Too much champers

This is not a hangover post. New fathers don’t risk hangovers as the mornings come awfully early as it is.

I’d really like to meet the VCs that put US$16MM into the hakia search engine startup. Now there’s a liquor-fueled investment idea. Not even written on a napkin; it was the inside of a case of Jordan.

The NYT quoted their CEO as saying “We expect to be one of the top three search engines”. So, two of Google, Yahoo, Altavista and MSN are about to see their traffic dry up.

Crazy as it sounds, the engine is blistering fast. Type in “Venture Debt” and you’ll get hundreds of relevant links in no more time than Google; and you’ll still find us within the first 15 suggestions, versus 10 with Google. Glad to see we are the first Canadian firm that pops up!

But it really isn’t clear why the rest of us will rip out the Google toolbars or Yahoo Finance pages and convert to another aggregator. Well, maybe we could stand to dump Yahoo Finance.

Youtube, flickr and the like were serving a need. There’s no obvious need for a better search engine. And if there is, Google has proven that they have a few billion to invest on improvements and the currency to acquire along the way.

Let’s have a contest and see how many days they stay in business as an independent firm. I’ll start off with 800.

MRM