Last week the CEO of one of the companies that I’m an investor in asked me why all the companies I was blogging about were Web 2.0 companies. I despise the Web 2.0 label so this made me cringe and I asked him to give me more feedback. We talked for a few minutes and he helped me see my blogging through a different filter than my brain.
I’ve always been a “thematic investor.” I pick a theme that I’m interested in that I think has a long term (greater than ten year) investment horizon, hope I’m a couple of years (vs. a decade) ahead of the curve, and then go to work with great entrepreneurs to create some companies. Themes that you may have heard me talk about here including email, RSS, and the Implicit Web.
Over the last dozen years, I’ve refined my thinking about how this works and am confident that I’ve got an approach that will serve me well over the balance of my investing career (I figure I’ve got another twenty years in me.)
One of themes I’ve mined successfully in the past is one I call “IT Management.” As I’ve watched the shift to SaaS, Microsoft’s 2007 product release cycle, the rise of the Enterprise 2.0 meme (gack), and the reinvigoration of corporate IT spending, it’s clear that there are lots of nifty new product / company opportunities in this arena.
However, I think there is something more profound going on. Rather than invest in “security” or “application management”, I take a top down approach that is a result of my secret weapon, a person I call “The Architect” (the reference to The Matrix is deliberate.) I’ll try to channel him more frequently on this blog to distract y’all from Web 2.0.
Over the last few years Amy and I have become close friends with Ben Casnocha. We adore the guy. Ben started his first company – Comcate – at age 14. As of today (age 19), he’s now a published author as his first book – My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley – is officially available.
As an early reader / reviewer of the book, I highly recommend it. The story is oriented around Ben’s experiences as a teenager trying to deal with the pressures of both teenage and adult “business / entrepreneurship” life simultaneously. He does a magnificent job of articulating the characteristics of a startup without being preachy and weaves in a number of vignettes from experienced friends and colleagues. It is simultaneously personal, educational, and emotionally deep.
If you are an aspiring (or existing) entrepreneur, My Start-Up Life is required reading. If you are a TechStars entrepreneur, Ben will be out in Boulder in June – pick up a copy so you can pepper him with questions
In addition to recommending that you buy the book right now, Ben and I are going to do a giveaway on this blog of an autographed copy of the book to the commenter who has the best haiku with the word “start-up” in it. Join in the fun – now!
I know David Cohen is excited – I hope the TechStars teams are. The Denver Post had a nice article on How TechStars was born which includes several very silly pictures of us including one of me and David pretending to smash guitars while Jared talks on the phone and intelligently walks away from the nonsense going on in the background.
The real stars of TechStars are the entrepreneurs, which the Denver Post got right. The supporting cast includes the awesome list of mentors that we have lined up for the summer.
The list continues to grow. If you are a successful entrepreneur in Colorado and want to get plugged into the mentor program (or are a successful entrepreneur outside of Colorado and want to come play in Boulder for a few days), drop me an email and I’ll see if we can make something work out that makes sense.
I’m not a crazy baseball fan, but after 12 years living in Boston it’s hard not to have a soft spot in one’s heart for the Red Sox Nation. Fenway Park is one of the last great ballparks and I smile every time I’m there, even if I’m getting drenched.
Game 1: Red Sox 13, Braves 3. First base side. 1:05pm
Game 2: Braves 14, Red Sox 0. Third base side. 7:05pm
It was a “zero-sum” day, but a fun one. Well – that’s enough baseball for a while.
I had a great weekend in Boston with the men over 5 feet tall in my family. We watched the Red Sox paste the Braves (13–3) and then watched the Braves paste the Red Sox (14–0). It was rainy and shitty all weekend, but that didn’t stop us from having a great time.
When reading my blogs this morning as I woke up and prepared for my long run, I came across yet another article on Geni and their $100m valuation. I’ve never really been into genealogy so I ignored Geni, but after spending a weekend with some genetically linked people, I was inspired to give it a try.
The splash screen was great – it got the info from me that it needed to get started (first name, last name, email address.) I was ready to roll but then got caught up in the three email “confirm this is you, change your password, confirm that you are really you” loop. Then – the hell began. First problem – the Tree screen wasn’t centered properly in Firefox and as a result I couldn’t enter my father’s name. I fired up IE to try that and had a similar problem, but the formatting was a little better so I was able to pull it off. I entered my mother and nothing appeared. I entered her again and it said something like “we found her – is this the one?” I hit ok and it said “sorry – data problem.” I then entered my brother and got the “sorry – data problem” error.
