Posts from April 2007

1) Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky is great, at least I think so, my girls think its too mellow. Anway the record goes on sale May 15th and can be pre-ordered on Amazon. Wilco announced US tour dates yesterday and will be playing the Hammerstein in NYC on June 25th. TIckets haven’t gone on sale yet. I think the song Hate You Here sounds like Steely Dan. So here’s something for all you Steely Dan/Wilco fans.

Any Major Dude Will Tell You – Steely Dan covered by Wilco (from the Me Myself and Irene soundtrack)

2) Kings Of Leon is a band I want to like. Every once in a while I come across one of their songs and am blown away. They’ve got a new record and a bunch of the songs have been on the Hype Machine lately. I am not running out to buy the record, particularly since my favorite track isn’t even on the record. Check out this cool song called My Third House, particularly the guitar solos.

My Third House – Kings Of Leon

3) Techdirt says the Arctic Monkeys have rejected the very model that made them (leaking all of their songs on the Internet). That may well be true but a bunch of songs have appeared on the Hype Machine recently.  I like everything that I’ve heard but my favorite thing is this instrumental thing called Chun Li’s Spinning Bird Kick. It’s not even on the new record (Favorite Worst Nightmare) which will be out on April 23rd and is currently available for pre-order on Amazon. The Arctic Monkeys will be at the Hammerstein on May 15th. Here’s a video for the single called Brianstorms.

We’ve had season’s tickets to the NY Liberty (WNBA basketball) since we moved back to NYC in 1999.

And we’ve gone to a ton of games. My two teenage girls grew up idolizing Becky Hammon, the Liberty’s star point guard and sparkplug. They both play point guard on their school teams although that’s likely to change this year when they both play together on the high school team.

Today I got the news on my blackberry that the Liberty traded Becky to San Antonio for the rights to Ohio State star center Jessica Davenport and a 2008 first round pick. Apparently the Liberty are trying to get younger and bigger.

My girls didn’t take the news to well. We’ll see how well they take to the team without Becky. They’ve watched the core team they grew up wtih; T-Spon, Crystal, Vicky, and Becky all get traded away. I guess that’s what happens when you are a sports fan. You learn to cherish your favorite players while they are around because nobody’s untouchable. Hell the Knicks let Patrick go and haven’t won since.

We’ll miss Becky and wish her well in San Antonio. We are already checking to see if we’ll be in town when San Antonio comes to the Garden this summer.

Rich Skrenta points out the web pages have begun to be standardized.

Back in 1995, when the web was new, visitors to a new site would lean
forward, squint at the page, and try to figure out how it worked.

That metaphor didn’t last. People don’t lean forward and squint at web
pages to figure out how they work anymore. They instantly recognize —
within 100 milliseconds — which class of site
a page belong to — search result, retail browse, blog, newspaper, spam
site, message board, etc. And if they don’t recognize what kind of page
they’re on, they generally give up and hit the back button.

That’s an interesting observation and I think its true. I certainly do that. And I urge my companies to adopt standard web page metaphors to make their services easier to use.

Maybe the web has become like every other media before it. It’s developing its own categories of services. In television, a show is a sitcom, a drama, a news show, etc, etc. It doesn’t take very long to figure out what kind of TV show you are watching.

Is this good or bad? Has most of the innovation on the web already happened? Are we now in mainstream mode, sucking as much cash out of a mature model as we can?

I am not entirely sure. There have been a number of new web page metaphors successfully introduced in the past five years. The wiki style, the blog style, the web video page, the photo page model, etc. I think we aren’t done with innovating, but it’s interesting to think that the web has become so standardized in such a short time. Just a bit over ten years and it’s certainly not the chaotic adventureland it once was.

One of my favorite companies that I don’t have an investment in is Sonos. I own their products (four zone players), I’ve written extensively about them, and they sponsor my "In Heavy Rotation" widget which to my mind was the first sponsored blog widget.

So when I found myself in Santa Barbara this week, I felt like stopping by and visiting them. And I did that yesterday. I remarked to the team that greeted me how different their headquarters looked (that’s it on the left). They asked me what I expected. I told them the standard silicon valley style office building. They all laughed and told me that doesn’t exist in Santa Barbara.

I dropped in pretty much unannounced but everyone made time to come by and say hello to me. It’s a very friendly company. I got to talk to the marketing people, the product management people, the technology people, and the CEO, John MacFarlane.

Here’s a photo of me and  John MacFarlane, taken by Thomas Meyer on my way out at the end of the visit.

We talked a lot about new features I’d like to see, the marketing opportunities and challenges they face, and why Sonos is such a great product. We also talked a bit about the venture business, the best ways to finance companies and how to create value.

I came away from the visit with an even greater appreciation for Sonos the company. I guess I should have known. It takes great companies to build great products.

