Tag Archive: Antone Johnson

Evaluating the Risks in Facebook’s IPO: Would You Invest?

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Facebook is forthcoming about the challenges of mobile: No revenue currently generated from mobile advertising; unclear how much mobile use could be monetized; failure to solve this puzzle combined with a dramatic shift toward mobile usage could be a serious problem; and they don’t control the iOS and Android platforms. Frankly, if there were one thing that persuaded me not to invest in FB at current valuations, this would be it.

Avoiding “Janitorial” Legal Work for Startups

Winklevoss Twins

Guide to laying the legal foundations of a successful startup company by startup lawyer Antone Johnson, Founding Principal of Bottom Line Law Group

Convertible Note Financing 101 for Startups

Gust Blog

A key advisory role of startup lawyers in my opinion is to level the playing field by bringing our own perspectives to bear, having gone through the twists and turns with many clients over the years. Knowledge is power.

South by Social Media: Improving the Signal-to-Noise Ratio

Social Media Club

It’s impossible to capture all of the ideas, experiences, people, products, pitches, events of such a huge, intense event in one blog post. A few thoughts and resources to cut through the chatter:

Silicon Valley After the Dot-Com Crash: An Insider Perspective

Excite@Home Building For Sale

After the last ops and engineering staff were laid off, I remember wandering through the cavernous, deserted NOC, strewn with assorted equipment that was left to be carted off to auction, looking up at the huge projection screens that forlornly flickered “No Signal.” It felt downright post-apocalyptic, with huge diesel generators out back standing ready to provide backup power to a NOC and data center that no longer needed it.

If You Build It, They Will Abuse It

MySpace Traffic Growth - Hitwise

As a completely made-up statistic, assume that 0.01% of users are sociopaths or predators who cause serious damage to the community and its other members. With 10,000 users, that’s one guy. With a million, it’s a hundred people. With 100 million registered users — the scale at MySpace when I left — it’s ten thousand. That kind of math illustrates why every major consumer Internet company has an abuse team that serves as the first line of defense against all kinds of ugliness.