Shiny Social Things

“PME” means how the Russell 2000 public index did over the same time frame. So 60% of VC funds were worse.

Outside of the top 5 (Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Greylock, Accel, USV) or maybe top 10, I don’t think past performance is an indicator of future performance, given just how hits driven these things are. Frankly, the only VC investment model that makes sense to me is USV’s, because investing in network effect businesses materially reduces the risk of poor execution by management teams (see: Etsy, Twitter).

marksbirch:

Every so often in my web ramblings, I come across an interesting tidbit.  While not meant to be an endorsement of Automattic, I find it interesting that a company with such a huge impact on the Internet has 113 employees total and is not constrained by geography.  While not quite the 12 person, $1 billion tech company I wrote about last year (and which Instagram was so gracious to prove), it is quite an impressive feat.

Massive teams with extraneous resources not directly adding value to the products these companies create are going to be a thing of the past.  I could not honestly tell you what 75% of the employees at Oracle, Microsoft, Google, and the like are doing.  These are companies with teetering org charts filled with people that exist only to justify their own existence and make imaginary work for others.  The result is that the products produced over time are simply not that great.

Forget about starting all lean startup then binge hiring to scale the company.  That is the slow boat to Bloatsville, management bureaucracy, product stagnation, and shitty HR employee manuals.  Size is simply puts a chokehold on innovation and stifles independent thought.  Start lean and stay lean and never hire for the sake of hiring even if the pull of snagging an “A player” infects your thinking* or your investors push you to hire in order to take the market advantage.

* There are no A players, that is a bit of myth-busting I plan to drop this week.

I’m all about efficiency, but if you calculate revenue per employee, Google actually looks pretty good. They did $40B in revenue last year, or $1.5M per employee. Automattic (makers of Wordpress.com) estimate $45M this year (last year’s numbers not available), or $398,000 per employee. If we were to use Google’s 2012 estimate financials, I bet that gap is even larger.

lickystickypickywe:

Ketchup—the national condiment of 1896, according to the New York Tribune—wasn’t always tomato based. In fact, if it had remained in its early form, we might be spreading fish paste on our burgers (gulp) instead of the tangy tomato-y goodness we presently rely on.

Somewhere along the line ketchup went through a grand transformation, which made it synonymous with the tomato. And today Heinz alone sells 650 million bottles of the special sauce annually.

It all started with anchovies (of course!). The first English reference to “katchop” was in the book, Compleat Housewife [sic], published in 1727, which contained directions for a sauce spun from “twelve to fourteen anchovies, ten to twelve shallots, white wine vinegar, white wine…mace, ginger, cloves, whole peppers, a whole nutmeg, lemon peel, and horseradish.” Way back it was more like a fish sauce than our condiment today… Cookbook authors were reprinting the above recipe well into the 19th century.

The sauce likely made its way to England by way of British explorers in Southeast Asia. Mushroom and walnut varieties along with red pepper-, grape-, and oyster-based ketchups got quite a bit of play on the English recipe book circuit. Ketchup was a hit. One of the reasons that it did so well its high concentration of salt and vinegar: The stuff could sit on the shelf for a long time, a bonus before the age of refrigerators. Since ketchup could apparently be made with whatever, tomatoes finally got their shot at the sauce in the first half of the 18th century.

In the 1820s commercial ketchup bottling (the tomato kind) began in the US. What was stocked on the shelves, though, still didn’t look like what’s stocked in diners today. Since yellow and green tomatoes were not easily canned, they were tossed in the mix with the red ones destined for ketchup. But the mixed bag led to a muddy brown concoction in the bottle. It was clear ketchup still needed to come into its own.

Heinz started selling ketchup commercially in 1876. Fifteen years later, recipes for the homemade version had largely disappeared from cookbooks. Heinz’s in-house magazine, namedPickles, explained in 1901 the appeal of the ready-made:

“He little knows how fortunate he is to have been born a generation or so late, and to have escaped the miseries of scouring…kettles to brassy brightness, the primitive manner of fruit-picking, the boiling of jellies and the parboiling of his face and hands as he stirred, stirred and constantly stirred the catsup [sic] to keep it from burning.”

With all the effort it took to make by hand, combined with the fact that ketchup was one of the first packaged foods, it’s no wonder bottled ketchup was pretty popular from the get-go.

But in 1930, the food scientists at Heinz started wondering if they could get more from their tomatoes. What they wanted was more consistency, so they developed a tomato-breeding program to attempt to take more control of their product.

Makes sense. Both anchovies and ketchup (also worcestershire sauce) impart umami flavors.