We’ve been struggling with the explosion of social networking software and our perception of its usefulness for a while. David Hornik from August Capital has a priceless post on the Churchill Club’s event last night called Blogging and Social Networking: Who Cares?
A brief except of the full post follows:
“Welcome blah blah blah relationship capital blah blah blah social contracts blah blah blah media businesses blah blah blah identify the rabid fans of the iPod blah blah blah utility media blah blah blah this is the future of the web blah blah blah RSS blah blah blah Spam blah blah blah killer app blah blah blah business model blah blah blah advertising model blah blah blah is this a product or a feature blah blah blah a feature doesn’t make a business blah blah blah leveraging relationships blah blah blah decentralized system blah blah blah privacy concerns blah blah blah profiling people blah blah blah social networking is blogging dumbed down for the masses blah blah blah…”
Thanks David – that was a good one.
There’s been an overwhelming amount of “news” in the past year about the growth of India’s technology sector. Much of the focus has been on the significant trend of US companies outsourcing jobs to India – starting with call center and data processing type jobs but accelerating in the past year to higher-end software development, engineering, and design jobs.
As the outsourcing of jobs to India has increased, there’s been the expected political backlash. Since it’s an election year, both Bush and Kerry are taking strong positions on this issue.
Independent of my views on Bush or Kerry, I believe the resistance (or opposition) to outsourcing is a simple case of protectionism. There are endless debates on this, but I’ve always felt that protectionism was a bad idea and violated the simple American concept of “land of the free and the home of the brave” (recognize that line?).
As a venture firm, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this issue. About a third of our software-related companies have some sort of “activity” in India. We’ve concluded that one of the highest leverage issues we will continue to and need to be facile with is the notion of a cross-border US / India company where some of the activity of the business is based in the US and some is based in India. One of our companies – Stratify – recently had a nice article published about it titled Stratify woos Indian BPO market.. Stratify is a US (California) based company, is run by a very smart and accomplished Indian named Ramana Venkata (BS from IIT Chennai, MS from Stanford) and has a mixed US / Indian management team. Stratify has been very effective at developing part of the engineering team in India and is now directly addressing the Indian market (as well as the US market).
This is a hard problem to optimize as the natural reaction of venture firms would be to “hop on the trend”. This is dumb – a deeper, more thoughtful approach is required that is based on both a real understanding of the issues as well as experience. Entrepreneurs like Ramana help us understand this better.
Feedburner implemented an upgrade to their statistics page today. It’s solid progress.
I’ve written about the issue of blog stats in the past. This is an area that both as a blogger and an investor I’m particularly interested in because of my historical involvement (and success) with several analytics companies (I use the phrases analytics, stats, and metrics interchangeably). Fred Wilson and Pamela Parker have also posted recently on the issues of stats and Matt Blumberg, Fred, and I have had several discussions about this in the past few weeks as we try to figure out what our reader adoption looks like.
Feedburner has come up with a new concept called circulation as their core measurement. Their definition of circulation is “an approximate measure of the number of individuals for whom your feed has been requested in the last 24 hours. Circulation is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. Circulation is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed.”
So – rather than struggle with hit counts and trying to correlate to a measurement that doesn’t mean anything, the Feedburner guys have done something that is fundamentally simple and smart. Whether they realized it or not, they’ve used a concept Jerry Colonna coined in the mid 1990’s called “the analog analog”. Whenever Jerry and I talked about a potential investment, one of the first things that he’d ask is “what is the real world, non-digital analogy” (later shortened to “what is the analog analog”). A decade later I still use the concept regularly (ok – I stopped for a few months – er – a year or two – around the turn of the century).
Feedburner’s analog analog is – circulation stats in the publishing industry. In Dick Costolo’s post about Feedburner’s New Detailed Statistics Page he states the analog analog clearly as follows.
“The key is to think of circulation in much the way, well, commercial publishers think of it. It represents the best current approximation of how many people you reached today, via the various agents reporting back to us through feed accesses. This number is particularly interesting as a trend over time.”
Nice job Dick and the Feedburner crew – my stats are more useful today then they were yesterday.
