Rob Sandhu

One of the best new web apps I have come across in a very long time.  Prismatic pulls in news to your personal feed based on your tweets.  Topics can be added to your profile and the feed is immediately updated with the new topics.  

Prismatic has replaced Google Reader and Twitter for my news source.  Best of all, its built with Clojure. 

Eric Eldon quoting Harj Taggar on the latest YC Demo Day with respect to mobile focused startups:

Partner Harj Taggar says startups like note-syncing startup Simplenote helped kick off the trend back in 2010. The Android explosion, he says, has made the mobile focus particularly attractive.

As a partner of one of the most influential early stage investment firms in SV, when Harj speaks you listen.  I was particularly interested in the direct interest he displays for Android given the latest iOS numbers from Horace Dediu:

The iOS platform as a whole reached 316 million cumulative units at the end of last year. The iOS platform overtook the OS X platform in under four years and more iOS devices were sold in 2011 (156 million) than all the Macs ever sold (122 million).

Why so much enthusiasm for Android given the number of iOS units sold?

VCs love the numbers game with respect to:

• daily actives
• number of downloads
• ‘open’ platform dominance ie. web and possibly Android

Your investor will be interested in the exit strategy and the above list of attributes are the ‘selling’ point of your startup.  iOS might be the most profitable platform (with respect to unit sales), but Android is the mobile platform that will draw the numbers and in turn the largest acquisition terms.  At next board meeting, the set of investors are looking for X-times the number of downloads from the previous meeting.  On iOS, you might be building a great business with slow, but organic growth - which is seen by investors as a ‘lifestyle’ business.  Will Shipley, outlines this concept with a great analogy of Farming vs. Mining. 

In addition to reaching the most users, investors are concerned with the control Apple has on their platform.  YC and other investors will advise their entrepreneurs to build product on an open platform such as the web.  During the Web 2.0 days, your app distribution was the browser with HTML/CSS/JS.  Today, the open platforms are seen as Android and HTML5, just ask Fred Wilson where he advises to build for Android first.  Fred makes a great point, “I believe Android will be stronger in the developing world than it is in the developed world”.      

For many of us developing for iOS, is it time to shift towards Android (Objective-C or Java, pick your poison)?  Raising that round might just answer your question for you.  Your passion and enthusiasm is for iOS, but that great investor with contacts is pushing for the greatest reach.  

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