Posts from December 2006

We are off for two weeks in Italy with the family. Everyone is so excited. Blogging will be lighter although the Top 10 Records posts will run for another week.

And I hope to blog here and there about fun stuff we are doing in Italy (like I did with our year end trips in the past).

And probably a few VC/tech related posts as well here and there too.

The Gotham Gal and I sat through a meeting earlier this week with a good friend we are doing a business deal with and our respective lawyers.

As our friend said at the beginning of the meeting, "we’ll surely end up a little less friendly by the end of the meeting".

It didn’t turn out too bad, but when she saw this video, the Gotham Gal was reminded of that experience.

Here’s her original post.

FeedBurner rolled out something pretty neat recently. Using their headline animator service, you can create basically ad units that pull from your feed. This is just a first step in a larger effort to build a suite of feed powered services that will distribute your media wherever you want it to go.

Here’s an ad for my blog that I built this morning in about five minutes.

I am going to see if I can buy a bunch of impressions on the FeedBurner ad network for this ad. It’s not yet automated, so I’ll have to call in a favor. If I do that, you’ll probably be seeing this ad in feeds and sites across the blog world.

Every year I like to include at least one record that nobody has heard of (I don’t really mean nobody, but you know what I mean).

This year’s choice is The Gun Album from Minus Five, featuring one of the top ten songs of the year, With A Gun.

There are a lot more great songs on this record. Aw Shit Man, My Life As A Creep, Cemetery Row (sung by Colin Meloy of Decemberists), and Cigarettes Coffee And Booze are all standouts.

The Minus 5 is the name of the people who play music with Scott
McCaughey of The Young Fresh Fellows.  This time around he’s got Jeff
Tweedy, John Stirratt, and Glenn Kotche from Wilco, Peter Buck from
REM, and Colin Meloy from The Decemberists.

I have kept coming back to this record throughout the year while others go to the back burner. And so that’s why it’s in my top 10.

I wrote in my Social Networking Interconnects post the other day:

I do know one thing. MyBlogLog seems to be taking off. The number of
contact requests I am getting via MyBlogLog is going up every day.

Well maybe Eric read that. Or maybe not. But he wrote a post on the MyBlogLog blog yesterday outlining exactly how fast MyBlogLog is taking off. Here’s my favorite chart. This shows the number of reader rolls served every day.

I like this chart for a couple reasons. First because it shows how fast MyBlogLog is growing. But it also shows how widgets can be used to build a real web presence quickly.

If the widget was an ad, it would be getting a million impressions a day. At the rate that costs on my blog (about $10 cpm) that would cost $300,000 per month. So that’s a very valuable attention gathering strategy.

In the case of MyBlogLog, I don’t know how the service could work without the reader roll widget. It’s the front door and the reason the service is popular. So going from basically zero impressions in at the start of the fourth quarter to over 1 million this week is a great accomplishment. Congrats guys.

Jay Rand, my lawyer of some fifteen years and one of the best and most experienced VC lawyers in NYC, sent me an email early this year and said, “you gotta get the new Mark Knopfler Emmylou Harris record”. Jay’s a huge Mark Knopfler fan so I wasn’t surprised. I told him I wasn’t sure about Emmylou Harris or Mark Knopfler anymore. Jay said the songs are the best Knopfler has written in a while. That’s all it took. I got the record and it was in heavy rotation for a couple months.

The first four Dire Straits records are fantastic. I love Mark’s guitar playing and his soulful voice and great delivery. I haven’t been much of a fan of the stuff he’s done since, although I loved the work he did on several Dylan records in the 80s.

I think All The Roadrunning is indeed the best thing he’s done in a long time. The songs are great, the pairing with Emmylou Harris worked out wonderfully. And I love listening to this record.

The song that got all the airplay is This Is Us, and it’s a fine tune. But the best songs on the record are I Dug Up A Diamond, Rolling On, and All The Roadrunning. If you are a Mark Knopfler fan and don’t have this record, you are making a mistake. I’ll second Jay’s comment – “you gotta get the Mark Knopfler Emmylou Harris record”.

This year saw many of the great artists of the past put out compelling records; Neil Young’s Living With War, Dylan’s Modern Times, Tom Petty’s Highway Companion, Mark Knopfler’s collaboration with Emmylou Harris (which is in my top 10), and Bruce Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions.

I love new music and new artists. I don’t subscribe to Jackson’s assertion that “the last great record was made in 1991.” I think anyone who thinks that has just stopped trying to find and listen to new music and they have nobody to blame but themselves for the lack of good new music in their lives.

But the artists of the 60s, 70s, and 80s were a special group. Bob Lefsetz is right that those were the magical years of rock music. And so it’s great to see the legends of that time remain important contributors.

In some ways I am giving honorable mention to all of them and not just the ones I mentioned at the top of this post. But the one record that sums this up for me this year is Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions. His choice to cover great folk songs with a big raucous band is a telling one. Bruce is saying that music is timeless and it lives on forever.

One of my top music moments of the year was at Saratoga Springs in mid June watching Springsteen do his traveling show outside on a beautiful night with my son Josh and our friends. About 2/3 of the way through the set, after a particularly high energy number, Josh looked up at me and said, “Dad this is a great show”. Springsteen made music written many years ago relevant to my ten year old son. And that is a gift, to me, to Josh, and to everyone who has the record and/or saw the tour.

I went through a period where I listened to the record every day. But it didn’t last that long and I am listening to it now for the first time in months. It’s not one of my top ten records this year. But it’s a great record nonetheless and it certainly deserves an honorable mention.

The Gotham Gal has her top 10 records of 2006 up on her blog. I’ve heard these records endlessly this year as she is usually the first one in the kitchen in the morning and thus controls the airplay.

Three or four of her choices will make my top 10 as well. Others like KT Tunstall, Ben Folds, and Lilly Allen, are solid choices, but not my thing.

Although she didn’t order her records, I can tell you The Decemberists Crane Wife has to be her top pick for 2006. I can’t remember the last time that record wasn’t playing in the kitchen!

Last night at a FeedBurner board dinner we had an interesting discussion about "requiring attendance" at board meetings. I am an advocate of face to face board meetings. I know that I am not particularly useful when I am on the phone and I generally think that is true of all board members.

Matt Blumberg (whose board I am on) told the group that he "requires" board members to attend at least four meetings face to face and he structures those meetings so that he gets the most he can out of them. They generally start with or end with a board dinner.

I told Matt that I like his approach but I don’t like the idea that the other meetings are "optional", which is the message you send when you make four meetings mandatory.

I suggested a similar but different approach. Strongly encourage board members to attend all the meetings, but pick four meetings each year and make them "strategic planning" meetings and have a dinner the night before. Send the message that those meetings are not to be skipped. And schedule them at times of the year when people are unlikely to have vacations and such.

As companies get more mature, its fine to switch to a different approach. Comscore does four face to face meetings each year and four board calls. That’s a good model for companies that are large enough to be run on a quarterly basis. Same with Matt’s company, Return Path.

But for early stage companies that are still building their businesses and revenue models, monthly meetings are critical. I like to do 10 meetings a year and have all board members in attendance. That’s not going to happen at each meeting but it should be a goal. I also like board dinners, but not before every meeting. I think the idea of four "big" meetings a year with dinners the night before, and six other face to face meetings is a perfect system.

One more thing on this subject. Management often over prepares for meetings. Not mentally. But in the presentation materials. Hundred page board decks are nuts but I see a lot of them. Maybe for the big strategic meetings they make sense. But for the monthly update meetings, I think management should spend less time preparing for those meetings than many do. If you are spending a month a week preparing for a board meeting, something is wrong.