Posts from November 2006

Dan Primack of PE Hub is trying to help first year MBAs get summer internships.

If you are a venture firm or private equity firm and are looking to hire one or more interns this summer, check out this post and Dan will tell you how to get involved.

I don’t like to comment on other VC firm’s deals and I am not going to comment on this one either.

But as a long time BitTorrent user, I found this analysis spot on.

I’ve been working, slowly but steadily, on a series of posts on the Union Square Ventures website on how we invest (to compliment Brad’s posts this summer on what we invest in).

My latest post is about geography and how it impacts what we invest in (and my returns).

Here are the other posts I’ve done on how we invest:

Intro

Early Stage Investing

Traction

Lead Investor

Deal Size

Cool Wallstrip show today. First they talk about the risks and rewards of investing in component suppliers. Flatiron was a venture investor in Portal Player and fortunately got out before the stock blew up so I know all about that one.

But even better, they went down to see Peter Rojas and got his take on the new Apple iTV and more. Great stuff.

The Shake Shack closes today for the winter. In honor of the closing, I am taking down my ShackCam widget (it wasn’t fitting in the right sidebar anyway with my thinner look). But I’ll run it in this post so everyone can check out the line before getting their last shack burger of the year today.

I never fail to marvel at the power of blogs in the SEO equation. I was looking at my google analytics screen tonight. And I noticed that I was getting a bunch of traffic off the keywords "sacha baron cohen" and "Sacha Baron Cohen". So naturally, I went and typed that into Google. Here are the top seven links.

IMDB, Wikipedia, Bullzeye, Yahoo!, Answers.com, Rolling Stone, and me.

Go figure.

We’ve always thought that authenticity was a key attribute of a successful web service. We define authenticity as that intangible feeling you get when you come across a service that does exactly what it is supposed to do, is novel, true to itself, etc. Digg, Delicious, Flickr, and Craigslist are all authentic services and have remained so.

Last night I wondered whether you can fake authenticity. I think not, but certainly many have tried. What do you think?

Since I had to take my last song of the day down, here’s another.

A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger – Of Montreal

This one sneaks up on you. Give it some time.

From Matt Richtel’s story about YouTube’s deal with Verizon:

YouTube’s phone-based version
will require a $15-a-month subscription to a Verizon Wireless service
called VCast.

and

And instead of choosing what to watch from a vast library
of clips, VCast users will be limited to an unspecified number of
videos selected and approved by the companies.

and

Verizon
would have the exclusive rights to distribute YouTube videos on mobile
phones “for a limited period of time.”

and

YouTube said
its editors would select short videos from its library for the Verizon
Wireless service. Verizon Wireless said it would vet the videos to make
sure they met the company’s editorial and taste guidelines.

and

“We’ll select content that has the broadest appeal and the highest entertainment value,” Ms. Liang said.

This deal violates the entire ethos of YouTube, not free, not open, exclusive, no community, limited, censorship, etc, etc.

Why tarnish the YouTube brand with a deal like this? 

I know that you can’t put the entire YouTube service on a mobile phone (yet, flash lite enabled mobile browsers should fix that).

But this just is sooo lame.