Search Results for: palo alto

The Newest Status Symbol

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Here in Palo Alto (whose weather, for the benefit of snow-bound Chicago viewers, can be seen here) there's a weird new phenomenon going on. It basically involves a person being given the opportunity to be made rich beyond the dreams of avarice and then refusing that offer.

It's the newest kind of status symbol. Just yesterday, the founder of Path.com – a startup about which I've never heard anything – was offered $100,000,000 (that's one hundred million dollars – – say it Dr. Evil style for the full effect) by Google, and he told them to go jump in a lake. It seems Google is becoming a bit of an expert in getting the cold shoulder:

0203-turndown

I was sort of wondering what kind of amazing, world-changing application could come from a new company that would garner such a high price tag. Well – brace yourselves – here it is:

0203-path

Yep. It's an iPhone application that lets you share pictures in some oh-so-sexy social way. I'm guessing their annual revenue is $0,000,000 right now.

Groupon's recent dismissal of Google's $6,000,000,000 offer was even more extraordinary. It wasn't that many years ago that Apple had a market cap of about that amount. Now an online coupon provider with countless imitators has done the same.

My view is that this is just a new twist of what the Silicon Valley went through in the late 1990s, except this time, the payday is massively inflated purchase prices from giant firms as opposed to IPOs. Back in the late 1990s, when I saw firms like TheGlobe.com (remember them?) go public to wild acclaim, I figured I must be somehow retarded in not understanding what was happening. My fears of retardation lasted years, actually, because the bubble blew up from 1995 to early 2000, but in the end, the bubble burst.

This new bubble could have years of life left. We could well see Facebook go public, and Groupon, and LinkedIn (hell, they are coming public – what – this week?), Zynga, and God knows what else. Successful IPOs – and Lord knows Facebook's will be successful – will just spur on smaller companies to join the frenzy. We could well be in the equivalent of 1996 right now when viewed through the lens of the 1995-2000 bubble. Irrational markets tend to chafe me, but there's nothing I can do about it.

As for the folks turning their noses up at getting insanely rich, it could go either way. The founders of Google tried to sell their product to Yahoo for a million dollars back in 1998 or so, and Yahoo told them to get lost. If you had asked the Yahoo management team what the chances were of those kids completely crushing Yahoo within a few years, they would have been too busy laughing to give you a probability.

On the other hand, the guy who founded Pointcast back in 1994 (or thereabouts) was offered $400 million by Rupert Murdoch, and after he refused, Pointcast wasn't around very long until it became utterly irrelevant. Something tells me he wishes he had said yes.

Note to Google: if you want to buy a really nice financial blog for $50 million, I won't say no. I'll even keep writing for you for a while. Drop me a line.

I Have a Dream, Too

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I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of Slope.

Five years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, began shorting the market. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of bears who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But five years later, the bear is still is not free.The life of the short-seller is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. We bears live on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. We are still languishing in the corners of American society and finds ourselves an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a pledge that both bears and bulls would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That promissory note, however, has been securitized and sold off by the great vampire squid.

We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. 

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Slope community must not lead us to a distrust of all bulls, for many of our buy-side brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.

As we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of fair markets, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the bear is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of Goldman Sachs' brutality. We can never be satisfied, as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot short an obviously overpriced market that is made to levitate only through the grace of the New York Federal Reserve. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Go back to Manhattan, go back to the Hamptons, go back to Greenwich, go back to Stamford, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all traders are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the the paper-strewn floor of the New York Stock Exchange, both bulls and bears can sit at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even at 200 West Street in New York, a building sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my two little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the the positions in their portfolio but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day, down at the Treasury Department, with its vicious POMO purchasers, with its secretary having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Washington, little girls and boys of traders of all kinds will regard one another as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

Let freedom ring from the tree-lined streets of Palo Alto

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of Northstar!

But not only that; let freedom ring from JP Morgan!

Let freedom ring from Chase Manhattan!

Let freedom ring from every cubicle and glass-walled office of Goldman Sachs!

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, options traders and futures pit-dwellers, buy-and-holders and HFT gun-slingers, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Wall Street spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we have free enterprise at last!"

From the Outside Looking In

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Years ago, in high school, I took Latin as my second language. I took it for four years, and although I didn't learn as much as I might have, I do remember the infinitive speculare – from which we get the word speculate – means "to observe."

I have been cursed with noticing things all my life. Perhaps it comes from being an overly visual person, or maybe it's just that I was born an outsider. I have experienced life from the outside looking in, and I have chosen a lifestyle which only exaggerates this circumstance. That is, I have no commute, I don't attend any meetings, I have no reports to submit, no presentations to make, and no peer reviews to write. I just chart, trade, blog, and tend to my family.

Given this, I tend to watch other people much like an alien visitor might (without seeming too intrusive). Most of the time it makes me sad for the human condition. (And this is in Palo Alto; God help me during those rare chances I wind up in a place like Las Vegas, which compels me to find the highest tower I can and leap from it).

Tonight was such a night. Our family schedule is somewhat complex, and it required us to have a profoundly early dinner (4 p.m.) at The Fish Market. Folks who eat dinner at 4 p.m., let's face it, or going to be a little unusual (present company notwithstanding, of course).

