his own gushing words:

I was blown away by talent of the Shaker team. I’ve been searching for many years for what only Shaker has accomplished. We at Menlo Ventures are excited to be leading this major investment in Shaker. Shaker is the human serendipity engine. Shaker is going to touch and transform human connection and entertainment worldwide.”

Mike, so here’s the crazy story of how I met them. I was working on scouting a Jedi Council retreat in Cabo. I met these amazing guys from Mexico at Summit Series who are were working on an entrepreneurs resort. I began mentoring one of them, Bear. He wanted to learn how to become an investor and VC in the future. My advice was to go forth and travel around the world scouting for amazing startups and bring it back. I didn’t expect to hear from him for months. Instead, a mere 3 weeks later he had traveled to Egypt and Israel, and I flew into Burning Man. He said, “Shervin, I listened to you! Thank you! And I found this amazing startup, Shaker. And they are flying into the Playa tonight and they are competing in Techcrunch Disrupt!” That night I met them and was very impressed with them and their vision. But with no connection I had to wait until the following Tuesday to get the demo at a Samovar in San Francisco. Within a minute, I knew what I saw was the future. I had been looking for this for years. Their product execution was nearly flawless. A very hard feat to accomplish given the vision. The next day I brought them in to meet the rest of the Menlo partners. They agreed and we were off! Meanwhile, while we tried to come to an agreement on an investment, Shaker won Disrupt! I actually got the term sheet done and signed from the streets of Haiti the following weekend while I was volunteering in Haiti for jp/hro! Hopefully, there will be karma in that and all of the serendipity that brought us together.

I am very excited that Shaker is my first major investment at Menlo! Go Shaker!

Why’d we invest? Like Airtime, Shaker addresses the difficulty in meeting new people on the Internet:

“We are trying to address the problem of what has happened the last 10 years of social media,” says Parker, who was also the founding President of Facebook. “Your social network has become more rigid and constraining.” Airtime, it seems, will be more about meeting new people. “Facebook is about identity, the people you already know,” says Parker. “It has little to do with people you don’t know.”

Shaker is a virtual world where you can meet new people using your Facebook identity (picture and basic information). It’s strangely addictive. And we’re very excited to be investors.

…which you can only get if you have a blog and replace the header logo with the Apple logo 🙂 . Or you visit an Apple store three times. A nice surprise, I didn’t even know it existed (here’s more on it).

This was a real checkin, even though most of my Foursquare checkins are part of my fantasy life. Just bought a shiny new Macbook Air.

Nuance has acquired Seattle-based startup Swype for something more than $100 million, says a source with knowledge of the deal.

I’m a big fan of Swype, and this is a brilliant acquisition by Nuance. Swype first launched at a TechCrunch conference in 2008. It’s software for mobile devices, and helps people input text at far faster speeds than through normal methods. It will soon be on over a hundred million devices.

Nuance already has T9, a predictive text application first developed in the 90s, and T9 competes directly with Swype. Oddly enough, the cofounder of Swype, Cliff Kushler, also founded T9. Check out this CNN article earlier this year on Kushler.

I have no idea how this acquisition affects the existing Nuance T9 product. I assume we’ll hear more about that in the future from Nuance.

Sidenote – Swype didn’t win the launch competition at the TechCrunch event. They came in second to Yammer. I wrote an article last year on why the best company doesn’t always win, even when the judges jump out of their chairs to try it out. From that article:

And like UJAM, Swype stole everyone’s hearts. People wanted to try Swype themselves, and you can see all the judges getting up from their seats after the demo to try it themselves. People were jumping up and down in the audience. Etc. Watch it all here.

Swype also had amazing founders, and since TechCrunch50 has gone on to do amazing things. Their software is now being built into tens of millions of mobile handsets a year, and they collect a fee for every install.

But at the time they just weren’t far enough along to win the show. Their first big licensing deals were ahead of them, and the judges felt more comfortable with Yammer as the winner. And like UJAM, a lot of audience members were really angry that Swype didn’t win it all.

Congratulations to the founders and executives (Mike McSherry, Cliff Kushler, Aaron Sheedy, Loreen Milbrath and Mark Illing), employees and investors (the company has raised just $14 million). I loved this application from the first time I saw it. Hopefully this acquisition will let the team continue to create even better technology to help us with those damned tiny keyboards. If this was a company that I met today for the first time, I’d invest aggressively in it (yes, I know, hindsight, etc. But you know what I mean).

You lived. You really, really lived.



I want to welcome MG Siegler as our newest general partner at CrunchFund. MG, who I worked with for several years at TechCrunch, will join me and Patrick Gallagher in the next couple of weeks.

More on this shortly.

Update: MG’s post with details on his decision is here. TechCrunch post on his future role as a columnist there is here.

Google announced a real time “premium” analytics product last week. Pricing? Contact them to find out.

It’s $150,000 per year. Wowza.

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The Premium features (including faster data, unsampled reporting, more custom variables) can be enabled on your existing GA account within 2 business days of you joining the program – no retagging necessary.

Please let me know if you’d like to set up some time to discuss further.

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“No one likes a tattletale, Danny… except of course, me.” Ty Webb (Chevy Chase), Caddyshack.

An interesting twist in the Zynga lawsuit with Vostu over game stealing – At least one Vostu employee, and a source says there are more – has approached Zynga with “evidence” of just how overtly Vostu was copying popular Zynga games. A source tells me that these employees are asking for payouts from Zynga to turn over the information.

Two thoughts on this. First, this is really bad for Vostu if it’s true (and I think it is) – if you tell employees to just go copy something exactly there’s a good chance that someday that’s going to become publicly known. Second, I wonder if these employees understand that they are going to get sucked into this litigation now whether they want to or not, and there’s little to no chance of getting any kind of payment from Zynga. Their best bet is probably to simply hope for a Zynga job offer once the dust settles.

Nick Bilton, the NY Times lead technology writer, may be one of the most heavily recruited tech writers around. He was our number one most desired hire while I was at TechCrunch. And apparently at CNET, too. He turned down an offer from CNET and parent company CBS that would have given him over $1.5 million in total compensation, says a source.

Instead, he elected to stay at the NY Times earning, by my estimate, significantly less than $150,000 per year.

CBS was looking for Bilton to do regular tv bits on technology, and write heavily for CNET, for an annual salary of over $500,000, says the source. In addition, I’ve heard, CBS subsidiary Simon & Schuster was to purchase the rights to his upcoming book to be titled “Owned,” which is about “the end of privacy and ownership.” Bilton’s first book, I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works: Why Your World, Work & Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted, will be available in paperback shortly.

But he hasn’t done a book deal around Owned yet. Simon & Schuster, says a source, was going to pay him “seven figures,” or at least $1,000,000, for the book.

A source close to CBS says these figures are wildly inaccurate. A Simon & Schuster deal around Owned was only “a possilibity, not a reality,” says the source. And the total CBS/CNET combined compensation was in the $300,000 per year range, not $500,000+.

Either way, it was quite a potential raise.

Bilton did manage to get a new job at the NY Times out of this, at least. He’ll become a weekly technology and business columnist, and will continue to blog. Last year he wrote some 350 blog posts and about 50 print articles. Now he’ll focus on the weekly column and write only occasionally on the blog, I hear.

I know TechCrunch was also aggressively pursuing Bilton, as was the Huffington Post (perhaps competing with each other, who knows). Other publications were also actively pursuing him as well.

Not bad for a guy who never got a journalism degree, or any other degree. Bilton’s background is in design. And he’s one of the best writers the NY Times has. They’re lucky to have kept him.