Randall Stross discusses his recent book: The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s Most Exclusive School for Startups. Stross’s behind-the-scenes look at Y Combinator details how the seed fund has been able to produce young entrepreneurs and successful startups such as Dropbox and Airbnb. Stross also discusses Y Combinator’s early history, the typical Y Combinator participant, the fund’s rate of return, the gender gap in the program, and the reason Silicon Valley has become the epicenter for startups.

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Related Links

• Randall Stross home page, Stross
• The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Amazon
• Q&A: Randall Stross on the World of Y Combinator, Gannes
• What’s coming out of Silicon Valley?, Stross

Business Insider reports that, sometime next year, Scribd will launch a “seamless” interface that allows users to access Scribd docs on their Kindles.  That’s a major step forward for the startup, which aims to be the “YouTube for print”—and which Adam and I use to make all our PFF papers available online in an embeddable Flash viewer that’s much quicker to load than the full PDFs.  But it also represents a serious potential long-term challenge to Amazon, since Scribd is “quietly developing a strong e-book storefront to match its hoard of user generated content,” as Business Insider notes, and because:

If Scribd can put its books on the Kindle, this number should only grow, especially since it offers publishers a better business deal than Amazon.  Amazon reportedly offers a 50/50 sales split. Scribd only keeps 20% and allows publishers to set their own price.

So much for “The coming Kindle monopoly” the cranks over at Oligopoly Watch warn us about!

It would be more accurate to say that Scribd will be “Kindling” e-book competition within the base of Kindle users, and of course, competing devices like  Barnes & Noble’s Nook offer cross-platform competition, just as satellite television competes with cable.   In both cases, the platform operator has a strong incentive to compete for users by offering as much content (books/video programming) as possible at attractive prices.

On the one hand, one might say that inter-platform competition is stronger in the case of video delivery platforms, because users generally lease equipment on a month-to-month basis, while e-book users must buy their $250+ device up-front (making it therefore harder to switch from Amazon to Barnes & Noble, if one decides one doesn’t like the offerings or prices for e-books on the Kindle).  But on the other hand, if Scribd can compete head-to-head with Amazon in offering e-books on Amazon’s Kindle (and perhaps on the Note, too, someday soon), users don’t need to switch devices at all: They can just switch e-book providers. Furthermore since e-books are bought on an à la carte basis, users don’t have to switch completely, they can just switch for any particular book—meaning that Amazon needs to compete for every additional purchase they can get, which means lower prices and more choices for consumers.

In short, there’s no reason to think that competition won’t work in this market.  But, then again, it works pretty darn well in the video programming delivery market, too, and yet we still see the Federal Communications Commission trying to uphold outdated regulations based on supposedly ” gatekeeper power” that cable providers lost roughly 15 years ago, when satellite television became an alternative to cable for essentially all Americans. If the general activist direction of antitrust enforcement under this administration is any indication, I fear we may soon see this kind of stasist thinking applied to the very competitive new market of e-books. And if recent tech history is any guide, innovative, scrappy startups like Scribd will simply be dismissed out of hand by regulators incapable of imagining what’s just around the corner.

First, let me just thank all the TLF readers who actively participate by commenting on the site.  We really value your participation in this community built on a shared interest in technology policy!

Readers who visit the site will notice two new badges at the top righthand corner of the site for the TLF’s Twitter and Facebook pages.  Please take a moment to follow us on Twitter and to become a fan of our Facebook page—and to “share” that page with your friends on Facebook.  Of course, we also have RSS feeds for the blog and the Tech Policy Weekly podcast (RSS or iTunes), which should again become more “weekly” this year.

I’d love to hear any ideas any TLF readers might have about how to increase the site’s readership or upgrade its functionality.  With the TLF’s five year anniversary coming up this August, we’re looking for ways to make the most of the blog as a tool for “keeping the politicans’ hands off the ‘net and everything else related to technology.”

Two quick tech tips for using the site.  First, regarding Disqus (“Discuss”), our Comment Management System:  If you haven’t already done so, don’t forget to “claim” comments made with your email address.  As Disqus explains, this will help ensure that no one else posts a comment under your name (something only someone as dastardly as, say, Jim Harper might do):

If you’ve made a comment on a blog using Disqus, you automatically have a profile. To claim the comments and profile, verify your identity by clicking “Claim” on the profile. Once the profile is claimed, no one else will be able to use that profile or email address to comment aside from you.

Second, Adam and I often post PDFs in our posts using the nifty iPaper viewer provided by Scribd (for example here).  Because it’s Flash, this tool allows you to see a PDF embedded on a page without having to download it or wait for the whole document to load.  A few of our crochetier TLF colleagues have complained that the Flash viewer is too small to read easily.  The simple solution is to click the rectangle-in rectangle button at the top right corner of the Scribd viewer, which will instantly expand the viewer to full-screen.  If clicked again, the viewer will revert to its original size.  This feature doesn’t seem to be as self-explanatory as the folks at Scribd assume.  

Again, thanks for reading and for your feedback!

When people ask me why I do what I do for a living — and, more specifically, why I focus all my attention on digital media and technology policy — I often respond by showing them the new gadgets or software I am playing with at any given time.  I just love digital technology.  I am swimming in a sea of digital gadgets, consumer electronics, online applications, computing software, video games, and all sorts of cyber-stuff.

