Marc Andreessen's blog

I'm incredibly excited to share with you something that our good friend Steve Hargadon just pointed out to us.

This is a list of user-created social networks on Ning in and around the world of education.

Each of these social networks was created by someone who signed up for an account on Ning, created a network, and then invited in friends, colleagues, and/or students to interact around specific educational topics.

I love this list because it is a vivid illustration of what it means for there to be almost 150,000 social networks on Ning already, with hundreds more being added every day. Our core thesis for Ning has been that people are incredibly creative, and if you give them a way to easily create and express themselves -- via social networks on any topic -- they will run with the ball and come up with more ideas than any one person or company can possibly come up with. And that is proving out in a major way.

Fun!

Read more at Marc Andreessen's blog.

First, a big thank you to all of my readers who made my first year (pro-rated) of blogging so much fun and so satisfying!

Second, here's my blogging plan for 2008:

* Continued blogging about startups, entrepreneurship, Silicon Valley, and related topics. Including many ongoing installments of the Pmarca Guide to Startups.

* Profiles and in-depth analysis of creative professionals across several domains. What do programmers, serial entrepreneurs, writers, artists, cartoonists, film directors, and stand-up comedians have in common? They're all creative professionals, who totally master their fields and then create on a sustained basis throughout a career that can last 50 years or more. I've become fascinated by how creative professionals operate and what we can learn from one another both within and across domains, and so will spend quite a bit of time on this topic in 2008.

* The history of the creation of various forms of media -- in particular: movies, television, radio, and newspapers -- and in parallel, the accelerating emergence of the Internet as the central medium of the next 20 years. I believe we have a lot we can learn from the history of other forms of media -- even the ones that are now in full-scale collapse -- that can help us both understand why things have happened the way they have so far with the Internet as a medium, and how things are likely to unfold from here.

Third, I also plan to blog a little more extensively about my own professional activities, including Ning and my outside investments. I've tried to not overdo it but I get a reasonable number of regular questions about either Ning or other companies in which I invest, and so I will crank that up a little bit as well -- focusing on what we are on to at Ning on the one hand, and why I am making the outside angel investments that I am on the other hand.

Aside from all of those topics, I will also continue to blog about anything in the world at large that amuses me, and maybe you too.

Fourth, expect some interesting design and feature changes to the blog itself in the months to come -- more on that soon, I hope.

Finally, all my best and many wishes for a speedy and complete recovery to Om Malik!

As always, reader feedback is welcome via the email address given on the home page.

On to 2008!

Read more at Marc Andreessen's blog.

Last week I posted a rather pointed polemic titled "Suicide by strike" in which I argued that the big entertainment companies were acting suicidally in picking a fight with the writers at precisely the wrong time.

In this post, I more dispassionately outline my theory of why that's the case, and what I think may happen next.

The writers' strike, and the studios' response to the strike, may radically accelerate a structural shift in the media industry -- a shift of power from studios and conglomerates towards creators and talent.

First, some context. In Hollywood, the talent -- actors, directors, writers -- is unionized, and those unions engage in old-fashioned collective bargaining with the studios, also known as "the Man". That collective bargaining establishes the economic framework by which most of the talent gets paid.

Last week, the writers' union -- technically unions, but I'll use the singular form for simplicity -- went on strike for the first time since 1988 after an acrimonious breakdown in negotiations with the studios over a new deal.

Significantly, the actors' and directors' unions are due to renegotiate their deals with the studios soon as well; some people in Hollywood believe that the studios are being deliberately hostile to the writers in order to send a signal to the actors and directors to not expect much.

The writers are on strike primarily over the terms by which they get paid "residuals", or ongoing payments, for various forms of distribution of television shows and movies. In a simplified nutshell:

* Due to amazing historical circumstances around the birth of the VCR in the early 1980's, television and movie writers are currently paid approximately 4 cents for each DVD sold -- bearing in mind that the average sale price for a DVD is over $10, and the cost of manufacturing a DVD is less than 50 cents. The writers want that residual rate doubled to 8 cents per DVD, and the studios are refusing.

* Currently, writers are not paid for Internet downloads via online video stores like iTunes and Amazon Unbox. The studios want to extend the current 4-cent DVD residual formula to Internet downloads; the writers are holding out for more.

* The studios are refusing to pay residuals on Internet streaming of television shows and movies -- even when that streaming comes from their very own web sites and contains revenue-bearing commercials. The studios call all such streaming "promotional". The writers are howling with outrage that if the studios themselves are streaming complete TV shows containing commercials, that's clearly not just "promotional". The writers have a good point.

