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"That's not a company, that's a feature..." Well, now it's a company...

On Thursday, I was fortunate to be at the Facebook F8 Keynote and Hackathon. It was an amazing event, where Zuck gave a keynote with a Jobs-esque flair for pacing and drama.

He announced the launch of Facebook Platform. As it has been covered in detail elsewhere, I won't give a detailed explanation; suffice to say, it allows developers to build new applications (music players, dating services, etc.) within the Facebook environment, giving Facebook users quick and easy access to these new services. An important element of Facebook platform is that developers get to keep all of the ad revenue from the Facebook applications.

I found this interesting, because in Silicon Valley you are constantly exposed to entrepreneurs who have great ideas that aren't sustainable businesses by themselves. The question venture capitalists often ask is, "is that a product or a company?". More recently, with the emergence of web 2.0, the problem has gotten worse. For example, I might have an idea for a much better, simpler way for online invitations to work.  VCs have been asking "is that even a product? or is it a feature?" A great idea isn't such a great idea if nobody knows about it and nobody is signed up. 

Until now. Facebook's platform will allow many of these cool product ideas to actually become businesses in their own right by leveraging Facebook's platform of users. Facebook users won't have to learn a new interface, visit a new web page or change their current behavior.

Pretty cool, I think. Look for my Facebook apps to be launching soon ;)

Interviewing at the Red Herring Conference

Through an interesting series of events, Red Herring magazine asked Julio and I to be the official video interviewers at their conference in Monterey. Julio and I drove up tonight and will be conducting interviews all day tomorrow and Thursday. Should be a lot of fun. I don't have our final list of guests, but first up is Max Levchin (co-Founder Paypal, CEO of Slide, Chairman Yelp). The interviews are supposed to be featured on Red Herring's website, so stay tuned and I'll send the link when I get it.

Chad & Steve on Why YouTube Won

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Chad and Steve, co-founders of YouTube, came to our Entrepreneurship & VC class. I was fortunate to have lunch with them afterwards as well. One of the questions that I asked them was:

Given that there were dozens of video sharing sites before YouTube (indeed, iFilm had seemingly "won" in the space, being acquired years before), what specifically did YouTube do that everybody else missed?*

So, I will generously paraphrase the answer, but basically they said that it came down to two big things. First, although they were a relative late-comer to the online video space, they were the first to add easy embedding of videos in other pages. This allowed them to ride the MySpace phenomenon. Second, YouTube had a highly scalable back-end, so when "viral videos" brought down other services, YouTube stayed up. It turns out that much of the success of these services is based on these viral videos, so this led to YouTube's continues success.

Of course these two major factors were in addition to thousands of "little things" that YouTube did right every day in executing their vision. However, it's instructive to think of the major factors that allowed them to win in a space crowded by so much money and talent.

* Long-term readers may have noted that this is a topic I'm generally interested in. See my post referencing Danah Boyd's thoughts on why MySpace beat Friendster.

My Spin on the iPhone Launch

It was the first day of school and I'm enrolled in a called "Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital". What's particularly cool about the class is that it's taught by Peter Wendell (Founder of Sierra Ventures), Andy Rachleff (founder of Benchmark Capital) and Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google). In class today, Peter apologized for Eric's absence, saying that Eric unfortunately had to miss class as he was Moscone Center making an announcement with Steve Jobs. An hour into the class, my neighbor, Meagan, got a message on her blackberry, and passed me a note that Steve had brought Eric on stage to help announce the iPhone. For a kid from Canada, it was a pretty cool Silicon Valley moment.