Anyway, even though this is a technology policy blog, I sometimes highlight new digital toys or applications that have changed my life for the better. As the year winds down, therefore, I thought I would share with you five technologies that improved my life and productivity in 2008. I’d also love to hear from all of you about the technologies that you fell in love with this year in case I might have missed them. Here’s my list:

#1) Naturally Speaking 10:

Thanks to Nate Anderson’s outstanding review over at Ars Technica, I finally made the plunge and bought Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 earlier this month.  Wow, what a life-changer. I had played around with an earlier version of this market-leading speech recognition technology and found it somewhat clunky and unreliable. But Ver. 10, has ironed out almost all the old problems and become an incredibly sophisticated piece of software in the process. I love the way I can use simple voice commands to navigate menus in Microsoft Word and in Firefox. Perhaps best of all, I can dictate random rants into a pocket recording device and then upload them to Naturally Speaking (via a USB connection) and have them instantly transcribed. I’m even composing blog entries like this using it! Only problem is inserting HTML code; that’s still a hassle. Also, I find that switching from one input device to another definitely affects the quality of the transcription. Once you “train” Naturally Speaking using one device, it makes sense to stick with it. It’s not just the quality of the microphone; it’s also the proximity to your mouth that makes a difference. Regardless, this is one great product and, best of all, it’s should help save my rapidly-aging hands from becoming prematurely arthritic! All those years of video games and keyboards have taken their toll. #2) Scribd:

Like many other policy wonks and academics, I’ve long been housing my papers and studies on SSRN to give them more widespread visibility or share them with others. But SSRN’s format is clunky and its functionality is extremely limited. Worst of all, it didn’t provide any embeddable code such that documents could be hosted directly within a blog post. Scribd solves all those problems for me. It’s a slick document-hosting service that is also highly searchable. It also offers up relevant documents as you are viewing others (the same way YouTube does for video). Very cool feature. Better yet, Scribd let’s you create groups for your organization or interests to collect related documents in one place. (For example, check out the PFF group page here.) Why couldn’t SSRN be more like this?!

#3) Ubiquity for Firefox:

“CTRL-SPACE BAR.” Thanks to Ubiquity, that keyboard shortcut has forever changed the way I use the Firefox web browser. I know this won’t seem like a big deal to some people, but for an old geek like me, I still prefer navigating some applications with keyboard shortcuts instead of using my mouse and drop-down menus. Ubiquity lets me do so in a browser environment. Basically, anytime I see something in my browser that I’d like more info about, I just run my cursor over that term, hit CTRL/SPACE and up pops a command prompt box that lets me run an inquiry of my choice. Once that box pops up, I can run a quick search about the term by just typing Google, MSN, or Yahoo and then hitting enter. Or I can map it instantly by typing “map.” Or search for an image or video related to it by typing “Flickr” or “YouTube.” Or “eBay” it. Or “Wiki” it. Or “Digg” it. And so on, and so on. Here’s lists of the command prompts at your disposal (1, 2, 3).

#4) HTC Touch (Verizon Wireless XV6900):

Screw the iPhone. This is little beauty can do everything the iPhone can do and do it in more compact package. This thing sits in my front shirt pocket and I often forget its there. It also has a stylus. Don’t understand how you iPhone zombies get along without one. It also has none of the silly restrictions that encumber the iPhone. I’ve downloaded more mods and apps to this thing than I know what to do with. While you iPhoners are salivating over the slim pickings at the iPhone apps store, I’m sitting on 10,000 choices to decide from over at Handango (and that doesn’t even begin to scratch the market for homebrew hacks). HTC’s TouchFlo navigation is very cool and works effortlessly with the flick of your thumb. The touchscreen keyboard wasn’t so hot, but who cares when dozens of aftermarket ones are available (I went with Resco). Same goes for the IE mobile browser, which is the weak spot of any Windows Mobile equipped device. But I solved that problem with my next choice…

#5) Skyfire mobile web browser:

The mobile version of Internet Explorer has just never cut it, and Skyfire capitalized on that fact to produce a very slick touchscreen browser for Windows Mobile smartphones. The early beta version had some bugs, but they’ve been working those out and producing a great product in the process. Is the iPhone Safari mobile browser better? Yes, it still is. Even an Apple-hater like me will admit it.  But Skyfire is catching up quickly.

Honorable mentions…

LinkedIn: Yes, I know LinkedIn has been around a couple of years, but it really took off in 2008 and made impressive improvements to become more than just the “Facebook for Old Farts” I once thought it was. I am a huge fan of the new applications they have worked into the site, especially the WordPress blog app and the Amazon books app.

Google Chrome: Although it won’t be displacing Firefox in my heart any time soon, I have come to really appreciate Chrome’s speed compared to my Firefox experience, which is now bogged down with waaaaaay too many add-ons. (So much so that it takes me well over a minute to even get Firefox to boot up!) So, I pull up Chrome and run it alongside Firefox to surf script-heavy or graphically-intensive sites (like ESPN.com) or to just keep my eMail accounts and LinkedIn page active on another screen.