“Welshman Michael Moritz, senior partner at Sequoia Capital on the hub that is Sand Hill Road, had the vision to nurture and champion Google, PayPal, Yahoo! and most recently YouTube, an $11.5m investment which reportedly returned $495m - a forty-threefold increase in just over a year. Such maths has created a less hard-edged version of US capitalism: entrepreneurial failure is regarded as positive, a learning curve. You failed? Here’s more cash. You failed again? Here’s more cash. Better to fail five times and learn, it is said, than to succeed first time and learn nothing.”

From here.

Also (from the same piece):

The new YouTube is … Loopt

One day Sam Altman, 21, a student at Stanford University, was walking out of computer science class and wanted to meet friends for lunch. ‘I thought it would be great to see where everyone is by looking down at a phone,’ he said. So he set about writing software to make it possible and raised $5m from venture capitalists. Loopt causes mobile phones to send a ‘beat’ to a phone mast or satellite every 15 minutes, pinpointing their location. Phone owners can share this information with friends’ phones or computers for $2.99 per month in the US.

The new Craigslist is … Yelp

Volunteer reviewers, or Yelpers, write about their local restaurants, shops, doctors - anything worth reviewing. Their eagerness to share combines the best of social networking with the tools of local search, such as Google Maps. Bob Goodson, a 26-year-old from Norfolk now working for Yelp in San Francisco, says: ‘It is like word of mouth but amplified online.’ Yelp had 1.6 million visits last month. It aims to reach 28 US cities soon, with expansion to Britain likely. Its more prolific reviewers, ‘The Yelp elite squad’, are rewarded with a monthly party.

Loopt is a fellow Y Combinator fundee. Bring on San Francisco (we’re going in January).

Posted on November 29