Linked List: May 6, 2015

Wednesday, 6 May 2015

Startup L. Jackson on Bill Maris’s ‘Bank Heist’ Line 

Captures the VC mindset perfectly.

Update: A whole blog post from Mr. Jackson, including a correction on the numbers involved.

Sonos Fights and Wins Against Patent Troll 

Craig Shelburne, co-founder and general counsel for Sonos:

In 2012, a newly formed patent assertion entity (PAE) called Black Hills Media filed a suit against us for alleged infringement of 11 patents they had acquired from defunct companies. Despite Black Hills Media being a PAE (which are sometimes labeled as “patent trolls”), we thoroughly investigated the patents before deciding our course of action. Not only were we 100% certain that we did not infringe any of these patents, but we also strongly believed the patents themselves were not valid.

We chose to fight back in court and at the Patent Office. We spent millions of dollars and thousands of hours defending our position, on the principle that you should not pay for something you do not use.

Good for Sonos.

Apple Confirms Their Web Crawler: Applebot 

Barry Schwartz, writing for Search Engine Land:

After much speculation around an Apple Web Crawler, Apple has finally posted a help document confirming the existence of AppleBot, their web crawler.

Apple said, Applebot is the web crawler for Apple. AppleBot is “used by products including Siri and Spotlight Suggestions,” the company said.

It’s the confirmation of Applebot’s existence that’s new, not Applebot itself. Developer Jan Moesen wrote about it back in November, noting that it was apparently written using the Go programming language. Looking at the logs here on DF, it’s been calling itself “Applebot” since February.

(For the curious, here’s what the last 24 hours of Applebot traffic to DF look like.)

Evolution 

Mike Isaac and David Gelles, writing for the NYT Bits blog:

After the flurry of attention and just a few months later, Secret opted to raise another round of financing, this time seeking $25 million. Bill Maris, managing partner of Google Ventures, did not think it was a good idea and the company did not participate.

“We advised them against it,” Mr. Maris said in an interview, referring to Secret’s leaders. “We told them they didn’t need the money. And raising that much money that soon, it was going to be impossible to meet the expectations in the future.” […]

The company completed its $25 million financing led by Index Ventures and Redpoint Ventures, along with a variety of individual angel investors. In that round, the two founders each wanted to take $3 million off the table for themselves, a practice that is commonplace for more mature companies, but less so for very young start-ups.

“It’s like a bank heist,” Mr. Maris said. “That’s not how you do a start-up.”

Later in the day, in an email to Isaac he posted publicly on Medium, Bill Maris wrote:

I want to correct and amend a few things. I wanted to let you know how my views had evolved since we spoke. […] I do want to make clear that this was not a “bank heist,” and that was a poor choice of words on my part.

That implies that the founders were trying to line their pockets at the expense of others. After having a heart to heart with David, I don’t think that’s true. David rightly pointed out to me that he and Chrys worked extremely hard. They built something that captured the imagination of a lot of people and had a huge amount of users. The tone and content of my comments as printed don’t pay the appropriate respect to that fact.

I don’t know what motivated him to speak so openly to The Times, but I know which one of his views sounds more honest to me, and it isn’t the “evolved” one.

Brian X. Chen on Customer Service and Product Reviews 

Interesting piece from Brian X. Chen for the NYT:

Product reviews are broken. They are great at telling you about the speed of a computer or the brightness of a screen. But there’s a big gaping hole in evaluations of most products, from phones to computers to televisions. The product evaluations neglect to mention the quality of a company’s customer service, which becomes the most important factor of all when problems or questions related to the product come up.

I learned this lesson from a bizarre experience with a Samsung oven that I bought last year.

Oculus Rift to Ship in ‘Q1 2016’ 

Oculus VR (now a division of Facebook):

Today, we’re incredibly excited to announce that the Oculus Rift will be shipping to consumers in Q1 2016, with pre-orders later this year.

The Rift delivers on the dream of consumer VR with compelling content, a full ecosystem, and a fully-integrated hardware/software tech stack designed specifically for virtual reality. It’s a system designed by a team of extremely passionate gamers, developers, and engineers to reimagine what gaming can be.