It looks like they're so ready to be the next Google they're just going to skip right past hard work and reality. Why have actual growth charts that might be depressing, when you can just make up your own and be happy?
They've put more effort into their modeling tool than some startups put into their successful products. If they were an agile little startup it might be really smart to turn the company into a Growth Forecasting service.
This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for "fuck-you money." It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic indicators. Sometimes when Avi is working at his computer he will leave the spreadsheet running in a tiny window in the corner so that he can see the current value of "fuck-you money" at a glance.
I would say it's only depressing if you don't plan on working hard.
1) Hire a bunch of very smart people. Now go let them play ping pong and stuff.
2) Pay a graphic designer to make screenshots of a prototype that solves a particularly difficult problem (i.e. Natural language search perhaps?)
3) Egg Google on with a spreadsheet predicting how much market you will take from them
4) Wait for the phone call
Seriously, Google has to be weighing the odds right now - would it be better to buy the tech before it launches, wait and be perceived as the evil villain who swoops in and buys a superior technology?
I've been thinking about a startup that would hold several gigs of data per user (the first set of data would live on S3.)
First thing I did was write a simple monte-carlo code to determine the average and +- 1\sigma cost per user. Proud of myself, I showed my analysis to some business types who told me I was wasting my time when I should be building a product instead :)
Nevertheless, I believe the exercise was useful. I now have a fairly clear picture of how much it directly costs to serve a user.
I sorta care about the spreadsheet modeling, but I'm really interested in the Flash frontend to the spreadsheet, which would really come in handy at my day job...
They've put more effort into their modeling tool than some startups put into their successful products. If they were an agile little startup it might be really smart to turn the company into a Growth Forecasting service.