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May 13, 2008

Entrepreneurs: Random Musings on Web's Past and Future

kevin%20ryan.jpegA group of top tech entrepreneurs paneled in New York tonight. Talk was lively, if not deep, given the audience ofINSEAD alums hailed mainly from the relatively distant shores of Wall Street.

Discussion encompassed online media and marketing. Some highlights:

Start-up vet Kevin Ryan was anything but bullish on mobile. "Not one single company in mobile is valued at $1 billion. The carriers are blocking all the innovation."

Moderator Henry Blodgett asked the panel how to fix newspapers. Bain Capital Group's Daniel Allen thinks they ought to capitalize on their relationships with local advertisers and teach them the ropes of online marketing.

What's hot that should be not? The Ladders co-founder Alexandre Douzet thinks Ning's value lies primarily in co-founder Marc Andressen's name. Indeed's Paul Forster votes for Twitter's lack of a business model.

And while there was general agreement things are about to get a little grim, none of these entrepreneurs believe online is on the verge of a recession that even approaches the severity of the last bubble, or dot-bomb. Ryan laughingly reminisced about a week in 2000 when he went skiing and DoubleClick's market cap soared $1 billion while his out-of-the-office e-mail auto-responder was, essentially, running the company.

Posted by Rebecca Lieb at May 13, 2008 9:25 PM

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Comments

How funny. He was also CEO when the value of Doubleclick dropped by a billion. He did a top notch job.

Posted by: pasan at May 15, 2008 7:55 AM

I think you missed the point of the comment.

I've heard Kevin Ryan joke about this before. He was pointing out that he was well aware the .com economy at the time was in a bubble, and DoubleClick was over-valued at the time. There is no way a company should go up like that on a weekend.

What did he do? Like any good business man: sell stock if over-valued, buy your own stock if you are undervalued. So he sold. People were so irratioally exuberant at the time that they didn't even take his own market signal. Smart man. That move allowed DoubleClick to survive the correction when most companies were wiped out.

Posted by: Nex at May 16, 2008 4:52 AM

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