I noticed an old woman walk in. She had that quiet dignity and poise of an older woman who, even when eating by herself, wants to look nice for dinner. Soon thereafter, a couple of a similar age (lots of seniors eat early) came in and sat at the table near hers. The gent left for the bathroom, and the woman blew her nose loudly and lengthily.

The man came back to the table. There were two things that struck me about this couple. First, their utter silence. Not a word was exchanged between them. They didn't seem mad at each other. They simply had run out of things to say. Utter, unending, agonizing silence.

The second thing was their facial expressions. The man looked extraordinarily uncomfortable. He rubbed his face with his hands; he stared off in the distance; it seemed he wanted to be anywhere but there. And the woman seemed to keep her eyes closed most of the time. I'm not sure if she was sleepy and resting her eyes, or if she couldn't stand to see the silence. They looked right past each other, and although I can understand not having a lot to say to someone you've known for forty years or more, the consistency of the pained silence could have been made into a full-length, black & white picture called Despair.

Not too long after this, a large woman waddled in to the restaurant. And by "Large", I mean the kind of person who shops at a store whose sizes are:

+ Husky

+ Extra Husky

+ Oh My God, It's Moving Toward Us

She was by herself, and the waitresses showed her to her table. She did not sit down, however. After the waitress left, the woman pulled the entire table away from the bench, made sure the space was wide enough to accommodate her, and then plopped down onto the padded cushion (nearly sending my son, seated farther down the same bench, almost through the ceiling), finally pulling the table yet again toward her. Mission accomplished. Time to eat.

She got out her People magazine and – unpredictably – a canister of some kind of artificial seasoning like Butter Buds or Molly McButter or something along those lines. Why anyone would want to sprinkle dry chemicals onto freshly-made food in order to enhance its flavor is beyond me, but there you have it.

And so this completes the scene. Next to us, the Giant People-Reading, Butter-Buds-Consuming Woman from Another Dimension, and one more table out, the Silent Couple That Winces and Despairs. And I'm able to take all this in without anybody noticing.

If there is a God – and I've lived my life believing there is – I've got to believe he spends a lot of his day disappointed. I don't make these observations out of criticism; far from it. I cringe at many of my own actions, inactions, and self-created circumstances. But I do know there's a reason I've never been tempted to do drugs; my brain is messed up enough as it is. If I turned on, tuned in, and dropped out any more than I already do, I don't think I could make it.

Lonely

The Facebook Bubble

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The past two days, on the front page of the New York Times, the latest investment (from none other than Goldman Sachs) in Facebook is featured. Nominally, the valuation of Facebook is now at $50 billion, a new record, making mid-20s Zuckerberg one of the richest people on the face of the Earth. (I would also note that today's Times also gives Facebook the majority of the front page of the Business section as well).

It wasn't that long ago that I remember passing by the little placard on a small downtown office in Palo Alto looking for people to come work at "TheFacebook.com". I've even seen Zuck downtown a few times back in the days of Prophet (they have hence moved from Palo Alto's little downtown to Stanford Industrial Park). So it's pretty amazing seeing how fast this company, led by this one youngster, has grown.

But, as the graph below indicates, Facebook is now nominally worth more than eBay and Yahoo (by a long shot). I think Facebook is elegantly designed, and it's inconceivable how any firm, no matter how well-funded, could push them off the top of the social networking heap any time in the next decade. But does this valuation make any sense, or is it just the 3,875th bubble we're witnessing in our lifetimes?

0104-facebook

Gubmint Knows Best

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My lifelong relationship with government has been a simple one: I have paid them ("them" being the US Government, the State of California, the County of Santa Clara, and the City of Palo Alto) millions of dollars in taxes and fees and have given up a certain amount of civil liberties, and in exchange I have received………almost nothing.

Yes, I get to drive on roads, and I suppose on an per-user basis that's probably worth a couple of thousand dollars to me. And I enjoy clean drinking water, which I'd be willing to pay for anyway. And I live in a society governed, to varying degrees, by the rule of law. But, on the whole, I'd say I've received about ten cents of value for every dollar (and I'm in a generous mood).

I bring this up because of an article I just read about how the government's newest food safety law also provides for the banning of school bake sales. Now, it doesn't ban them outright, but it provides for that kind of power.

Commenting on the new law, Michelle Obama (whose official role is………what?) declared, regarding child nutrition, "we can't just leave it up to the parents."

Of course not. I mean, I'm a father, and smarter than the average bear, but God knows I need Michelle Obama to figure out what my kids eat.

I've always viewed political parties as being along a continuum. On one extreme, Communism, the view is that people are hapless morons and need a paternalistic government to shepherd them from cradle to grave in a life devoid of meaning or self-actualization. On the other extreme is Libertarianism, which leaves it to individuals to figure their own lives out, and if they can't fend for themselves – – well, tough tacos.

I used to be a pretty hard-core Libertarian until I realized that a lot of people actually are hapless morons and need adult supervision, so my views have mellowed somewhat over the years.

All the same, this kind of pronouncement from Michelle "her arms are so toned!" Obama is the kind of thing which makes me inch back to my Libertarian leanings. Stay out of my kitchen, Obama mama. My family can handle things on its own without your help.

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