Bernard Moon – a VP at GoingOn (a new company recently launched by AlwaysOn / Tony Perkins and friends) – has written a good post on building a team from an entrepreneur’s perspective in a startup. While VCs can blather on – well – almost anything – I think the “really good stuff” comes from entrepreneurs who are living their current experience and are self aware enough to write (or talk about) it. Ironically, I’m chewing down Wayne McVicker’s (co-founder of Neoforma) Starting Something: An Entrepreneur’s Tale of Control, Confrontation & Corporate Culture (I read half of it tonight – it’s a great in the trenches story), so my mind was particularly prepared for Bernard’s post. Buried in both is the age old adage that gets re-learned every day – “trust is essential.”
Quova has started a blog on “the impact of real-world geography on the way business is conducted on the Internet” called The 37th Parallel that is hosted on AlwaysOn. I posted an article titled IP Geolocation – Investing in Insight that talks briefly about my first encounter with the notion of “IP Geolocation”, the origin of my investment in Quova, and the evolution of IP Geolocation from a clever, gimmicky idea in 1999 to a technology that is now at the core of a wide variety of Internet-based applications.
I’m participating in a half day event on 9/28/05 from 9am – 1pm put on by IBD Network and hosted at the Fenwick & West office in Mountain View, CA called The Dealmaker Forum. The quick overview is:
If your company’s strategy involves a merger, acquisition, or strategic partnership, The Dealmaker Forum is where you need to be. The Dealmaker Forum brings together expert dealmakers – CEOs, corporate development executives, VCs, and M&A experts – for an exchange of strategy, ideas, and best practices. Through an interactive, roundtable format, participants can delve into topics of critical interest for the growth of their businesses.
In addition to me, the group of “experts” currently includes:
Space is limited to 100 people and is invite only – if you are interested send an email to greta@ibdnetwork.com with your name, title, company, company URL, and phone number.
I’ve always loved numbers (especially primes and multiples of 3) – that partially explains my interest in web analytics and my fascination with looking at data trends. Over the past year, I’ve created my own little data laboratory – my blog. When I started blogging on 5/4/04, I obviously had 0 subscribers via RSS (by 5/8/04 I had 4, by 5/31/04 I had 60, today I have 3500 according to FeedBurner). Thanks for contributing to my laboratory (hopefully you are getting some benefits from it also!)
Since the beginning of this year, I’ve been paying a lot more attention to and experimenting with the various things you can measure on a blog. While the absolute numbers are occasionally useful, the trends are really what I’m after, so the law of large numbers works in my favor over time to improve the validity of the trends. I’m also trying to understand what impacts the trends – the deeper post specific data really helps with this.
I stepped back from it all yesterday and did an inventory of the various data I’m measuring on a daily basis. Following is the list of the services I’m using:
I’m also using a number of these services to enhance my blog, all which collect (or generate) other stats.
While FeedBurner and AWStats form the core of my analysis, I’ve been spending more time in the other tools recently looking at the data. It dawned on me that I’m missing a classic “CIO dashboard” view across all my data. Much of this data is “open” and freely available via APIs and web services although some isn’t easy to get. Now that I’ve got a suitably large set of data, it’s time to step back and see if there’s a better way to consolidate / represent it.
As I’ve said in the past, I’m a long term fan of Warren Buffett. Many of you are also as I’ve received over 500 requests for the Annual Letters of Buffett Partnership, Limited, 1957 – 1970 over the past few months. As the Q205 filings roll in, I happened to notice the disclosure for the stock holdings of Berkshire Hathaway, which are as follows.
