Troubled Startup Color Loses Cofounder Peter Pham

I would love a chance to see the Color founders doing office hours with pg! Or even just pgbot. I can see it now:<p><pre><code> Color guy: We're building an app that lets you share photos with your mobile phone, with people within 100 feet of you, but it uses your social graph to make sure you see stuff you're interested in. pgbot: WTF? Color guy: I mean, it lets you share pictures that you just took, and people within 100 feet of you will see that you just shared a picture. pgbot: What problem does this solve? If they're 100 feet away, wouldn't they have seen the same thing you saw, or even taken the same picture anyway? Color guy: You don't get it, it's mobile... pictures and mobile, together. Like peanut butter and chocolate. pgbot: Who wants this? Color guy: Well, erm, I mean, erm, that is, aaahhh... um, you know... like, um, aaaghh... well... uhhrrmmmm... college kids. And hipsters. And hipster college kids. pgbot: You mean the two classes of people least likely to either A. have money, or b. spend money, unless it's on cheap beer, crappy clothes, or Apple hardware? Color guy: But, but... pgbot: Who's going to pay for this? Color guy: Aaaah, well, you see... aaah... umm.... pgbot: I worry, I worry...</code></pre>

I noticed today Color have removed the notice on their office that they'd like fellow denizens of Palo Alto to stop by and give feedback.<p>They've also turned off the projectors showing pictures from the app on their front windows. Very quiet at their office at the moment.

The thing that worried me is that the founder said they didn't launch at SXSW because he wasn't a fan of conferences. It was on within a few days of launch and seems like the perfect proof of concept for it. When you have just been funded for so much who cares about your personal preference.<p>Either that or you need some kind of exclusivity in niches to build a critical mass of users like Facebook with colleges. Google Wave was a great case for the path color has gone down not working, people getting into the app, not seeing anyone else to interact with and forgetting about.<p>Even having a fake persona in it that you can delete, just to give people a feel for how the app works would be better than what they have now.

Is it just me or does Arrington sound like he got snubbed by color somehow? Did they not show the proper respect through the usual startup TC story begging or deny him an investment opportunity? I know a lot of the community is unimpressed with color and I'm certainly not some big fan, but to me he sounds as petty and bitter as when they run the "yet another yahoo fuck up" gloating stories.

Some startups manage to get on Arrington's wrong side and he goes Perez Hilton on them.<p>This startup might have gotten too much investment at the wrong time but it is built by the same type of hard-working and brilliant people that apply to Ycombinator, only they had a good track record and contacts with more traditional venture capitalists. I'd like more in depth analysis than shallow criticism because there's as much and maybe more wealth in information that could be gained from what went wrong with their plan.

It's fun to bash something, but I think Color has a lot of chances left. They have a rockstar team and the money to support themselves for several years. Their current product isn't very good, but it's a mistake to write them off or call them "troubled" this early.

Color was a nice way to relive the life and death of Cuil.

From the box about Peter Pham at the bottom of the article:<p><i>Currently is the Co-Founder and President of Color.</i><p>I understand it can be difficult to keep these things up to date, but at least make sure it doesn't contradict the article it's posted on!

This was expected. I like the idea of a proximity-based social network but the problem is that they didn't do a good job presenting it that way and they were overshadowed by a very negative launch to the tune of 40+ million dollars. Set up to fail from the very beginning.

Color will burn through it's funding and declare bankruptcy in 24 months or less. Anyone want the under?

They pulled the Android app from the market and it has not returned. Odd.<p>It was really, really terrible, but you would have thought that it could have been fixed up by now...

I'll skip how half-baked and confusing their app was, and go to an implication of the idea.<p>Color relies on having groups of people and really works best in a crowded area. Heck, it relies on two or more people using the app at the same time in an area. I can see it working great at concerts, but it seems to fail at the night out with friends and one person taking shots.<p>It also seems that it is the opposite of Facebook for rural users. Facebook or Twitter allows people to connect over great distances and see things far away. Me taking photos on Color during my road trip seems like a huge mismatch. It just seems like it cannot be "the goto service", and that makes it vulnerable to never being used.<p>Lastly, let's assume there was no Twitter at the time of the US Airways Flight 1549 (Hudson plane water landing) and Color was it. Would the wave of information been different? Does that matter to Color?

I don't take any merriment in the fact that things are not going well for another entrepreneur, so I hope they turn things around. I think it's time to pivot. Get over the mode of trying to appear to hipsters who sit around the bar looking at their phones and do something that regular people will enjoy. And this time don't take shortcuts; no more deals like they did with the british paper to have a special page of Color photos from the royal wedding. Go viral this time, win it because people genuinely enjoy what you're doing.

The problem is not necessarily because Color didn't get traction. Entrepreneurs have a great deal of patience and will try different things. My reading is that there is some kind of disagreement over direction (either with the other founder or investors), and Peter decided he had already made enough F* money from his previous venture he's going to walk.

Arrington is clearly enjoying this.

Who all want to say , I told you so ?