paul graham - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

An interview with Paul Graham on TechCrunch is attracting flak from the blogosphere for the investment criteria he uses for Y Combinator.

Last week we witnessed the sale of Kiko, a well-designed Y Combinator-funded online calendar. The deal went through via eBay to an as-yet-undisclosed party, for a quarter of a million dollars. Which is a good return for Paul and the Kiko founders, but not the really big bucks that they would have seen had Google bought it. Google of course launched its own calendar app, integrated into Gmail, which prompted the Kiko sale.

So does a fire sale on eBay, albeit a profitable one, mean that Graham is any more correct when he advises startup founders not to worry about business models?

This week Web 2.0 startup Kiko put itself up for sale on eBay, after its founders seemingly became bored or disillusioned.

Kiko, which is priced at $49,999 (it has yet to attract a bid), is an online calendar built using Ruby on the Rails and claims about 40,000 users per month. Which, in case you are wondering, is a cost to the ‘business’. Kiko doesn’t appear to have any notable revenue streams.

Paul Graham, one of the founders of web incubator Y Combinator, says we’re not in a bubble, and he’s right. There’s way too much talk about this mythical bubble. It ain’t a bubble, folks.

However, I think Paul is wide of the mark on a number of his assertions made when interviewed by Ian Delaney, who is currently writing a book on Web 2.0. Paul says he has spotted “a social trend that will last”, namely: “the startup world will increasingly be ruled by technical people rather than business people”.

God forbid!

I’m amazed that a savvy investor would think that way. Paul is a hacker himself of course, and a successful entrepreneur to boot, so I could be wildly out on this one. It just seems… wrong… on… so… many… levels…