Being Right or Making Money

This week we find Jon Huntsman in the race officially. Rick Perry continues to look at getting in the race. And there’s a battle shaping up in Iowa.

I’ll get into it all and how the candidates are stacked up.

Michele Bachmann

The Congresswoman continues to be the leader of the anti-Romney pack right now. She dazzled the crowd in New Orleans and Minneapolis. She is giving strong speeches, but she’s also doing something very smart — going silent. The campaign is showing serious discipline that was not there just a few months ago.

This minimizes the “gaffe police” being able to embarrass the campaign, or try to, and it increases demand for the candidate. There is so much buzz about Michele Bachmann right now that the less she supplies in terms of appearances, the more demand there is for her. It’s a valuable commodity at this point and I suspect she’s going to be able to turn it into some serious fundraising.

Bachmann’s rise hurts Pawlenty and Cain in serious ways.

Herman Cain

Cain has rebounded nicely from last week’s debate. There is still huge interest in his campaign and his ability to wow and dazzle a crowd outpaces even Michele Bachmann. The downside for Cain is still policy. His campaign gets tired of people, including me, saying it, but the contrast between a Bachmann speech and a Cain speech is that Cain leaves the crowd with great one liners. Bachmann leaves the crowd with some powerful facts and figures.

The Bachmann campaign is throwing a wrench in Cain’s outsider, tea party fueled surge and he’s going to have to figure out a way to overcome it moving forward.

Newt Gingrich

Just when you thought all the wheels had come off the Gingrich campaign, more fell off. Newt is not, at this point, a viable candidate.

Rudy Giuliani

The Rudy buzz is gone, replaced by a Perry buzz. I don’t see him getting in now.

Jon Huntsman

His speech played well in the media, but the hits are going to keep coming. If conservatives do not soon rally around a candidate, Huntsman is going to be able to exploit it to his benefit. In New Hampshire, he is going to give Mitt Romney a run for his money.

If conservatives rally soon around a Pawlenty, Perry, Bachmann, Cain or other, Huntsman will have to fight Romney for the centrist wing of the party. That hurts Huntsman. Otherwise, Huntsman could play the field and we shouldn’t count him out. One thing to keep in mind though, according to the latest Gallup survey, the more Republicans find out about Huntsman, the less positive their views of him are. That’s not a good sign for him long term. He’ll have to rely heavily on independent voters and run the table with them.

Gary Johnson

This will probably be his last appearance in this list. No traction. No chance. Not worth the time and energy to write about him.

Ron Paul

Ron Paul will not be the nominee, but his ability to excite a base of youthful voters is something that continues to impress a lot of people who should know better.

Tim Pawlenty

Pawlenty’s campaign feels stagnant to me. That’s not a bad thing. He went down after the New Hampshire debate and is at least holding steady now. He’s got to start boosting his name identification, which I think is one reason he is up early with commercials in Iowa.

It’s a smart move on his part to go on now and start the acceleration of name ID. But then that is money he can’t get back. My guess is his fundraising is less than what they want, and there is a feedback loop of both low name recognition playing into low financing playing into low name recognition.

His stump speeches have gotten better and I still think without Perry in the race, he’ll ultimately become the anti-Romney crowds rally around. But the longer there is buzz about another candidate getting in, the longer it will take for that to happen.

Rick Perry

He’s not in yet, but he’s already making waves. I have no inside knowledge as to whether he’ll ultimately decide to get in, but the odds are looking good. It also looks like Perry won’t be in a position to announce anything until after the Texas legislature’s special session wraps up.

Mitt Romney

Romney continues to be the front runner, but part of me wonders if his play it safe strategy is ultimately going to hurt him. Right now, Romney is coasting with a third of the GOP electorate willing to support him. But that leaves two-thirds at play and I wonder if he’s reached his ceiling.

Some of his recent moves on global warming, Romneycare, etc. will continue to plague him along the way. But right now, it remains his race to lose and his willingness to go on and sound like he is in the general election with Obama ultimately helps him hone his message and keep up the air of inevitability.

