Posts from October 2003

I’ve been wondering for the past year if blogging can become a mass phenomenom or just something for those of us who’ve made the net such a central part of our lives.

Well, my experiment in this regard is a couple weeks old (in my case) and a couple days old (in the case of my wife).

And i’ve got to tell you that its more of a mass pheneomenon than i would have guessed. My wife’s friends are reading her site every day. But more impressive is the fact that some guy in UK today responded to my wife’s post of her grandmother’s noodle kugel recipe with a question about exactly how you whisk the eggs.

That blows me away. My wife’s grandmother, who passed away last year, made an amazing noodle kugel on yom kippur every year. Now someone in the UK will be sharing that same dish with his family. I love that.

There’s an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Venture Firms in ‘Protect’ Mode“. I apologize for linking to a paid site, but if you are interested, the article is worth reading, and you might want to pay the $39/year and have access to wsj.com.

Anyway, enough with the advertisement for wsj.com, this article features a bunch of leading VCs and VC lawyers arguing that they can no longer provide their investors (called limited partners or LPs) with all the information they have provided in the past because public pension funds and public universities are being forced to disclose all this data as public information.

Many leading VCs are even disinviting public funds from their next funds and requiring very strict confidentiality agreements as part of the partnership documents. The WSJ article implies that Sequoia, one fo the top VC firms for the past 20 years, has actually requested that public funds divest their interests in their current partnerships.

I am not sure what the big deal is. Sure it would be embarassing for my supposedly confidential comments about an underperforming investment to get posted in some kind of public forum, but I am sure that there are easy solutions to those problems. Any material that is truly confidential and should remain so could be posted in a password protected web site that the LPs would have access to but would not technically be the property of the LPs and thus subject to public disclosure requirements.

But I believe this issue is not really about that. It’s about performance (or lack thereof) and the VCs desire to avoid being subject to quarterly performance pressures that public investors have lived with for years.

I think transparency is good when it comes to financial markets and I do not believe that venture capital is really different in that regard. Venture fund’s quarterly performance should be available just like the performance of any other asset class. And there should be real indexes of funds based on vintage years (the years they were formed) that are published alongside this data. This comparative data is key because venture funds lose money in the early years as the bad investments are written off. It isn’t until the later years when the good investments pay off that the performance is delivered. So reporting quarterly performance without a high quality vintage year index is a bad idea. But publishing it alongside high quality comparative data is a good idea and something the industry should want, not run from.

I think being in ‘protect’ mode is giving the venture industry a black eye. It’s like we have something to hide. We don’t. Our industry has produced the best returns over a long period of time than any other popular asset class. And it will continue to do so. So let’s invite transparency and learn how to live with it.

Wired.com has a great piece up this morning comparing Craigslist and Tribe.net.

Of everything going on in the social software market, I think this may be the most interesting battle to watch. While Friendster vs. Match.com may be more interesting in the short run, Personals has never been as big a business as For Sale and Jobs.

One thing is for sure, the newspapers are going to be the losers in this battle unless they get busy and start buying up these services.

The New York Times wrote today that Michael Wolff author of of Burnate and the weekly media columnist in New York Magazine was behind a bid to buy that magazine, backed by Donny Deutsch.

I, for one, would love to see that happen. And, I think they should recruit the other excellent columnist for New York Magaizine, Jim Cramer, to join him in his bid. Michael and Jim were early pioneers on the Internet. Jim made it, Michael didn’t. It doesn’t matter. They saw the power of the Internet almost 10 years ago and realize what many media moguls still don’t know, that the Internet has and will continue to change the face of media.

What better platform to use to showcase the power of the Internet than New York Magazine? They’ve already started to move in the right direction with the launch of The Kicker. The city is full of great weblogs like Gawker, Gothamist, Megnut, 601am, my wife’s Gotham Gals, and many more. With great Internet savvy media minds behind New York, they could eliminate at least 50% of the editorial organization and rely on all this great user generated content instead. And then they’d have a true New York Magazine, instead of one created in the minds of some editor in some skyscraper somewhere.

The New York Times today pointed to a story on Wired.com that ran last week that somehow I missed.

Wesley Clark thinks we’ll be able to travel at speeds in excess of the speed of light. That’s pretty provocative stuff.

Daniel Akst wrote a great column on this subject today in the Business Section of the NY Times, titled “Where Nobody Knows You’re a Music Thief”.

My favorite quote – “The absurd Robin Hood narrative that has sprung up around music sharing only obscures what is happening: that a large group of mainly middle-class individuals are not just breaking the law, but also attacking the legal concept that is essential to freedom and prosperity in the information age.”

Her name is Joanne.

We’ve known each other since we were 20 years old. That was 22 years ago.

She turned 42 today. Happy birthday Jo.

And she started a blog today too.

it’s called Gotham Gal

Check it out. It’s pretty cool.

We’ve all done it. Because its so great. You hear a song or you hear of a song. You log onto a file sharing network and download the song. You listen to it on your computer, you burn it onto a CD, and you put it into your MP3 player. This is the best way to acquire and listen to music that has ever been invented.

I first did this in 1998. I’ve used Napster. I’ve used Morpheus, Kazaa, Limewire, and countless other file sharing networks. I had one of the first Rio players. I’ve played MP3s on PDAs and cell phones. And I love the iPod. If this sounds like a confession, it is.

Because stealing is wrong. And it has to stop. And I think it will.

I’ve had file sharing software on all the computers in my house for years. My kids used them. I used them. But the day that Apple came out with the iTunes music service, I removed all the software from all the computers in our house. I gave my kids a monthly allowance on the iTunes service and taught them how to use it (which took about a nanosecond because its so intuitive). We’ve been legal ever since.

I read earlier this week in Frank Barnako’s Internet Daily that the use of file sharing networks is down 41% since the RIAA starting suing people several months ago. That’s a good thing contrary to most people’s opinion. Stealing is wrong and the music industry had to come up with a good PR initiative to make that point loud and clear. I think they’ve finally found that PR initiative in these lawsuits. They aren’t looking to crush anyone. In fact, most of the initial lawsuits have already been settled.

But playing hardball isn’t enough. Because most of us aren’t stealing because we don’t want to buy music legally. We are stealing because downloading is the best way to acquire and listen to music that has ever been invented.

So the music industry had better hurry up and get their entire library online. Do it now. Because they’ve got a window of opportunity to close the deal with consumers. But it won’t last forever. And if they blow it now, then consumers will realize that they don’t ever have any intention of giving us music the way we want it.

And then I will go back to Kazaa, Morpheus, Limewire, and the rest. And I won’t come back next time.

If you could combine Keith Richards and Patsy Cline and throw in a little Koko Taykor, you’d get Lucinda Williams. But just like these great artists, Lucinda is an original.

I’ve loved her music since discovering her when she released the great Car Wheels On A Gravel Road in 1998. For the past five years, I’ve kept coming back to her timeless music.

But I had never seen her perform live. Until last night. She’s doing a two day stay at the Beacon Theater here in NYC. I went last night with my wife and some friends.

And I was blown away by this gutsy humble woman who belts out her songs and just tells it like it she sees it. The words are raw and powerful. Sometimes the songs are gentle and beautiful. Sometimes she puts on the electric guitar and rocks out. Either way, she’s great.

If you love rock, country, and the blues, my bet is you’ll love Lucinda too.

My Favorite Lucinda Williams Albums:
Car Wheels On A Gravel Road
Essence
World Without Tears