You make a great point. You'd be hard pressed to find any information source that is truly independent and that isn't pitching their book. Buyers generally know this. Caveat Emptor.

Having an active secondary market in private companies will certainly have an impact on IPO activity and has probably contributed some to allowing Facebook, Twitter, and others to go public later than they otherwise might have. But the secondary market is dominated by just a few consumer-focused companies so it will be interesting to see what happens to it when the big ones that have been driving all the volume go public.

Ken - I couldn't agree more. We're definitely in the very early innings of a long-term shift. There will be plenty more incredibly big winners to come!

To address your points: 1 - LinkedIn is indeed profitable and they doubled revenue from 2009 to 2010 to $243m. With their numbers, we'd have to be in the worst part of the Great Recession for them to ONLY get a $1B valuation. Check the details here: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1271024/000119312511088315/ds1a.htm#rom122081_9 2 - If the numbers that have been bantered about are true, then Facebook grew more than ~4X in 2010 to $2B and their growth is accelerating! In Bubble 1.0, they would have been worth 2x - 3x what the secondary market is now valuing them at. 3 - I have to say I agree with you on this one. Personally, I don't see the barriers to entry or anything that will lead to a lasting premium value for them. They're in a market where competitors proliferate and margins will continue to get squeezed. They're doing well now though. Again, I just don't see it.

Bryan - Thanks for your comment. I certainly see your point, and there is no doubt that if the entrepreneurs followed through and refused to accept "no answer" as an answer, then VCs would say "No" more often. But when a VC is listening to an entrepreneur's pitch, the underlying premise of the meeting is that the VC has money to invest and the entrepreneur wants some of it. If that's not the case, and I take plenty of meetings where it is not, then that is stated up front. I've had many entrepreneurs call me and ask me if I would listen to their pitch and provide feedback. In those cases, I certainly don't feel obligated to tell them I'm not interested in investing since the meeting was agreed to under a different context.

Kim- Yes indeed. I'm certainly happy you made the choice you did, as I'm sure you are. And I'm not surprised it was longer ago than I remember, I must be getting old :-)

Ho- I couldn't agree more. Luck is the one variable you can't control, so you'd better use your smarts and put in tons of hard work. Eventually, you'll get a lucky break or two. /greg

Karl- I couldn't agree more with one of the core tenets of your comment and your linked blog post - that measuring the wrong things can be a huge waste of time and scarce resources. When companies get "over-measured", the team runs the risk of spending all their time looking at the scoreboard and not playing the game. Companies need to be constantly reviewing and refining the metrics they are tracking to ensure they are still valid measures of progress along whatever dimension is being tracked. Regards, /greg

Great points Ray. Thanks for the comment. Every entrepreneur has to constantly balance between maintaining focus and being opportunistic. You can't sit around waiting for the world to happen to you though. You have to pick a path and put all of your effort in to executing against it. You can change the path, and all companies go through a process of course adjustments - some of them complete course changes. But you have to place your bets. And when that crazy opportunity falls out of the sky, you need to be willing to put all your wood behind that arrow. I have found that truly great entrepreneurs are always open to questioning their assumptions with the knowledge that they may indeed have it wrong while at the same time maintaining laser focus on their chosen path. I'm a big fan of NNT's books - Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan and I'd rather be lucky than smart any day.

Thanks Raghu. I'm glad you enjoyed my posts. I'm always open to suggestions for subjects to cover. Sorry I neglected to mention ActOn (http://www.actonsoftware.com/). If companies need to do lead-nurturing, it's a fantastic solution.

I would have spent all of B-School on my bike :-)

Lifetime Value is certainly the right metric against which to measure the efficacy of your SEM and SEO efforts, but early in the life of a startup, there often isn't much more to go on than the first customer transaction. Anything that hasn't been empirically proven ends up being significantly discounted in the minds of the venture capitalist. As for paid SEO links from someone's own stock, as you correctly state, it doesn't have any long term value and it's a bad idea anyway. It has much lower value, or will as soon as Google figures it out, which they will, than longterm SEO investments in your own content's value, legitimate linking, site structure, etc. etc..