Monthly Archives: May 2007

holy-valuation bat-man! microsoft buys aquantive

Posted by Todd Sawicki on May 18, 2007 View Comments

Microsoft (Ticker: MSFT) announced that it was buying its Seattle neighbor aquantive (Ticker: AQNT) this morning for a whopping $6 billion!!!!!  Aquantive is best known for its two main business units – Avenue A (media planning agency) and AtlasDMT (ad server).  Congrats to all my friends who work their now and worked in the past and still own the stock.  All I have to say is wow.   MSFT is paying a 133x multiple of net income and more importantly 46x multiple of this year’s EBITDA!  From my M&A experience that’s a one hell of a multiple.  If that multiple was applied to some of the companies I hold stock, let me just say my wife would get off my back about all my gadget spending.

pimping spock

Posted by Todd Sawicki on May 15, 2007 View Comments

Having been fortunate to have worked last winter with Spock, the burgeoning search engine for people, I have a beta account.  So I figure I would should share somethings – here’s my spock search of the day:

heroes thoughts

Posted by Todd Sawicki on May 14, 2007 View Comments

I admit I am a sucker for shows with a mythology arc – from X-files to Lost to now Heroes.  I just got done watching this week’s episode where basically nothing happened.  And as such - is it just me or was heroes way better before the spring hiatus?  And has the build up to the season finale next week been rather tediously drawn out especially compared to the pace from earlier in the season?  That’s the problem with tv sometimes – story lines have to be made to fit 24 episodes whether or not the story would better fit in 20 episodes.  Food for thought – I am looking forward to the finale next week for sure, I just think the buildup instead of intensely building up to the climatic scene feels a bit stretched.  Here’s hoping for a big bang ending!

redfin vs. the traditional agent

Posted by Todd Sawicki on May 14, 2007 View Comments

With Redfin in the news with the company being featured on 60 minutes last night, I figured I would share my experience.  Last fall, I bought my current house using Redfin in large part because of the comission rebate after having played with their site for the prior year as my wife and I considered a re-model vs. buy a new house debate.  (Ed. note – redfin’s website for tracking homes for sale is by far the best site i used – the visualization of homes for sale and comparable historical data kicks butt). 

Here’s the rub: works as promised – you get 2% back as a cash rebate.  Unfortunately mortgage companies won’t let you apply the rebate against the purchase price, but you could always apply against the mortgage after closing.  We got a dedicated agent – Kelly Engel – who was available by phone or email as much as we needed her.   Kelly was knowledgable and professional and compared at least on phone to any other agent i’ve dealt with (can’t compare to in person as we never met face to face).  Redfin has a separate field agent who represents you at walk throughs, inspections, etc.  Now we knew the house we wanted so can’t say if Redfin can help with you that but I guess that’s what the website is for.  Great value on the buy side – can’t imagine why anyone would not use Redfin.

Now on the sales side, my wife and I decided to use a traditional agent.  From my perspective, the Redfin sales side is really meant to appeal to someone who is a DIY’er or has a house that want need much of a push to sell – neither of these were us.  I bet our decision seems odd given who enthusiastically I just endorsed Redfin on the buy side, but our house we expected to need some real local pricing knowledge and aggresive marketing because it had a lot of quirks (old house, unusual layout, need for upgrades from new residents, etc.).  We did try and negotiate the commission to no avail in case you are wondering.  Our agent did put in a lot of work – personally visiting every comparable house that went on the market in the three months leading up to our listing, helping us determine appropriate pre-sale fixes and repairs, staging help as well as promoting the sale aggresively to local real estate agents.  The house sold for the asking price in a slightly softer market (Seattle’s is still decent but not what it was a year or two ago) in literally 27 days from listing to sale (folks in Las Vegas and Miami will cry when they read how fast our sale was).   Did we get fair value from our agent?  In this case most likely.  For our current house which was new construction would we use redfin or traditional agent?  We’d likely use redfin as it lacks the quirks and should be able to sell itself.

it’s a bird, it’s a plane, no it’s super-vc!

