The Pulse #110: VC-funded companies acting more like bootstrapped ones?
Also: first-ever double Nobel Prize wins for AI research, and an interesting cloud platform price comparison startup built on a budget
The Pulse is a series covering insights, patterns, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Send me a message.
Today, we cover:
Industry pulse. Google to be broken up? NVIDIA may compete with cloud providers, Twilio commits to full-remote work, third-party app stores coming to Android, and more.
VC-funded companies being more bootstrapped? More seed-stage VC-funded companies aim to become profitable fast in order to avoid future fund raising rounds. It’s like how bootstrapped companies operate, and reduced levels of available funding will keep this approach popular.
First-ever double Nobel Prize wins for AI research. Both the physics and chemistry Nobel prizes have been awarded for AI-related work. And three of the five prize winners have Google connections.
Interesting startup idea: benchmarking cloud platform pricing. A team of 3 developers built a neat platform called Spare Cores that makes cloud instance pricing more transparent. They currently track 275,000 up-to-date server prices across 4 cloud providers – and built all of this on top of a €150K ($165K) EU innovation grant in ten months.
1. Industry pulse
Google to be broken up?
In August, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) ruled that Google broke antitrust law by paying other vendors to be the default search engine. Now, the process moves on to decide the penalty. The Department of Justice (DOJ) is suggesting the break-up of the search giant, in order to end the company’s monopoly in search.
The DOJ is seeking “behavioral and structural remedies that would prevent Google from using products such as Chrome, Play, and Android to advantage Google search and Google search-related products and features.”
It is down to the judge to decide the penalty, and whether to take the drastic decision to break up the tech giant, in the way the US government broke up oil companies in the early 20th century. The last time it happened to a Big Tech company was in 2000, to Microsoft. Back then, the business appealed and got the decision overturned in 2001.
It reads like the DOJ will push for Search to be a separate company, and products like Chrome, Play and Android to operate in a unit independently. It is a fair question if products like Chrome would be viable without being subsidized by the profitable ads business. Microsoft and Apple both subsidize their browser development from other parts of their businesses.
If Chrome, Android, and Play became a separate entity, this entity could feature search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search businesses, could pay to be the default search engine for a limited time, or for a region.
Google will no doubt fight hard and do whatever it can to avoid being broken up.