Company Class Value Shares Coca Cola Com $8,350,000,000 200,000,000 American Express Co. Com $8,070,237,000 151,610,700 Gillette Co. Com $5,112,617,000 100,980,000 Wells Fargo & Co. Com $3,476,090,000 56,448,380 Moody's Corp. Com $2,158,080,000 48,000,000 Wesco Financial Corp. Com $2,053,111,000 5,703,087 Washington Post Co. Cl B $1,442,736,000 1,727,765 M&T Bank Corp. Com $705,493,000 6,708,760 Shaw Communications Inc. Cl B $456,940,000 22,000,000 American Standard Cos. Com $440,072,000 10,497,900 First Data Corp. Com $346,208,000 8,625,000 Gap Inc. Com $304,826,000 15,434,243 Comcast Corp. CLA SPL $299,500,000 10,000,000 USG Corp. Com $276,250,000 6,500,000 Gannett Inc. Com $245,228,000 3,447,600 Costco Wholesale Corp. Com $235,011,000 5,254,000 Sun Trusts Banks Inc. Com $231,500,000 3,204,600 Nike Inc. Com $214,300,000 2,474,600 Iron Mountain Inc. Com $155,100,000 5,000,000 Tyco International Ltd. Com $146,000,000 5,000,000 Pier 1 Imports Inc. Com $113,520,000 8,000,000 Outback Steakhouse Inc. Com $82,283,000 1,818,800 Servicemaster Co. Com $75,195,000 5,611,600 Lexmark International Cl A $64,830,000 1,000,000 Sealed Air Corp. Com $55,431,000 1,113,300 Petrochina Co Ltd. ADR $48,404,000 659,000 Home Depot Inc. Com $36,760,000 945,000 Proctor & Gamble Co. Com $33,232,000 630,000 Mueller Industries Com $23,084,000 851,800 Comdisco Holding Co. Com $22,784,000 1,518,978 Lowe's Cos. Com $22,706,000 390,000 Dean Foods Co. Com $13,233,000 375,500 Total Value $35,310,761,000
While the old mainstays are predictable (and make up the majority of the value), the holdings in the $100m to $1b range are fascinating.
We just had the biggest earthquake of the summer – a 4.7 at 12:57pm our time – about 38 miles from Homer. Following is the map (hint: look for the big red box.)
We have lots of little earthquakes nearby all the time – this time it was big enough to notice. At first I thought Amy had snuck up on me and was shaking the back of my chair to get my attention. I said something like “hey babe” but the shaking continued. I turned around and Amy wasn’t there. I then noticed that my computer monitors were bouncing around at which point “EARTHQUAKE!” entered my brain. I rolled with the last five seconds (it was about 10 seconds long) and then went up stairs to announce the event. Amy thought I was slamming doors down stairs, so she didn’t make the connection until I told her.
As long as I can remember, a phrase that I have heard regularly is “what is the next killer app?” Entrepreneurs and VCs are always looking for the next killer app upon which to build a huge business. Last month, Richard Nolan and Robert Austin wrote a short article in Sloan Management Review that concluded that “even gifted visionaries [will not be able] to imagine the next killer app.” They asserted that – as a result of research they’ve been doing with their HBS Internet2 Business Group – there are two critical practices to overcoming impediments to identifying the next multi-billion markets for communication technologies. They are:
Nolan and Austin conclude by suggesting “Extrapolation of the present will follow lines less straight and more recombinant than can be deciphered. In that case, we will need processes and technologies that will allow us to intelligently stumble upon the future.” Adam Bosworth talked recently about “keeping it simple and sloppy” – this is a big part of intelligently stumbling forward. Who needs a “killer app” when you can play until something special emerges?
Dan Bricklin has a thoughtful post on software patents as a follow up to a bunch of stuff that’s gone around the web the past few weeks since the NY Times article on Microsoft’s quest for patents. Buried in Dan’s post is the ultimate wisdom:
“I’m not against patents in general (they are good for some industries, I guess), but I do have real problems with how they are affecting the software industry which has other means of protection and incentive that have proven successful to society. Of course, as I’ve written, they are the current law of the land and I still apply for them at times.”
In one of Fred Wilson’s VC Cliche of the Week posts, he stated that “patents are just like nuclear bombs, you just got to have some.” Mutually assured destruction is supposedly a deterrent, isn’t it? Some day, the elusive “someone” (whenever any of us said “someone” in my house growing up, we always really meant “mom”) might get around to fixing our patent system with regard to software patents. Until then, as Dan says, “… they are the current law of the land and I still apply for them at times.”