Henrik Torstensson's Weblog

Stardoll looking for front-end developer (employee or consultant)

2009-11-19T16:36:00.003+01:00

This is almost turning into a job board, but Stardoll is looking for a strong front-end developer (employee or consultant) starting immediately. Requirements are knowledge of HTML/XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and preferably jquery. Somewhat longer list of requirements (in Swedish):

* Mycket djupa kunskaper om HTML/XHTML, CSS & JavaScript. Gärna erfarenhet av jquery.
* Känsla för UI/design.
* Goda kunskaper i svenska och engelska, både i tal och i skrift.
* Erfarenhet av utveckling/design av communitysatsningar är meriterande.
* Erfarenhet av java och/eller php är meriterande.
* Dina personliga egenskaper är teknikintresserad, ansvarstagande och flexibel.

Please contact me at henrik@stardoll.com.

Looking for a project manager to join Stardoll

2009-11-18T11:18:00.003+01:00

I'm looking for a great project manager to join Stardoll in Stockholm. Web experience is a must, technical knowledge is an advantage. Contact me for more information or with potential leads.

Let's buy a company

2009-11-09T20:01:00.003+01:00

* Electronic Arts to acquire Playfish for $300 million plus $100 million earn-out
* Google to acquire AdMob for $750 million
* Skype founders end up with 14 % of Skype in exchange for IP rights and cash

Must read on virtual goods (even if you don't work with it)

2009-11-07T12:34:00.003+01:00

Virtual Goods in Asia

View more documents from Benjamin Joffe.

Must-read presentation for anyone working with online in general and virtual goods in particular. Some takeaways (read the entire report for everything):

* Virtual goods can be as big as search ($30 billion/year) in the US (based on market size in China, Korea, Japan)
* Examples of leading sites and games in Korea, China and Japan (Cyworld, Maple Story, Pigg, NicottoTown, Poupee Girl, QQ Pet, Meet-me, Nurien, Mixi, Gree, QQ, Renren, Kaixin001, 51.com, and others)
* The history of farming games (a'la Farmville). Sim Farm was released in 1993. Innovation in gaming, social and viral aspects.
* Business model evolution: 1) packaged software, 2) online + subscriptions, 3) virtual goods, 4) social games
* 8 listed Chinese online games companies and Tencent (QQ) have a combined market capitalization of $52 billion. Leading Western games companies Electronic Arts, Activision, UBI Soft and Take Two have $22 billion in market capitalization.

Startups and capital

2009-11-04T23:02:00.002+01:00

Ben Holmes (of Index Ventures, follow his new blog): The social media investment conundrum. "Pinpoint timing is required. In my experience the best time to invest for a venture capital firm is post launch when the business has 100,000's or low millions in Monthly uniques (stages 3-4). Here the metrics and to an extent the business model may be proven and the valuation still gives room for venture returns. However businesses can often pass through this stage in a matter of a few months, so unless you are already very close to an investment opportunity as it moves from stage 2 into stages 3 and 4 you will likely miss the opportunity."

Both Sides of The Table: Are Business Plans Still Necessary?. "I'm talking about your financial spreadsheet. I will quote a prominent, well-known entrepreneur whom I like and respect and who told me when he was raising money, "I don't know how much I'm going to charge for my product so why should I create an artificial spreadsheet?"

Here's why. Your financial model tells a story. Let's take your revenue line. It should talk about how many customers you think you will acquire and how much you'll charge for your product. If you can't estimate the former then I would suggest you haven't done your homework before building the product. Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small?"

Steve Blank: Lean Startups aren't Cheap Startups. "If you confuse Lean with Cheap when you do find a repeatable and scalable sales model, you will starve your company for resources needed to scale. Customer Development (and Lean) is about continuous customer contact/iteration to find the right time for execution."

Chris Dixon: How to select your angel investors. "The most common mistake entrepreneurs make is to base their choice solely on the investors' "celebrity" value (by "celebrity" I generally mean in the TechCrunch sense, not the People magazine sense). Picking celebrity angels might help you get a little more buzz when you announce the financing and a few SUL tweets, but that's about it. A startup is a long trip — what you should care about is whether, through the ups and downs and after the buzz dies down, the investors will actually roll up their sleeves and help you."