Posted by Todd Sawicki on May 14, 2007 View Comments

Noted New York VC Fred Wilson’s comment on his non-involvement with any of the purported machinations going on with wallstrip, the online video show, raises a great point.  VC’s are not super-men/women or the masters of the universe that perhaps the public might perceive.  In almost every case, the credit for success and failure of a vc-backed startup goes to the team.  Yes, VC’s can stick their fingers and muck up the works but that’s only because founders let them – at least in my experience.  So the next time you see a huge success, congratulate the team, not the VC’s.

joost – is it just me or am I the only one?

Posted by Todd Sawicki on May 11, 2007 View Comments

This is perhaps the best followon to my post about Renee’s observation about living in an echo-chamber – what is all the excitement about joost for?  Let’s see p2p streaming techonology – that’s been around for years from folks like kontera and even in video form for the last year from AOL with their very cool in2tv application.  So nothing new there.  Let’s see high quality video content – been able to get for years direct from sources like abc.com, indirect like youtube or even torrents.  So basically there’s no killer new technology and we’ve seen online video before.  Maybe the content is hugely unique and compelling – not yet – sure they’ve signed a deal with viacom and cbs – but all of that content is already available online.  So again why all the hype for joost? 

Oh wait – that’s right it’s because it’s the kazaa and skype guys who made a bundle on both.  Maybe someday the hype will be justified – I’m just not there yet.  And this coming from a guy who is a total sucker for shiny, new balls evidenced by the fact I bought an apple newton (pda) and pj jukebox (first HD based mp3 player) back in the day.

sometimes we forget where we are on the curve

Posted by Todd Sawicki on May 10, 2007 View Comments

Friend and colleague Renee Blodgett (she can blame me for getting her involved in the people search engine startup Spock) wrote an interesting post about what she calls the web 2.0 echochamber.  Her point is that we in the online startup business can get wrapped up in the new and latest tech fad but often forgot our place as super-eager early adopters of new technologies and services.  To her point, my brother a 33yr old manager of a TGIF’s restaurant back east has never heard of half of the web services that Renee’s friends insist everyone is using.  My mom can still barely turn on a computer and my Dad, a pretty middle of the road adopter of new things, has barely heard of anything beyond yahoo, amazon.com, ebay and espn.com.  As a marketer, it’s easy to forget sometimes, just because it seems cool, doesn’t mean it’s mainstream.  And if it, whatever it is, doesn’t solve a real problem for a large group of people, then it’s not likely to go mainstream. 

Is it a generational thing like Renee posits?  Nope, I don’t think so.  We just sometimes forget the whacky insular world we live in SF, the Valley, Seattle and sometimes LA.  Does that mean Twitter isn’t important or potentially huge? Nope.  As the next generation comes of age – they like their previous generation’s counterparts in Europe and Asia are much more mobile.  But let’s not rush to distraction, remember not everyone is as infatuated with the latest and greatest as we are.

quick followup on google and yahoo

Posted by Todd Sawicki on May 9, 2007 View Comments

I’ve been getting emails from folks about both posts.  First, I don’t have anything against Google or Yahoo.  And in Google’s case I should point out - there’s nothing illegal about being a monopoly (a point MSFT might have better pursued).  What’s illegal is anti-competitive behavior.  And there’s no indication of that yet.  More my point is that the inevitable soap opera of market dominance as the past has shown seems to lead to the drama of an anti-trust showdown.  And who doesn’t like a good drama?

With regards to my rant about Yahoo – I am not picking on Yahoo to make the point about whether or not Google is better.  I am picking on Yahoo because I want and need them to succeed in the search game.  Competition is a good thing and breeds innovation.  I am pushing Yahoo to get better and point out some of the nutty business and product decisions they have made like still not allowing cpc bids below $.10 per KW.  Yahoo please stop ignoring the long tail of KW’s – it’s in everyone’s best interest. OK I’ll move on now.

emetrics report: google analytics new ui

Posted by Todd Sawicki on May 8, 2007 View Comments

I was able to visit emetrics today on behalf of loomia.  Thanks to my colleague and friend dave mcclure I was able to meet some cool folks.  But more importantly I got to see a demo of the new analytics UI.  If you’re an adwords user – it’s AWESOME.  Much better product.  To guys I meet from the GA team – Good Work!  And don’t worry guys I won’t even mention what McClure was talking about :)