For the last two days I have been doing meetings in Sandhill Road.

Met with some very smart (and successful) people. And they ask good questions too...

Sometimes I wonder though, how they really do make the decisions they do.... Yesterday I was in a meeting and dropped in passing the name of a company that has just been snapped up, reportedly for round $300M, and said I thought that the underlying technology seemed pretty trivial. The VC smiled, and said to me that he agreed. It had started out as something quite different, but they had made some changes, and then 6 million people started using it regularly and that is what commanded the value. Well, I get that. But I wonder how much luck is involved in the decision making process.

And that is because in almost the same breath we talked about another company that was sold recently for about $20M. The VC said that he had looked at about 75 companies doing almost exactly the same thing (video fx for user created content) and passed on all of them.

So when does a feature become a product?