November 2009
19 posts
2 tags
Email Holiday Cards?
Susan and I are pondering whether to continue the tradition of a family picture as a physical holiday card (ordered from Shutterfly) or sending emails instead. On one hand, emailed pictures seem kind of cheap. Regular email is what we all use for work every day and so has a very utilitarian connotation. Sending one is free, which in and of itself signals cheap. And it is somewhat difficult to...
1 tag
Happy Thanksgiving!
Thanksgiving is by far my favorite holiday (isn’t it everybody’s?). We tend to have at least one if not two big family meals and there is nothing quite like leftover turkey sandwiches. But more importantly, it is a hugely important reminder that I have so much to be thankful for: my wonderful family, working with great partners and passionate teams, being able to do what I love,...
The True Meaning of MSFT-NEWS (Cont'd)
Yesterday I wrote that a potential MSFT-NEWS deal is all about GOOG’s splitting of the profit pie (sorry - no links - writing on BB). As I have been thinking more about this, the most striking thing to me is how many people seem to dismiss any claim to a payment by content owners out of hand with statements such as “they should be glad that Google is sending traffic their way.”...
7 tags
The True Meaning of MSFT-NEWS
There are a lot of posts worth reading about the potential impact or lack thereof of a possible deal between Microsoft and News Corp (and maybe other news sources as well), including Danny Sullivan, Jeff Jarvis, Andrew Parker and others. But one thing that I have missed from everything I have read (and it may well be that it’s there and I missed it) is what this is truly all about: the...
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New York City Is Rocking For Startups!
Here is just a small sampling of all the awesome events that took place in NY City this week (I realize I should have posted this at the beginning of the week). Just to name a few, there was Web 2.0 Expo, the net neutrality debate on Tuesday night and New York Entrepreneur Week. There was also the UK digital mission to New York and I am sure many others that I am forgetting or did not know...
5 tags
The Open Web is Under Attack: What To Do (Part 2)
Following up to yesterday’s post, here is what I think folks should do about the threat of platform lock-in at the application/content layer. First, recognize that this is directly related to net neutrality. The ability of existing platforms and content owners to try to force the web back into walled gardens is limited by the ability of entrepreneurs to start open competitors and reach...
4 tags
The Open Web is Under Attack: What To Do (Part 1)
Yesterday, I wrote about why the open web is under attack. Today, as promised, the follow up on what to do about it. I believe the single most important thing is to let Congress know that people actually care about this. Big companies are spending a lot of money lobbying, but good old fashioned calling and faxing (yes, faxing, at least so I am being told by folks from DC) can make a difference....
5 tags
The Open Web is Under Attack
Yesterday, Tim O’Reilly published a provocatively titled post: “The War for the Web.“ In it he discusses the dangers to the web as an open platform from the attempts by the biggest players to own more and more of the user experience:
We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an...
4 tags
Content Capital
Had a great discussion at dinner last night about the future of publishing and the role of authors and agents. My believe is that agents have to start providing content capital. The idea behind content capital is pretty much the same as that behind venture capital. Content capital puts up the money, the author creates the work(s) and all proceeds are shared. These would be what the music world...
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Hiring: Lack of Diversity Becomes Self-Reinforcing
The first startup I was involved with was a management consulting company in Germany. I had been out of college for less than a year when I joined four much more experienced guys in forming Bossard Consultants Germany (some initial funding was provided by Bossard France, a well established consulting firm there). We got off to a great start, landing some premier clients such as Lufthansa and...
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Will Apple's History Repeat?
As a teenager, I was a die-hard Apple fanboy. The boy part is obvious. The fan part was the result of having and hacking an Apple II. Naturally, I was hugely excited about the arrival of first the Lisa (remember those?) and then the Macintosh. While I enjoyed programming the Macintosh — all the way through college — I was frustrated with its unfriendliness towards hackers. My...
Achieving Excess Returns
One of the persistent questions for anyone investing money (whether in the public or private markets) is how to achieve excess returns. I have been thinking about this quite a bit over the last weeks as we have prepared for our annual meeting with the Limited Partners in Union Square Ventures and as I have talked to a close friend who is managing a large trust. I believe that out-performance comes...
Welcoming Founders Collective
Yesterday, Chris Dixon announced on his blog (http://cdixon.org) the formation of Founders Collective, a $40 million seed stage fund. I have known about Founders Collective for some time and am excited about the launch. I have written on several previous occasions that there is never enough seed capital available, so it is great that they are targeting this need. Even better though is that the...
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Launching a New Site for Union Square Ventures
This morning we have launched the new web site for Union Square Ventures at usv.com.
We are very excited about all the dynamic elements on the site. For instance, if you visit the page for a portfolio company such as foursquare, you will see recent blog posts, tweets, photos and videos about the company. The same is true for the team pages. Here is my page as an example.
The dynamic content...
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Don't Let the Funky Math of Convertibles Bite You
Convertible notes tend to be a great way to raise money from angels. They are easy to paper and don’t lock in a valuation or terms. But they will impact the valuation of the financing that they convert into and in a way that’s a bit funky. The math of an investment when there is no converting debt is simple. For the company as a whole it goes: Pre money valuation + total amount...
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Network Effects And Scale Economies (aka Spolsky...
David Heinemeier at 37signals published a post titled “Bug tracking isn’t a network-effect business” in response to a piece by Joel Spolsky in Inc. asking “Does Slow Growth Equal Death?” Heinemeier’s post is a possibly intentional misreading of Spolky’s so as to make it seem more controversial than it might otherwise be, with sentences like “I...
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ad:tech Panel On State of Digital Economy
I will be participating in an ad:tech panel this afternoon with the title “Digital Economy 2010: A Robust Recovery or Another Year of Trench Warfare?” I have to admit that I am not entirely sure what that means, but in a prep call with moderator Mark Mahaney we came up with some fun questions. The one that is most interesting is whether we may be facing a long-term decline in the...
Unemployment and Structural Change
It is likely that the unemployment rate is going to hit 10 percent when the next monthly report comes out on Friday. That is 1 in 10 people without a job (in fact it is worse because the official statistics significantly undercount). Now we have had some growth in the economy last quarter, but a non-trivial portion of that was attributable to increased military spending and the cash-for-clunkers...
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Programmer-Archeologists Needed
I love Vernor Vinge’s concept of a “programmer-archeologist” (A Deepness In the Sky, he also coined “programmer-at-arms”) as someone who digs through the layers of existing systems to understand why and how stuff works. I was reminded of this over the weekend, as I worked through some old code of my own and that from a bunch of other developers on DailyLit.
My...