Apple:
2011 Profits: $43B USD.

Time it takes Apple to make facebook’s profits: 8 days.

Facebook:
Projected Mkt Cap: $100B USD

Apple:
Mkt Cap (Today): $425B USD

Facebook’s relative value to apple: ~25%.

Facebook makes 2% of what Apple does, yet is worth, relatively, 10x more.

Yet, despite my love for the creative arts, I got fed up being poor and unrecognized as an artist, so I came to Babson to live the glamorous life of an undervalued, underpaid, and underfunded entrepreneur. And one of the most important things I’ve learned here was how different disciplines are often interconnected.

It turns out both of my passions are no different – entrepreneurs and artists have quite a lot in common. I believe there are many lessons entrepreneurs can learn from artists and vice versa.

So, what do entrepreneurs and artists have in common?

For starters, artists and entrepreneurs both — love – being — miserable. The rewards are smaller, the hours are longer, and most of what we make is terrible. Our prime motivators are being behind on bills, not having seen our friends in weeks, unpredictability and stress. And the only way we can tell if we’ve accomplished anything is when other people tell us how bad it is…

Yet, every morning, we get up and we do our work because this is what we love.

We love the late-night epiphanies fueled by sleep deprivation. We love being forced to think creatively and on our feet. And when we get rejected – which we all invariably will – we come up with ten new ways to get rejected again. Misery loves company, and that company is full of poets, painters and entrepreneurs.

Now, part of why artists and entrepreneurs love their craft is because they are journeys of self-discovery. Entrepreneurship, like art, is the entrepreneur’s interpretation of the world around them, packaged and presented to the world. It’s intensely personal – our most genuine and honest work. It requires us to understand ourselves intimately, or risk being seen as frauds. It separates the amateurs from the professionals. It’s unyielding and uncompromising, and we will have it no other way.

But finally, and most importantly, entrepreneurs and artists have a shared desire to innovate. As the true artist knows that there can only be one Picasso, the true entrepreneur knows that making the next Facebook adds nothing new to the world. Artists and entrepreneurs are similar because we have an inexplicable, intense spark within us to create something from nothing. We know we will be miserable. And we know that we will be judged and criticized. Yet… we do it because we all want to make our mark in human history.

So to everyone, I’d like to propose a challenge: Let’s all become true artists and entrepreneurs. Let’s all rid ourselves of preconceived notions about what we should do or what we can be. And let’s all dare to be different.

Let’s not be the next, or be the best – let’s be the FIRST, let’s be the ONLY. Why would you want to be the next Bill Gates or Warren Buffet when you can be the very first YOU?

The world is your canvas, and you should paint it any way you want. Go out and do it, whatever it is.

The past few years have been an interesting one for the wireiess industry. For years, Verizon was the 800 lb gorilla. While their phones were nothing to write home about, this is the company you wanted if you wanted the best reception. You may recall the “can you hear me now?” campaign of a few years back.

ATT tried to counteract by providing a larger array of handsets and the rollover minutes fad, but they took a big leap forward when they scored the exclusive contract with Apple’s iPhone. This helped them surpass Verizon in a lot of ways in the mind of the consumer. Many consumers who were not willing to give up their cellular coverage before were now giving it up, and paying an extra $10 for data to boot. AT&T became very profitable despite rumblings of heavy payouts to the fruit company.

When Verizon and Sprint recently announced iPhones for their product lineup, the game had changed. A lot of customers were leaving AT&T again. There were new entrants to the field such as Android and Windows Phone. It’s not hard to see that perhaps Verizon taking back its crown as “best” wireless provider.

T-Mobile, flush with about $4 billion in cash from the failed AT&T merger deal is taking a different approach. They are letting AT&T and Verizon spend the big bucks to fight each other. Instead, they are lowering their prices. They know they can’t compete with the big boys directly, so they created this little niche between the big players and the up-and-comers like MetroPCS.

T-Mobile is not interested in having the iPhone (at least not bad enough to pay for it). They are interested in becoming a value player, and teaming up with a brand known for low prices couldn’t hurt. Especially when they are addressing the major complaints about the big two – high prices, long-term contracts, and less than stellar customer service.