I’m gearing up for my next marathon on my goal of running 50 (one in each state) by the time I’m 50 (I’ve done 4). I’ve decided on the Deseret Morning News Marathon in Salt Lake City on July 24th. While it’ll be a hot day at altitude, the course starts at 7500 ft. and drops to 4500 ft., so with the exception of two stretches (each two miles), it’s – as they say – “all downhill”.
As part of my training, I’ve begun swimming at least twice a week for an hour. I grew up in Dallas and spent the summers at the neighborhood pool, so I thought I knew how to swim. After a couple of hard one hour swims, I realize that I suck at swimming. I get through the water fine, but the 60 year old grandmother swimming in the lane next to me is faster at the freestyle and seems remarkably less winded than I do.
I asked my friend JB for a swimming lesson – JB is a good swimmer and his son is an up and coming champion (according to the proud dad). We met at the Golden Community Center this morning. JB spent an hour with me, teaching me how to swim like a real person (vs. someone who learned in the mid 1970’s and never thought about it again).
As I was driving home, I pondered how much there is to learn. I am a real novice at so many things and it’s a blast to go up the proverbial learning curve. There’s nothing like sore muscles and getting passed in the pool by a six year old to give one (ok – me) humility. I know it’s cliche-ish – but this experience made me smile today.
Fred Wilson and I are cross posting each other today (we must miss each other) – he had a good post this morning on how turn downs work in venture capital and then followed it with a followup post about what makes a great VC.
Fred’s post on telling the truth is right on the money. One of the most infuriating experiences an entrepreneur (or VC) has to get turned down from someone with a “blow off reason” (or no reason at all). Entrepreneurs get this all the time from VCs – but VCs also get it from each other (as potential co-investors when a VC looking at a new deal turns an existing VC’s deal down) or from LPs (when they decide not to invest in a VCs new fund). While it’s unreasonable to expect people to go into excruciating detail about why they are turning you down, I’ve have much more respect for people that will give me a clear, truthful, simple reason they aren’t interested vs. an elusive, twisted, convoluted – or passive and silent – rejection. I’d much rather hear that my baby is ugly (or that I’m ugly) then get blown off.
Fred’s post made me think of two pet peeves that I have – one around rejection and the other around honesty.
Concerning rejection – even worse than a “blow off turn down” is the “slow no”. VCs are the master of this – rather than turning you down, they string you along – never saying yes, but never saying no. My advice to entrepreneurs is to drive to a definitive yes or no and – if it’s a maybe – understand why and what you have to do to move it from either a maybe to a yes or a no. Now – a maybe is ok – as long as it’s supported with both action and elapsed time (e.g. talk to me again in three months). The ambigous or unclear maybe (which is really just a string along because the VC – or whoever is stringing you along) is simply unwilling to make a decision. That’s weak.
Concerning honesty – the title of Fred’s post made me think of the millions of times I’ve heard someone start a statement with “To tell you the truth, …” or “Honestly, …”. When ever I hear this, I want to jump up and down and scream in their face “No – don’t tell me the truth – I want you to fucking lie to me!” Until a month ago I bit my tongue, but I can no longer deal with it so I do jump up and down and scream something comparable. If you are going to tell me the truth, just do it. If you are going to lie to me, do it, tell me you lied, and then delete all my contact info from your universe since I don’t ever want to deal with you ever again.
I’ll end with another one that a friend joked with me about today – “You guys are 360 degrees apart.” Now – wtf does that mean?
Walking to Vermont: From Times Square into the Green Mountains–A Homeward Adventure by Christopher Wren is a fun trip from Manhattan to Vermont along the Appalachian and Long Trails.
Wren – a 65 year old former reporter and editor for The New York Times (he’d been the bureau chief in Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, Ottawa, and Johannesburg) is – as you’d expect – a delightful writer. You feel like you are with him during his five week, 400 mile hike. In addition to the stories of his experiences and the characters he meets on the trail, Wren intersperses flashbacks from his many years as a reporter throughout the story, linking his current experience to the often wild and exotic things he’d seen as a journalist.
