Posts from November 2006

I’ve been playing around with my stylesheets again. I’ve gone back to a fixed sidebar and center column width. For now.

I am going to try a fluid center design next.

Sorry to be moving things around, but at least I am learning some CSS.

Back in late October, Business 2.0 asked me to contribute a column to their "How To Succeed" issue that is now on the newstands. We went back and forth on what I might write about and finally concluded that I should write about blogging. The column that ended up in the magazine was a fairly well edited version of the original so I am posting the original including the headline I used when I wrote it.

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I always like to use a sensational headline. Many people read blogs in aggregators and these aggregators generally only show the headline in the main view. So you have to give people a reason to click through and read the post. I don’t think I’ve achieved either fame or fortune via blogging. Wikipedia kicked out an entry on me because I wasn’t “notable” and I make about $30,000 per year in advertising on my blog which I give all to charity.

But blogging has become a critical piece of how I do my business these days. My business is venture capital. I don’t think I need to explain what venture capital is to the readers of this magazine, but I will define the way I do venture capital. I am an early stage investor in Internet delivered services. I am the co-founder of a firm called Union Square Ventures which I formed with my partner Brad Burnham in 2003.

I started my blog that year too. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I started my blog. I met Mena Trott (founder of Six Apart which makes Moveable Type blogging software and the hosted Typepad blogging service) at a party at Nick Denton’s apartment. She was in town to launch Typepad. I asked her what Typepad was. She told me I could set up a blog in about two minutes in Typepad. I was curious so I went home and did just that. I haven’t looked back since.

The first decision I had to make when I logged into Typepad was what to call the blog. I called the blog AVC because that’s what I am. A VC. I then was asked to tell the blogging world a bit more about me. I wrote:

My name is Fred Wilson.

I am a VC. I have been for 17 years. I help people start and build technology companies. I do it in NYC, which isn’t the easiest place to build technology companies, but its getting better.

I love my work. I am the Managing Partner of two venture capital firms, Flatiron Partners and Union Square Ventures.

I also am a husband and a father of 3 kids. I do that in NYC too. And it isn’t the easiest place to raise a family either. But it’s getting better too. I love my family more than my work.

And that was really all it took. I started writing at least one post every day and have done that ever since. When I go on vacations, I write a bunch of posts in advance and then autopost them on a regular schedule. I have found that having something new on the blog  every day is the single most important thing to building an audience.

At first, I really didn’t know what to write about. So I wrote about the things I was passionate about; my work, my family, music, politics, new york city. I still post about all of these things. But I don’t post so much about my family anymore. As my audience grew and people with no manners starting leaving hurtful comments about my family, I stopped doing that. There is a downside to being so public about the things you love.

I also don’t post that often about politics although at times like right now, when we are in an important election, I can’t help myself. I care about our country and when I see it going down a path I don’t believe in, I feel the need to speak out.

So my blog is mosly about my work (venture capital and technology) and music, with a bit of new york city spliced in to keep it fun and fresh.

Many of my readers tell me that they love the diversity of the posts I do. They come for the technology and venture capital stuff but enjoy getting to know me through the other stuff. I think this is critical. Blogs need to be real and personal. Reading your blog needs to be like hanging out with you. I play music for my readers. I show them videos I like on YouTube. I tell them what I did over the weekend. And I tell them what I think is happening in the technology, Internet, and venture capital markets.

It seems to work. About 50,000 people each month come to my blog. And 13,000 people are subscribed to my feed via FeedBurner. I am sure that most of those 13,000 are also in the 50,000 number.

I know who many of these people are. They comment on my blog. They upload their faces in my community which is powered by MyBlogLog. They email me. And I email them back.

I met my friend Howard through my blog. He took me and my son to a Phoenix Suns game when he read on my blog that we were in town. He’s now producing a great web video about the stock market called Wallstrip. I met many people who share my love of music, too many to name right here. But they all know who they are. We trade music ideas all the time.

