Pet Peeves

A few years ago, I realized that I had run out of namespace in my brain and the only way I could learn a new name was to forget one that I already knew. This notion annoyed me for a little while, then amused me, and then became my reality. I’ve always been bad at names + faces, but I have a savant like ability to remember stuff that I’ve read, especially numbers. I’m a visual learner, not an auditory learner. Not only can I read much faster, I retain so much more. So it’s not that surprising to me that when someone comes up to me it’s hard for me to associate their name with a face. ...

I first heard the word “grinfucker ” a decade or so ago from a close friend who was a former investment banker. He said, in response to a meeting we were in with a person who was very polite and charming “he’s such a grinfucker.” I loved the word and, as I found out later, it described the person perfectly. I had an encounter with someone on Friday that made me think to myself “that person is a grinfucker” and I vaguely remembered a post on the web from someone about grinfuckers. A quick Google search generated a post from Mark Suster titled Don’t be a Grin Fucker . It’s excellent – go read it – this blog post will wait patiently for you to come back. ...

Following is something that happens to me on a regular basis, with a new and exciting twist. I’m telling this story both to vent (maybe I’m grumpy today – I don’t know) as well as for an object lesson on how not to interact with a VC, or at least with me. First – the normal part. I’ve had an email exchange with an entrepreneur over the past week. We’ve never met, but he started the email thread by asking if I’d be interested in getting together about his company because he’s looking for financing and he’s sure I’ll be interested. I asked for a short description of what he’s doing. He sent me another email telling me all the friends we have in common who will vouch for him. I responded by asking what he was working on. He gave me a vague description and told me I’d love it. I didn’t really understand it, but it didn’t fit in any of our themes and I told him so. He said he’d looked at the themes and thought I’d be really excited about what his doing. I again asked him to be more specific in case I was missing something. ...

It’s that time of year again. Everyone that publishes content and is looking for link bait is publishing a top 10 list of 2011. I’m getting asked daily to contribute – I finally decided to create a blog post so I could simply refer to it instead of saying “sorry – I hate top 10 lists, count me out.” 10. They are boring as shit. 9. Extraordinary selection bias prevails. ...

Let’s put this in the category of “pet peeves” around things that are obsolete. One of my goals as a VC is to help create companies that cause obsolescence of existing products, companies, and industries. As a result I think about what’s becoming obsolete all the time. I don’t just think about this in the specific areas that we invest in, but in all aspects of my life. I find that this frame of reference – namely “will we be doing X in 20 years” is a fundamental part of my approach to what I do. ...

Put this in the pet peeve rant category. I’m tired of “Revenue” being referred to as “Income.” Yes – I know Quickbooks defaults to “Income.” I know it’s technically correct when referring to “Income accounts” in a company’s “Chart of Accounts.” But it’s confusing, and it baffles me. I spent a few minutes tonight trying to figure out the origin source of this but got bored. I did find a fun explanation in the source of all truth (Wikipedia). ...

Recently I’ve been on the receiving end of a bunch of due diligence calls. Some of them are for companies I’m involved in, some are for entrepreneurs I’ve worked with in the past, and some are for other VCs I’ve worked with who are raising new funds. I view these differently than reference calls (I won’t do reference calls for anyone) – these are not about “employment”, they are about investment and a long term working relationship. ...

In the last month I’ve had the chance to make about 50 new friends. I’ve suddenly become very popular with investment bankers and have been on the receiving end of over 50 emails that look something like the following: “We met once a long time ago when I was with firm X. I’m now at firm Y. We are the blah blah blah best at blah blah most successful blah blah tied into blah blah working with blah blah blah connected with blah blah blah. Congrats on all the success at Company W. We are very interested in talking to them about blah blah strategic blah blah – can you introduce us to high-profile-CEO.” ...

Suddenly the VC/entrepreneur meme for Q1-2011 is “The Quora for X.” Here are two examples from the past few days: Google Ventures Leads $600K Investment In LawPivot, A Quora For Startup Legal Advice Hipster Is Quora Plus Location – Or Q&A For Where You Are Lest you think this is a TechCrunch phenomenon, I’ve received a half dozen emails in the last week pitching companies as “Quora for X” or some derivative of this (often “The Quora for X”). Of course, Joshua Schachter very cleverly suggested last night via Twitter that we create the “Quora for XXX “. Given the presence of PornoTube and YouPorn in our universe, I expect some clever porn purveyor will quickly figure this one out. ...

I nominate “platform” for overused tech word of 2010. Yeah, I whined about this a few months ago in my post Your Platform Is Not In My Space . I hear the word “platform” in over 50% of the short pitches I get. A friend of mine who is working on a new startup that isn’t even funded yet (and he’s grinding on the financing) described his goal of “creating a platform for a-phrase-that-only-73-early-adopters-will-userstand.) Entrepreneurs everywhere describe the first release of their MVP (“minimum viable product” – for those of you that haven’t intersected with the Lean Startup movement) app as a “platform”. The first three pages of a google search on “platform” are 33% tech, 33% politics, and 34% other. At least Google image search is more accurate, for example: ...