Done. Less than 10 minutes and Geni lost me, at least for now. I have no clue what the real problem was and if I’m an isolated case, but it’s bad news when the user experience breaks on a site that demands extreme viralness to succeed. I’ve written in the past about how all the little things really matter with consumer facing sites. My experience this morning is yet another example to toss on the pile.
Postscript – after writing this post, I closed my browser and started again from scratch to see what would happen. The data sort of is there (my dad, mom, and brother appear), but when trying to add Amy I had the same UI problem in Tree view and when I go into List view there doesn’t appear to be a way to add a new person to the tree. Now I’m really done for now.
Time to go run around the Charles River in the rain and ponder the next generation of user interface paradigms while I’m in the proximity of MIT and the Media Lab.
I’m in Boston this weekend for the annual Feld Men’s Trip with my dad (Stan), my uncle (Charlie), my brother (Daniel), and my two cousins (Jon and Kenny.) We had tickets to tonight’s Red Sox vs. Braves game (very expensive ones – thanks StubHub) and have tickets to tomorrow afternoon’s game (and now rescheduled evening) game.
The weather has not cooperated. I’ve been here since yesterday afternoon and it has been raining continuously. We just finished our traditional annual steakhouse dinner at Abe & Louis (don’t ask what veggie-boy Brad ate) and we slogged our way back to the hotel in the monsoon.
Since it’s all of 8:11pm, I thought I’d check a few things online before bed. I saw a note from Tom Evslin that his new Amazon Short titled The Interpreter is up. I loved Evslin’s last book Hackoff.com (and think Tom is a hysterically fun nerd writer.) I downloaded the PDF and am struggling to toss it on my Sony eReader. Not quite as fun as a Red Sox game, but a lot less expensive.
Update: Getting the book onto the eReader wasn’t a big deal. However, reading it will be a nightmare because of the lack of font formatting (font standards – uh huh.) And the eReader software seems to think the name of “The Interpreter” is “Microsoft Word – Main.doc.” Other than that, it’s great.
The cliche “rules were meant to be broken” is a common one in the world of entrepreneurship. Paul Berberian – a great entrepreneur (and dear friend) almost died yesterday when flying his airplane because he broke three of his rules of flying in a row. Paul got lucky and I very glad he’s alive.
As an investor, I’ve developed some rules. These are not absolutes – I break individual rules on a regular basis. These are not “ethical”, “moral”, or “legal” rules; rather they are functional guidelines for helping create companies that I’ve developed over 20+ years of doing this with 100+ companies. If you are an entrepreneur or executive at a company that I’m an investor in (or a co-investor with me) and have ever had to listen to me blather on about a story of something that has happened at another company to illustrate one of my points, you understand what I mean by “a rule.”
While my rules evolve over time, the core principles don’t. Paul’s post illustrated a point that I hadn’t ever really thought about. When you have a set of rules, it’s ok to break one of them, but it’s probably not ok to break two in a row and it might be fatal to break three in a row. In some recursive parallel universe, I guess that’s a rule.
As a result there are two concepts in play: one of “rules” and one of “additive rules.” (Rule_1 or Rule_2 or Rule_3) is very different from (Rule_1 and Rule_2 and Rule_3). The second case is the one that will get you intro trouble.
Being rigid and slaveishly following rules is stupid. Being flexible and breaking three of your rules in rapid succession might be fatal.
In the spirit of those awesome Apple / IBM ads (and the Apple / IBM spoof ads), Nick Denton at Valleywag (yes – I read Valleywag – doesn’t everyone?) has put up a great San Francisco vs. Silicon Valley ad.
Today’s announcement that Microsoft is paying about $6 billion to buy aQuantive is the latest ownership change of an advertising-related Internet company.
Yesterday WPP Group announced that it was buying 24/7 Real Media for $649 million. And earlier this week Silver Lake Partners and ValueAct Capital announced they were buying Acxiom for $2.25 billion and taking it private.
Three deals, $9 billion dollars of consideration, and another big shift in ownership and alignment of Internet advertising alliances. All sparked by Google’s $3 billion purchase of DoubleClick.
While old media continues to slow dance (think News Corp / Dow Jones and Thompson / Reuters), new media is turning into a mosh pit at an AC/DC concert.