Posts from August 2005

Since I put The Wailers Catch A Fire in the Top 50’s first ten records, I’ve never had an opportunity to sing the praises of Bob Marley in a post.

I love Bob Marley; the man, his music, and everything he stood for.

Bob Marley rose up from the trenchtown ghetto to show the world what reggae music could be and should be.

Nobody did it better than Bob and somehow I doubt that anybody ever will.

We own most everything that Bob put out in his lifetime including two amazing live records, Live (featuring the definitive version of No Woman No Cry) and Babylon By Bus, both of which I highly recommend.

But Bob’s masterpiece and the greatest reggae record ever made is Exodus.

Released in 1977 at the peack of his powers, Exodus is a concept album about faith, life, and love. 

It’s Bob in his role as a the Natural Mystic.

I never tire of Bob Marley’s music and I never tire of Exodus.

The other day I got an education in feed nonsense from a friend.

He explained to me that RSS 1.0 is really more feature rich than RSS 2.0 (go figure) and how we got Atom (a third standard?).

It’s frankly an ad for Feedburner which allows me to stop thinking about feed incompatibility.

Then today, a reader emailed me to let me know that suddenly earlier this week my Atom feed started displaying as HTML in Safari’s RSS reader. 

Ugh.

So with this post, I am officially not supporting my Atom feed and my RSS (.rdf) feed. 

If you are subscribing to either of them, you might want to switch to my Feeburner feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/AVc

That’s the one I will support (via the good people at Feedburner) going forward.

Maybe I am falling into the classic entrepreneur move of seeing everything as validation of my ideas, but this post by Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Watch (via John Battelle) seems like validation of my relevancy rant.

Size doesn’t matter, relevancy does.

In fact, size is the problem.

The Gotham Gal hates Google now because she gets too much garbage and not enough good results.

I don’t feel the same way, but I understand why she feels that way.

Size of index is clearly the wrong vector.  Relevancy is the way to go.

About nine months ago, Tom Evslin sent me the draft of the first chapter of a book he’d started writing as soon as he left ITXC, the company he founded and I invested in during "the first Internet bubble and rubble" as he calls it.

I am not going to say anything about the book or the first chapter, other than the fact that it was quite entertaining and very much a product of the world Tom and I had been living in for the past ten years.

For those that don’t know, Tom was one of the first successful Macintosh software developers, sold his company to Microsoft, oversaw the development of the first versions Back Office, Outlook, and Exchange, went to AT&T where he got them into the Internet and invented flat rate pricing for dial-up internet accesss, and then finally to ITXC where he invented commercial grade VOIP.

So it’s not surprising that Tom isn’t going to stop innovating now that he’s moved on from technology into writing books.

As Tom describes in this must read post, he is going to self publish this book, but not in the traditional self publishing way.  He’s going way beyond that.  He’s going to serialize the book in beta version in a blog form.  He’s going to build a web site for the fictional company.  He’s turning this into a multimedia extravaganza all by himself with the help of some rented servers in the sky.

I can’t wait to watch this unfold.  As I said at the top, the story is really good and very entertaining.  If you lived through "the first Internet bubble and rubble", its your story too in many ways.

So go visit Tom’s blog, sign up for his feed or Bloglet email and get ready for the launch of Books 2.0.

Counting links to blogs has been the most popular way to determine who is "A list", "B list", etc.

I’ve said my piece on the damn lists, so I’ll move on.

Link rank is clearly important.

But it’s even more interesting to see the Comscore and Alexa stats which measure raw users and traffic compared the Technorati and Feedster stats which measure link rank.

Boing Boing and Engadget seem to do really well on the link count.

Drudge Report does better on traffic but not so great on links.

They are clearly highly correlated but they are not the same.

Last week there was a big stink over the traffic and audience stats that Comscore put out.  Clearly they were in need of some work.  But I said that they were a good start and I stand by that comment.

But the accuracy and  of the Comscore and Alexa stats seems pretty good to me when compared to the link rank numbers that Technorati and Feedster are putting out.

This is not mean to be a critiiscm of Technorati or Feedster, just an observation that the numbers are not close in many cases.

Take Wonkette.  It’s #20 on the Technorati top 100 with 5,247 links but its #59 on the Feedster 500 with 4,366 links.

OK, so they were close on the links but the rankings were off.

Well, not so fast.  Technorati has Boing Boing #1 while Feedster has Boing Boing #3.  Pretty close on the rankings this time, but Technorati says that Boing Boing has 16,913 links while Feester says Boing Boing has 36,229 links.

It gets even crazier when you guy down lower in the list.  Om Malik’s Broadband blog has 1,980 links in Technorati and 4,568 links in Feedster.

Then there is my blog.  Feedster says its the 150th most linked to blog with 2,132 links.

Technorati says its the 805th most linked to blog with 1,106 links.

I don’t know which of them is right (if either of them are) and I honestly don’t care when it comes to my blog.

But I think the blog world deserves better if link rank is as important as I think it is.

Our kids got back from two months at camp.

It’s always great to get some time away from each other, but getting them back is even better.

I’ll be on a "working vacation" for a bit but hope to keep blogging at a normal pace.

