Looking back at 2007, looking forward to 2008
While 2006 was a year of transition with the break after Zingy and the creation of OLX, 2007 was a year of consolidation. I put my disagreement with the acquirer of Zingy behind me. I made two new Internet investments. OLX continued to grow slowly but surely – we now have over 80 employees and are present in 40 countries in 12 languages.
I continued to travel far and wide for OLX and hope that there will be less business travel in 2008. On the personal side, my life has been more boring, though I did manage to go heli-skiing in British Columbia, kite boarding in Cabarete (Dominican Republic) and hiking, biking and rafting in Costa Rica. I am also continuing to (very slowly) work on my tennis game, open mindedness, patience and humility.
The best books I read in 2007:
- The Black Swan by Massim Nicholas Taleb
- The Undercover Economist by Tim Hartford
My best blog posts in 2007 were:
- Passion and love at the end of the age of innocence
- “Loving” versus “Being in Love”
- Happiness and the dangers of belief in the written word 🙂
- The Theory of Social Obligation
- The nature of entrepreneurship: randomness, trial and error, and how intelligence can get in the way
- Ethics, spirituality and religion: a debate on torture
- Fear and uncertainty in the time of prosperity
- Capitalism and Democracy
- Macro Perspectives on Global Liquidity: How Chinese Farmers and Oil Sheiks are Subsidizing American Consumption and its Implications
- A Different Perspective on the Global Economy
- Facebook: the next Google?
I predict 2008 will be a year of slow growth:
- It will continue to be too early to tell whether OLX will be a success or not – given the non viral nature of online classifieds, this project is going to take years.
- Two of my Internet investments will enter the Alexa top 50 – one is Badongo.com, the other I will talk about when the investment officially closes in January 2008.
- One of my investments is likely to fail.
I have not yet decided whether I will be foolhardy enough to make predictions on the global economy and the US election. Stay tuned 🙂
Happy New Year!
Thanks for your time writing these posts
Keep on the good work in 2008 (-:
Hey Fabrice,
Is badongo using Allmydata for its back end ?
Fabrice great blog, I really admire your ability to tell a great story, after listening to your interview on Venture Voice. I have 2 Questions, Is it sad to see Jamba/Jamster as the king of ringtones now or are you at this point completely detached from your old company?, It seems the artists/ringtones on Zingy are 5 years out of date, just my opinion…( no I take that back, as I’m writing this I went to the site to see if my statement is true, go to the « pop » category and the first artist your hit with is Paula Abdul ). Second question is what do you think of this idea for a website, think Youtube/wikipedia,,, lets call said site « show me.com » on the website users upload videos on how to do things, anything from how to ride a bike to tear an engine apart….the users upload the videos, and in exchange they receive a percentage of the income the ads on their pages generate. Think of a generation of people who learned a good majority of their knowledge from this site, imagine someone asking a child « where did you learn to tie a shoe? » and their response is « show me.com » , yes other user generated sites have the category of « how-to » already on their sites, but I feel they treat this how web companies in the late 90’s treated « search », they felt it was something « extra » and not worthy of much attention, this site would also kind of remind me of the monopolistic trend that E-bay sets, meaning if you can’t sell something on Ebay, it won’t sell any where else, so if your not able to find a video tutorial on « Show me.com » more than likely you won’t find it any where else. You’ve had success with other companies, what are your thoughts on this idea?
Mike: Badongo and Allmydata are unrelated. I like the idea you suggest, but right now Badongo is so much larger than Allmydata, it’s not feasible.
Jerome: I left Zingy over 2 years ago (in 2005), I really don’t know what they are up to. The current ringtone leader seems to be http://www.thumbplay.com/
Regarding your idea, it sounds like a « user generated about.com ». It feels like a good idea, but can you really get users to post things that are monetizable? I also doubt that sharing the very small ad revenues will be all that motivating for most. People do it for the pleasure of educating others or for fame (e.g.; Wikipedia). You should also note that what you are describing sounds an awful lot like http://www.wikia.com...
One last thing, I know better than to judge ideas. What strikes me as a good or bad idea – may or may not be good or bad. The first time someone told me they were creating a ringtone company in France, I told them they were crazy that no one would ever pay for them. A few months later he was very successful and I decided to copy him 🙂
Hey Jerome,
I thought you might want to read this:
http://venturebeat.com/2008/01/03/how-to-video-site-5min-lands-funding-begins-uphill-climb-in-us/#more-68826
quick question fabrice, how does badongo.com make any money, is it just the ads on the site ?
Ads + subscription for more storage, no waiting, etc.
Thanks Mike and Fabrice for taking the time to respond. Mike I read the date on the article and it blew my mind it was dated for 1/3/08. I’ve been thinking of doing a site like that for less than a year. Of course I thought I could do it far cheaper than 5 million.