Small ideas, big companies
Turns out in the past hour I've met strategists from eBay, Yahoo, Amazon. They are here to see the small ideas. Some of them are pretty cool. — Here's my favorites of what I saw at the Entrepreneur 27 event that just concluded at Stanford University. — Flagr.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Microsoft Geek Blogger has made a habit of reporting from the edges of the Seattle and Bay Area tech scenes — his Notes from Mind Camp in November 2005 covered the same kind of informal gathering this Stanford event extends. What makes the Entrepreneur 27 symposium notable is who showed up in the audience: confirmed attendees include strategists from eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon, there explicitly to see what the write-up calls 'the small ideas' among the nine startups on show (per TechCrunch's pickup alongside Strategic Designer and the organizers' own coverage).
That scouting behavior fits the moment: Yahoo has already closed purchases of Flickr and Del.icio.us, speculation is circulating — unconfirmed — that it will snap up Technorati next, and TechCrunch had just celebrated another tiny idea in 1000Tags weeks earlier. Small, cheap, quirky products are being treated as a legitimate asset class by portal corporate-development teams, and a Microsoft employee blogger amplifying them adds an unusual cross-company signal layer.
First-order effects
- Flagr and its fellow E27 presenters get immediate distribution: a high-traffic Microsoft blogger names Flagr a personal favorite, and same-day syndication across TechCrunch and two other outlets puts nine student-era startups in front of buyers without any spend.
- eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon strategy teams walk away with a low-cost pipeline of vetted early-stage ideas, effectively outsourcing parts of their idea generation to a Stanford demo day.
Second-order effects
- Rival portals now face pressure to staff equivalent scout networks or risk reading about the next acquisition target secondhand — especially Yahoo, whose Flickr and Del.icio.us deals set a precedent that is already fueling unconfirmed Technorati takeover talk.
- Demo-day visibility becomes a pricing input: startups that draw blogger attention before revenue arrive at negotiations with strategic suitors holding both leverage and valuation benchmarks set at events like E27.
Third-order effects
- If incumbent portals keep sourcing innovation through scouting rather than internal R&D, the default exit for consumer web startups compresses from public markets toward early acquisition, concentrating the category's direction in a few corporate development offices.
- University-adjacent showcase events institutionalize into formal deal-flow channels for large companies, blurring the line between campus entrepreneurship programs and corporate M&A screening.
The trend: Mid-2000s web incumbents are shifting innovation sourcing from internal labs toward scouting and acquiring small startup ideas surfaced at campus demo events, with blogger amplification accelerating the match.