Posts from May 2007

I’ve had a Facebook profile since early last year, but I don’t use it very much. That’s slowly changing as my network grows and there is more stuff I can do there. I am hopeful that I’ll be using it a lot more soon because Facebook is now an open platform. I spent about a half hour this morning adding some of my favorite apps to Facebook and now I have Twitter, last.fm, and MOG on my profile.

I had a few more, including iLike (which is apparently the most popular new application on Facebook right now). But I took iLike off my profile because it didn’t do anything for me. I couldn’t see the songs I’ve been listening to, my friends, or any of the things on iLike that I find useful.

I got last.fm on my profile thanks to my friend Jeff Jarvis‘ son Jake who built a last.fm application for Facebook. I found out about that on Techcrunch last night. Now this totally rocks because it shows how open this whole open Facebook ecosystem is. A young guy (I think Jake’s the same age as my daughter Jessica) who has nothing to do with Facebook and last.fm other than being a user of these two services built a last.fm widget that I can use for my Facebook profile. Thanks Jake!!

Take a look at the middle part of my Facebook profile:

You are starting to see hints of this blog emerging on my Facebook profile. There are my most recent posts showing up as notes. You can see my Twitter message, and two cool music widgets, last.fm and MOG. Interestingly, MOG and last.fm disagree about what I’ve been listening to most recently. I gotta figure out why.

I’ve got two thoughts on this whole thing.

The first is I like the way Facebook has chosen to open up. It’s more like the way Firefox allows extensions and less like the way MySpace and others allow embedded code. I’ve got nothing against the MySpace approach. That’s what I use on my blog as well and embed code has moved the web forward in amazing fashion. But an open API is possibly going to be more powerful for some apps than embed code. It will be interesting to watch how this all plays out, but I am betting Facebook’s gonna get some really cool apps very quickly with this approach.

The second is that I don’t yet see my social network at Facebook interacting much in these applications. Maybe I’ve chosen the wrong ones to install. My Facebok social net will be notified via the mini-feed that I’ve added these apps to my profile, but beyond that what happens?

Why can’t Twitter be more tightly integrated? Why can’t it power my status message so that all my friends on Facbook see when I change my status via Twitter.

Why can’t my Facebook friends engage with my last.fm and MOG widgets? Why can’t they favorite the songs they like and message me in Facebook about that?

I am sure that’s coming. Maybe some of the other Facebook apps already do stuff like that.

There’s a chance that someday, Facebook will be the preferred place to read this blog because of all the social apps that will be built around it. You can already read this blog at Facebook but few people, if any, do that currently.

Mark Zuckerberg says he wants Facebook to be the social operating system of the web. That’s a grand ambition. But I like it. Because its something Google isn’t and is never going to be (unless they buy Facebook). At this point, nobody is closer to that vision than Facebook and by opening the system up this past week, Mark has taken a big step forward and is moving closer to that vision for sure. Well done.

The Gotham Gal came home yesterday with a bunch of Hamptons Magazines in hand. One of them had a list of the top 10 real estate deals in NYC/Hamptons this year. Right near the top at number two was a picture of yours truly. The sale of our NY townhouse earlier this year still seems to be making news. We learned our lesson. We won’t be buying homes in our own names anymore.

But that’s not what bothers me. The short blurb was all about me, not a word about the Gotham Gal. If our life together was a venture partnership, Flatiron and Union Square Ventures would be my deals and the real estate would be hers. She’s the one who bought that house, fixed it up, and ultimately sold it. But just because she’s a woman and I am the "man of the house", I get the credit.

It’s not right. The world we live in is still way too sexist for my taste.

They make you take a test to get a learner’s permit in New York. I think they should make the parents take a test too.

I found myself in the passenger seat with my oldest daughter behind the wheel for the first time today and I realized that I had no idea what the right level of oversight was.