Scamville and four thoughts on online advertising

2009-11-03T23:36:00.004+01:00

TechCrunch's Scamville articles about the use of less than forthcoming offers for virtual coins in Facebook games and the following industry debate are good reads. Even more interesting reading, at least if you're running an app or a site, are How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insider's Confession and Are social gaming offers scamming users? A detailed analysis of Techcrunch’s Scamville article.

Some quick thoughts:

* To reap value from online advertising a party (publisher, middleman or advertiser) needs one or several of the following things: user intent that can be converted into action (Google AdWords), homogeneous audience at scale (largest site in a category), data on user interest/behavior/demographic and targeting technology, a good sales force, niche content and category advertisers (example: travel sites), knowledge about mis-pricing not known by other parties (buy cheap/sell for more "arbitrage opportunity"), advertisements that generate high response (good creative execution, incentives, design that trick users into clicking or similar)
* There are a lot of murky things going on in online advertising. Buyer beware. However, most online marketers can learn new methods and strategies from working with aggressive affiliates. A bit like outsourced marketing R&D (thanks to good friends for describing this way of working with affiliates to me)
* Advertisers will, over time, pay less for incentivized leads if the quality of leads are lower due to the incentive
* Companies running widely used games, sites and applications hurt themselves significantly if users feel cheated when trying to buy from them (even if it is a third-party offer). It's likely smaller players that over time will have a more difficult time getting away from the shadier, but often higher paying, offers.

Building to keep

2009-11-02T23:03:00.002+01:00

This tweet by Bonnier R&D head Sara Öhrvall tied into a discussion I had earlier today and thoughts I've had the last couple of weeks.

"Leaving after one week in the US. Met many many entrepreneurs building businesses to sell but not one building a business to keep."

I don't think selling a company, backed by venture capitalists or bootstrapped, is wrong. However, I think building a company of more than a couple of people to sell it to a larger company rather than going for an IPO (or other buyout of early investors) will make it less likely to succeed.

As making, as we say in the business, a shit-load of cash is very difficult for most employees, the opportunity to create something special is the true talent-magnet. If the goal is to build a (mid-sized) company that is acquired by Google/Amazon/Microsoft/eBay/Yahoo/etc for $50-100 million were the startup CEO reports to a big-co VP, you're likely capping your vision and as a result capping the number of high-quality people that will be interested in joining the company.

In addition, I think it's telling that many founders leave the company that bought their startup when their earn-outs are up.

Sunday mix of articles

2009-11-01T15:50:00.002+01:00

Chris Dixon: Embrace the medium. "An obvious but surprisingly under-practiced design principle is to "embrace the medium." Applied to software, this means building applications that take advantage of the strengths of the platform instead of trying to mimic the strengths of another platform."

Reaction Wheel: The 300%-500% Lift Meme. "I even heard a story of a VC, after being pitched on a more reasonable lift, say "your approach is interesting, but we need to see you deliver a 300%-500% lift to be competitive in the market." (I looked at this VC's website and found no ad targeting companies in his portfolio.)

Sometimes upon hearing this, I drift into a daydream about combining behavioral targeting, social targeting, retargeting, creative optimization, rich media, distribution optimization, contextual targeting and offer optimization technologies into one super-arbitrage strategy. The resulting 328,050% - 19,531,250% lift would allow me to buy $0.50 CPMs and pretty much overnight control the US economy*."

A VC: Swinging For The Fences. "These entrepreneurs usually have enough money in the bank that they are not looking for a payday. They don't build their companies to flip. They build their companies to go all the way. They are doing it for money, but they are also doing it for the thrill of the game, for ego, and to build a legacy. Those are very powerful motivators, much more powerful than money if you ask me."

VentureBeat: MySpace and Facebook are officially talking. But it probably doesn't look like this. Pretty funny actually.

Jardenberg: Planeto: EPIC WIN. "Martin has kindly asked me to join him in his quest for world domination, an offer impossible to resist. My mission will be, as acting CMO, to help Planeto reach the masses and get the attention it deserves. Our determination to make Planeto an epic #win knows no limits." Jocke Jardenberg joins Martin Walfisz' (Massive Entertainment) new startup Planeto.

Fred Destin: The Ignorant VC as counterpart to the Ignorant Entrepreneur. "I think that Europe usually fails on the third category: we tend to undercapitalise the businesses that are doing well. And this is where we get a competitive disadvantage to the US. They have a tendency to overcapitalise early, but when they scale they scale well because they are able to raise repeat large rounds of money to really capture an opportunity."

