Posts from March 2005

With the venture capital and IPO markets opening up big time, everybody is an entrepreneur again.  That’s good news.

Everybody also wants to raise venture capital again.  That’s bad news.

Martin Tobias has a great post where he talks about telling three entrpereneurs in one day to avoid VC.  That’s pretty good.  A VC talking against his own game.  I like that.

I sometimes do a class at NYU’s Stern Business School called "Venture Capital, When You Need It, When You Don’t".  I make the point in this class that Venture Capital is the wrong source of capital for the vast majority of entrepreneurial ventures.

Here is the powerpoint I use when I teach the class.  If you are thinking about raising venture capital, give this a read and think hard about it before you start the process.

This week I am going to make fun of a commonly heard VC cliche.

I’ve been in quite a few board meetings over the years when things aren’t going so well and the Board goes into executive session (a code word for kicking the management out of the meeting). 

I should stop and say that executive sessions are good things for Boards to do, but let’s just call a spade a spade, they are designed to let the Board talk without management in the room.

Once the management is out of the room, someone, usually one of the VCs says, "What we need in this company is a world class CEO".

I used to sit there and agree.  But I’ve come to realize a number of things about the "myth of the world class CEO" as Jerry calls it.

1 – There isn’t such a thing as a world class CEO
2 – If there were, they’d be interviewing for the CEO job at Disney, not your little piss ant company
3 – A world class CEO isn’t going to fix a bad investment
4 – Many "hired managers" are good at operating but lack the passion, drive, and vision that founders/entrepreneurs bring to the table
5 – I’ve seen more world class CEOs (who weren’t world class or CEOs) screw up companies than founder/entrepreneurs

The next time I am in that executive session and someone uses that world, I am going to jump across the table and strangle them.  Then I am going to bring the management back into the room and tell them that we need some help, some "A students" to keep the trains running on time and support the "B students" that got us into this mess.

As to who has what title, that’s an important factor and time will tell what’s right, but really its about building a group of talented people that can function as a team and get the job done. 

There are no silver bullets in building a company.

I am home sick today, so what do i do with my time?

IM with our crack analyst Charlie about his decision to sell his GM stock after he left GM to join us, of course.

That led to a little fun with Yahoo charts which in turn led to Charlie’s blog post on the subject.

His post is great, so I won’t add anything to it other than a larger view of the chart.

His is too small for my 43 year old eyes.

I thought Ben Folds had lost his mind when he hooked up with William Shatner to do Has Been.

But now I am sure he’s lost his mind with his recording of Dr Dre’s classic foul mouthed rap opus called Bitches Ain’t Shit.

Dr Dre’s Chronic is on my top 50 list and its my favorite rap record of all time.  But it’s also incredibly foul mouthed and vulgar.

As this is a PG-13 rated site, I am not going to post the MP3.  If you want to hear it, its available on iTunes, where its made it to the top 10 list in less than a week of its release.

But I will link to one of my favorite sites, CollegeHumor.com, where they have a video of Ben’s live performance of the song. 

I am not sure if Ben Folds is a comedian or a musician.  And I am not sure it matters.

Yesterday, I gave a fairly provocative presentation at the Venture Association of New Jersey that I titled "IT Investing – "It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine".

Apologies to REM for hijacking the title of their hit song off the 1987 Document almbum, but that’s exactly how I feel about IT investing right now.

The rules are changing, the business is changing, and we need to change with it.  And I am fine with that.

Here is the powerpoint file.  Download if you are interested.  Sorry that there aren’t any speaker notes.  Some of the slides probably need some context, but I didn’t have time to add them.

Comments are welcome.

I’ve been sick for the past couple days and trying to pretend that I am not. 

I decided to acknowledge it and stay home and stop subjecting my coworkers to possible infection.

So with that as a backdrop, I give you Ben Lee’s new song, Catch My Disease.

This is a great pop song. 

I particularly like the part about Good Charlotte, Sleepy Jackson, Beyonce, and Ben.

Give it a listen.

Bill Burnham has an excllent post about software as a service being the preferred way that IT organizations buy software today.  I agree with Bill completely.

But I wonder if web services and the ease of integration that Bill talks about in his post are going to bring more change to the enterprise software business in the coming years.  Will IT organizations move to lower cost lightweight web services and just integrate them in order to get the functionality they get from their hosted software vendors today?

I’ve been sick the past couple days and feeling really crappy so I failed to blog a big event that happened yesterday.

Emily turned 12.

We celebrated last night and The Gotham Gal has the details.

So now in the past month, all three of our kids have added a year to their ages.  Makes me feel older.  And this head cold doesn’t help!

There was an interesting article in today’s New York Times business section by Saul Hansell on Landmark Theater’s decision to convert all of their projectors to this cool looking digital projector that costs $100,000 per theater.

Landmark is co-owned by Mark Cuban, so maybe this isn’t such a big thing.  Cuban believes in being digital after all.

But it got me thinking about the pace at which most media businesses convert to digital. I’ve lived through this in the radio industry where the broadcasters waited almost five years to adopt HD Radio and it was only when satellite started really hurting them that they did it. They did not embrace digital as something they needed to get behind quickly. They were forced to do it by competitive pressures.  And interestingly enough, the cost to convert a radio station to digital is about the same $100k that it costs to convert a theater to digital projection.

So back to the theater business.  Cuban isn’t converting his theaters to digital because the picture will look better (it will).  He’s doing it because digital changes the game.  He can now do short run movies cost effectively.  He can broadcast live events.  He can show movies that come straight from the camera to the screen.

These are the benefits of being digital.  Low cost, instant delivery, intelligence in the bit stream, network effects, etc etc.

Landmark will use these benefits to its advantage and change the game in the theater business.  I wonder if the big chains will wait five years until its clear Landmark is winning to react.