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.
If you are a blogger, it’s time to consider implementing Lijit for your blog search. Matt Blumberg jumped on board last week and Fred Wilson tossed it up on his blog a few weeks ago.
I’ve enabled all the features. At the top is a search box. Just type in your search terms.
If you don’t want to take up a lot of sidebar space, you can just surface the search box, but I like all the functionality to be front and center.
Next is a tag cloud of most popular searches. Finally, you see the list of My Content. These are all the content sources that I publish on the web:
Now – the neat thing is that you can search my blog, my content (anything I’ve published on any of these services), my network (anything I’ve published and anything anyone in my network has published.)
My network is really special – Lijit is working hard to automatically build these networks. My blogroll is one of the informers of this – look for others coming soon.
Incorporating Lijit into your blog is easy. If you are a Typepad user it’s now in the Typepad Widget directory. If you use a different blogging platform, it’s easy to set up on the Lijit web site.
Once you start playing with Lijit, you’ll discover lots of layers of interesting things. The search stats are superb and remind me of the early days of using FeedBurner and discovering new and exciting feed stat info on a regular basis. The Re-Search feature is pure magic.
If you give Lijit a try and either need help or have feedback, drop me an email.
If you are a NewsGator user, you might know about some of the neat add-on tools that build on the NewsGator Online reader. They were hard to find on the old NewsGator web site – the version released last week makes it a lot easier to find them. They include:
If you are an active reader of RSS and feed and are not using at least Toolbar and Desktop you are missing out. All of these automagically integrate and synchronize with your existing NewsGator Online setup and dramatically enhance the overall feed reading experience. And – as a special bonus – they are free.
Maybe there are. But I thought it was a catchy title for a post. There are plenty of dogs, cats, and 400,000 people on Dogster as of today. One of my all time favorite New Yorker cartoons (hanging on the wall of my office) is “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Well – they might.
I’m an early stage investor. Very early. Think “seed stage.” My favorite investments are in tiny teams of founders that I can get in a closet (e.g. one to four – a normal sized closet, not Amy’s.)
One of the seeds I planted in 2004 was NewsGator. I met Greg Reinacker in the spring of 2004 via an introduction from one of the members of the Return Path leadership team who said “hey Brad – there’s this RSS thing – it looks a little like email – you should check it out. Oh by the way, there is this guy named Greg you should meet.”
I sent Greg an email and we set up a meeting. I spent some time poking around on the web before the meeting. I figured out that RSS was a protocol, a bunch of smart software guys had gotten into a huge war over it and a protocol called Atom, and it had something to do with the blog things that were popping up all over the place. Other than that I didn’t really get it.
In that first meeting, I spent two hours in a conference room with Greg. The first thing I learned was that Greg was one of those rare software developers that is 100x better than virtually everyone else. When you find a guy like Greg, you lock him in your basement, make him break up with his girlfriend, and don’t let him out until you have a deal. The second thing I learned was that RSS was a transformational protocol that has extremely broad implications.
I often say that my analogy for RSS was SMTP. SMTP is the protocol that begat email. Email has been very, very, very good to me (and continues to be – witness the success of Postini and Return Path.) SMTP:RSS as RSS:“something”. I didn’t really know what the “something” was, but I knew it was something (brilliant, I know.)
We did the seed financing for NewsGator in May of 2004 and its growth has exceeded all of my expectations. Yesterday, along with announcing a new version of the NewsGator Enterprise Server, they announced that they now have over 100 customers and 400,000 seats of its enterprise software licensed. NewsGator now has well over a million people using some version of their software every day. And yes – it’s a real business – generating real revenue.
I’ve continued to plant plenty of seeds. My garden of stuff around RSS and a theme I call the “Implicit Web” is growing nicely. I continue to tend to it, remove weeds when necessarily, and fertilize regularly (I’ll let you figure out how I do that.)
Greg, JB, and the entire team at NewsGator – thanks for helping create a tree! Now – let’s work on the forest. And Greg – sorry about that girlfriend thing.