Taken on their own, these issues are most likely negotiable and solvable. However, trust between the two sides seems nearly nonexistent; the writers feel like they have been repeatedly burned by the studios over the last few decades; and the studios may well have a vested interest in beating up the writers in order to motivate the actors and directors to not push too hard in their upcoming negotiations.

Read more at Marc Andreessen's blog.

Today I'm extremely excited to tell you about a philanthropic gift that my wife Laura and I are making:

We are giving $27.5 million to Stanford Hospital, for two purposes:

First, to significantly enhance and upgrade Stanford Hospital's current Emergency Department.

And second, to fund the creation of a new state-of-the-art emergency facility in the new hospital that Stanford will build -- assuming it is approved by the city of Palo Alto -- over the next several years.

As you can imagine, Laura and I are unbelievably excited by the opportunity to make this gift. In fact, we are so excited that I am going to tell you all about it at some length in this blog post!

For us, this gift is a great fit between a clear immediate need, and the prospect of helping to change the way the system that serves the need operates.

And we think the impact on Silicon Valley can be tremendous.

Read more at Marc Andreessen's blog.

From the New York Times:

A strike by Hollywood writers began in New York just after midnight Monday...

[M]ore than 12,000 screenwriters represented by the Writer Guild of America West and the Writers Guild of America East in the early morning hours in New York began the first industry-wide strike since writers walked out in 1988. That strike lasted five months...

Throughout the weekend, guild leaders held orientation meetings for strike captains, who would supervise picketing teams, and otherwise prepared for an effort to shut down as much movie and television production as possible...

The sides have been at odds over, among other things, writers? demands for a large increase in pay for movies and television shows released on DVD, and for a bigger share of the revenue from such work delivered over the Internet.

So imagine you're a major media mogul, a captain of the film and television business, a shaper of global culture, one of the anointed few who can green-light major entertainment projects.

You're faced with a massive, once-in-a-lifetime shift in mainstream consumer behavior from traditional mass media, including film and television, to new activities that you do not control: the Internet, social networking, user-generated content, mobile services, video games. It's been snowballing since the mid 90's, for like 12 years -- 12 years of denial and obfuscation -- but it's really rolling fast now.

Many of your current lifeblood properties are not growing anymore or are in outright decline, and you don't own enough of the vital new properties to offset that, nor are you certain how you would make money with the new properties even if you did own them. And the consumers you rely upon for revenue are so frustrated with your company's inability to supply them with what they want, when they want it, that digital piracy of your content has become mainstream and socially acceptable behavior practically overnight, and all of your efforts to stop it seem to only make it worse.

And your company's culture is not prepared to deal with the shift. Your company was founded 50 or 80 or 100 or 150 years ago by different people in a different time, and the overwhelming majority of your people now -- smart and well-meaning managers and bureaucrats, but still managers and bureaucrats -- have to be retrained and reoriented toward entrepreneurial thinking in a viciously dynamic and startlingly fast-changing world not of your, or their, creation.

Is this really the right time to pick a fight with the writers over royalties from DVD and Internet sales, leading to an industry-wide shutdown and massive economic pain for all sides in the world of traditional scripted film and television content?

Really?

Read more at Marc Andreessen's blog.

Tonight, a small group of entrepreneurs, technologists, executives, bloggers, press, and professional campfire tenders gathered in Mountain View below the official Google tyrannosaurus rex and formally launched Open Social into the world.

As I write this, Google is about half an hour away from officially putting the Open Social spec and code on the Internet for general consumption. At that same time, the video from the launch event should be going live. Keep hitting this currently nonworking link until you get satisfaction! [Correction -- the official site is up at that location! Also, here's the video of the launch event with all the demos.]

So how'd it go?

Great! In addition to speakers from Google, the launch event included demos from a wide swath of the "coalition of the willing" assembled in support of Open Social -- including the newest member and Open Social supporter, MySpace.

All of the demos were -- to my knowledge -- live running code. And they worked.

The T rex not only did not eat us, but did not fall over on us.

They had smores.

What's not to like?

Read more at Marc Andreessen's blog.

My company, Ning, is participating in this week's launch of a new open web API called Open Social, which is being spearheaded by Google and joined by a wide range of partners including Google's own Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Salesforce.com, Oracle, iLike, Flixster, RockYou, and Slide.

In a nutshell, Open Social is an open web API that can be supported by two kinds of developers:

* "Containers" -- social networking systems like Ning, Orkut, LinkedIn, Hi5, and Friendster, and...

