Last week Don Dodge, Dan’l Lewin, and Dave Drach from Microsoft visited TechStars. Don has a nice post up about his visit including brief descriptions of several of the TechStars companies that I don’t think has appeared in the wild yet.
Don, Dan’l, and Dave are good friends – among other things Dan’l runs the Microsoft Emerging Business Team which is responsible for Microsoft’s relationship with the VC community and venture-backed startups. Scott Maxwell from OpenView – who sits on Dan’ls advisory board with me – summarized how EBT works from a VC’s perspective in a 2006 post titled Microsoft’s Work with Emerging Growth Companies – Five Stars.
TechStars was one of the stops on a day long tour that Don, Dan’l, and Dave made through Boulder. This was true evangelism – only two of the ten TechStars teams are heavy users of Microsoft technology. Some eyes got opened along the way – both directions – and I think the dialogue was great.
Don followed up his post on TechStars with a thoughtful essay titled Angel investors deserve respect from VCs which riffed off of Rick Segal’s post titled Shortsighted Greed. Great stuff for anyone playing in the seed stage of the investing universe.
Wesabe just came out with an API. If you aren’t familiar with Wesabe, it’s a new investment by my friends at Union Square Ventures – Brad Burnham describes why they made the investment in his post Wesabe Is More Than A “Personal” Financial Service. A quick search on Fred Wilson’s blog (via Lijit) shows tons of chatter on the term “API” on both his blog and his network. API is also prevalent in my blog postings and my network.
Twittermania was partially driven by the API. Almost all of the web services companies that I’ve invested in, including FeedBurner, NewsGator, Technorati, and Rally Software have powerful APIs. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are obsessed with API’s. Remember the SDK? It’s now the API. Repeat after me: REST and SOAP.
This is not a new idea nor am I suggesting it is. But it’s a phenomenon that has become key to what’s going on around the web today. Some people – like the fine folks at the Programmable Web – are even cataloging this. Remember the phrase “information wants to be free.” Your computer programs do also, and an API is the way to help them.
One of the investment themes I’m intrigued with is human computer interaction (HCI). I believe that in 20 years the notion of typing on a keyboard and moving a mouse around will seem quaint. If you are skeptical about this, remember that punch cards were all the rage a mere 35 years ago when IBM came out with a new 96 column format, our good friend the IBM 3270 came out in 1972, and the ubiquitous VT100 came out in 1978.
If you are in NY and walking down 14th Street near Union Square today, you’ll see is simple example of what I mean by HCI. Adobe has an ad up on the wall of the Virgin Megastore that is interactive. The wall is 7 feet by 15 feet and while it’s a marketing campaign (vs. a functioning UI), it’s a colorful example of some interesting things that are coming – and fast.
While FeedBurner is no longer an investment of mine, I still am a huge FeedBurner fanboy and love everything about those cuddly little guys and gals. Today they announced that they have seemless integration with Blogspot. If you are a Blogspot blogger, you can now be as happy as the TypePad bloggers (at least as far as your feed is concerned.) Zap! Pow! Kraaakkkk! – I’m so delighted that the humor gremlin at FeedBurner has not left the building – I guess he likes the free Google food.
I hate the 2.0 label. Hate it hate it hate it. Hate it. However, I’ve heard the phrase “Enterprise 2.0” 3,625 times in the past two weeks. All my enterprise friends are using it. All the big companies I work with have been using it. All the analysts have been using it. It’s even in Wikipedia. I yield.
Today’s Techmeme meme is based on Facebook advertising brings poor results.
Most of the posts are talking about the rotten clickthrough rate (0.04%) on Facebook. Some of the posts – like Scoble’s – have some constructive suggestions about how to make the advertising more relevant (note to self – “tie it to people, just like Google ties AdSense to search results.”)
In the past two weeks, I’ve seen or heard of four Facebook focused ad networks that are about to launch that are specifically aimed at Facebook apps. One of the TechStars companies – J-Squared Media – has a rapidly growing Facebook up (Sticky Notes – 232,137 users – ranked #52) so we are getting an inside look at the action, traffic dynamics, and advertising (oh yeah – and dealing with scale on short notice.)
So far, it’s all about the CPM. I’ve seen proposals ranging from $0.50 / CPM to $15.00 / CPM. Do the math – it’s interesting. I expect the CTR will be low (< 0.1%), but some of the CPM based ads that I’ve seen are awesome and – especially if they are interactive in page with a call to action – render CTR meaningless.
Remember also that Facebook doesn’t really want anyone to leave Facebook (at least I don’t think they do.) In a conversation yesterday at Me.dium, we were trying to figure out the correct way to describe it (e.g. “inverted AOL”, “walled fortress”, “AOL 2.0 without the fee.”) We never got satisfied with the label, but the concept is an important one if you are trying to figure out the really effective long-term advertising approach.
Yeah – it’s old news now (announced on Monday) but it has been a busy week with little sleep (due to the existence of a puppy in my life.)
My partner Ryan (congrats man!) has the detailed version of the story if you are interested. I’m extremely proud of the Postini team, especially the co-founder Scott Petry – for their amazing job in building this company. It’s extra gratifying given that 42 days ago I wrote a post titled Google Acquires FeedBurner. Congrats to the folks at Google for acquiring another great company – now Google will really engage in the mission of eliminating the evilness of spam from the universe.
If you are making the move from a big company to a startup, Scott Converse has a must read post up about passive-aggressive behavior titled Corporate vs. Startup behaviors.
I can’t stand passive-aggressive behavior, especially in a startup context. I’d much prefer a good argument. The value of being direct is extremely high, especially when faced with the amount of ambiguity that exists in a startup.
I’ve never really worked for a large company (even my time at AmeriData was really more of a big startup since it was growing so fast and doing so many acquisitions) so I’ve never really learned (or experienced) how to survive in a big company. Nor do I really care since I doubt I’ll ever be in that environment. However, I do care about how to map big company experience to entrepreneurial experience and Scott provides some very useful insights in his post.
As StartupWeekend continues, a 90 second yoga break has been introduced at the tail end of the 7 minute check in that happens once an hour. The yoga has gotten a little creative nerdy.
Laptop yoga anyone? It’s a new ancient style from the far west end of Boulder.