Last year, Facebook bought Instagram for the outrageous price of $1 billion. This was around the same time that What’s App founders approached Facebook to sell their company at a reasonable price, and were ignored. In 2014, when all was said and done, Facebook purchased What’s App for $16 billion or $344 million dollars per employee! It makes me wonder how Facebook will recover their investment – even if they sell ads.
I think Facebook is really just buying the eyeballs already affixed to What’s App.
Often tech people try and come up with the “next greatest thing” because they hope to sell it for huge amounts of money. When does it become too much? With What’s App, you almost get the sense the creators stumbled upon it by accident – and that their motivation wasn’t about money at all, but rather providing a platform that encourages better communication.
This feels almost like a second tech bubble after the early 90s period of “excessive exuberance.” Investors, companies and people bought start-up firms with no clear indication of how these entities could make money.
Since I’m working with some early-stage tech companies, I help them stay focused on their mission…to keep their eyes on their core technology. One thing I frequently tell my clients is to take a deep breath and look at the world. They can’t afford to stop and chase the “shiny penny” and miss out on the valuable opportunity right in front of them, as anything is possible.
With a cutting-edge solution, everybody will want to come to your door. The challenge is that it’s not just fancy technology alone that drives demand, but the application to do something useful with it. Will people actually care about what it does? Does it serve a particular purpose or fill a niche?
Some recent studies have shown that multitasking is somewhat of a myth. I tell the people I advise to avoid doing more than three things at a time. When you have eight things on your plate, you actually become much less efficient and are conflicted as to what you are trying to do.
I read an article recently which compared two groups of people. The first group considered themselves great multitaskers, while the second group considered themselves not so good at multitasking.
-
The group of non-multitaskers were more efficient, because they tended to stay focused.
-
The group that called themselves great multitaskers bounced from task to task and didn’t complete most of them.
I thought that was really telling, because in today’s world so many of us think “I have to do everything at the same time.”
What I’ve found works best is keeping a whiteboard on my wall that identifies the 3 key tasks I have set for myself that day. It gives me a great sense of accomplishment when I put a star next to each item as it is completed. How do you manage your day to stay on task without being distracted by doing too many things at once?
203-461-8711