Saturday, October 23, 2010

bets on mobile

Entrepreneurs in technology industry like to make bets. They bet on technologies such as PHP, JSP, ASP/.Net; Oracle Database, MySql; iPhone, Android...They bet on the kind of business to go into.  Perhaps the most important decision an entrepreneur can make is what business to go into.

I recently read Tony Hsieh's book: Delivering Happiness. In The book, he mentioned that the most important decision a poker player can make is which table to sit down. I really agree with that.

In retrospect, I think Tony didn't pick the best table to play his cards. He mentioned that Zappos made $100 Million in enterprise value annually on average. It translates well in to its $1 Billion sale to Amazon 10 years after it was founded. $100 Million a year seems to be a really big number. But when I look at a few companies in the mobile space, I realize wealth was created much quicker there.

For example, Admob was acquired by Google for $750 Million less than 4 years after it was founded. On average, it created about $200 Million a year. Twice as much as Zappos.


After a few months working in the Internet industry, I'm convinced that there're still a lot of money to be made in this industry.
The things I'm willing to bet on are: mobile (location based services, social apps), internet (cloud based apps). 

There were a number of exciting news in the past few weeks. Including sFund which target social applications, Google's mobile display business is on the run rate of $1B and Fred Wilson encourages all his companies develop on Android.

I saw the movie The Social Network with a few friends (2 from Google, 1 from Facebook, 1 from EMC) 2 weeks ago. It's a pretty exciting movie for people in technology to watch. Being in silicon valley and watching the movie made me believe that I made the right decision moving here.


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