Riya: OK people, we were just playin' with Google

Robert Scoble has just posted about a new rumour fact about Riya: the company is *NOT* being acquired by Google. The blogosphere was buzzing a few weeks ago about the acquisition, so much so that the Riya launch party was supposed to be the celebration of the take-out.

Que nenni! (sort of “Well - Not!” in old French).

Munjal Shah is addressing the rumor on his blog for the first time:

For the past few months, there have been many speculations about our future as an independent company. For various legal reasons I couldn't and still can't directly comment on these. However, at this time, Riya continues as an independent team fully focused on making our photo search dream a reality.

As we say on our site: “Riya is more than photo search. Our goal is to help you find every photo of yourself on the web. We want to help you recover every moment, every place you’ve been and all of the people you’ve met along the way. We want to give you the tools to discover your future, every place you want to go and meet new friends. We will be successful when we can find every digital photo in the world.”

We still have a very long ways to go, but this is a journey we want to undertake. Our goal was to pursue the best path that would allow us to achieve this vision and in some small way change the world.

As I hope you've seen we are manically focused on building a product people will love. Thus, we are going to keep learning from our alpha users and we plan to launch in general public availability (anyone can register) at the Demo conference in February. We hope to see you there.

Peter Rip, one of the board members and VC backers of the company, is also commenting on the “announcement” in a must read post:

The glitter of the rumor of instant tech wealth is the affirmation we all seek for devoting ourselves to the irrational pursuit of the Myth. The Myth of the Hero Hackers, who, with a computer and some Red Bull, can create Being from Nothingness. The Myth of the Hero Executive who can join a wobbly little start-up and ride off into the sunset with personal wealth and fame. The Myth of the Hero VC who can take credit for finding (and claiming to have “built”) the next Big Important company, thereby confirming how much smarter s/he is to have been luckier than all the other VCs. Business journalists know we all have the hunger and feed our appetite for the Myth.

And the Myth is powerful. The Myth is the basis for the Entrepreneur Bubble. It is the basis of every investment bubble. And it is structurally part of the venture capital industry, The median venture capital investment loses 36%. This is a hits business, and the rates of return are positive in aggregate because the hits are so big as to swamp the losers. But if VCs lose 36% on the median investment, it means that the Preferred Stock loses money. If the Preferred loses money, the Common sees nothing. The Myth is built on Survivor Bias, not base rates.

So the median outcome is a loser for everyone. But so is the state lottery. So is every casino. But venture capital investing and starting small companies is more like a casino than a lottery. The lottery is a blind pool. It's a game called midnight rain-out baseball in poker. All random. In a casino you have a choice of games, and some games have better odds than others. Some games have odds that actually can be influenced if you are smart enough to know how. The casinos call it counting cards, and will throw you out. The VCs call it risk minimization and will reward you for it. The current built-to-flip chatter is the ultimate pursuit of pure Myth. As most any VC will tell you, built-to-flip doesn't work because you can't reliably time someone else's agenda. You can't time the Myth. Myth happens.

So it sounds like Riya has chosen the “Execution” path, and will most likely raise additional financing before officially launching at Demo 2006. Automatic tagging/naming is a big deal, and if Riya can perfect its algorithms to increase the quality of its recognition, it will be worth a lot. And one can bet that GYM will be watchin'.

Best of luck to the team, you have a cool service - and I wish you well... And I need to go back alpha-testing the service and understand why my latest pictures don't seem to upload.

Update: Just saw that Shel Israel has posted his own account, as a consultant to Riya, and Scoble's co-author of Naked Conversations.

Tags: riya

Comments

[John Furrier]

See you guys at Demo.