* "Apps" -- applications that want to be embedded within containers -- for example, the kinds of applications built by iLike, Flixster, Rockyou, and Slide.

This is the exact same concept as the Facebook platform, with two huge differences:

* With the Facebook platform, only Facebook itself can be a "container" -- "apps" can only run within Facebook itself. In contrast, with Open Social, any social network can be an Open Social container and allow Open Social apps to run within it.

* With the Facebook platform, app developers build to Facebook-proprietary languages and APIs such as FBML (Facebook Markup Language) and FQL (Facebook Query Language) -- those languages and APIs don't work anywhere other than Facebook -- and then the apps can only run within Facebook. In contrast, with Open Social, app developers can build to standard HTML and Javascript, and their apps can then run in any Open Social container.

If you recall how I previously described the Facebook platform as "a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry", you'll understand why I think Open Social is the next big leap forward!

Open Social takes the Facebook platform concept and provides an open standard approach that can be used by the entire web. Open Social is an open way for everyone to do what Facebook has done...

...including Facebook itself, potentially -- more on that below.

Read more at Marc Andreessen's blog.

Several days ago, Gary Rivlin of the New York Times called me about a story he was writing about the brilliant Max Levchin of Paypal and Slide, and the general topic of serial entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. The story came out yesterday; below are the notes I prepared for my conversation with Gary.

In a nutshell, Gary's question to me was: what makes serial entrepreneurs tick? Why do people like Max keep going and start new companies when they could just park it on a beach and suck down mai tais?

First, in my experience, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are all over the map when it comes to personality and motivation. Some are purely mercenary -- one hit and they're out. Others just love the technology, and the business is a side effect. Still others are like Chauncey Gardiner in Being There. And some just love starting and building companies.

Second, there were serial entrepreneurs in the past, but there are certainly more now than ever before. There are many factors that lead to this -- here are the big ones:

* There are simply more entrepreneurs now -- due to the amazing surge in venture capital and the culture of startups over the last 10-15 years -- so you'd expect more serial entrepreneurs just based on that.

* A lot of new companies simply develop faster these days than they did in the past. Microsoft and Oracle, for example, both needed 10 years of incredibly work to get to their IPOs (both founded in '76, IPO in '86), and they only had a few hundred employees each when they went public -- and those were the two biggest software successes of their era.

Versus these days, when many companies are founded, built, scaled up, and sold (or, yes, taken public!) in a few years.

The process can happen so fast that people are freed up much faster; therefore, upon being freed up they are younger and tend to have more raw energy than people who in the past would have spent 10 or 20 or 30 years building a single company -- and by the time they freed up, they maybe didn't want to put that level of effort into something again.

* Also because of the faster cycle time, when you start company #2 you can assume that it won't necessarily consume the next 10-20-30 years of your life -- you can probably build something successful over say 5 years, maybe 8 years max, and so you're not committing the rest of your life.

This makes it easier for people to say, OK, hey, it worked once, I'll try it again.

* The culture of startups in the Valley is clicking on all cylinders -- everything from fundraising to hiring to building out a management team to signing up lawyers and accountants and bankers is simply easier than ever before. I'm talking in a macro sense -- over the last 10 years, versus prior decades, even considering the early 2000's bust.

So it's just easier to start the next company that it was the past -- the "pain in the ass" factor is lower.

* In terms of exit, there are some IPO's, but the big thing is that M&A is a widely accepted and viable exit. Big companies in and related to the Valley have actually become quite good, in general, at acquiring small companies -- not perfect, but quite good. They do it frequently, in order to build out their product families or grow market share. This of course inspires more companies to be started and tends to compress the time cycles further.

Read more at Marc Andreessen's blog.

[IMPORTANT WARNING: What follows is satire. I'm NOT being serious. Except for one paragraph at the very end. See if you can spot that one.]

When I first started this blog four months ago, one of the first substantive posts I wrote was called "Bubbles on the brain".

In it, I attempted to use "logic" to explain the reasons we are most likely not in another dot com bubble.

Since that time, talk of a new dot com bubble or Web 2.0 bubble or Internet bubble has only escalated in volume and intensity.

OK.

You're right.

It's a bubble.

A huge, massive, inflating bubble.

We're all doomed.

Doomed, I say!

DOOMED!

It can't last.

It won't last.

It can't won't not last.

Here we sit, with over $7 billion in venture funding this year chasing exactly zero good ideas.

Paid keyword ads? All BS. Once users figure out those things on the side of the page aren't natural search results, that's it, no more click-throughs. Pop goes the souffle.

