
Troubled Startup Color Loses Cofounder Peter Pham - tbgvi
http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/14/troubled-startup-color-loses-cofounder-peter-pham/
======
mindcrime
I would love a chance to see the Color founders doing office hours with pg! Or
even just pgbot. I can see it now:

    
    
      Color guy:  We're building an app that lets you share photos with   
      your mobile phone, with people within 100 feet of you, but it uses 
      your social graph to make sure you see stuff you're interested in.
    
      pgbot:  WTF?
    
      Color guy:  I mean, it lets you share pictures that you just took, and   
      people within 100 feet of you will see that you just shared a picture.
    
      pgbot:  What problem does this solve? If they're 100 feet away, 
      wouldn't they have seen the same thing you saw, or even taken the 
      same picture anyway?
    
      Color guy: You don't get it, it's mobile... pictures and mobile, 
      together.  Like peanut butter and chocolate.
    
      pgbot:  Who wants this?
    
      Color guy:  Well, erm, I mean, erm, that is, aaahhh... um, you 
      know... like, um, aaaghh... well... uhhrrmmmm... college kids.  And 
      hipsters.  And hipster college kids. 
    
      pgbot: You mean the two classes of people least likely to either A. have 
      money, or b. spend money, unless it's on cheap beer, crappy clothes, 
      or Apple hardware?
    
      Color guy: But, but...  
    
      pgbot: Who's going to pay for this?
    
      Color guy:  Aaaah, well, you see... aaah... umm....
    
      pgbot: I worry, I worry...

~~~
abbasmehdi
I see the value prop though. At parties, weddings, events etc, where you'd
likely be in a picture, you'd wanna see what everyone else shot.

Haven't you been to a party where everybody took pics and you couldn't wait
till they uploaded the pics on FB or something to see what they shot?

~~~
potatolicious
> _"Haven't you been to a party where everybody took pics and you couldn't
> wait till they uploaded the pics on FB or something to see what they shot?"_

yes, but I'm at the party for _the party_ \- I have no intention of spending
the entire party staring into my smartphone and living vicariously through the
pictures of the lives of people _ten feet away from me_.

~~~
nl
This isn't necessarily true.

Have you seen how much people spend, and how much trouble they go to for
wedding photos?

~~~
potatolicious
Wedding photos are still admired _after_ the fact. There still isn't a use
case for "hmm, I wonder what images people are taking within a 100' radius of
me!".

~~~
btilly
There is a use case for, "I wonder what images were taken within 100' of me!"

If the app is on, and tracking photos that were taken, then can resolve it
after the fact (and get those photos), I think a lot of people would be
interested.

~~~
potatolicious
Wouldn't that be in Facebook's territory? i.e., "Hey Facebook, I took these
pictures at Bob's wedding. Based on the geotag, can you show me other pictures
from nearby at the same time?"

It seems convoluted (not to mention a gigantic drag on your battery life) to
do so on each and every device in real-time.

~~~
btilly
Not quite the use case I was considering.

Your phone knows where you were, when. And says, "Here is where I was, what
pictures were taken around me?" I want this information regardless of whether
I was personally taking pictures.

Keeping a history of where you are can be done without much drain on your
battery life. It can just log a location every few minutes.

~~~
ryan_brunner
Is location really the key piece of data differentiating "pictures from Bob's
wedding" from "the universe of pictures", though? I would think some concept
of tagging that went beyond mere location would be far more useful.

80% of the time (walking down the street, sitting in my office, etc.), I don't
care about pictures that were taken around me. For the 1% of the time that I
DO care, I can probably easily name the thing that I want to see pictures of.
Location is perhaps a handy filter for "tags that might be important to me",
but it's hardly the sole determiner, or even a major factor, in whether any
given picture will be one that's interesting to me.

~~~
btilly
The point is that if you, say, go to a conference, you want to see the random
pictures that strangers snapped which you might be in.

~~~
SimHacker
And what is the chance that random stranger is using Color? 0.000001%. So why
don't you just walk over there and ask him to send you a copy? Social
networking at its finest, in real time, at a conference.

------
timcederman
I noticed today Color have removed the notice on their office that they'd like
fellow denizens of Palo Alto to stop by and give feedback.

They've also turned off the projectors showing pictures from the app on their
front windows. Very quiet at their office at the moment.

~~~
kongqiu
Maybe this is the sort of thing Color would be good for -- monitoring what
changes within a 100 foot radius of an office building, scanning faces for
lawyers, accountants, M&A people, etc. This the stock market may actually pay
for!

------
robryan
The thing that worried me is that the founder said they didn't launch at SXSW
because he wasn't a fan of conferences. It was on within a few days of launch
and seems like the perfect proof of concept for it. When you have just been
funded for so much who cares about your personal preference.

Either that or you need some kind of exclusivity in niches to build a critical
mass of users like Facebook with colleges. Google Wave was a great case for
the path color has gone down not working, people getting into the app, not
seeing anyone else to interact with and forgetting about.

Even having a fake persona in it that you can delete, just to give people a
feel for how the app works would be better than what they have now.