When a startup company needs to raise money, a rifle shot approach is always better than a shotgun approach.  This is true of every raise, but it is particularly true of the second and third rounds, once there is already a VC firm or two in place.  Raising money is time consuming and you must focus on a small set of highly likely prospects if you want the fundraising process to go quickly and end successfully.

I always tell the entrepreneurs and managers that we need to put together a "short list" before we start the fundraising process.

Building the short list is an iterative process.  Someone starts it off, usually the company, but sometimes the investors.  Then they pass it back and forth, usually in an excel file, and make modifications.  The short list should be shared with everyone in and around the company who has relationships in the venture business, including your lawyers, advisory board if you have one, angel investors, and even employees and friends.

What you are looking for in a short list is a list of venture capital firms where you can get a high level (partner level) introduction, where your business is a very tight fit with their investment strategy, and where you have reason to believe that the firms can be helpful in the development of the business going forward.

I would suggest that the short list should be no longer than ten firms, and ideally as short as five or six firms.  But the short list should start much longer, probably around twenty firms, and then get whittled down using the iterative process I described above.

There is a tendency to build the short list around brand name firms.  How many times have I heard, "we need a top tier west coast VC in this round"?  While the top tier west coast firms are very good investors, just because they have a brand doesn’t necessarily make them the ideal investors for your business.

There are something like 800 venture capital firms operating in the US right now. There are roughly 550 firms who are members of the National Venture Capital Association.  So they are a ton of options to choose from and you should take the time to do the upfront research, get suggestions, do more homework, and build a great short list.

One thing that is critical in putting together the short list is figuring out the stage and valuations that the various firms like to invest at.  If you have done two rounds of venture capital already and are targeting a $30 million valuation, you don’t want to focus on early stage firms who focus on the first venture round, as Union Square Ventures does.  But there are plenty of firms who prefer to invest a bit later in the development of the company and they should be on your short list if that is your profile.

Once you have your short list nailed down, its time to do more homework.  You should know about  every portfolio company in your general market sector of every firm on your short list.  You should know the names of all the partners and associates and analysts at every firm on your short list.  You should know the most successful investments of the firms and particularly the partner you are targeting as your entry point.  You should spend some time on Linked In and figure out who you know who knows the firm and the partner you hope to work with.  These bits of information will be very valuable as you navigate the process with the firm.  Don’t throw them all out in the first five minutes of the first meeting, but keep them in your head and use them at the opportune moment to solidify trust and comfort which are the most important ingredients in a successful fundraising process.

In summary, you must have a short list to execute the optimal venture capital fundraising process.  And the firms on the short list must be pre-qualified by your network to be highly likely to be interested.  Getting it right will make a big difference.

I feel in my gut that we need a new dimension, a new vector, a new lode to mine.  And I feel that we are close to finding it. 

Note the conscious use of the word we in the last sentence.  I am not close to finding it, but we are.  By we, I mean everyone who is working in technology and web services.

Software and web services have been about functionality for the past thirty years.  They help you organize and process the things you need to do.  At this very moment in time, I have six applications open.  Outlook for email.  Outlook for calendaring.  Outlook for contacts.  Word for writing.  Firefox for browsing.  iTunes for listening.  I could have more, but that’s all that I am doing right now.

Each is an island (or a ghetto as a friend of mine says) of automation with efficiency as the ultimate end goal.  Microsoft largely won the “organize and process” era because they offered the most efficient applications using the DOS/Windows operating system as the foundation for delivering efficiency.

There is progress being made connecting these islands of functionality in the browser.  I can write in Firefox (and oh the pain of a browser crash), I can listen in Firefox, I can do email in Firefox, I can do calendaring in Firefox, and so on and so forth. 

The browser is replacing the OS.  Big deal, we all know that.

But once that happens, then what?

Many have said that search is the new dimension. Google’s success would certainly suggest that they have found the next lode to mine and are doing a damn good job mining it.

But I think search is just one of the vectors and that the new dimension is relevance.

And search isn’t the ultimate in relevance.  In fact, I think search is a very rudimentary way to deliver relevance.

Many readers have said to me, “Fred, why are you making such noise about the cookie thing?”

Because I believe that relevancy is the next dimension and stored user preferences and data are the foundation of delivering it.  Cookies are one of the ways to do that and I think they are a very important part of the next big thing.

But this is about a lot more than cookies.

It’s about understanding how the next 10-20 years are going to play out in technology and web services.

The Gotham Gal was looking for some stuff for the kids yesterday on the Internet.  She is one of the best Internet shoppers I have ever met. She knows all the best tricks of finding what she wants.

But she said to me that the Internet is getting really crowded these days.  There is so much stuff out there.

Information overload?  No, we were overloaded ten years ago.  What we are today has no word for it because we are too busy checking our non stop email deluge to think of one.

We’ve largely solved the “automate and process” problems. 

But we haven’t begun to scratch the surface of the relevancy problem.

So grab your picks and shovels and let’s go mine that lode together.

We came across this scene on our bike ride this morning at the West Side Highway Northbound and Dyckman Street.

It must have happened several days ago but there was no sign of injury.

And no sign that the car had jumped the rail.

Probably a ditched car.