Posts from February 2005

I’ve been reading lots of good stuff about Google Maps so I figured it was time to try them instead of my favorite of the moment which is Yahoo Maps.

I am on my Powerbook in the kitchen where we do most of our “local search” in this house.

Well guess what, Google Maps doesn’t work yet on Safari or IE running on OSX.

That means we’ll keep using Yahoo Maps in the kitchen for now and I’ll have to check them out on my laptop later.

Matt Blumberg on why RSS won’t impact email.

Brad Feld on the RSS/blog world entering the "me too zone". If you are involved with or interested in VC and blogging, you really must read this one. 

Tom Evslin on evolution and extinction from dinosaurs to disruptive technologies and everything in between. I know Tom is linked to on every must read post, but I just call them as I see them.

As was rumored and mentioned in my previous Blogging 1.0 post, The New York Times announced its acqusition of About.com yesterday.

First, I’d like to congratulate our friend Martin Nisenholtz and his team over at the New York Times.  This was a very smart buy as I’ll explain in a minute.  I know that Martin and his team have been working on this for a while and faced some significant competition for this deal and so they should feel very proud about coming out on top.

So, why was this such a good deal for the NY Times?  First, they got one of the web’s most interesting properties at a very good price.  About.com is a bigger and, I’d argue, a better business than Marketwatch and that sold for 60 times EBITDA last year to Dow Jones.  The NY Times only paid 30 times EBITDA for About.com. 

Second, and much more importantly, the NY Times is constructing something that I think is very powerful in the emerging digitial world we are living in.  It’s a network where creativity and advertising happen both centrally and on the egdes.

I had a long brainstorming lunch with two particularly savvy media guys yesterday and we spent a lot of time on this notion of a network where creativity and advertising happens on the edges.  That’s About.com with its guides model of content creation and its Google-like CPC revenue business model.  There are literally hundreds of businesses emerging on the web that look like this and they are very powerful business models because they cost very little to operate.

If you look at the economics of Marketwatch vs About.com, you’ll see the benefits of this edge business model.  Marketwatch’s EBITDA was 10% of its revenues at the time it was purchased.  About.com’s EBITDA is 33% of its revenues.  That’s operating leverage and operating leverage makes growth much easier.

I pointed out to my friends at lunch that if you combine a network like that with a traditional centralized network, you get something even more powerful.  The two can feed each other and create even more value.

And that is what Martin and his team have put together.  It will be very interesting to watch them execute this acquisition.  If the content that is created on the edges starts to show up in the middle and the content that is created in the middle starts to show up on the edges, that will be a big deal.  If the ads sold by the central sales force start to show up on About and if the CPC ads start showing up more on NYT, that means they’ve done it.  I sure hope they make it work because it will be a model for the rest of the traditional media world to emulate.

The LREI 8th grade girls did it. 

They won the regular season title.

And over the past couple days beat two great teams from Brooklyn Friends and Trevor Day to take the tournament title too.

The finals were played today at Trevor Day on the upper west side but that didn’t stop the LREI fans from coming up from the village to show their support. 

Josh went all out to show some Red spirit.

The girls had a great season and I am proud of all of them and their coach Larry who did a great job getting them to gel into a team.

Way to go girls!

Not all cliches come from the venture business.

This week’s cliche was made famous by Colin Powell in his comments to George W. Bush when he was told the US was going to invade Iraq.  Powell said to Bush:

You break it, you own it.

The same is true of a company.  The VCs on the board often have the power to change out the management of a company.  But if they do that, they are responsible for fixing the management and the company.

And startup companies are fragile.  They often don’t recover from the breakage that results from a restructuring of the team.

So, just like Powell was cautionary in his advice to Bush, so am I in my advice to my colleagues in the venture business.  Don’t go into a company thinking you can swap out management easily.  And don’t make a management change unless you are willing to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty for a while.  Because that’s what’s required when you "own" the business.

Tom Evslin on why simple subscription pricing beats complicated usage pricing every time.

Nick Denton’s postings of his sites’ traffic vs. the direct competition.  These comparisons are not always flattering to Nick’s sites.  And the transparency he is embracing impresses the hell out of me.

Searchview’s post on Claria going "behavioral" (aka respectable).  Can the prodigal son get back in the good graces of the industry?  We’ll see.

Seth Godin’s post on the absolutely most maddening thing on the web – the stupid dropdown box to select the state you live in.  God do I hate that thing!!!

The girls in red traveled up to the west side yesterday to play Columbia Prep. 

It was a physical game fought mostly under the boards.  In the end, LREI came out victorious, but not without a tough fight by Columbia Prep.

The regular season ended with LREI as the regular season champs with a 10-1 record. 

They are the first seed in the four team playoffs which start tomorrow with the finals on Thursday.

A friend showed me this great coffee mug available on Cafe Press.

It says:

I ordered a couple for our office!

I used to go to Demo all the time.  It was the best place to go see new companies.

But somewhere along the way, a lot of the most interesting companies got funded before they got to Demo.  And the audience is full of VCs, so the unfunded ones were funded pretty shortly thereafter.  So it became an exercise in frustration for me.

Here is a map, created by IntroNetworks, one of the presenting companies, of Demo’s attendees.  The quadrants are business owners, Fortune 500 companies, venture capitalists, and one other that wasn’t identified on BloggingDemo’s post. 

I will bet that the upper left quadrant is the VC quadrant.

Given the difficulty in actually finding companies to invest in at Demo, the only benefit is seeing all these new products and services live and in action.

But for that we’ve now got BloggingDemo.  I can spend 30 minutes on BloggingDemo every morning, watch the videos, and I’ve replicated all but the schmooze factor.

This is a great service to the VCs who aren’t in the room like me.