The Apple Dilemma: Marketshare or Margins

Steve Jobs famously got Apple back on track by reducing the number of products Apple had down to a reasonable number in order to create product excellence.

Focus, focus, focus.

Excellence, excellence, excellence.

That's why it's was a huge, huge deal when Apple finally -- after Steve Jobs fought against it -- launched the iPad Mini. The press and consumers went crazy for this product when Amazon had had the Kindle Fire out for 13 months and Google had had the Nexus 7 out for five. It was a big deal not because of the product itself, but because the app ecosystem was finally freed to embrace a new footprint.

Steve was right about focus while simultaneously wrong about the smaller tablet footprint -- long live cognitive dissonance and a tolerance for ambiguity!

He made a judgement call: focus 100% of our effort on making one killer tablet that explodes in the market because it's "That. F#@!ing. Good!"

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LAUNCH Festival 2013: David Cohen, Robert Scoble, David Sacks Plus a TechStars Slot and $50K for our Hackathon Winner

You already know the LAUNCH Festival is the best place for startups to launch their companies -- and that's largely because we make sure founders get honest feedback from industry veterans.

Here is the first batch of amazing judges for the 2013 LAUNCH Festival (our 6th launch-style event!) at the San Francisco Design Center, March 4-6:

Paul Bragiel, i/o ventures
Wesley Chan, Google Ventures
Jeff Clavier, SoftTech VC
David Cohen, TechStars*
Tony Conrad, True Ventures
Jay Levy, Zelkova VC
Tim Lee, Sequoia Capital
Thomas Korte, AngelPad
David Sacks, Yammer
Robert Scoble, Rackspace
Angelo Sotira, deviantART
Josh Stein, Draper Fisher Jurvetson
Christine Tsai, 500 Startups
Stefan Weitz, Bing
George Zachary, Charles River Ventures

*Like last year, TechStars is awarding a slot in one of its programs to a winning LAUNCH company. David Cohen rocks!

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10 Things That Made Me Say, 'Hmmm...'

Things are going really well for me right now, and I hope your 2013 is rocking!

Plans for Inside.com are humming along, and the nine shows we're doing for YouTube are crushing it so well that we came up with a slate of 15 new show ideas, and I think we're going to sell 7-10 of them -- perhaps even all 15.

This means in the second quarter I'll be running a TV studio. Like a real TV studio with 15-25 shows including my own ‘This Week in Startups.’ Crazy huh?

Anyway, I'm off to CES for a bunch of meetings with cool ad agencies, portals, content companies and TV marketers, but I had some things I wanted to share.

Here are 10 seemingly random things I've been tracking and thinking about. There is a thread inside there.


1. Video Game High School Infographic
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Freddie Wong runs the 6th most subscribed-to YouTube channel. He makes action-packed short films based on video games, and a year ago he decided to run a Kickstarter (one of two of the most important startups) campaign for a TV series called "Video Game High School." He raised about $250k on Kickstarter, and I'm assuming made a bunch of money from advertising and distribution.

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The Series A Crunch Survivor's Guide

Got a ton of feedback on my email from Christmas Day titled 'There is no Series A crunch.'

If headlines, and people's attention spans for them, allowed for completer arguments, the headline could have been expanded to:

'There is no Series A crunch for startups with these characteristics... "

Besides, headlines are best when they seduce you with only partial information. What's the fun of getting all the facts in one line and moving on with your life (like we're doing with the LAUNCH Ticker: www.launch.co)? ;-)

Much of the feedback I've gotten over the past 48 hours came from both sides of the tables: founders and investors, and of course some bloggers and 'social media experts.' Of course, social media experts should be renamed 'people who talk a magnitude more than their experience entitles them to,' but I digress.

This is specifically to founders who are not able to raise a Series A. If you're an investor, you can't read this.

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Facebook's Product Strategy: Decisive, Distracted or Disaster?

A year ago at the WSJ's D Conference, I was at a private dinner with a dozen VCs and founders of note. One famous attendee lamented to me that their daughter was on Snapchat all the time.

"What's that?" I asked, always on the lookout for the next Rapportive (bought by LinkedIn), Uber (crushing it), Gowalla (Facebook), Wanderfly (TripAdvisor) or GDGT (crushing it) to invest in.

"You don't want to know," they lamented.

I downloaded it that night and had that moment of dread that exists only after you have children in the world. If you're a parent, tell me if you've ever had this thought: "Why would anyone build something like this?!?!? Oh yeah, they must not have kids yet." I know I'm not alone in this thought.

Fast forward a year later and Facebook has copied Snapchat with Poke -- which is the slang word for intercourse in case you're over 34.  

Facebook is very proud of this product, so much so they've leaked all kinds of interesting nuggets to the press like the fact that -- gasp! -- Zuckerberg wrote some code for it and -- whaaaaaaaat?!?! -- he voiced the sound effects in the app!

Also, Facebook's PR machine can't seem to shut up about the fact that they copied Snapchat in just 12 days. Twelve days!  

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