Swedish Neo Technology raises $2.5 million

2009-11-01T15:41:00.002+01:00

"NoSQL" database company Neo Technologies has raised $2.5 million from Sunstone Capital and Conor Venture Partners. Nikolaj Nyholm will join the board of directors and Eric Ries will join as an advisor. More at Arctic Startup.

Regular programming interrupted

2009-11-01T12:15:00.002+01:00

Looking back at my posts for September and October I realize that the number of high quality, original posts have been very low. Hopefully there will be more posts going forward, but in the meantime have a look at the following blogs:

Danish Unity raises $5.5 million from Sequoia

2009-10-20T23:49:00.003+02:00

Danish Unity Technologies has raised $5.5 million from Sequoia Capital. Unity develops and licenses a multi-platform game development tool. Congrats to Unity for getting the investment, now the real work continues. :)

Pricing of online ads and Facebook game development

2009-10-20T23:22:00.003+02:00

Jerry Neumann on online advertising pricing: Media has always been an attention economy, Two (More) Hypotheses on Low Online CPMs and Details, details. "The online CPM is the above number divided by impressions per hour. Note that the online spend/hour is pretty steady from 2002 to 2008, between $58 and $66 per thousand hours. The decline in online CPMs can't be attributed to this, unless there was a large increase in ads/hour. This may be so (I can think of arguments both ways, but have no idea what the facts are) but who cares, really? If I spend an hour on the NYT site and they show me 30 ads at a $2 CPM or 6 ads at a $10 CPM, they make the same amount of money: I assume they show the number of ads that maximizes their revenue."

VentureBeat on Zynga's making of Cafe World. "The team included 25 producers, product managers, game designers, artists and programmers - all from a variety of backgrounds, not just video games. Sehgal himself considered himself to be a "web guy, not a game guy." ... "To keep the game going, Zynga is releasing new features and assets for the game several times a week. Sehgal told the team that 20 percent of the effort was building the game and 80 percent is operating the game as an ongoing service.""

On price: What is it worth? and What's the relationship between cost and price?

Online video and venture capital links

2009-10-20T16:09:00.002+02:00

VentureBeat: The future of online video: Q & A with Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire. "When you look at online video advertising, marketers are just trying to re-use what worked offline. I think we're going to see more hybrid video ads that offer experiences and ask users to engage. When ABC launched their catch-up TV services on ABC.com, they started introducing a really compelling format that used Flash to take-over the entire player environment with a rich, engaging and interactive marketing experience. In that kind of model, it is invitational, and the creative opportunities are pretty limitless. However, for media buyers, this is going to involve a lot more custom creative work, so it’s hard for such a format to gain scale."

VentureBeat: Ooyala gets $10M more for online video. "Ooyala, a video startup founded by a group of former Googlers, has raised $10 million in a third round of venture funding. The Mountain View, Calif., company sells its technology to companies that want to include video as part of their web content"

Both Sides of The Table: Retro: My Favorite Blog Post on Raising VC. "So for anybody who has been through the funding process before I hope that this will resonate and for those that haven't I hope it will be interesting. I don’t plan to write the authoritative venture capital blog, just some anecdotes. If you are interested in reading good blogs about venture capital my favorite two are VentureBlog and Feld Thoughts."

Both Sides of The Table: VC Seed Funding is Dead, Long Live VC Seed Funding! "See, I don’t think it’s a question of To VC Seed or Not to VC Seed, I think it’s the age old question of who you’re working with and how well they reference. I’m surprised at how little referencing some founders do on their VCs. I'll save that for another post. You're never going to have a gaurantee with ANY investor that they’ll commit to the next round. But great companies who choose great investors invariably have an easier time."

For the most part, it's about the people

2009-10-18T12:54:00.006+02:00

Anyone who hires (or manages) people or thinks about organizational performance should take a few minutes and (re-)read the late Peter Drucker's Picking People - The Basic Rules from The Essential Drucker.

Three data points

2009-10-13T22:57:00.004+02:00

* YouTube is serving more than 1 billion streams per day. YouTube launched in February 2005 and thus is not even five years old.
* Zynga's Facebook game Café World reached 10 million players in a week (!!!). Zynga's most popular game is Farmville with 56 million players (!!!) in the last month and the company is rumored to have $200 million in annual revenue (!!!). Zynga was founded in June 2007 and is just over two years old.
* MySpace is switching from traditional hard disk drives to solid state drives from Fusion-io. The new drives will have 1 % of the power and cooling costs of traditional drives. MySpace was founded in August 2003.