I read that the top six contenders; Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Romney, Guiliani, and McCain raised over $100mm in the first quarter of 2007.

Those are my numbers as I added up what I read about each campaign.

Not a dime of that $100mm came from the Gotham Gal and me. We’ve met and given to Hillary and Edwards in the past. We’ve voted for Guiliani but don’t plan on making that mistake again.

I’ve been reading Obama’s book about his roots, called Dreams From My Father. I’ve not had the pleasure of meeting this man, but I will tell you that he can write.

I am not done with the book but its better than anything I’ve read by Clinton (both of them) and Gore.

I’ve got Obama’s other book in my nightstand at home. I’m doing my diligence. I’ll let you know where I come out when I’m done.

In today’s Wallstrip show, the sponsor Lifelock, gets a short (3 sec) brand flash, and then a 30 second post-roll. Check it out.

The NY Times came out today on the side of taxing carried interest as ordinary income instead of capital gains. I’ll be the first one to admit that the preferential treatment of carried interest as capital gains is a great boon to the general partners who run private equity and venture capital firms. And being a progressive who is in favor of more equity in our tax code, I would gladly pay more taxes. But I am not sure this is the best way for the federal government to get more money from me.

First, I think there are a couple things the NY Times got wrong.

Here’s a quote from the Times’ opinion piece:

The deeper question in all this is whether capital gains — which are
currently taxed at less than half the top rate of ordinary income —
should continue to be so lavishly advantaged. The answer there is no.

I think the Times is dead wrong on this one. Entrepreneurs and investors who risk their capital in an attempt to create new businesses that employ people, make our lives better, our businesses more efficient, etc should be rewarded for doing so. I don’t think a long term risky investment that pays off should be taxed the same way that interest on a corporate bond is. We need a tax code that creates some incentives to take risk or wealthy people will be less inclined to do so. This is a competitiveness issue and the Times clearly doesn’t get that.

Second, private equity and venture capital are different animals. An early stage venture firm that is making $1mm investments in hopes of a 10x gain over five to seven years is just a different animal than a buyout firm that invests $5bn in equity to make a $5bn gain in two to four years. The amounts are different, the risks are different, the incentives are different, and the gains are different (all by orders of magnitude).

But to my mind the biggest issue with changing the way VC carried interest is taxed is the unintended consequences. If angel investors who put up their own dollars at risk continue to get capital gains treatment (as they should) and venture capitalists who are investing institutional money lose capital gains treatment, the best venture investors will simply choose to invest their own capital instead of others. It’s already happening. The capital bases of the very best venture capital firms are increasingly made of of the general partners’ own capital. They continue to invest third party capital as well. If the economics of managing third party capital gets much worse, I bet we’ll see the best firms move to investing only their own capital.

In Santa Barbara, California some veterans have created a memorial to the troops who have lost their lives in Iraq. They call it Arlington West and they put up the memorial each Sunday on the beach right by Stearns Wharf.

It’s a powerful and moving memorial no matter what your particular take on the war is. One of the veterans who was on duty yesterday was handing out postcards with information for veterans with post traumatic stress disorder. This is clearly a political statement, but it’s also a labor of love by veterans for others who have served their country and paid the ultimate price.

But for me, the most impactful part of this memorial was the right hand side, where they have put up cards with time based milestones (invasion, Sadaam topppled, free elections, etc). Take a look at this picture.

What you see is that so many of the deaths have come since the end of the military mission, even after a democratically elected government was established. It’s pretty clear that the invasion itself was not a particularly deadly affair for the US Military. The occupation on the other hand has been a massacre. I guess standing between two enemies who are trying to kill each other isn’t the safest place to be.

One of the most interesting things about my experience over the past five years as an investor and board member of TACODA, the leading behavioral targeting ad network, is that much of what TACODA is doing was tried once before, in the late 90s, by a CMGI company called Engage.

Maybe Engage was too early with its profile driven advertising services. Maybe it got caught up in the bubble and bought too many other advertising businesses. Maybe the financial engineering done by CMGI did it in. The answer is probably all of the above.

Anyway, much of what Engage set out to do in the late 90s has been accomplished by TACODA and its competitors in the behavioral targeting (BT) sector of the internet advertising market. I expect that when you add up all the BT campaigns run this year, either directly on portals like Yahoo!, or online publications like The New York Times, or networks like TACODA, the total market will be north of $200mm and possibly much higher. Behavioral targeting has arrived in the mainstream of internet advertising. It works, media buyers understand it, and money is flowing into the category.

So it’s quite exciting to me that Daniel Jaye, a founder and CTO of Engage, has joined TACODA as its Executive Vice President, Product Management & Development. So much of what goes on in web 2.0 is refining and executing on ideas that were hatched in the first go round. It’s a great thing to see when someone who had the right idea but couldn’t get it to happen gets another chance. Welcome aboard Daniel.