Todd G. Simpson

It used to be that an IPO was: The first major liquidity event for shareholders A means to raise growth capital The first time a company was "market priced" due to (1). Because private market trading is now so prevalent, even small companies can achieve liquidity early in their lifecycle, with significant trading volume.  This also means that the companies will have fairly accurate market pricing.  If anything, they may be overpriced as the private trading system attracts earlier, higher risk investors. The secondary markets also provide a means for companies to attract early growth capital...with a lot less hassle than an IPO.  Companies will probably stay on secondary markets until they are more mature, meaning more of the upside value will have been realized before they go public. This is certainly the case with Facebook.  They are mature, they are profitable, and they raised a lot of their growth capital already.  The IPO (rumored to be raising $10B) is more ab

If this article is accurate, Microsoft is paying Nokia almost $250 for every Windows phone that Nokia ships.  The payback, ostensibly, is twofold: Wide enough adoption that Microsoft becomes a player in mobile People, through usage, will stick to Microsoft services, and become long term customers. I wonder if Microsoft could achieve both aims through a software-only play?  I imagine buying my new Android phone, and then installing "Windows Phone 8", the App, for which Microsoft will pay me $20/month for every month that I am an active user.  They can do that for 12 months for the same amount that they are paying to Nokia, so they have a full year to make me a believer in Microsoft solutions. Of course, Google may react and try to shut down, or limit, such a practice.....but operators might endorse it.  More Microsoft services, more data usage. The marketing tradeoff is straightforward: is it easier to get someone to download the Windows 8 App, or to purchase a Noki

I have been reading up on Donald Stokes theories of innovation, which, for some reason I had not seen before.   It is quite philosophical, but has some interesting points.  The main one is that "the path to innovative products" does not always start from pure research and evolve towards useful products.  Instead, research often moves between quadrants - both left and right as well as up and down.  Sometimes, for example, very applied research will highlight a fundamental technology gap, which then drives use-inspired basic research.  Beyond Bohr, Pasteur, and Edison, I was trying to map some other projects into the matrix.  DARPA, for example, is focused in the Pasteur Quadrant, while the CERN work is certainly Bohr-ish :-) BrowserID , which we have been developing at Mozilla, is a good example of Edison research.  The fundamental building blocks were available, but they had not been put together in a way that met our "consideration of use" (a sign-in system whic