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by nickmolnar2
5562 days ago
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I'm gonna play devil's advocate here. Don't bet against a world-class hustler who can also build cool shit. And that's Bill Nguyen. Let's remember how Lala came to be. He built a service for swapping physical CDs, which promised to make sure that every album ever recorded made its way onto Bittorrent (since someone could rip and flip an album that had never been encoded for <$1). He managed to use that as leverage on the record labels to give him extremely permissive licensing for the Lala streaming service, in exchange for shutting down the CD swapping business. I've been involved in content negotiations with record labels, and they do not give up ground easily. Not even Apple seem to be able to get that far...and they're Apple. Then, he managed to get Sequoia to give their highest-ever pre-launch funding round. Sequoia isn't known for being a pack of dummies. Color has probably spent less than 10% of that round so far. There's a billion dollar market somewhere in this mobile photo sharing thing (I can't see it yet, but I can smell it), and I wouldn't be shocked if he's the one to cash in on it. Color has an accomplished team, and enough cash to make plenty of mistakes. He might have used every buzzword on earth to raise the round, but it worked, and now he's got plenty of gas in the tank to build something genuinely disruptive. And if Lala is any indication, he knows how to disrupt markets and build tight products (Lala was at least 2 years ahead of its time as a product). While Color app might sound like it was created by pasting together TechCrunch and FastCompany articles, this is only the beginning for them. Color is clearly in it for the long haul. |
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He sold OneBox in 2000 for $850M (I realize that's insane-o bubble money), then started Seven (which is used by pretty much every carrier I can think of), and then sold LaLa to Apple for $80M.