My first whiff of Silicon Valley entrepreneurialism came five years ago when I left Miami to intern at Netscape. Working in the company of so many ambitious people was literally a kid’s dream come true.
But as Netvibes gets $15 million dollars richer, it’s all starting to get a little too dreamy now, a little too chimerical.
Netvibes is a customizable portal that aggregates e-mail, stock prices and other slices of your life. It’s a solid portal, but it’s still just a portal. Many developers could piece it together on a dime. Many already have. While I must assume the company is planning a capital-intensive expansion, I can’t imagine what on God’s earth would justify an additional fifteen million dollars, unless we’re about to see Netvibes appliances, or medicine, or medicinal appliances. Admittedly, my strongest frame of reference is my own venture-backed project, which I personally consider very ambitious. In nearly two years, we’ve raised $100,000.
It’s a problem of skewed perspectives. When we hit one million downloads of Firefox, that wasn’t “normal.” That was outrageous, intoxicating. Today it’s difficult to find anyone who even notices when the counter rolls another million. The 200 millionth download was celebrated with digital balloons. What’s 300 million, a :-)? It’s a frightening attitude—we can’t afford to be blasé about a single person, let alone a million—but at least if it brings us down, people just change browsers.
The stakes are higher in the Valley, where many venture capital firms refuse to invest anything smaller than the “normal” $3 million series A. So can we really make do with only two? That company raised “4,” that one “9,” that one “16.” Zeroes are extinct in Silicon Valley, trampled in our breathless pursuit of the next great enterprise. It’s all a damned game out here, losers go home with a :-(, it’s just play money anyway, you can always start another company.
Except that if you have fifteen million dollars, someone else doesn’t. Most founders know that investments carry fiduciary responsibility; Netvibes, for instance, now owes its investors a sizable return. What about social responsibility? Will that IPO be your legacy after you RIP? Before raising large—and yes, these are large, so fix your normal if you disagree—amounts of money, founders may wish to consider life after liquidity.
I think about it often, particularly when people ask pointedly if I want to make a lot of money. The answer is yes, but not for myself. I want to suck the money out of this ludicrous system and give it to the people and organizations for whom a million dollars is still a million dollars, zeroes and all.
