"... One entrepreneur won over by the Founders Fund's philosophy is Barney Pell, the 38-year-old founder of Powerset, a natural-language search-engine startup that harbors ambitions of challenging Google ..."
I wonder how well 'Clarium Capital Management' are advising their funded companies. Powerset is really setting themselves up for a fall if their search results are a magnitude worse than google. They have made some mistakes that I can think of so far:
- they are 'talking' about their instead of 'showing' their product
- talking about technology (nlp) instead of about how it makes search easier, better for users
"... Parker came up with a novel arrangement that he hopes will benefit other founders as they build their companies: a new type of stock that allows 'founders to cash out a small percentage of their stake in a funding round so they don't have to wait until the company is sold or goes public' . ..."
But they are getting some things right (percentage of cash up front)
I wonder how well 'Clarium Capital Management' are advising their funded companies. Powerset is really setting themselves up for a fall if their search results are a magnitude worse than google. They have made some mistakes that I can think of so far:
- they are 'talking' about their instead of 'showing' their product
- talking about technology (nlp) instead of about how it makes search easier, better for users
- licensing their 'core' technology from PARC, Xerox & not investing in their own ~ http://www.powerset.com/press/parc
"... Parker came up with a novel arrangement that he hopes will benefit other founders as they build their companies: a new type of stock that allows 'founders to cash out a small percentage of their stake in a funding round so they don't have to wait until the company is sold or goes public' . ..."
But they are getting some things right (percentage of cash up front)