Cobb: Mining the Mind of Steve Krause

February 02, 2006

Mining the Mind of Steve Krause

Back in the days when I was complaining that 30 year olds were running corporations, the gang of us at Hyperion eCRM had to deal with the equation hype + money - common sense = success. At least that's the way it was in the days of irrational exuberance. As one who always likes to review history in the light of renewed appreciation or scorn, I find it fascinating to find out whatever happened to.. along the lines of my career path and pointed pontifications. It's for that reason that I started my little jag on Xerox History. In the meantime, as the F500 slouches towards real security, BPM and data mining, I have fun digging up data on my own industry.

Steve Krause is my latest find. He puts up a nice practical post on Last.fm and a competitor that I never heard of or paid attention to. It fits rather congruently with my 'Do As I Say' theory. Note that the ultimate judge of the appropriateness is aesthetic consistancy, an entirely human creation.

It also turns out that Krause was a competitor at Personify. It's amazing that they were able to burn through half a billion dollars. If those happy days ever come back, never give a sucker an even break.

Posted by mbowen at February 2, 2006 02:22 PM

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Comments

I'm thinking you meant to include the link to that nice practical post. It's at www.stevekrause.org/steve_krause_blog/2006/01/pandora_and_las.html -- and I would agree it's a good read.

Posted by: Editor B at February 3, 2006 06:13 AM

Just a clarification: Personify did not "burn through half a billion dollars." In fact, of its original peer start-ups, Personify raised and burned the least money.

Your point of confusion may have been the sentence, "We had just raised private money at a $500 million valuation." That means the company was valued at $500 million for the purposes of calculating the amount of shares the actual money raised would buy. The amount raised in that round, which was for letting a few strategic investors in, was a few million dollars.

Posted by: Steve Krause at February 10, 2006 08:56 AM