One of my favorite CTOs – Tim Wolters of Collective Intellect – is on Wallstrip today chatting with Lindsey.
While I’d much rather there was less of Tim and more of Lindsey, I think Tim did a good job explaining what Collective Intellect does and why it’s useful to anyone that trades public stocks. I’m an investor in Collective Intellect and have been nudging Tim and his partner Don Springer along on how to think about dealing with all the user-generated content in the world. They’ve got it – and Tim is now actively participating in it – sort of. Plus – he’s basically long on everything, which is an attribute that is helpful for all entrepreneurs.
Some of the companies I invest in are innovation factories – it feels to me like something interesting comes out of them at least once a week (and sometimes daily.) FeedBurner and NewsGator both fit in this category – it’s a combination of having amazing developers, a core platform architecture, and a philosophy of iterating quickly on small product increments (rather than the “big bang – take 12 months and release a product – approach.”) While the spirit of web-based apps encourages this, I’m amazed at the number of startups (including some that I’m an investor in) that have a rapid innovation cycle at the beginning of their development, but then slow down significantly as they add headcount and complexity in their application (more on this in another post.) Hint to those of you that want to go faster – consider using an agile methodology and tooling.
One of the innovation factories that I’m an investor in is Lijit. Stan James and Todd Vernon are obsessed with getting stuff out the door on a short cycle, testing it in the real world, and iterating. Every time I turn around Stan shows me something amazing (Stan – when does the world get to see Bubbles?) – on Monday it was the first “known” (at least to me) widget stat report. The methodology is described below:
These statistics are based on a crawl of 8552 blogs done over April 11-15, 2007. This crawl was “centered” on blogs with the Lijit widget (or as we call it, Wijit), and expanded outwards by following the blogrolls. Due to some bugs in how we stored this data, we had to throw out a large number of blogs. These stats only include numbers which we are sure to be correct. This is our first time, after all! For this sample we take a wide definition of widgets, including non-visible widgets such as as Google Analytics. Also note that we do not include image-only widgets, this includes the Feedburner subscriber count badge and the LinkedIn badge. Also not included are “widgets” that are automatically added by a blogging platform, like those from Blogger or Typepad. Because our crawl expanded outwards by blogrolls, and because of the general disconnect between the traditional blogosphere and social networks, widgets from sites like MySpace are not included in these stats.
During the first crawl and analysis, Stan clearly acknowledges what assumptions they made, what didn’t work on the crawl, and hints toward what they’ll be tuning with their algorithm.
As a data junkie, this was intensely interesting to me. The top 10 widgets on the crawl were Google Analytics, Google Syndication, Sitemeter, Technorati, Flickr, Statcounter, Mybloglog (damnit guys – why did you sell to Yahoo – we could have built something really big), FeedBurner, Blogrolling, and icio.us (del.icio.us). The next 30 are an interesting collection of things to pay attention to (and a few surprised me with both their relative popularity or their relative unpopularity.)
While this is still a small sample size (8552 blogs) with built in bias (crawl centered on blogs with the Lijit Wijit), it’s a fascinating start. Analytics dominate with Search relatively light. The power curve (or long tail for those of you that don’t like math) is front and center in the analysis.
You should assume that there’s a method to the madness with this type of crawl (rather than just a desire to make a set of pretty graphs and satisfy my need for data.) That’s part of a really interesting thing that you’ll see soon from Lijit.
I love Leland – he totally cracks me up. Nothing like having a rock star on staff at NewsGator that likes a video camera. Knowing Leland, he did this in one take.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpXH1GdfDYU
Not quite the RSS in Plain English video, but much more melodic.
I love Wallstrip – it’s one of the funnest angel investments I’ve ever made. I wake up several times to a week to a five minute video of Lindsay being hysterically amusing about some public company stock that is at an all-time high. Today she takes on the Defense Industry and demonstrates why she is now comfortable with the military industrial complex (not really.) It’s a good contrast to my recent West Wing visit.
If you are new to Wallstrip and looking for a place to start, try Jack in the Box.