Articles about venture capital and startup funding

2009-10-05T00:41:00.002+02:00

If you're interested in venture funding, the following articles are worth spending some time on. And as they are pretty long articles, be prepared to spend some time.

Dave McCloud: Gordon Gekko 2.0: Flipping is GOOD. (aka Memo to Jason Fried: Sorry, You're Fucking Wrong.). "In summary, the benefits of selling startups early -- or simply when a transaction is available -- may be a smart strategy for both entrepreneurs and VCs to help improve the market, and reward themselves at the same time. It may not be the best strategy for Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, or other titans of industry, but it might be a reasonable strategy for 1st-time entrepreneurs under 30 looking to establish their careers & ensure that future endeavors are more likely."

Reaction Wheel: Is the Time for Angels Past? "The people I've co-invested with over the past couple of years have been a huge resource to the companies we're in. I'd hate to see that strategic value squeezed out in favor of investors who are more money-manager than company-builder. But that, I think, is what is about to happen."

Fred Destin: On risk taking in the venture world. "Each venture firm tends to have a "risk-return DNA" that determines the natural risk habitat in which they will feel comfortable investing. Some folks are highly comfortable with taking on two technical co-founders in an unproven market whilst others like to help companies scale and like to use reliable KPI's and financial models as a guideline to decision making. The best, most experienced investors and outstanding partnerships may be able to operate across the spectrum."

Both Sides of the Table: The Great VC Ice Age is Thawing (for now) – Part 1 of 3, The Big VC Thaw – Why The Market is Moving Again (part 2 of 3) & 2010 VC Funding Outlook for Startups – Prepare for Winter (Part 3/3). "So what is driving the new energy in the remaining venture capital firms when we kept hearing how much the whole industry was "against the ropes?" 1. The market rebound, 2. IPOs and M&A have returned, 3. You can't get paid for sitting on the sidelines, 4. The success of the iPhone, 5. The growth of Facebook and social gaming led by Zynga, 6. The growth and $1 billion valuation of Twitter and its impact on business.

Above The Crowd: What Is Really Happening to the Venture Capital Industry? "It is indeed quite likely that the venture industry is in the process of a very substantial reduction in size, perhaps the first in the history of the industry. However, the specific catalyst for this reduction is not directly related to the issues just mentioned. In order to fully understand what is happening, one must look upstream from the venture capitalists to the source of funds, for that is where the wheels of change are in motion."

Facebook is cash-flow positive (news is a month old, but posting for the record)

2009-10-04T20:09:00.002+02:00

I never posted a comment to the news that Facebook is free cash-flow positive and passed 300 million active members.

As the news seem to have been missed by some people, I thought posting the news would be appropriate as Facebook being profitable changes some discussions on the viability of Internet startups.

Some thoughts on Facebook's business (and employee stock options) I wrote about a month ago.

Look at user behavior

2009-10-03T15:56:00.004+02:00

Fred Destin writes about Research In Motion, makers of the Blackberry, in the blog post Getting it completely wrong. Very good points.

"So how wrong can you be ? It turns out that a company controlling the device and the server could actually do a few things well, such as deliver on the fundamental requirement of its user base (absolutely reliable email access on the move) and getting the rest right over time (such as the phone).

My lesson from this is that what may seem to be sound strategic thinking from a VC standpoint (absolute focus on one core area of expertise, search for extreme scalability, natural preference for software and "atom-free plays") can lead you to overlook the best companies, those that go all out to crack the user's need in an imperfect but perfectly appropriate way. And yes, we passed on TomTom too...

[...]

Another useful reminder that scrutinising user behaviour and acceptance is the best yardstick for determining which companies will succeed, rather than one's grand opinions about long term market evolution or deep theories about the future of tech !"

One post just for Chris

2009-10-03T15:41:00.003+02:00

I was going to put together an interesting links post, but realized that Chris Dixon had penned three posts that each made it on to the list - thus he gets a post of his own.

Chris Dixon: Online advertising is all about purchasing intent. "When people talk about search being a great business model (for, say, Twitter), they should distinguish between search with purchasing intent, which is an incredible business model, and search without purchasing intent, which is a terrible one." Word!

