[nostrademons]

Well, Cuil is actually a counterexample to the "funded" part of your statement. They raised a crazy amount of money considering their lack of accomplishment.

I think Lars could get funding from just about any investor in the valley, if he wanted to start a new venture. But Norvig said it best (paraphrasing): "If you want to accomplish interesting things, go where the data is." Right now, FaceBook has one of the most interesting data sets on the planet, possibly rivaling Google's. If Lars wanted to replicate that, he needs to build a product that's useful enough to convince everybody to give him their data. That's non-trivial. It's easier just to join a company that already owns the data and then figure out interesting things to do with it.

[gizmomagico]

Wouldn't it be possible to make a startup that wasn't based on covertly collecting little worker ants' personal information? I'd like to see something else for a change.

[nostrademons]

In software? What data would it run on? Software doesn't do anything without data.

I suppose you could have something like the PC revolution, where the industry was still based around manipulating data, but the data lives on your personal property. But that ship has sailed: personal computers have been available for 35 years, so pretty much all applications that rely on one person's data being manipulated in isolation by themselves have already been discovered. The interesting work now is when you collect patterns of data among many users, and that requires that many users be willing to give you their data.

[gizmomagico]

In software? What data would it run on? Software doesn't do anything without data.

You say it like our personal information is the only data in town.

Of course, any app needs data, but it can be anything.