I blogged this idea about three weeks ago. Since then we’ve had the shares that were issued incorrectly and now this.
This is not the way to do an IPO. You’d think they’d be on top of this stuff. But they aren’t. Scary.
Brad beat me to it. I wanted to blog all the VC cliches I’ve heard, uttered, made up, stolen, loved, and hated over the years. I may still do it. But until then, go read Brad’s list.
I teach a class at NYU’s Stern School of Business every semester for my friend Dick Miller. The class is all about why you shouldn’t raise venture capital. I know that its a crazy idea. Why have a VC teach a class that educates the students on the issues with venture capital and how to grow a business without it? Because it gets their attention. It’s a great class and we always have so much fun with it.
Well, Jerry wrote a column for Inc this week on the same subject. And as usual, he does a great job with it. I’ll have to steal some lines from this one for my class.
For those of you who know Jerry Colonna, the idea that he would ever wear a Red Sox hat is truly ridiculous. Well it happened and at all places, Fenway Park!. Go check it out.
I am not a voracious reader like The Gotham Gal and my friends Jerry and Brad.
I read primarily on airplanes, trains, and at my beach house. This summer I’ve read three books, all of which I’ve enjoyed. The best was The Accidental Connoisseur, a book about wine and travelling that I loved. I just got a mixed case of wine made up of the highlights from that book and we are going to drink it over the next month. I’ll let you know if any of it is as great as it sounded in the book.
The other two books were at the suggestion of Brad. Bringing Down the House and Ugly Americans, both by Ben Mezrich. Both are easy and fun reads. Perfect for the summer.
Now back to The Gotham Gal. She reads like nobody I know. Today she blogged her summer reading list. It’s great. I wish I could read all that stuff in two months. If you like to read, go take a look.
We went to see Lucinda Williams again last night at Summerstage.
Wow. What a woman. And such great songs.
We all hate spyware. It’s on my Internet Axis of Evil list.
So I was pleased to hear that congress is going to issue some laws that will address this issue.
We got a hold of the bills and read them. It is Can-Spam all over again. These well intentioned legislators don’t understand our industry well enough to regulate it. They want to take cookies off our machines so publishers have no way to target online advertising. That’s not a good thing. So I did the same thing I did with Can-Spam.
I went to see My Senator.
Can Spam was a more difficult situation because Chuck had already staked out a position and, unfortunately, it was not the right one. We had a lot of work to do to get him to move to a better position.
This time around, spyware was just getting his attention. We explained that there are good guys and bad guys in the online ad business and the bad guys are ruining it for the good guys by pissing off consumers. We explained that cookies have been an instrumental part of online advertising for years and that they are not bad. We explained that the industry has been developing some rules about what is “good” and what is “bad” behavior and that congress should work closely with the industry in developing these bills.
Chuck listened. And he put us in touch with the right people in Washington. So we are going to help the congress get this one right, like they did in the end with Can Spam.
Phew.
The Gotham Gal and I went to see Modest Mouse at the Hammerstein Ballroom last night.
We went because we love the new album, Good News For People Who Love Bad News.
As with many shows we see, this was eye opening.
This band rocks hard in sort of punk/grunge way, but they do it with some very different instruments. There’s a cello up front and lead singer Isaac Brock plays a banjo a fair amount.
Isaac Brock is a piece of work. He sings on Bukowski, “God who’d wanna be such an asshole?” Which seems funny to me, because he sure seems like one up on stage.
There were a bunch of great songs that I’ve never heard. I’ll have to find the set list or even better, go back and get all the old albums.
I was riding up the west side highway this morning on my normal morining ride up the the GW bridge and I passed the west 34th Street heliport. Usually there’s not much going on, a few businessmen coming or going.
But today was different. There were cops all around. TV camera crews. Lot’s of security. I assumed some big shot was coming or leaving NYC.
Wrong. I got back and read the front page of the NY Times today. I guess we’ve got a code organge now on helicopters too.
Back in 1999, we started an initiative at Flatiron called “Pervasive Computing”. We wanted to invest $50mm into companies that were taking advantage of the mobile Internet.
It was not one of our most successful efforts. We were too early for one. We made some bad bets for two. And the market blew up a year later which sealed its fate.
Only a couple of those bets made it to today. They are Portal Player and Vindigo.
Vindigo is really a story about survival. When we invested in April of 2000, they had a market leading location-based application for the Palm. Everyone used it. It was on the strength of that application that we invested. But the Vindigo application never produced a lot of revenue, even after it went subscription a year later.
But the management team didn’t quit. They moved into applications for mobile phones. They made a big bet that paid off on the Brew platorm. They build a business in the mobile Internet market. And they survived when most of their competitors failed.
Last week we announced that Vindigo was sold to a Japanese wireless company called For-Side for a very nice amount of money. Rafat Ali has a nice post on the story.
It wasn’t a home run deal for us, but it was a very good one. And the best thing of all is that the entrepreneur and the management team made money on the deal. Considering what they went through to keep the company alive in 2001 and 2002, that’s a great outcome.
Congratulations to the Vindigo team.