Chris Dixon: What if online business model innovation is slowing down?. "On the other hand, what if we are mostly done creating big new business models for the web? History suggests that business model innovation is rapid right after the advent of a new medium and then slows down considerably. If indeed it is slowing down, social media could end up like instant messaging – incredibly popular but basically lousy at monetizing." It is not only about business model innovation but about business model adaptation and execution.

Chris Dixon: Why content sites are getting ripped off. "But content sites have no way to track their role in generating purchasing intent. Often intent generation doesn't involve a single trackable click. Even if there were some direct way to measure intent generation, doing so would be seen by many today as a blurring of the the advertising/editorial line. So content sites are left only with impression-based display ads, haggling over CPMs without a meaningful measurement of their impact on generating purchasing intent.

All of this has caused a massive shift in revenues from the top to the bottom of the purchasing funnel - from intent generators to intent harvesters. Somehow this needs to get fixed."

The publishers' work is in figuring out how to start tracking intent generation (via traditional proxies like brand awareness, brand perception etc but also domain type-ins, search volumes), connect it to purchase behavior and get paid for it.

Listen to Spotify offline

2009-10-01T18:00:00.003+02:00

It is now possible to listen to music offline with Spotify when using a computer (and not only when using a mobile phone). It works pretty much like the mobile solution and premium users can sync up to 3,333 tracks for offline listening.

In a little under a month Spotify has gone from a freemium model with a relatively weak reason to upgrade (no ads and some exclusive content) to a quite strong reason to upgrade (no ads, some exclusive content, mobile and offline usage). For each freemium model it is crucial to find and implement the service specific features and reasons for members to start paying.

Some, mostly older, thoughts on paid online news

2009-09-22T23:30:00.000+02:00

This weekend Svenska Dagbladet wrote about paid online news and initiated a blog relay race on the subject. As this is not the first time the subject is discussed, I dug out some decent older posts that still reflect my thoughts on the subject. In addition to the older posts I'd like to add:

1. It seems like paid online mass media news, as an idea, is driven more by ego (i.e. this is important thus people should pay) than strategic thinking (i.e. this is what we can get paid for and use the proceeds from to reach our strategic objectives)
2. The product quality (the packaging of news, relevancy, insight etc) of online news must likely improve as readers increasingly have alternatives (other Swedish newspapers, international newspapers, blogs, Wikipedia, etc)
3. As newspapers are going from a monopoly-like to a more competitive situation they will have to increase their focus on cost-base, effectiveness (doing the right stuff) and productivity (doing the right stuff efficiently) while improving product quality in order to stay profitable

Now for the older posts with a more strategic perspective:

Rant on online newspaper business model and differentation (Jan 2009)

"The big problem for online newspapers that want to charge their readers is that they are producing something that, to a large extent, is an undifferentiated commodity. While news is popular, it is hardly ever unique. Most of the content, for the lack a better word, found at Aftonbladet, Expressen, DN and SvD can be found at its main competitor in very similar form. No individual Swedish newspaper does create a product that is great enough to motivate a larger number of people why they should pay for it when there are advertising-funded alternatives. (It doesn't mean that it is impossible to create a product that you can charge for, as Wall Street Journal Online proves.)"

"As a good online newspaper gets lots of visitors (even if they usually lack commercial intent and as a group are heterogeneous and thus far less valuable than a visitor to a search engine or niche site), the possibility to launch mass-market add-on services (which has been done in classifieds, dieting, dating and other sectors) to add sales is at least as great as when selling DVDs with the physical paper."

Big is beautiful (Sept 2007)

"As a large media site Aftonbladet gets some advantages from investing in user paid services like Plus:

- Less dependent on advertisers (which is a good thing)
- A platform to be a fast follower or develop new paid only offerings internally (think dating, dieting etc), as parts of the knowledge and infrastructure is in place
- Higher revenue per (paying) user for certain services than advertising will provide

The three areas of advantage lead both to significant short-/mid-term revenue opportunities and longer term strategic flexibility.

25+ million SEK is nothing to sneeze at (Sept 2007)

"Advertisers are bad masters for online media, probably especially to newspapers, so one shouldn't rule out premium (a.k.a. paid for by users) material and features even if the international trend is to go all advertising supported. There are lot of ways to implement premium features, and with the devil in the details a freemium model makes a lot of sense to many web sites."

Bad bank rules for .se - sign the petition

2009-09-22T00:00:00.002+02:00

Sign the petition against the proposed rules regarding the word bank in .se domains: Namnbank.se.