But most of all, I am getting to know entrepreneurs of all kinds via my blog. Entrepreneurs in India, Australia, England, China, Silicon Valley, and of course, New York.

They read my blog. Correct me when I am wrong. Pound the table when they agree with me. I get to know them. And they get to know me. And when it comes time for them to raise money, they come to me. But only if they think what they are doing will be interesting to me. And how do they know that? Because they read my blog where I talk incessantly about what is interesting to me.

So my blog acts as an amplifier and a filter. I see many more opportunities, but they are also way more relevant. It makes me a better investor. And hopefully that will lead to fame and fortune.

I’ve heard the world prosumer used a lot lately.

I’ve noticed that it has taken on two separate meanings.

The first meaning, coined by Alvin Toffler in his prophetic book, The Third Wave, is the merger between the notions of producer and consumer. Toffler envisioned the world we now live in where the consumer is participating in the production of customized products and services.

But there is a second meaning, that of products targeted between the low end consumer market and the high end professional market. You hear it most often used in products in the audio, photography, and video markets.

And then there is the more activist meaning, which simply takes Toffler’s meaning and extends it into a world where mass produced goods are bad and "do it yourself" is the mantra. We certainly have made a number of investments at Union Square Ventures which are based loosely on this theme, certainly Etsy and Bug Labs, but also to some extent delicious, FeedBurner, and Oddcast, play on the theme of consumers creating their own products and services.

Blogging is also an expression of the "do it yourself" mantra. Why rely on traditional mainstream media to inform, educate, and entertain when we can do it ourselves now?

The reason I am writing about this today is that I’ve been reading a bunch of essays that Jessica was assigned to read in her history class. One of them was from Horace Mann, written in 1848, and titled On Education and National Welfare. This is an amazing essay and one which you should read if you’ve never seen it before.

In his closing paragraph, Mann writes:

That political economy, therefore, which busies
itself about capital and labor, supply and demand, interests and rents,
favorable and unfavorable balances of trade, but leaves out of account
the elements of a wide-spread mental development, is naught but stupendous
folly. The greatest of all the arts in political economy is to change a
consumer into a producer;

I don’t know whether Toffler was inspired by Horace Mann or someone else in his conception of the prosumer, but I agree with both of them. We are into a new era where techonology and education have allowed the consumer to become the producer. It’s an important change in the forward progress of the human condition.

We’ve spent thanksgiving weekend in our home in Amagansett, out on the east end of long island.

We’ve been blessed by amazing weather once the rain cleared on thursday night. We’ll all return to New York City rested and relaxed, which is a wonderful thing.

This photo is from my morning bike ride out to lazy point in Nappeague. It was 7am and the sun was coming up and the mist was hanging over the marshes. By the time I got to lazy point and was making my way back, the mist had burnt off.

It sort of sums up the weekend.

Whenever I listen to "neighbor radio" on last.fm, I almost always get songs from both of these artists.

Seems like people who like what I like are fans of Elliot and Sufjan.

Only I never have and probably never will like either of these artists.  I am not sure why.

Just now I started neighbor radio and got Elliot first and Sufan second.

Good thing Sigur Ros came up third. Now there’s a band I love.

I got an advance copy of the new Bloc Party record, called Weekend In The City.

I loved their first album so much that this one is bound to be a disappointment.

But I’ve already found one song, called Waiting For The 7.18, that I really like.

[song removed at the request of the band]

I am writing you on behalf VICE Records, Atlantic Records, the Warner
Music Group, Wichita Records, Bloc Party and their management and
authorized to act on behalf of the owner of exclusive new music from
Bloc Party that is currently illegally being offered on A VC.  The
illegal material is currently here: http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/11/
song_of_the_day.html and must be removed immediately.  Please contact
me with any additional questions and notification of the removal
would be appreciated.

I know you’ve been supportive of our bands in the past, but this song
is not meant to be offered to the public at this time.