Rick Santorum

With Michele Bachmann’s surge, the rational for a Santorum campaign diminishes daily and I don’t expect him to have either stellar fundraising numbers come out or the ability to sustain himself through the end of the year.

Wednesday, nearly eleven years after Tim Westergen and his colleagues started Pandora, it began trading on the public markets. I posted a blog post on the news, and suddenly was overcome by emotion, tearing up a little as I thought about Westergen who has been through hell and back as the founder of this company. His story is no different from any entrepreneur who dares to try to capture lightning in a bottle – but it is one with a happy ending.

There are two ways of looking at Pandora. You could look at through the lens of a life-long skeptical reporter who cannot reconcile the valuation of the company with its business reality — and there are many who are doing exactly that. The other extreme view is to look at it from the point of view of a startup founder, one who has been through his or her own ups and downs. I will let the skeptic take the day off for today. To me, Pandora’s story is about hope.

A Savage Beast

I remember meeting the Pandora team days after my former Red Herring colleague Alex Gove, then at Walden VC, introduced me to Larry Marcus (partner at WaldenVC and an investor in Pandora)  and Westergen. The company was at that time called The Savage Beast and was building a music-genome project. Being a reporter who normally focused on the nuts and bolts of the Internet, I didn’t much care for the company, but I liked Westergen.

Over the years, he and I stayed in touch. The boom turned to bust and what was an idealistic quest turned into a journey over burning coals, with constant rejections and a test of faith. He has bobbed, he has weaved, he has pivoted –- and he has survived.

After all these years, and many rounds of funding, Westergen is not making billions of dollars, as many would assume – in fact, he owns a miniscule share of the company: 2.39 percent, which is worth just over $60 million at the closing price of $2.8 billion, a fraction of the money his investors are making. Something isn’t right about that, but that is the way of the world.

Can’t Buy Me Love

I know Westergen and I don’t think he started Savage Beast/Pandora for money anyway. All these years, he has been the same guy. A pair of jeans, a simple t-shirt, plain old sneakers and a bag slung across his shoulders –- and more importantly, an easy smile and willingness to believe that things will get better, if only he could fight for one more day. He did Pandora for one reason: love.

He loved the idea of building a music genome. Eventually the company figured out what the business model would be — and the team there will figure out profits as well. Most startups come from love, not a desire to make pots of money.

These days, it is commonplace to lionize the amount of money a start-up snags from venture-capital investments or billion-dollar valuations some investors place on a company and the insanity of the public markets. Nothing annoys me more than “money” defining one’s convictions. The world unfortunately tends to focus on the destination, not the journey undertaken. And raising money or the public markets are those destinations.

I often joke with my friends that startups are like climbing sheer rock without any support, always slipping a few feet, and then gaining an inch. It is that inch you climb that brings immense joy, even if it is short-lived. The rest is just fighting to stay alive, trying to get ahead and just getting it down.

Rejection shapes us as much as the positive news. Just ask Tim! Or Reid Hoffman! Ask them about how many times venture capitalists rejected their quest for investment dollars. Just because twenty investors reject the idea of a social network for professionals doesn’t mean that it is a bad idea or it is wrong -– it is just an idea that the world doesn’t quite understand yet.

Being a real entrepreneur is a long, lonely road as Tim’s journey tells us. Creating something that is lasting — something you love — takes time. Often a very long time! But in the end, the journey is worth it.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Can Social Media Save the Music Business?
• In Q4, Data Was Mobile’s Hot Spot

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Amusing <b>News</b> Aliquots | Newscripts

Silly samplings from this week's science news. Compiled by Bethany Halford and Lauren Wolf. Got a good story about late Chemistry Nobel Laureate William.

Amusing <b>News</b> Aliquots | Newscripts

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Pentax announces four additional Q mount lenses: Pentax has announced four additional lenses for its new Q mount. As well as the kit 49mm equivalent F1.9 '01 Standard Prime' lens that will come with the camera, ...

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