Adobe to acquire Omniture for $1.8 billion: doesn't make sense to me

2009-09-21T00:30:00.000+02:00

Adobe paying $1.8 billion in cash for Omniture has a very, very high chance of being one of the worst Internet acquisitions ever. Pricey (5x sales/1.73 PEG/10x gross profit/26x operating cash flow for a $300 million business), in cash (almost 80 % of Adobe's cash), few synergies, fighting customer economics (only makes sense for e-commerce and maybe brand marketers, not for advertising-driven publishers) and fighting Google and other 'free' analytics providers that have strong incentives to subsidize analytics (a.k.a. pricing pressure is likely to increase).

Adobe could have spent far less cash and been far more customer-oriented by investing in better technical integrations with different analytics solutions rather than acquiring the high-end provider that a lot of Adobe customers don't use. Congratulations to Omniture, Adobe shareholders should beware.

Interview with Daniel Ek of Spotify

2009-09-20T21:57:00.008+02:00

Videos, eight in total, of the interview of Daniel Ek of Spotify at The Glasshouse on September 17, 2009 (via Shak). Some tidbits:

* If 10+ % of users pay you have a very good freemium model. Less than 10 % of Spotify's users pay for Premium.
* Revenue split likely to be around 50/50, maybe 60/40 premium/advertising. Some people have reported this as 60 % of Spotify users are likely to be premium, which seems to be incorrect.
* Hope to launch in the US either late 2009 or early 2010.
* There's likely entrepreneurial opportunity (outside of Spotify) in moving concepts between the Western world and Asia
* To entrepreneurs: Think of one problem and one solution to that problem and you can build a company around it
* Spotify wants to be the platform for playing music, provide tools to developers
* Spotify is looking at how to help people share music with their friends (not playlist aggregation like ShareMyPlaylists etc)
* Spotify's two "secrets" for success: a great product and getting the music licenses
* Spotify has plenty more to prove in music before going into film and other content
* There will be several Spotify powered devices, but probably not hardware built by Spotify.
* Music taste is not currently widely used to target advertising, hopefully it can be used to improve the quality of advertising. Spotify will invest in making it better.
* Rights are getting more fragmented as artists run their own music companies and license to distributors in different territories.
* 50-100 people in the big music companies were the key success factors for getting the licensing deals as they supported the deals inside the music companies.
* Spotify has chosen to grow instead of being cash-flow positive
* Trying to build a company that is really big, run from Europe and is a stand-alone company (like SAP)
* Goal is to be a platform between the artist and the fan
* You [as an entrepreneur] always have doubts, but never doubted they could build a great product. At times doubted if artists and record labels would like it.
* Big setbacks: thought they'd get licenses within six months from founding but it took 2.5 years, user-information leakage in early 2009,

Double standard

2009-09-10T22:30:00.001+02:00

Sarah Lacy, who wrote Once Your Lucky, Twice Your Good, wrote an article for Business Week calling the Facebook employees who sell up to 25 % of their vested shares mercenaries. I think that is giving a bad name to good people.

* Saying that founders should be able to partly cash out, as Mark Zuckerberg apparently has done, but not early employees because the founders invest "everything" in the company simplifies the reality of a startup. Many employees put as much or at least nearly as much of their lives into a startup as the founder.

* People work at companies for love AND for money. It's not an either or question.

* Employees might want to sell some shares to make a down payment on a house or pay off student loans. Or diversify their investments. That doesn't make them mercenaries.

* Facebook seems to have a 13x revenue multiple, valued at $6.5 billion on alleged $500 million in revenue (likely on the high side). It is a fair to high valuation. Consider the valuations of the four most successful public US Internet companies (Google $145.2 billion, Amazon.com $34.9 billion, Ebay $28.1 billion and Yahoo $20.3 billion), and it is clear that Facebook needs to execute close to perfectly to increase its valuation. Having the majority of your net worth in such a company is quite a risk to an individual employee.

* Given its size, reporting requirements to the SEC and fund raising, Facebook pretty much is a listed company in every sense except being listed on a stock exchange. And apparently being listed is when its ok to sell.

* When did drinking the Kool-Aid become a negative? Well, ask the Enron employees who had large parts of their 401(k)s in company stock. Working at a startup is easier if you drink the Kool-Aid. But as most drinking, it should be done in moderation.