
Firespotter, a Google Ventures funded incubator - turoczy
http://www.firespotter.com/
======
endtwist
"Firespotter isn’t an incubator. We aren’t looking for ideas or teams to back.
We will instead be building products that we want to use ourselves and quickly
get them out into the world."[1]

[1] <http://www.firespotter.com/blog>

~~~
razin
This sounds a lot like what Bill Gross' Idealab does <http://www.idealab.com/>

------
mpakes
The video on their 'Contact' page is particularly well done:

<http://www.firespotter.com/contact-us>

The narration is a series of excerpts from the 'Wave Speech' passage in Hunter
S. Thompson's _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_ , written about the hippie
movement in San Francisco. Apropos.

Kudos to Alex Cornell, who apparently made it.

------
adrianwaj
Instead of 20% free time, it's 100% free time, and they get to own a chunk of
what they make. Smart way to outsource R&D by pre-owning a stake in what could
be the next big thing, without the complexities and competition of
acquisition.

I think they should just build what's getting funded at the time, and not get
too crazy. A fast (and better) follower mentality.

------
benmccann
The TechCrunch article gives a lot more detail about what they're doing than
their own site does:

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/04/google-voice-ceo-craig-
walk...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/04/google-voice-ceo-craig-walker-
launches-firespotter-a-google-ventures-funded-incubator/)

------
robertgaal
How do you guys think this actually works in a sense of equity? Google
Ventures gets a stake in Firespotter. What happens if they spin-off one of
their ideas into a new company? I take it Google Ventures is still involved
then, right? Why invest otherwise?

------
lotusleaf1987
There really is an unwritten law somewhere that Google must and will expand
into every possible web-related business category. They look more like Yahoo
and AOL to me. Jobs says it best: People think focus means saying yes to the
thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means
saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are. You have to pick
carefully. I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the
things we have done.

~~~
arkitaip
I guess that means that IBM - doing pretty much everything in IT - will fail
any day now.

~~~
lotusleaf1987
But IBM has a focus--business to business. You could argue Google's focus is
advertising, regardless Google is much more aggressive than IBM or any other
company in expanding into ever semi-related web category.

