When the VC says no

A very insightful post by Marc Andreessen for the first-time entrepreneurs. Some excerpts from the post:

One "no" doesn't mean anything -- the VC could just be having a bad day, or she had a bad experience with another company in your category, or she had a bad experience with another company with a similar name, or she had a bad experience with another founder who kind of looks like you, or her Mercedes SLR McLaren's engine could have blown up on the freeway that morning -- it could be anything. Go meet with more VCs.

The state of the live web

David Sifry (of Technorati) is reporting some very interesting weblog statistics here. The bullet that surprised me most is that Japanese is the #1 blogging language, amassing 37% of the market. Some very interesting data from the site:

• 70 million weblogs
• About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or...
• 1.4 new blogs every second
• 3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day
• Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December
• 1.5 million posts per day, or...
• 17 posts per second
• Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
• 22 blogs among the top 100 blogs among the top 100 sources linked to in Q4 2006 - up from 12 in the prior quarter
• Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
• English second at 33%
• Chinese third at 8%
• Italian fourth at 3%
• Farsi a newcomer in the top 10 at 1%
• English the most even in postings around-the-clock
• Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
• 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags
• 2.5 million blogs posted at least one tagged post in February
  

EDA and Private Equity

Most EDA stocks took a climb today as CDNS is reported to be in talks with KKR and Blackstone, the influential Private Equity firms. It will be interesting to see, how these burgeoning PE players can improve the output of such R&D intenstive companies operating in a flat/stagnant industry. If anything at all, it points me to another bubble in making.