It’ll be interesting to see what you do with that $4 bil, T-Mobile.

currently, i’m on a modified 4 hour body diet. if you don’t know what that is, let me give you the rundown:

1. no white foods (sugar, dairy, flour, etc)
2. eat within an hour of getting up
3. lots of proteins every meal, at least 1/3 (by weight)
4. supplement this diet with PAGG (policosanol, alpha lipoic, green tea [ecgc] and garlic.
5. one mandatory binge day.

but i’m not here to tell you about what i’m not eating; i’m more interested in what i’m going to eat on my mandatory binge day.

it all *starts* with sourdough starter.

add 20g (4% of flour weight) of cocoa powder…

People are saying this is a smart move for google – the big G can sit on a bunch of patents they no doubt can turn into cash payments, fight off patent lawsuits, or earn more licensing fees for its android platform. But everyone’s overlooking the possible business and political implications of this move.

For starters, it’s putting HTC on edge. Google’s biggest OEM, HTC has a lot to lose in this deal. Now that Googorola is a first-party manufacturer, HTC is in direct competition with them. HTC has had immense success on the Android platform competing on the free market. Much of that success came with aggressive pricing and availability of android handsets. HTC loses a lot of their advantage now that Google will undoubtedly try to keep device pricing more stable and more profitable for themselves and smaller OEMs.

Secondly, this causes more platform fragmentation. It’s costly for a device maker to test and roll out platform updates. When Googorola begins rolling out monthly, or even weekly updates to its platform, can the smaller players afford this? Will Google bear the burden of testing Android OS on every device out there when they have their own? Probably not. This creates a situation where the official devices become the one to get, rather than a third-party device. The Nexus One remains a highly favored device amongst Androids users for this very reason.

Remember ex-computer manufacturer Compaq? Compaq went out of business partly due to competing directly with their retail partners, which made them lose favor in their channels. If Google makes their devices THE Android device to have, there will be many unhappy OEMs and unhappy owners of third-party Android devices.

When you rely solely on device propagation to bring in profits to your company, the last thing you want to do is piss off the people making and shipping your devices.

Expect many OEMs to concentrate much more on Windows Phone 7 in the months ahead.

“We welcome today’s news, which demonstrates Google’s deep commitment to defending Android, its partners, and the ecosystem.” –J.K. Shin, president of Samsung’s Mobile Communications Division

“I welcome Google’s commitment to defending Android and its partners.” –Bert Nordberg, CEO of Sony Ericsson

“We welcome the news of today’s acquisition, which demonstrates that Google is deeply committed to defending Android, its partners, and the entire ecosystem.” –Peter Chou, CEO of HTC

• “We welcome Google’s commitment to defending Android and its partners.” –Jong-Seok Park, CEO of LG Electronics’ Mobile Communications Company

50 Things You Should Feel Good About

Some select tidbits:

Since 1995, the Dow has returned about 11% per year (including dividends). That’s a healthy return by any standard.

Nine percent of American households are millionaires.

GDP per capita in the United States is 12 times higher than it is in China. Remember that next time someone mentions how domineering China’s economy is.

2010 was a record year for both patent applications and patent grants. Innovation is nowhere near dead.

It’s not that the economy is really bad, it’s just that it’s not as good as when it was when everyone was on a crazy frenzy of paying millions of dollars for companies that didn’t make a single dollar in revenue…

Happy weekend, everyone!

1. Supply and demand. As the demand for workers increase, the supply grows short. Companies must fight for their laborers, and if one factory isn’t willing to pay the newer, higher wages the workers are demanding, they will walk down the street and work at another factory. As these wages continue to rise, the benefits of American companies moving to China will soon be diminished. Remember when people thought America was sending too many jobs to India? Far less of that is happening now there for this exact reason.

2. Chinese companies could soon see their own revolution, overtaking American companies in China and developing great brands of their own for the world stage. If they are building durable goods, which tend to be very heavy, then shipping charges will diminish any price advantage of making them in China. If they are to sell these durable goods in China, then the average wage must increase by a significant amount, so the average consumer is able to afford them. The local major economies of Japan, Russia, and Korea are already building their own durable goods, thereby making them less desirable in those countries, as well as unaffordable in local markets.

3. Chinese people just aren’t creative. (This is an extraordinarily wide-cast net and could even be considered a stereotype. But if we’re going to discuss the intricacies of one of the world’s largest economies in a blog post, I hope you will allow it.) The strengths of the Chinese economy and their political policies has to do with putting the desires of the state over their own individual desires. As such, collectivism is a part of the Chinese DNA, of sorts. The Chinese economy more or less values engineers over artists; lawmakers over playwrights; mid-level salarymen over entrepreneurs. That is the critical key difference between the American and Chinese economies. The American economy is driven by innovation, whereas the Chinese economy is driven by production capacity, and it is through this innovation that true wealth is created.