~~~
dwynings
Actually, they didn't even know about SXSW.

~~~
ahi
Wait, what? SXSW is so hip and popular it's no longer hip and popular. It's
been written up in Parade Magazine for fucks sake.

------
trotsky
Is it just me or does Arrington sound like he got snubbed by color somehow?
Did they not show the proper respect through the usual startup TC story
begging or deny him an investment opportunity? I know a lot of the community
is unimpressed with color and I'm certainly not some big fan, but to me he
sounds as petty and bitter as when they run the "yet another yahoo fuck up"
gloating stories.

~~~
arctangent
Maybe he has just been around long enough to realise theft when he sees it...

(Yes, I know they didn't get the whole $41m up front.)

~~~
DevX101
Theft from whom? Presumably the investors who paid them $41M did more due
diligence and know more about the company than any of us.

It's possible that this was a bad investment decision, but it certainly isn't
theft.

------
flocial
Some startups manage to get on Arrington's wrong side and he goes Perez Hilton
on them.

This startup might have gotten too much investment at the wrong time but it is
built by the same type of hard-working and brilliant people that apply to
Ycombinator, only they had a good track record and contacts with more
traditional venture capitalists. I'd like more in depth analysis than shallow
criticism because there's as much and maybe more wealth in information that
could be gained from what went wrong with their plan.

------
dfield
It's fun to bash something, but I think Color has a lot of chances left. They
have a rockstar team and the money to support themselves for several years.
Their current product isn't very good, but it's a mistake to write them off or
call them "troubled" this early.

------
Hovertruck
Color was a nice way to relive the life and death of Cuil.

------
j_baker
From the box about Peter Pham at the bottom of the article:

 _Currently is the Co-Founder and President of Color._

I understand it can be difficult to keep these things up to date, but at least
make sure it doesn't contradict the article it's posted on!

~~~
phlux
It's techcrunch.

------
joshuahays
This was expected. I like the idea of a proximity-based social network but the
problem is that they didn't do a good job presenting it that way and they were
overshadowed by a very negative launch to the tune of 40+ million dollars. Set
up to fail from the very beginning.

------
daimyoyo
Color will burn through it's funding and declare bankruptcy in 24 months or
less. Anyone want the under?

~~~
Animus7
I don't know. Burning $40 million for a new venture takes a special kind of
ignorance and incompetence when you're surrounded by shaking heads from all
corners.

Sequoia believed in them. Maybe they haven't opened the bag of tricks yet.
It's too early to write them off.

~~~
phlux
In 1999 that was _normal_

~~~
dasil003
Sure, but how much did a GB of RAM, a GB of bandwidth, a Ghz of CPU, and the
code to run a basic service on it cost?

~~~
drewda
All those dollars aren't for equipment or even for salaries, they're likely
for marketing/advertising in order to do a big rollout in the already crowded
world of mobile social networks.

~~~
dasil003
Further supporting my point. In 1999 you needed millions in the bank just to
get the product ready for prime time, and competition was thin. In 2011 you
got everybody and their 19-year-old college dropout brother pursuing a lean
startup using free open source tools on bargain-basement hosting that can
support tens of thousands of users for less than a 1-bedroom rent.

Raising 41m for a mobile app pre-launch is just too many eggs in one basket
IMHO. Obviously this has tainted everyone's views of Color, and maybe they
actually need the money and have a solid strategy, and I won't lie and say I'm
not a little envious of their fundraising power, but mustering all the
objectivity I can, I just can't get behind the strategy. Putting that kind of
money in the bank on day 1 just drains the hustle right out of the team.

------
dabeeeenster
They pulled the Android app from the market and it has not returned. Odd.

It was really, really terrible, but you would have thought that it could have
been fixed up by now...

~~~
slouch
I am still wondering why there is no explanation for this. It's been a couple
months since it left the market.

------
protomyth
I'll skip how half-baked and confusing their app was, and go to an implication
of the idea.

Color relies on having groups of people and really works best in a crowded
area. Heck, it relies on two or more people using the app at the same time in
an area. I can see it working great at concerts, but it seems to fail at the
night out with friends and one person taking shots.

It also seems that it is the opposite of Facebook for rural users. Facebook or
Twitter allows people to connect over great distances and see things far away.
Me taking photos on Color during my road trip seems like a huge mismatch. It
just seems like it cannot be "the goto service", and that makes it vulnerable
to never being used.

Lastly, let's assume there was no Twitter at the time of the US Airways Flight
1549 (Hudson plane water landing) and Color was it. Would the wave of
information been different? Does that matter to Color?

------
MatthewPhillips
I don't take any merriment in the fact that things are not going well for
another entrepreneur, so I hope they turn things around. I think it's time to
pivot. Get over the mode of trying to appear to hipsters who sit around the
bar looking at their phones and do something that regular people will enjoy.
And this time don't take shortcuts; no more deals like they did with the
british paper to have a special page of Color photos from the royal wedding.
Go viral this time, win it because people genuinely enjoy what you're doing.

------
teyc
The problem is not necessarily because Color didn't get traction.
Entrepreneurs have a great deal of patience and will try different things. My
reading is that there is some kind of disagreement over direction (either with
the other founder or investors), and Peter decided he had already made enough
F* money from his previous venture he's going to walk.

------
aneil
Arrington is clearly enjoying this.

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jijoy
Who all want to say , I told you so ?

