Posts from November 2004

How do you respond to an email from a frustrated entreprenuer like this one?

From my experience in today’s climate:

• Unless your best friend in the world — whom you happen to have embarrassing pictures of — is a VC partner, please do not contact any VC. It makes no sense.
• Passion, experience, real-world results are not qualifiers for introduction to VCs. An MBA from some elite school with 20 board members who know Jack Welch personally, with an extremely complicated idea that has never been built, are preferred.

Jerry Colonna takes that on in his most recent Inc column and does a great job.  If you are a frustrated entrepreneur, go read this.

First, I want to thank everyone for the outpouring of recommendations in response to my Top 50 Albums post.  Please keep them coming.

Nothing yet from Tony Alva, other than his threat to stop reading this blog if I left out Exile on Main Street.  I did not, he has to keep reading, and I expect a longer comment than that from him.

Now for some explanations, prompted mostly from the comments.

This is my 50 favorite albums.  It’s not the 50 greatest albums and its not the 50 most popular albums.  It is a living list in that it can change at any time and it doesn’t have to have 50 on it.  And I am going to take my time building it.

It is limited to the album/CD format and honestly its also limited to "popular music".  As much as I enjoy classical and opera when others play it, I don’t listen to that music enough to put any of it on my favorites list.

It may include comedy and spoken word.  I hadn’t thought to include that, but now I might.

I hope that clears things up for those of you who were wondering.  Please keep coming with your recommendations.  I’ve got a lot of music to listen to now and that’s a good thing.

I talked this morning in my broadcatching post about my efforts to download Wilco’s cover of Blue Oyster Cult’s Don’t Fear The Reaper.

I finished downloading, converting, and listening to it.

And now I am going to make it my MP3 of the week.

Back in June, I blogged that this RSS+Bittorrent stuff, which I call broadcatching, was too complicated.

This morning I’ve got a great example of both the power and the complexity of it.

I subscribe to an RSS feed called Wilco Base Set List.  They publish a list of the songs in every live Wilco show.   It makes for interesting reading but occasionally a lot more.

This morning I was going through my feeds and saw that Wlco played Blue Oyster Cult’s Don’t Fear The Reaper as its final encore song at the Fillmore show in San Francisco last week.

Well I just had to get that.

So I went to bt.etree.org and looked for the show.  I found it and downloaded the torrent into Azureus and I am downloading the show now.

But that’s not the end of it.  The show is in FLAC format so I’ve got to convert it to MP3, then put into into iTunes and synch to my iPod.

That’s quite a few steps that I’d love someone to simplify for me.  But it’s also a big opportunity as well.  If anyone can integrate this experience from RSS through the iPod, then they’ve got a homerun on their hands.

I heard about something the other day that I’d like to see.

It was Skype running on a Nokia handset connected to a wifi network.

When the mobile carrier becomes an option for a wireless phone call instead of the only choice, then we’ll have some interesting opportunities in wireless.

Thanks to Brad Feld for pointing out Adam Bosworth’s excellent talk at the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing.

Adam points out the virtues of keeping web services simple and sloppy.  He points out that almost every attempt to create something with a lot of elegance, function, and structure has failed, and the simple things like HTML, RSS, XML, Google, etc have worked wonderfully on the Internet.

This is something we feel strongly about in our investments.  We’d much rather see entrepreneurs build something quickly, get it out there, and let the customers bang on it and evolve it.  The entrepreneurs who insist on over engineering their solutions inevitably end up with nothing to show for it.

Riding around Brooklyn is becoming my regular Sunday morning bike ride.  It was a rainy and cold morning so I let my friends and family sleep in and I went solo.  And I had an assignment from my mom, which I’ll get to in a minute.

I rode up Park Slope and did the loop around Prospect Park.

The thing that amazes me about Brooklyn is that it feels like a city all to itself.  It’s got its own dowtown which I ride through on the way to Prospect Park.  And its got its own cultural institutions. 

Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza feels like something out of a major european city.

And they sure don’t make libraries like this anymore.

After I did the loop, I went into Park Slope and checked out a couple of old townhouses that my mom’s family had built back in the 1880s.

Then I headed back home.  The entire ride was about 15 miles.  It’s a little shorter than my usual Sunday morning ride to the GW Bridge and back, but if I do another loop in Prospect Park it would be about the same.

The Gotham Gal looked at my list and told me that I’d left out Nirvana’s brilliant Nevermind. 

She’s right and so it goes onto the list at my 11th choice.

I’ve seen a number of lists appearing in the blogworld.

Jackson has a nice post on the best live albums although it displays his constant disrepect for anything recorded post the mid 80s.

I have always like music lists.  This is the time of the year that the top albums of the year lists come out and I regularly find gems that I somehow missed.

But I also recognize that its hard to sit down and compile a list of top records without missing something important.

And I like the idea of dynamic lists that can change over time, like my In Heavy Rotation List.

So with that prelude, I am launching a new feature to this blog, called Top 50 All Time Albums.  It’s a TypePad list, a feature that I really dig.

And it will not have 50 records on it for quite a while.  It could take as long as a year to build this list.  And I want recommendations.  I’ll only take them if I agree with them, but I am sure we share a few favorites among us.

And I will change albums out over time as they no longer make my top 50.

The list is at the lower end of the left column.  I hope you enjoy it.