“In order to create a successful new company, you have to find an idea that

(1) has escaped the attention of the major Internet companies, which are better run than ever before;

(2) is capable of being launched and proven out for ~$5M, the typical seed plus series A investment; and

(3) is protectable from the onslaught of those big companies once they figure out what you’re onto.

How many ideas like that are left?”

Answer: TONS OF THEM!

If not we might as well just shut down the patent office. ;-)

http://ask.yahoo.com/20050407.html

I like this:

We once thought Microsoft was a monopoly on the Internet due to IE. Laughable now.

We once thought the merger of AOL/Time Warner needed to be investigated by the DOJ. Laughable.

We once thought nobody could unseat Google since all inbound traffic to the web came from them. Enter social media and its importance as a traffic source.

Is Facebook unstoppable? Of course not.

How DID Google, Apple, and Microsoft let Dropbox and Box.net thrive?

It's a mystery.

Well the dropbox/Apple story is Silicon Valley legend and lore. :-)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/dropbox-the-inside-story-of-techs-hottest-startup/

Dropbox is the perfect business: "The 50-million-user figure is up threefold from a year ago, and it has solved the “freemium” riddle, with revenue on track to hit $240 million in 2011 despite the fact that 96% of those users pay nothing. With only 70 staffers, mostly engineers, Dropbox grosses nearly three times more per employee than even the darling of business models, Google."

I still don't understand how they could create a market out of thin air.

Why was Apple asleep at the wheel?

Apple is not incentivized to make their content available on other devices. iTunes was the exception, not the rule. And even then, cloud syncing for Apple is only a recent introduction.

Ultimately, the beauty of a private company is that it cannot be forced to do anything, except by its board, management, or government.

It's a classic guerilla war; there's no way for a massive company to stamp out a small uproot except through innovation or acquisiitoin.

See: Spotify.

Spotify and Amazon propose much greater threats to Apple than Dropbox or Box.net; then again, by the time we realize Dropbox can sync to everything -- cars, TV, home, mobile, desktop devices -- we may be asking ourselves, "how can anyone unseat Dropbox?"

I've just started working on a startup project and maybe I am a bit naive, (ok, a lot naive) but I had no idea about the massive amounts of crap people have to wade through here. Even if I had an awesome, amazing bazillion dollar idea I think I would be terrified of Silicon Valley. All I do is plan meetups, casual ways for people to meet each other and have fun and I have to deal with people who think they can help me monetize, recruiters trying to buy emails lists, B2B sales people showing up at events because they linkedin stalked people on the guest list. Off topic rant but I think if anything kills SV it will be the atmosphere.

Amy, what can we do to make it better?

I noticed that GitHub turned off messaging recently -- is it because of all those recruiters and sales people stalking the folks on GitHub?