I believe if the Chinese economy can raise the middle class to such a level that people can be free to pursue the arts and individual pursuits and learn to be innovative, China would be an incredible economy to behold. People to create radical new things, and people to buy them… China has neither at the moment, and it may take several generations of thought and philosophy change until they do.

But Apple had to know this was coming. It’s rare, and surely infuriating to users, that a company puts out a newer version of something that doesn’t support files from the older version. But this is Apple… they didn’t get where they are by asking customers what they want, insomuch as telling them what they want.

Lacking all kinds of “standard” and “critical” features in your application does something really smart – it creates space for entrepreneurial thinkers and developers to fill these holes in your program. And whenever someone comes up with a plugin (or a standalone add-on) for FCPX, it gets sold through Apple’s own App Store, ensuring Apple gets a hefty chunk of the proceeds without having to do any of the work themselves. It’s becoming very obvious why Apple will only sell FCPX through the App Store now…

This is also saving Apple a lot of money on things like software development, R&D and pushing up their bottom line. Crafty move, Apple… you’re the only company with enough cred to pull the wool over your own consumers like this.

Remember Hot or Not? Friendster? Or even myspace? Yea, I kinda do, but more for the serious valuations they received, much more than the actual services it provided. Youtube was a great sale for Steve Chen and co, but google’s still trying to figure out how to make money from it. Rupert Murdoch banked big on myspace, and sold it recently for little more than $35 million bucks, losing hundreds of millions of dollars.

All in all, it was a big payday for the founders of these companies, and they were savvy enough businessmen to sell them before the S hit the F. They were even savvier to sell these companies off before going the IPO route, as they don’t have to deal with fickle investors, nor more importantly, have fiduciary duty to shareholders. In other words, they could legally milk the cow dry before selling it to greedy billionaires, and let them clean up afterward.

The founders were smart though, as they saw market saturation, while the investors saw a large, ready, and captive audience (which, market research points to as being false). The founders sold their audience for a bag full of cash and made out like bandits… but that’s another story for another day.

And where have all these companies gone? My friends look on people who still use their myspace accounts with contempt. OKCupid has replaced Hot or Not. And youtube… is still not making money. All that money spent, and for what? Every one of these companies have become loss leaders for all of the investors that have bought them, and every single one of these companies have lost their status as critical successes and the darling of the masses.

So, why is Google spending so much money to create their own social network with Google+? Let’s suppose Google+ can overthrow the 800-pound gorilla in facebook. But so what? Every company that has gone before it has failed to turn their social networking venture profitable after finding mass market penetration. Why spend the millions (and hopefully not billions) to compete for a business model that has yet to prove that it’s profitable? Google, you’ve already gone IPO, you don’t have anyone to sell Google+ to for a hefty bag of cash… what will you do with it afterward?

I suggest waiting a few years, and buying facebook on the Nasdaq for $50M…

I’ve long said, a ridiculous valuation is completely OK as long as everyone involved is completely delusional, and in this case, everyone’s still drinking the kool-aid.

Assuming a $150B valuation, fool’s Alex Dumortier, says that this is a ~37.5x multiplier when using TTM revenues at IPO. This is twice the multiplier Pandora (NYSE: P) (17.4x) and Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) (18.1x) got. Anyone who has sold a company will tell you the best time to sell a company or go public is when interest is at a fever-pitch, and when sales seem, for the so-called forseeable future, to be on a trajectory that suggests phenomenal growth forever and ever. I am suggesting facebook is no longer on this path.

According to the observer, the click-through rates, of facebook have dropped from 0.063% to 0.051% between 2009 and 2010. That’s a 20% drop! But more importantly, you’re only reaching 0.05% of your highly-targeted and supposedly-very-interested audience! That is atrocious.

But, “that’s OK as long as more people continue to join facebook!” you say. That’s fine, except 96% of americans already use facebook. The 4% left over probably live in a cave somewhere without electricity, or are quitting… in droves. And let’s just say growth in many other countries have been tepid, at best.

facebook knows this. This is why they announced new measures in hopes of boosting revenues. Most of which, from what I’ve seen, are mere copies of groupon (see earlier post), foursquare, and yelp – already monsters within their own micro-industries. While I won’t deny them growth in these categories, it shows that facebook has run out of places to go, and things to do. It shows a desperation, a chink in the armor.

As I’ve said, the best time to sell or go public is when everyone is at a fever pitch, and sales seem to go on ad infinitum. If these new measures don’t do as well as facebook hopes, or facebook can’t find some new markets to sign up new users (good luck!), then it’s clear to see that revenues are certainly not on an upward trend for the forseeable future.

And no, hiring GeoHotz will not solve all of their problems.