Mark Pincus Blog

Visiting Hunter S. Thompson

posting from the pool at sky hotel in aspen. wireless net, shade, amazing burgers and 9,000 feet. heaven.

just thought i'd post a few pix of hunter s. thomson's 500 foot cannon under construction for his aug. 20th send off. for those who havent followed, hunter's last request was to have his ashes shot out of a cannon in the shape of a fist. i believe that johnny depp is paying and bob dylan is rumored to be playing. (guess he wrote a song about him?)

ironically (?), hunter chose to shoot himself with a shotgun the day after i closed on my 'ghetto ranch' near his farm in woody creek. maybe he and i would have hung out at his famous woody creek tavern. and maybe we would have connected and i could have helped him through his deep depression. ok. that is what went through my mind. anyway, it's cool he lived his own life and chose how he'd leave; a way that seems very fitting with who he was.

Sonos - mixed review

i recently purchased the sonos wireless multi room music player with great excitement. my hope was that i could play my itunes music throughout many different rooms. while the concept is great, the product delivered the worst out of box experience i have ever had. the Mac software immediately requires registering with the company and downloading new software to work. needless to say this did not work either. as is the case with many bleeding edge products, you spend way more hours futzing to try to get it to work than the end result ever merits.

what is surprising however, is the lack of understanding this company has for how to deal with consumers. now, they are located in silicon valley, where most companies believe great technology can make up for bad marketing. but that is no excuse for doing things that are just plain stupid. when i asked the support rep why they would ship a product with incompatible software, he said it was too late and already 'in the box'.

the senior tech rep did eventually fix my problems and i do love the concept of moving your music throughout a large living area (for me it's 4 buildings on an old ranch). my advice would be that you wait for version 2.0 of this whole concept unless you're very patient.

yo adam

wow. this is cool. we can all talk to each other through technorati by just tagging most popular tags and tagging around them.

hey adam, we should connect this week anyway. email me!

Connecting to 'Greek Tragedy' story

just realizing there's a really easy way for people to build their blog traffic fast. just blog about anything that is most popular on technorati. today it will obviously be stephanie klein, the vivacious girl of greek tragedy fame. wonder if she is technorati'ing herself too...? hmm, stephanie, if you're reading this, i have a few great guys to set you up with in nyc. email me.

80's Mercedes - The New Hip Car

has anyone else noticed that all of the sudden there's a lot of kids driving 80's and early 90's mercedes around? it actually makes a ton of sense and i'm even jealous. while a kid in a brand new 500SL looks offensive (to me), there's somehow something hip about a 25 year old version. i guess first off it's the price. a quick perusal on ebay showed these can be had for $10-20k which just looks smart. is this a phenomena that's always gone on and i'm just noticing it? maybe kids discover classics first becuase of the price factor. all i know is i've always secretly liked mercedes but couldnt take the image and now i'm seriously thinking about buying myself a swanky early 80's mercedes!  

News Corp Buys Myspace for $580M

bambi reports that news corp bought intermix, the parent of myspace, for $580m today. i have to admit that i passed on buying intermix stock a while ago at $6 because i thought that the overall valuation was too high for just the myspace asset. given the reported revenue numbers for myspace of around $9m, this had to be a highly strategic acquisition. i had thought recently that someone like viacom might be myspace or the facebook to add to their mtv properties as these sites are starting to aggregate such large young audiences. this looks like a nice fast exit for redpoint which i believe funded myspace a year ago at a $50m valuation. not sure how this worked out for them but guessing they made at least 5x, which would probably be about $50m on $10m.

Colin Powell joining KP

wow. seems like every so often our little world gets connected to the bigger one and reminds me of the power being weilded here. guess if carlyle group can hire ex presidents (GW) we should be able to at least hire ex-secretaries of state. ok, i know i'm not really part of 'we', but somehow it feels like it. as i said in the nytimes, 'there's an A list in silicon valley, and i'm not on it.' just when i started coming to grips with my massive john doerr envy, he hires colin powell as his advisor.

My 2 Cents on Hotjobs Scraping

matt marshall, charlene lie and others have all talked about the implications of hotjobs scraping and presenting job listings from other sites. thought i'd add my own perspective having spent many months analyzing this market opportunity for tribe. (btw, matt is becoming quite the blogger celeb in his own right with his recent wsj story. congrats to him.)

firstly, it is somewhat comforting to see the world actually move in this web 2.0 way when we've all been predicting it:) beyond ego gratification (which doesnt pay any bills), here's a few thoughts...

• what drives audience? i've never seen any proof that most comprehensive is a key driver for jobs or dates. in all our focus group studies at tribe we never found this to be true. popularity of sites like craigslist for jobs and jdate for dates proves opposite.
• people want to connect with people - job seekers have always told me they use CL because they can get to the actual hiring manager (via email) and avoid recruiters and hr people. this makes me think the winning site will have a perception of connecting people more directly.
• what drives listers?  every job lister on craigslist will tell you, 'omg, i got 10 responses in the first hour'. they do seem to care more about the immediate gratification. from this perspective aggregation is a good thing in driving more widespread viewing and responding.
• its all about brand - i believe the reason monster and careerbuilder can persist and charge such high prices is that they have brands.  brands take a really long time to build in classifieds where your audience may show up once a year or once ever. for this reason, i dont see any scenario where the aggregators win on better mousetraps. my bet is on craigslist, monster, careerbuilder and of course tribe:)

Owning google's 'feeling lucky' button

i feel kind of stupid and awestruck. this guy matt mullenweg owns google's 'feeling lucky' button to the point that he uses it on his bizcard instead of an email address. that's cool! if you type in 'matt' and click 'feeling lucky' it goes straight to him. i'm guessing this has something to do with his being the developer behind wordpress, the highly popular blog software.

[scott rafer points out that i own 'mark pincus' for feeling lucky. just not he same though.]

I Hate Limousine Liberals

one group i hate even more than the christian right is limousine liberals. these are the rich people who want to do 'good' with their money, that is use it to impact politics - issues and campaigns - in ways they believe will help the world. here's how they fail...

• no impact - as a group, i believe they have very little impact, positive or not (so why even write about them?). while i'm sure they find lots of ways to funnel lots of dollars to 'deserving' candidates, their money and efforts are a drop in the bucket and wont cause lasting change. they should be working to enable and ignite a movement, to help the people find their voice and power. this would have a big multiplier effect.
• hypocritical - it burns me up to see super rich liberals (like larry david) driving around in these ugly prius cars and then flying off in their private jets. first, one flight on their gulfstream probably wastes more gas than is saved by a lifetime of prius suffering. second, it just seems stupid, like camping out in front of your mansion. are they trying to set examples? only one i see is inconsistent BS.
• serving egos not the people - most of these people spend more time name dropping, telling me how they're about to meet with howard dean or al gore, than talking about any issues. feels more like they're collecting trophies than fighting a revolution.
• not acting as leaders - other than bono, i have yet to see any of these people use their fame, fortune and power to act as real leaders.  seems they could serve their egos far better as leaders than donors.