Bubble or not, check out these WTFs

So people are talking bubble and it seems it is not without reason : VC deals are coming across with an increasing frequency, the kind which make one think -

somebody’s gonna get a hurt real bad 
– Russell Peters, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzKHQX59Wso

So I’ve decided to start making a list of those companies, would be interesting to look back and know how it fairs a couple of years down the line. To start with, here we go with people putting photos online and needing boat loads of money in the process.

These two are pretty similar

http://instagr.am/ – USD 7.5 million in funding.

http://picplz.com/ – USD 5 million in funding.

both of them are photo sharing apps. the big USP seems to be, they allow you to apply a filter to your photo before you upload it to facebook, flickr etc. Huge. Totally worth it. Isn’t it. If I had dollars, this is where I’d bet my money on. No brainer.

http://www.cooliris.com/ – USD 28 million in funding. They make a pretty slide show visualization. They also have a live group photo sharing yada yada web service. And yes you’re reading that right.. 28 million moneys.

http://1000memories.com/ – USD 2.5 million in funding. This almost made me spit out my coffee. This is a service to host free obituaries. Whoa! Didn’t you just think why you didn’t think of this awesome idea before. Yeah.. me neither. They are somehow supposed to not only make money for themselves, but to multiply and return that 2.5 million to the investors too.

hence the phrase – somebody’s gonna get a hurt…

Sources

• http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/16/greylock-invests-2-5-million-in-1000memories-tctv
• http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/10/imeem-founders-raise-5m-from-andreessen-horowitz-for-social-photo-app-picplz/
• http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/14/instagram-2-million/
• http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/14/cooliris/

“I’m not paid what I’m worth”. Think again.

I just read this interesting post on HBR blogs, where the author makes the claim that we are often not aware of the ‘disruptive’ skillset that we already have, which we could/should be juicing to get paid more. While I agree largely to what she has to say, I think she misses out on one critical aspect – the happiness quotient.

Measuring by just our pay seems short sighted. We have to take into account the tax of lower satisfaction from a job that maybe pays much more but isn’t what we want to do. So maybe, when we feel, “I’m not paid what I’m worth”, the counterintuitive step that makes us happier could be getting paid even less but doing what we love.

Moreover, I don’t even think practicing our most disruptive skill will necessarily fetch more money. In business I do not find skill and profits to be proportional. Maybe the correlation is more in salaried professions, but I’d argue it is still nowhere close to being proportional.

As Paul Graham mentions

A great programmer might be ten or a hundred times as productive as an ordinary one, but he’ll consider himself lucky to get paid three times as much

So, aren’t we better off not measuring our worthiness by how much we earn (we’ll always fall short), but by how happy we are.