Ad targeting? Snort. The creme de la creme for Internet advertising, so to speak, is those acne cream banner ads you see all over Facebook. That's it. That's the best Internet advertising will ever be. Get used to the bottom of the barrel, suckers.

Subscription fees? Premium services? Ecommerce? Sponsorships? Mobile advertising? Mobile fee-based services? New hosting models? Video advertising? Music subscription services? In-game advertising? Massively multiplayer games? Digital gifts? Affiliate bounties? HA! Don't make me laugh. Oh, wait -- YOU JUST DID.

So people everywhere are flocking to these newfangled trendoid web sites by the tens of millions and spend hundreds of millions or billions of hours on them every month. So what. It's all a big fad. Think hula hoops. Pet rocks. The macarena. The clock is ticking, and the 15 minutes is almost up.

Move along, move along, nothing to see here.

These are not the droids you're looking for.

Venture capitalists? All stupid, and unnecessary to boot. Everyone knows that you shouldn't need to raise more than $5.37 in loose change to start a new web business. I mean, c'mon.

Entrepreneurs? Smoking dope. What are they thinking? Why aren't they all working for Apple, helping to build a fatter Nano? What's wrong with them? Potsmoking, mussed-hair, rooftop party-going, trendy glasses-wearing, sandal-clad, Red Bull-snorting, laid-getting wankers, the lot of 'em. The sooner they realize the world never changes and there are no new opportunities to pursue, the better.

Facebook apps? Good God. So they spread virally to millions of users in a matter of weeks. Not worth anything. Everyone knows that. Can't possibly build a business. I mean, don't you realize what else can spread to millions of people in a matter of weeks? Do you want to catch any of those? I don't think so!

Call off the dogs.

It's all over.

Stick a fork in it.

It has ceased to be.

The metabolically-differenced lady has sung.

Right now this industry is just like Wile E. Coyote in the old Road Runner cartoons, ran out over the edge of the cliff, hanging in midair, gravity just about to kick in.

Think Acme servers.

Where's it all going from here?

Now that I've raised a monster Series C round for my own company, all other funding of all other startups will immediately cease. No new competitors to my company need be started. There's certainly no major opportunity in what we're doing; why go after your fair share of a $0 dollar market?

Further, now that my company is in a rapid viral growth loop, will all the users please stop using anything new that comes along. And while you're at it, stop using most everything else also, please. Cut it out with the fads already. Posthaste. Chop chop.

Venture capitalists, I don't think I need to tell you what to do. OK, I do. Hand back the money you've raised from LPs. Quickly. Quietly. OK, now step away. Don't make any sudden moves. Back out of the office park, slowly, slowly. Hey, look at the bright side -- carried interest finally getting taxed properly won't affect you anymore! And now you will have time to play 250 rounds of golf a year instead of just 225, and you can focus on getting your Porsche 911's retrofitted to run on ethanol.

All you other startups funded in the last three years? Punt. Now. Liquidate the company -- get whatever cash you can for the Aeron chairs and the foosball tables and the lava lamps and the RAID arrays and shut down now, hand the cash back to the investors, preferably on fire, and leave town, head down, in shame. All those young programmers and product managers can go get jobs in retail footwear where they belong.

You big companies -- you eBays, you Yahoos, you Googles, you Amazons? Yes, and you, Microsoft? Think the new new B2B -- back to boring. What's with all these new products? The world is confusing enough. Shut 'em down and let's go back to the good old days: Windows ME, Mac OS 9, dialup modems, and 640 megabytes ought to be enough for everyone. You're just screwing us all over with all this new fancy broadband video-enabled phone-call-making wifi web-based lightweight touch-interface gorgeous long-battery-life flimflam -- just look at how you keep dropping the damn prices. I knew I'd be better off not buying any of it, ever. The class action lawsuits are in the mail. And for God's sake, raise your dividends -- what, you think there's any growth left in this industry? Fools. When the great shareholder revolt comes, you'll be first up against the wall.

You wanton scribblers of what will now once again be referred to as the "press", as everyone suddenly goes back to reading the news on smudgy-inked paper -- start cranking up the I told you so stories. You know you've been wanting to tell 'em -- here's your big chance! Pulitzer is waiting.

The sooner we all get back to 2003, when the few surviving companies had huge giant markets all to themselves, with no competition anywhere in sight, because everyone knew the world had come to an end, the better.

I will accept your applause and gratitude in the form of immediate compliance.

Thank you.

Read more at Marc Andreessen's blog.