yujinc

If you’ve come here from Ben Horowitz’s blog, below is the research he cited evaluating founding vs. professional (hired) CEO performance in the Software as a Service (SaaS) Industry.   This research was conducted as part of a sponsored study project with Yujin Chung (LinkedIn, Twitter), a graduate of the Wharton School ’10, Professor David Wessels of the Finance department, and Frank Chen, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.  Feel free to @ him with any questions.

The Japan Club proudly presents Takeshi Natsuno (WG’95), Professor of KEIO University and former Senior Vice President of NTTDoCoMo, the Japanese wireless giant.  Mr. Natsuno will talk about how he launched the world’s most popular mobile internet by the age of 35, breaking through the large corporation’s bureaucratic setting.

You are all invited to attend on Thursday, March 25th at 4:30-6:00PM in JMHH 250.

After graduating Wharton in 1995, Mr. Natsuno held key executive positions with HyperNet, a leading Internet venture. He joined NTT DoCoMo in 1997 and launched several innovative services including “i-mode”, attracting about 48 million subscribers to date.  He was named as one of the world’s 25 most influential e-business leaders by Business Week in 2001.  He started his new career as a  professor of KEIO University in 2008, while serving as a board of directors of several technology firms.

This is a very relevant article to our class discussion on Hulu:

It confirms some of the quant analysis we did in class:
- “Hulu’s deals with content owners revolve around an advertising revenue split; the owners typically receive 50 to 70 percent of the revenue, and Hulu keeps the rest”
- “Viacom’s decision may suggest that the economics of Hulu make less sense for content providers that lack equity in the Web site.”

My first take on this, which the article strongly hints at with the below quotes, is that this is simply a negotiation tactic taken by Viacom to improve its split and/or upfront fee or even, more aggressively, move in as an equity partner.
- “Hulu said it was talking to Comedy Central about “a number of opportunities,” and said viewers should “stay tuned.””
- ““There have certainly been instances where there was a premium paid for what you might call the ‘halo effect,’ ” the person involved in the negotiations said.”

My deeper read is this: If I were at Viacom right now, I’d be most interested in using this as an opportunity to measure the cannibalization effect of Hulu on its own streaming sites (e.g., thedailyshow.com).  Given similar ad selling teams, Viacom is likely monetizing its own sites at a comparable average CPM to Hulu, but doesn’t have to share 30-50% with anyone (though would have to cover its own hosting costs). The question it needs to answer with its internal metrics once TDS and TCR are off Hulu is, to what extent was Hulu viewing additive vs. cannibalistic.  At the same time, Hulu will be able to study to what extent TDS and TCR are anchor content — content that draw in users who then surf around the site to non-Viacom content, the “halo effect” — as opposed to being easily substitutable.  My hunch is that Hulu is fairly cannibalistic (personally, I’ll just start watching TDS on its own site and stop going to Hulu), and that most Hulu visitors are content-driven and it will see a drop off.

Conclusion: Good tactical move by Viacom, and unlike past user-unfriendly Viacom moves, this one doesn’t really affect users since Viacom provides the same content on its own sites.

I’d be interested to hear others perspectives on this.

Do you think the three existing equity partners would welcome Viacom (or CBS, or anyone else) as equity partners at this point?

- Jon LinkedIn

It’s been a busy week in the world of patents and lawsuits:

Facebook patents the newsfeed:  http://mashable.com/2010/02/25/facebook-news-feed-patent/

Google patents location based ads:  http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/03/01/google-location-ads/

Apple suing HTC + Google over patent infringement:  http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/02/google-htc-apple-lawsuit/, http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/02/the-complaint-apples-patent-lawsuit-against-htc-is-all-about-android/

So are these warranted?  Bluffs?  Encouraging or stifling innovation?  Chime on in…

From Gal, related to our discussion of hit driven industries:  http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/23/hollywood-stock-exchange-real-money/

And Matt’s ridiculously awesome YouTube video which has already hit mashable, alleyinsider, TC, and huffington post.  Truly a great case study in smart viral marketing…

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