Posts from June 2006

I found this link in the Union Square Ventures weblog comments section.

It’s an analysis of why Craigslist works. And its a good read.

My favorite part:

Craigslist is brilliant because his main activity is something that
posters are inherently promiscuous with — personal spamming. In any
other context, the bulk of the material on Craigslist would be
considered spam. In my email box, on another message forum, heck even
on one of google’s spam-ridden Blogger sites. The posts are the
equivalent of those indiscriminately posted flyers on corkboards at
universities.

Buy my mattress..need a ride to Chicago…come see my band. People put
these flyers up fully expecting only a handful to see or care about
them enough to rip off a tab with the phone number at the bottom. The
expectation of response is low but it’s cheap to try.

Now Craig’s lead-into-gold trick is that he gets his posters to
accurately classify their spam. Into 160 categories. Holy Toledo Jacob
Nielsen. You can’t have a pulldown with 160 things in it. Half of your
users wouldn’t get a pulldown with 3 things in it right. Ah, but it’s
not a pull-down. Half of the entire homepage is a giant selector
devoted to classifying posts.

Craigslist is personally tagged spam. Interesting observation.

The sports world is a rich source of cliches and this week’s cliche comes from the draft process.

Many teams believe that instead of drafting players to fill holes they should simply draft the best available athlete. And I’ve argued plenty that entrepreneurs and CEOs should do the same when hiring, particularly early in the developement of their company.

We’ve all known that person growing up that was good in every sport; fast, agile, coordinated, strong, could play forever without tiring. It used to burn me to invite a friend to play a round of golf with me, a game I’ve played without mastering for thirty years. And they’d be as good as me even though they rarely played. But I’ve come to understand that some people are just natural athletes and I am not one of them.

The same is true in building companies. There are people who have great range in business. They can manage, they can sell, they understand technology, they can plot strategy, they can do most any job well. In one of my portfolio companies, we have a guy who was CFO. He was a great CFO, but he wanted to do more. The CEO promoted him to COO and he now runs all operations and technology. He could run strategy too, if he was asked. That’s what the best available athlete does. Whatever the company needs at a particular time.

And in a company that is young, that is particularly valuable. Because things change quickly. Gaps don’t last long. They get filled one way or another. But talent is hard to come by and really gifted people are few and far between.

So that’s why I most often recommend hiring the best available athlete. If you build a team full of people who can play any position, you are going to do really well. I am sure of it.

  Eels at World Financial Center 
  Originally uploaded by fredwilson.

The Gotham Gal and I went to see the Eels play at World Financial Center tonight.

We got there a few minutes late and they were already playing. I didn’t recognize them because they were in army jump suits and E was wearing a knit cap with goggles. But soon enough, E sat down at his keyboard and everything was familiar again.

This was a very different show from the Town Hall show we saw last summer.  It was E plus another guitarist and a drummer and a guy who looked like a security guard but ended up playing keyboard and guitar at times.

The Eels are always a bit nutty and tonight was no exception. The Gotham Gal liked the show a lot because they rocked out.  I preferred the Town Hall show.

But we both loved the encore where they did Birds with two teenage girls jumping up and down all over the stage.

Best of all, the show was free, part of the River to River festival. You gotta love live rock n roll on a great summer night in NYC!

My favorite radio station is WEHM, East Hampton’s progressive radio station.

When we drive out east on long weekends or during the summer, I can’t wait until we get into range.

And we listen all weekend and all summer.

Well now we can listen all year because today WEHM turned on a live stream.

I think they need to tune the sound quality a bit, but I don’t really care. I feel like I am on the beach right now listening to Lauren Stone.  Oh yeah.

Thank you John Maguire (the owner of WEHM)!!!

Click on the play button to hear about our most recent investment.

Oddcast Announcement

Union Square Ventures weblog post

Brad has a good post up on the Union Square Ventures weblog talking about a brown bag lunch we had with Craig Newmark last week and why we admire the service he built so much.

The Gotham Gal’s got them.

And so do I.

OMG.  M Ward has done it again. He’s three for three with me. His new record, which is coming out on August 22nd, is called Post-War. I was treated to a preview and I can’t stop listening to it.

I’d put it on my In Heavy Rotation (left sidebar) and Top 10 Records for 2006 lists, but there isn’t even an Amazon listing for it yet (and Amazon powers those lists).

I’ll treat you all to some mp3s from it over the next month or so. And when it becomes available for pre-order on Amazon, I’ll let you all know so you can get it.

In the meantime, if you don’t have his other records, get them.  He’s the best.

The discussion over at Wikipedia continues over whether or not to allow my page to stay up. I am fine with whatever decision they come to. I understand that Wikipedia has rules and I didn’t play by them. But I also firmly believe that they ought to let the page stay up. We’ll see what happens.

Anyway, this whole episode, plus extensive readings of Jaron Lanier’s Digital Maoism essay and many of the replies (some of which are on this delicious tag of mine) have got me thinking about selfish activity and why it matters.

Clearly there are people who do amazing work for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. Jason Calacanis turned me on to this book about Dr. W.C. Minor who provided literally thousands of entries to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary.
But Minor, an American expatriate in England and a Civil War veteran,
was actually a certified lunatic who turned in his dictionary entries
from the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.

I am not saying that Wikipedians are madmen. Nothing could be further from the truth and that assertion would clearly end all chance of getting my Wikipedia page approved. But I am pointing out that people do amazing things for many different reasons that often have nothing to do with money.

But many more do things because they are selfish and vain. That is an important part of the blogging phenomenon and increasingly an important part of the Wikipedia phenomenon. And it should not be condoned, it should simply be understood and managed.

Selfish activity taken too far is spam. But selfish activity within reason is very healthy. If my Wikipedia page stays up, I will check it regularly to make sure it is accurate. Because I care about the accuracy of a page about me. I don’t intend to control it but I do intend to monitor its accuracy.

Search engine optimiziation is healthy to a degree. The machines at Google and Yahoo! may not have initially made Coca-Cola’s home page the number one result when someone typed in "coke".  But it is now. Coke’s marketers made sure of that. And that is good.

Search engine marketing/paid results are good. There are certainly plenty of searches where the paid results are better than the organic ones. That was Bill Gross’ initial insight that led to the creation of a business model for the search business, the best business model invented so far for the Internet.

Self tagging is good to a degree. Publishers and bloggers who provide a bunch of descriptive tags on their content to delicious, technorati, and others are doing all of us a service. It makes it easier to find what we are looking for. But those who take it too far are tag spammers.

So I think selfish activity should be celebrated not condoned as long as its within reason. Of course, a soft term like "within reason" is a problem for people who write algorithms. But most people can determine "within reason" fairly easily.  Maybe that’s a really good job for the hive mind.