Is there a CFO in the house?

"The great thing about Silicon Valley is that I can pull together a startup team so quickly. This place has all the talent you need, and it is often right under your nose," said Nand Mulchandani, CEO of Determina, when I met him the other day at an SRI International event.

I started wondering...would it be possible to stride into a Silicon Valley Starbucks and recruit an entire management team? I bet you could get at least two thirds of the team, maybe the rest at the laundromat.

Anybody want to try it? Let me know....it could be a fun.

William Hambricht, the man behind the Google IPO auction, was on Charlie Rose a few weeks back. I Tivo'd it but didn't watch it until recently.

He made a killer point and it went something like this:
"You've always known that half your advertising dollars are wasted, but, you never knew which half. Google figured it out, with its pay for performance advertising."

This is exactly why I believe print advertising will decline further. It's taken several years, but ad agencies now know how to track online ad performance, and more importantly, they can produce solid ROI numbere, plus they get lots of ancillary customer data to explore.

Print advertising can't offer that kind of value; you can only estimate an ROI, and there is usually little in customer data produced.

There are many dead men walking out there, still waiting for print advertising to come back...

Stonestown mall gets an Apple Store.
You have to hand it to Apple. Its Apple stores are hot. About one in seven of Apple's revenue dollars come through its stores--and they are very profitable.

The Apple Store in downtown San Francisco is a superb example of how to control and create a high quality consumer brand experience. If HP and Dell and others want a lesson in brand support and brand experience, they should walk into that store. As Roger McNamee, our local whizz kid uberinvestor gushed earlier this year, "I've never walked into a store where I wanted to buy everything in it."

I think I had that experiecnce when I was a kid...and I know my 10 year old daughter has tried to convince me to buy entire store contents. But why stop at the store, Roger could easily buy the mall..

With the SF Apple store, there is a shocking juxtaposition to contend with. Just across the street from the minimalist design of the Apple Store building is, gasp, The Virgin Megastore! Five floors of CD's, DVD's and books.

Megastore...how touchingly 1980s...mom and dad are browsing for CDs while the kids are at the Apple Store, checking out a DJ workshop on mixing audio tracks.

Here we have two companies with rock star CEOs, two lifestyle-focused companies. Which one is tired? Has Sir Richard spent too much time in his ballon, in the rarefied atmosphere of our blue planet?

SVW Scoop: Did you know that Steve Jobs designed the upstairs theater in the Apple store? He personally selected the chairs himself (by the way, a very stylish choice Steve, nice one.)

Steve Jobs is rumored to be up for the top job at Disney, and I know that Steve would run that business with great gusto. I can see him now, overseeing the installation of the sprinklers outside ABC’s headquarters. I'm not saying Steve has a reputation as a micro-manager, he's just very detailed oriented.

And there's nothing wrong with that. You certainly won’t hear Apple Computer or Pixar investors complaining. Over the past few years they have done very well thank you, under Jobs.