Posts from June 2004

I’ve been thinking and talking about this age-old technology issue lately.

Last week, Jeff Jarvis wrote his post on A Place For My Stuff. I emailed Jeff the following:

The big problem with a web-based place for my stuff is that I can’t get to it on an airplane, many hotel rooms, etc.

Until we truly have IP everywhere, the web-based place for my stuff has some problems.

Instead of sending Jeff a private email, Ed Sim did what bloggers are supposed to do and blogged Jeff’s post, not once, but twice.

Then I was meeting with my friend Rob Reid yesterday. Rob started Listen.com which developed the Rhapsody music service. Rob’s at Real now and continues to work on making Rhapsody a great service. I told Rob that I’ve become addicted to Rhapsody for finding music and trying things out. But eventually, I want to buy music and “own” it; store it on my laptop, music server, iPod, and burn it. Rhapsody stinks at that and Rob knows it as well as anyone. iTunes does that brilliantly. So Rhapsody is the server in the sky and iTunes is the best client for music i’ve seen. For now, I still need to use both.

Last night, I was hanging out with my brothers and a couple friends. We got talking about the powerbook in my kitchen that has a screensaver on it that rotates through the entire iPhoto library. It turns the powerbook into a picture frame. And people can’t keep their eyes off of it.

One of my friends said that his wife prefers to keep their photos on the web. That’s cool and I do that too. But its not so easy to turn your powerbook into a screen saver that way.

My point in this rambling post is that the client has a lot to offer that the server just can’t replicate right now. In time, it may. But not anytime soon in my book.

The best collaboration in the music business this year comes from Loretta Lynn and Jack White.

The album is called Van Lear Rose.

The songs are all great, but my favorite is The Story Of My Life.

Fatherhood is a role that is easy to get cast in but incredibly difficult to nail. I’ve been working on it for 13 years and I haven’t gotten it right yet. I miss my cutes, screw up my lines, and occasionally don’t even make it to the show because of work or some other conflict.

But short of my role as husband to Gotham Gal (whom I married 17 years ago tonight), its the best role I’ve ever played.

Jessica is the star of the show, Miss Popular.

Emily is more complicated, but so very worth the effort. And a middle child like me.

And Josh is pure energy. I’ll miss him terribly this summer.

Jim Cramer has a great piece in this week’s NY Magazine which says it all about traditional media vs. new media.

OM Malik posted a piece that is incredibly bearish for the incumbent telecom providers. His thesis is the ubiquity of IP is putting the telecom industry in a death spiral. My experience suggests he is right.

As a friend of mine said recently, “The telcos are more screwed than the record labels.”

No, this is not a review of My Life. I don’t yet have the book and given its size, it will take me a while to read it.

My friend Tommy told me today that he went to the premiere of The Hunting of The President and was surprised to find out that Bill Clinton was in the audience watching it at the same time as he was. At the end, as Tommy described it, Bill got up and gave an amazing history lesson on presidents and politics since the time of George Washington.

I know that there’s a lot of people out there who hate Bill Clinton. I am not one of them. In fact, I love the guy. I wish I had been there. Apparently, Jeff Jarvis was.

Brad has a great post describing the debunking of his theory that it’s operating experience that makes for a great VC. Brad is a great VC, but its not exclusively because of his operating experience.

I like the pattern matching concept Brad’s limited partner talked about. I agree that being able to recognize patterns is a very key skill.

But in my opinion its a combination of experience, passion, honesty, integrity, leadership, and smarts that makes a great VC. These are pretty much the same things that it takes to make a great business person in any industry.

On the flight out to LA, I sat next to a woman who was very talkative. She was single and was doing a fair amount of online dating. She asked me for some advice about how to call it off with one of her dates. She wanted to tell him she was seeing someone seriously, which wasn’t true. She felt that would end it the easiest. I suggested to her that maybe she just ought to tell the guy the truth, whatever it might be. She wasn’t sure about that approach.

Why do I mention this? Because it inspired me to think about the way turn-downs work in my business. We raise money and we invest money. In the first activity, we are the ones who get turned down. In the latter, we are the ones who do the turning down.

I have to do turn downs all the time, sometimes as much as one a day. Telling anyone that you don’t want to do what they want you to do isn’t easy. When I was younger, just like the woman on the plane, I tended to say whatever got me off the phone the quickest. But I soon realized how counter productive that was.

Entrepreneurs have long memories and while they never appreciate being turned down, they also appreciate the VC that actually takes the time to spell out exactly what the issues that caused the turn down. I believe that you must think about every action you do in the context of a long career. If you take that approach, then taking the time to give constructive feedback nicely and engaging in a dialog instead of just delivering a message is the best approach.

I remember one particularly painful turndown from about eight years ago. We had looked very hard at a company in the Internet market and liked the plan and the opportunity but we got consistent feedback that the CEO was going to be very difficult to work with. We decided to pass on the opportunity. When the CEO called me, I said that we had decided to pass. The next question, of course, was why? I said that we had a number of concerns about the opportunity that we just couldn’t get over. A nice but totally uninformative statement. That wouldn’t work for the CEO. So, after beating about the bush for about five minutes, I decided to tell the truth. I said that we felt it was going to be difficult working with her. That didn’t go down very well. But it was the truth.

Tom Watson turned me on to our friend Jason Chervokas’ online creation of a novel called Electricity.

I read the first six chapters on the flight out to LA and the sixth and most recent one online just now.

This is a very cool way to publish a novel – chapter by chapter in a blog format. I’ve just subscribed to Electricity via RSS and look forwarding to reading it as it gets created.