HipMojo, a blog I’ve found myself reading a lot lately, has their list of the top 10 Internet acquisitions of all time (eleven actually, I love that).

Here is the list, but you really should click thru and read the color commentary.

#11 – Honorary Mention: Yahoo! acquires Yoyodyne in 1998 for $39 Million

#10 – aQuantive acquires Razorfish for $160M in June 2004

#9 – Microsoft acquires Hotmail for $400M in 1998

#8 – Ask Jeeves acquires Interactive Search Holdings for $343M in March 2004

#7 – eBay acquires Paypal for $1.5B in 2002

#6 – AOL Time Warner acquires Advertising.com for $435M in June 2004

#5 – Yahoo! acquires Inktomi for $235M in December, 2002

#4 – Yahoo! acquires Overture for $1.63B in July, 2003

#3 – Google acquires Sprinks (for basically nothing) in October 2003

#2 – New York Times acquires About.com for $410M in February, 2005

#1 – News Corporation acquires MySpace-parent Intermix for $580M in May 2005

I am not going to critique this list. It’s pretty good. I might have added a few and subtracted a few and rearranged the order, but it’s certainly a list of very good deals that have worked.

Three things I’d point out about this list.

1 – Six of the eleven deals were done in the range of $235mm to $500mm with the sweet spot in the $400mm range. I don’t know if this means anything. It’s just interesting to note.

2 – Seven of the eleven deals were done in the "Internet doldrums" of 2001-2004. It will always be true that the best time to buy is when nobody else is buying.

3 – Seven of the elven deals were done by "Internet companies" meaning they didn’t exist before 1995. Two were done by traditional media companies, NY Times and News Corp. One by a software company, Microsoft. And one by a hybird, AOL Time Warner. I don’t know whether this ratio will continue as traditional media companies and technology companies start buying Internet companies more agressively.

Lists like this are interesting to me because it’s always looking at what has worked and try to figure out what you can learn from it. What do you take away from this list?

We are headed to Italy (Venice, Florence, Siena, Rome) in a month. The flights have been booked for months and so have the hotels. But the rest of the trip’s itinerary has yet to be filled in. We like to have our trip booked solid a good month before we leave.

So the Gotham Gal got everyone together yesterday afternoon and laid out poster boards on the dining room table. Each city got a poster board.

Then everyone got out their laptops, travel guides, articles torn out of travel and food magazines and newspapers from the past year and we went at it. I hit delicious, google blog search, and a number of other web services. Emily and Jessica wrote down all the recommendations on the poster boards. The Gotham Gal managed the process. Slowly but surely the itinerary is getting filled out.

I love doing it this way because when we actually do the trip, everyone will remember why we picked that particular shop, museum, art gallery, restaurant, or whatever it is we are visiting. It makes it that much more of a collaborative experience.

I received 24 friend requests in the past day since I wrote my pandora vs last.fm post yesterday. Thanks everyone. Last.fm just got a lot better for me.

But interestingly, only one of those 24 friend requests made it through my spam filter into my email inbox. Spam filters continue to get away with huge false positive rates on things like site messaging alerts (last.fm, facebook, myspace, etc) and verification emails for new services. More work needs to be done around these issues.

I’ve also begun to play around with last.fm’s event recommendation service. It seems like they’ve basically built the same functionality that tourb.us has. But I can’t find any badges/widgets for the shows I am going to. If you know of them, I’d love to put them up on my sidebar.

The big thing last.fm is missing is being able to listen to any artist right from last.fm. I got a recommendation in last.fm to listen to a band called The Whigs. But I couldn’t play their record. I wish last.fm would integrate the leading streaming services like Rhapsody, Yahoo Music, and Napster into last.fm. And eMusic to buy the mp3. And something like the HypeMachine to integrate music blogs.

But regardless of what the service needs, last.fm is really close to perfection when it comes to music discovery.