If you’ve ever gone for a long hike, fantasize about tossing it all and spending a summer on the Appalachian Trail, or simply enjoy a well written travelogue, you’ll like this book.
Last week I had a meeting with a prospective limited partner (“Mr. X”) who is long time investor in venture capital funds. He’s extremely experienced, well respected, and has a phenomenal track record. He’s also very provocative, which always spices up a meeting like this.
As we were discussing the backgrounds of the various partners at Mobius Venture Capital, I made the statement that we all have had meaningful experience as entrepreneurs and technology executives (VP level or higher) prior to becoming venture capitalists.
X immediately asked me if I had any data to support my view that this was a good thing. He said “take the top 50 individual VCs (based on historical returns) and correlate their experience – what does it show?” I thought for a minute and ran through my head some of the great VCs I know. Before I reached a conclusion, X said “it’s random – totally random – there’s no correlation to performance.”
At first, this surprised me (I was about 50/50 in my quick mental sort when he answered for me). Then – as I thought more about it – I realized that operating experience is merely an attribute that someone has rather than an indicator of performance. Experience by itself (whether operating experience or venture capital experience) is not enough – I’ve certainly worked with some abysmal VCs who have a lot of “venture capital experience” (and I’ve also worked with some abysmal VCs who have plenty of operating experience).
I pushed on what he thought actually correlated with success. He responded that the great VCs he knew had a combination of incredible instincts honed by experience combined with the ability to quickly and accurately size up situations and draw effective conclusions. He labelled this “pattern matching” – which is a good phrase for this capability.
I think the combination is what is critical – neither operating experience or pattern matching alone is enough (e.g. “I’ve seen this before, but I don’t know what to do”).
It’s Sunday evening and I’m sitting at my computer catching up on email from the weekend listening to The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking by Roger Waters. Amy is upstairs watching The Horse Whisperer, which I have no interest in.
I receive an email from john.wiley721@bigblog.com with the subject line [Feld Thoughts] New Comment Posted to ‘What do my blog stats really mean?’. I know this is an email to approve a comment. A little warning light goes off in my mind since this is an old post, but I hit Reply and send back an email that says “Thanks for the comment.” I then go to approve the comment and as I’m doing this, notice that the comment info is as follows:
IP Address: 140.131.117.6
Name: オンラインカジノ
Email Address: john.wiley721@bigblog.com
Comments:
Wonderful work. I enjoyed read your site a lot.
href=”https://casino-jp.com”>オンラインカジノ
While I’m thinking about https://casino-jp.com and why it would be in the post (duh…), my email thank you bounces:
john.wiley721@bigblog.com on 6/13/2004 8:13 PM
You do not have permission to send to this recipient. For assistance, contact your system administrator.
mail.hotbank.com #5.7.1 smtp;550 5.7.1 john.wiley721@bigblog.com… Relaying denied
Then – nine more emails show up in my inbox – same drill – but comments for different posts. The emails are from john.wiley721@bigblog.com, johnhanco@myblog.com, nathanbartrim1939@hotmail.com, and john_hopkins@joeblog.com.
A pattern clearly has emerged.
I delete the emails and go to Movable Type and delete the comments. It’s pretty clear where this is going.
My mom (Cecelia Feld) is an artist. As kids, my brother and I were forbidden from bothering her from 9am to 5pm – time that she spent in her studio (“Mom’s working”). I imagine this has something to do with my love (and collection of) contemporary art.
Cecelia is having a new show at the Dairy Center for the Arts in Boulder, Colorado. The show is called Out of Context and deals with the familiar seen in a different light. A partially obscured, rusted sign on an old chain link gate seems familiar, and yet, not. Cecelia Feld explains, “We recognize and identify objects in certain contexts. When a familiar object is seen close up so that only part of it shows or a detail from one object is juxtaposed . . .it takes on a new meaning.”
The show opens on Friday June 18th from 5pm to 7pm. If you are in Boulder, come join me, my brother Daniel, our families, and a hundred of our closest friends in celebrating the opening (yes, we’re proud of our mom).