VentureBeat

I just sat down with Max Levchin, chief executive of leading widget-maker Slide, after his talk at the Web 2.0 Expo this afternoon.

He gave me more information on Slide’s interest in forms of revenue besides advertising and the role of feeds — like Facebook’s news feed or Friendfeed — on the web. He also tells me about the increasing number of application programming interfaces for third-party developers, and how maybe one day there’ll be APIs that let him create multimedia widgets featuring his favorite Russian rock band.

VentureBeat: There’s been a lot of talk about sites like Friendfeed, that let you see what your friends are up to across the web, on various services. Do you think this is a standalone company, or will large networks dominate, sites like Facebook that also have feeds?

When there’s a powerful network affect, then there’s not a lot of room for more than one winner. You have a winner that wins big, then also-rans that occupy niches. Its unclear to me whether that’s exactly how it is in Friendfeed’s case — but it’s clear that the news feed within Facebook has a very powerful network effect.

Right now, I’m not sure whether [Friendfeed's] service adds so much value that it essentially stands alone [although Max notes he hasn't been focused on studying Friendfeed, and may be wrong]. Any one of the sites that appears in a feed can also offer its own feed.

There’s a network effect of users, and a separate network effect of aggregated sources. I think I’m more drawn to users than sources. If I see what you’re up to on Facebook but I don’t see your updates on Flickr, I’ll still care about Facebook.

If there’s doubts about the genius of Mark Zuckerberg [Facebook's founder and chief executive], then the feed is proof that he has something gray between his ears that ticks pretty well.

[Facebook was the first large social network to introduce the feed concept, and it has since been widely emulated by social networks and other sites.]

VB: Nearly every web company seems to be launching their own application programming interface, to let other services in one way or another interact its data and features. While the significance isn’t yet clear, these APIs are creating new business models, ways of filtering lots of information and standards for helping lots of services to interoperate. [Check out this post by Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb for more on that.]. What impact do you see this movement having?

It’s obviously pretty cool but the reason it matters is because the web is becoming more centralized. We’re becoming slaves to our social networks — and that’s not a bad thing. You like your favorite networks, so do you friends, and pretty soon you have market winners.

It doesn’t change the fact that even the largest are still young and in need of help. That can mean not just throwing sheep in Facebook, but doing it on other sites.

But it gets more complicated, and lawyers are helping these companies define how to help users how to do things like revenue sharing and data sharing across networks. To some degree, it has to do with the culture and the mores of the social network? Maybe a network wants to maintain privacy to the degree that they don’t share information with other sites like that.

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YouNoodle, a new San Francisco company, says it has developed a “startup predictor,” or a set of analysis tools to help investors place bets on the university entrepreneurs that are the most likely to succeed.

The company, founded by two 20-something entrepreneurs who met at Oxford, will offer its basic technology beginning March 3. Its core analysis stems from work YouNoodle has done over the past 11 months, working with universities to help them organize business plan competitions. The “predictor” analysis will consist of historical data about qualities of a start-up team’s founders, the type of network these founders have, their participation in competitions and their progress over time. By comparing founding teams across hundreds of university, college and vocational campuses, YouNoodle says it can make good estimates for success entrepreneurial teams in their earliest stages. A more advanced algorithm will be released some time later for professional investors, for a subscription fee.

I talked with two of the founders this evening, Bob Goodson, 27 (left) who is chief executive, and Krill Makharinsky, 22 (right), both recruited by PayPal founder and Slide chief executive Max Levchin to come to the U.S. Levchin and former PayPal chief executive Peter Thiel have both invested in YouNoodle, as has Thiel’s Founder Fund. Goodson wouldn’t disclose the amount; he said other investors will also be announced.

I challenged them on their audacious goal of predicting success of start-ups, telling them it was impossible to say which ones become the next hundred billion dollar Google. I’d read Goodson’s quote the NYT earlier in the day where he said: “Give us some information, and we’ll give you some idea of what the company will be worth in five years.” That’s pretty absurd, and investor Paul Kedrosky’s quote to the Times was spot on: “If their tool did such a good job, they’d raise a fund themselves and beat the tar out of us.”

But when I talked with them directly, the two founders were somewhat chagrined by the New York Times article, saying it was sensationalist, especially the Times’ headline about being able to predict a company’s fate. Whether they were backtracking or not, I don’t know, but what they told me seemed to make a lot more sense than what I read in the Times. “That’s not what we’re doing,” Goodson told me. “What we’re interested in is the very earliest stage. That’s the biggest pain, when it’s just getting off the ground,” he said. He explained that they’re trying to do with more mathematical rigor what an investor tries anyway through time-intensive diligence, that is, check into a team’s heritage, its network, success with early prototypes, etc., and then make conclusions about a team by comparing it with other founding teams. Goodson conceded: “Of course, it would be absurd to say we’d predict all the factors involved that go into a startup being successful.”

In other words, this makes a lot of sense, and I can see it being quite useful if done right. There is so much work investors have to do, and so much inefficiency before the first round of capital, that anything to make it smoother would be good for both the startup and the investor. However, after the first round, market factors, and other dynamics take over, it’s impossible to predict how a company will do.

Today (Monday), the company has opened up sections of its site, including profiles of companies, entrepreneurs, as well as several of the groups that are hosting business plan competitions on the site, such as Stanford’s BASES, and the Stanford Social e-challenge Competition, as well as programs at Berkeley, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London. You can subscribe to an RSS feed to stay updated on events and news about start-ups of your choice, and you can upload your resume for others to see.

The company is a team of five.

Internet traffic measurement company ComScore will release data showing that slideshow company Slide is the world’s top widget provider.

We don’t want to fall into the habit of issuing these numbers constantly, but the sheer size of Slide’s usage, if true, is mind-boggling — especially given that San Francisco’s Slide is hardly two years old.

It has a reach of 117 million unique viewers, around 13.8 percent of the total worldwide Internet audience. By contrast, competitor RockYou has around 82 million viewers and photo company Photobucket has 28 million viewers, Slide said in a statement, ahead of Comscore’s data. If Photobucket was bought for hundreds of millions, Slide may also command a nice sum. The question is still, how do you monetize slideshows?

Slide is led by workaholic Max Levchin (pictured above), formerly co-founder of PayPal. Levchin has said Slide will collect substantial data about users, which potentially could be useful for advertisers.

The numbers are impressive, any way you look at them. Slide is getting more than 200,000 new slideshows added each day.

Slide, the San Francisco start-up that lets you create slide shows from your photos or other content, has raised a large third round of funding from Khosla Ventures and Mayfield Fund.

The amount remains undisclosed, but we’ve heard it is more than the company got for its second round, which was $8 million. That gives the company near or north of $20 million in total funding, putting it comfortably on the list of best-funded Web 2.0 companies in Silicon Valley — and apparently making it the biggest of any of the latest generations of photo-related sites.

The site lets you push slideshows, onto your blog for example, or to share your favorite photos with friends and family. But it also lets you pull them, accepting a slideshow of images fed from your friends or from your favorite Web sites. It is the latter feature, where people might pull slideshows of products from their favorite retailers, for example, where Slide sees a business model. Slide also lets eBay sellers feature their wares in slideshows. It’s unclear whether Slide has made progress in making money.

Here is our previous story about Slide.

Levchin (pictured above) said he hit it off with Vinod Khosla, the well-known venture capitalist who runs Khosla Ventures. Khosla grasped Levchin’s vision for slides more quickly than others, Levchin said.

The funding also included previous investors, BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund.