Several friends have been raving about The Gates. My mom – the artist – just sent me an email saying it was an amazing installation and I had to look at the web site. I love Christo and HUGE art pieces – they overwhelm me in a weird emotional way (Amy and I have a large installation of Jerry Wingren’s The Visitors outside our bedroom window that I wake up to everyone morning.) As a kid, I could sit and stare at the Claes Oldenberg sculpture in the Dallas Museum of Art forever.
Amy’s in San Francisco with her artist friend Theresa Chong looking at the amazing Lichtenstein exhibit at SFMOMA and playing up in Napa with collectors of Theresa’s art, so I’m home alone tonight and could take my time looking at the web site for The Gates.
It’s awesome. I’ve decided to make a special trip to NY in the next month just to wander around and soak it up.
I got the following email from a friend today that I hadn’t talked to in a year or so (see – email isn’t dead…).
Brad,
Just wanted to drop you a quick note to let you know I am planning to start using Rally on several projects I am working on as a “Rent-a-cto”.
Blog + Marketing = Blarketing
I got turned on to these guys from reading about them in your Blog.
Hope all is well in Feldland!
Earlier today, I gave an interview about the used of RSS / Blogging in corporate marketing and sales activity. I dissed the “blogs as an extension of a lame-ass corporate marketing campaign” stuff pretty hard. In the interview, I tried to explain that part of the value of the blog communication is honest, trusted, forthright point of views. You don’t have to agree with me – but you know I’m saying what I mean. Once this cycle of trust is broken – which is true whenever one shifts into a “corporate marketing” function (“I’m going to tell you want I think you want to hear in order to buy my product”) – things get stupid and gross pretty fast.
But Blarketing – and Brogging – is different. I’ve talked about Brogging before in the context of “Bragging about one of my companies” on my blog. Yeah – it’s promotion – but I’m proud of the work being done and I want the world to know. Blarketing is similar – I’m trying to tell you about real stuff that I think is good and worthwhile. If I stear you wrong and BS you, you’ll decide I’m full of crap and start ignoring me. So – there’s a built in governer on my behavior. I think this is broadly true for a medium like blogging – I get immediate feedback if I’m spewing out useless shit – and I know this – so I try to communicate relevant stuff, transparently, and with as much clarity and frankness as I can muster.
We’ll go through plenty of ups and downs along the way to using RSS / Blogging as an effective marketing medium. I’ve already seen a lot of new memes get propagated and I look forward to seeing some of these silly words take hold.
I got this email after my interview. If I had read it beforehand, I might have accomplished coining a new term today (which we should attribute to my friend Marvin Scaff – thanks Marvin). Does it count if it’s in print in blog vs. traditional media?
I stole Matt’s subtitle because it’s so cute. If you are part of either side of the “email is dead, no it’s not” debate, go read Matt’s post on “The Rumors of Email’s Demise …”. I couldn’t have said it better myself – so I won’t – just read what Matt said.
Return Path just released a study showing that a majority of users of Gmail come from existing Microsoft Hotmail users who are switching to Gmail. The stats are interesting – of new Gmail users that switched from something else:
I don’t learn from demos, conferences, or listening to other people present powerpoint presentations. I figured out a long time ago that I learn by reading, reflecting, experiencing, and playing with stuff. The best confirmation of this was my experience at MIT – I was there seven years (through 2.5 degree programs before they threw me out), went to about 33% of my classes, read everything I could get my hands on, and did just fine.
So – it was with great pleasure that I saw Jeff Nolan’s extensive blog coverage of Demo and Weblogs Blogging Demo site. I hate conferences – they are the convergence of all the “learning” approaches that don’t work for me. It’s not that conferences are bad, I just can’t bear to sit in a room for a day listening to other people – followed by mid-day and evening schmoozing. I realize this all has something to do with my upbringing on Planet Grodon as an earth child of a pair of space aliens, but – well – there you have it.
Back to Jeff’s coverage – it’s great. While the official Demoletter site has a good overview of the companies, Jeff gives his own point of view (as a good blogger should). As I was reading through his posts on each company, I had a strong feeling that the RSS / Blog universe has entered the “me too zone.” It started when I read about Five Across (a Six Apart clone, but better – please change the name <g>), saw the aggregator congestion (Onfolio, Pluck), and more blog / audio / video / photo tools (Serious Magic, Imeem, WhatCounts, Photoleap, iUpload).
Every emerging market hits a point where there is a mad rush of early stage entrepreneurs and VC’s piling in. In some cases, it drives rapid innovation; in most it creates near term over-saturation, lots of irrational financings, and plenty of carnage as the laws of Darwin play out over the next couple of years.
I’m afraid we just hit that point with RSS / Blogging. The meme has spread broadly – which is great. Now we’ll watch all gods children pile in to try to get something up and running in this “space” (more on the fallacy of “space” in an upcoming blog). Again – nothing wrong with this – it’s the natural dynamic of an early emerging market, but anyone that is experienced (and still has their long term memory intact) knows how it plays out for so many companies, entrepreneurs, and investors.
Clayton Christensen discusses this phenomenon in detail in his classic book The Innovator’s Dilemma – and reaches back to the example of the hard drive industry from 1976 to 1995. In 1976, there were 17 firms in the hard drive industry. Between 1976 and 1995 there were 129 new entrants to this industry. By 1995, of the 17 firms in the industry only one – IBM’s hard drive operation – still existed as a stand alone business. Of the 129 new entrants, 109 had failed. Christensen developed his “technology mudslide hypothesis” from this – “coping with the relentless onslaught of technology change was akin to trying to climb a mudslide raging down a hill. You have to scramble with everything you’ve got to stay on top of it, and if you ever once stop to catch your breath, you get buried.”
Sound / feel familiar? Christensen then studied a lot more data and concluded his “technology mudslide hypothesis” was wrong. He concluded that neither pace nor the difficulty of technological change lay at the root of the leading firm’s failures. This led to Christensen’s theories on sustaining vs. disruptive technologies – where the real meat of the discussion is (and I’ll encourage you to read the book for more – it’s worth it – even if you learn better from conferences then from reading books).
While Christensen addresses what happens in the early stage of a disruptive market, I can boil it down into my own simple phrase – “the me too zone.” It’s as if the whole world wakes up one day and starts working on the same types of things. Lots of innovation continues at the core – and the first movers either aggressively extend their lead or completely fuck up somewhere and self-destruct – but in either case a huge number of “fast followers” (or “me too”) companies appear. VCs suddenly get religion and the funding piles into the sector. Suddenly everyone is talking about the “hot new “X” space”.
The cliche “watching a car wreck in slow motion” comes to mind. It’s definitely fun in a sick sort of way. Welcome to the me too zone – I believe we just entered it for the RSS / blog world. There is a huge adoption (and innovation) curve ahead of everyone who is doing stuff with RSS / blogging – and there are plenty of good investments left to make and companies to create – but the noise and clutter is about to get really loud.
Dick Costolo and his gang at Feedburner have been on the front lines of the podcasting explosion. They’ve got great metrics on the growth and dynamics of podcasting and just put up a post on RSS Metrics, Podcasting that’s must reading for anyone that’s into RSS and/or podcasting.
I’m hanging out at Microsoft for another day during their PAC conference so it was pleasant to see a release from ePartners that they are partnering with 5by5 to use 5by5’s Bridgewerx product as part of ePartners’ Microsoft BizTalk integration services. Microsoft continues to blow me away in how they work with and manage their partner relationships across all lines of business and – at this meeting – I’m seeing a very clear focus from them on expanding and embracing their partners even further. One of my other companies – Oxlo – is also a deep BizTalk partner (it’s a key part of their product) – BizTalk and Sharepoint are definitely getting a lot of play as the next wave of Microsoft server-related products.
Fred Wilson wrote today that he and his partner Brad Burnham have officially launched Union Square Ventures and have completed the final close on their inaugural fund.
I’ve known Fred since the first day I started working with Mobius (called Softbank at the time). My very first Softbank-related meeting was to do due diligence at a company outside Boston called Yoyodyne and I met Fred, Charley Lax, and Seth Godin (the Yoyodyne CEO / founder) in Yoyodyne’s office (I kept looking for John Bigboote in the office but couldn’t find him.) Neither Fred nor I knew each other (nor did we know the other was going to be there), but I remember an immediate first impression about five minutes into the meeting of “smart dude.” Fred went on to start his first venture fund (Flatiron Partners), invest in Yoyodyne (with Softbank – which had a happy ending as Seth sold it to Yahoo! for a bundle well after he had no hair), and build a very successful NY-based venture fund with his partner Jerry Colonna.
Fred and I shortly discovered that we were both MIT grads and I recall one of our first long discussions on a wonderfully warm Boston night as we wandered from dinner in the Back Bay back to our hotel somewhere talking about MIT, getting to know each other, and laughing about how crazy busy things were (this was 1997). I worked closely with Fred and Jerry on a handful of companies (eShare – big success, abuzz – solid success, Mainspring – got our money back, Appgenesys – big failure, Return Path – success in progress) and adore both of them.
I’ve had the pleasure of working very closely with Fred over the past four years on Return Path – which we became investors in together when we merged an early stage company Fred had funded (Return Path) with an early stage company I had funded (Veripost). Return Path and Veripost were direct competitors, were both pre-revenue, and were the only two companies that had been funded to create “email change of address” systems. Fred and I had one of those “duh” moments and worked closely with the management teams to combine forces early, rather than pummel each other before the market matured. Matt Blumberg – the CEO of Return Path – has done an awesome job building the business and I’m extremely proud of the company Matt and his team have created (and hopefully Matt’s happy with the “help” that Fred and I have provided along the way.)
While I know Brad Burnham less well than Fred, having never worked with him, I watched Fred work with his partner Jerry Colonna and see Brad as another perfect foil for Fred. As the cliche goes – “every great partnership starts with two people” – and Fred and Brad seem like a superb fit.
Congrats Fred and Brad!
Greg Reinacker – founder and CTO of NewsGator – posted NewsGator’s near term product road map today. The gang at NewsGator has been heads down cranking on a number of fronts – I’ve been encouraging Greg and crew to be more open about what’s coming next. Greg historically has been very tight lipped – by his own admission – so we had some interesting (and useful) conversations about this.
While I’m not a proponent of vaporware or FUD, I do believe it’s useful for young companies to be open about what they are working on. Customer and partner feedback is hugely valuable as you are developing a new set of software products and it’s easy to get the word out there (e.g. via blogs) and get feedback (e.g. via comments, emails, and cross posts). In today’s fast moving world of software and short release cycles, I think a clearly articulated product vision, early beta programs, and lots of forums for feedback helps dramatically improve software product quality and value over the long term.