We were headed out to get coffee and muffins at Mary’s this morning and when we got there she was not parked exactly right. I grabbed the wheel from the passenger side and showed her how to get the car at the right angle. That wasn’t cool, she told me. She said I could tell her anything but grabbing the wheel was off limits.

I guess that’s a good rule until we are about to hit something or someone.

She drove three times today with me in the passenger seat. She did great. And I think I did pretty well too.

The Washington Post ran a story about email bankruptcy yesterday and featured my post declaring bankruptcy at the top of the story. The writer Mike Musgrove ended the story by noting that I did not return calls or emails requesting a comment. That’s true, but it’s not because I didn’t see the emails and phone calls. Email and voice communications for me is a triage. For every call and email that I return/reply, there are probably two or three that I don’t. I had to make a decision about whether talking to Mike and his colleagues Sabrina Valle and Richard Drezen was more important than all the other incoming calls and emails. I didn’t particularly want to be associated with this story and so I decided not to get back to them. I got into the story anyway.

And as a result, I got to see a guy named David Farber, who runs an email list called Interesting People, say in the same piece that if I can’t manage my email load, I should "get out of the technology field."

That pisses me off. I am a hypercommunicator. I send and receive hundreds of emails a day, I blog incessantly, I instant message, text message, and twitter all the time, I do calls on my office phone, cell phone, and home phone all day and night. I bet I communicate at 10x the rate that David does. It’s exhausting frankly.

My problem isn’t that I don’t spend the time it takes to reply to every email. My problem is my incessant emailing, blogging, texting, twittering, etc allows me to touch thousands of people every day. And many/most of them write back. And I do my best. Which is not good enough. At least for David Farber.

Guess what. I am not quitting. My job. Or my hypercommunicating.

Ever since reading about OmStrip on Paul Kedrosky’s blog, I’ve been wondering if Howard’s ultimate gift to the web is the suffix "strip". With that thought out of my head thankfully, here is FeedStrip, the latest acquisition craze mashup.

Comment spam is an ongoing problem for most bloggers. I’ve had my struggles with it over the years, but I’ve largely got it under control.

My biggest kind of comment spam these days comes in asian characters that I don’t understand. I don’t want to be a jerk and delete all comments in a language that I don’t understand, but I also have a strong suspicion that this is spam.

I have found that 90%+ of all comment spam is on posts that are 90 days or older. These old posts have serious google juice and are great honeypots of traffic (and spam). So when I see stuff like this on old posts in a language I don’t understand, I generally delete it.

It’s a tricky problem for sure.

I haven’t had so much fun blogging in a long time. But it’s not the stuff that’s on the main page that’s so fun. It’s the microblogging I am doing with Twitter that’s fun. Because it’s new, different, fast, easy.

There’s something about a 140 character limit that I can’t entirely explain. But if I didn’t hold back, I’d be twittering ten times a day. I realize that would be annoying so I try to keep it to 2-3 per day.

Today, I found something neat, via Twitter of course. I am not sure this is the real Steven Wright, but if it’s fake steven wright, that’s cool too. His latest Twitter cracked me up:

When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, "Did you sleep good?" I said "No, I made a few mistakes."

That’s certainly the way I felt about my last night’s sleep too.

I think doing humor in 140 characters or less is a great idea. I hope this guy whoever it is keeps it up.

Seeing SmartLinks on Seth’s Blog.

For any of you who don’t read Seth’s Blog, it’s the best.

It’s what inspired me to blog.

For more on SmartLinks:

A VC: SmartLinking

BlueBlog – Alex’s Post On Smart Links

That book widget on Seth’s blog used to just point to Seth’s books on Amazon.

Now it points to Seth’s books all over the web.

That’s a win for Seth, a win for his readers, and a win for SmartLinks.

Made my day.

Emily and I were at the theater last night watching Spring Awakening (just so so, not recommending it). The lead actress was being dragged by her mom to some shady doctor who would "fix her baby problem" and ultimately kill her in the process. And I am thinking, "why do women get such a raw deal in this world".

Maybe that was a freudian reaction to reading this comment on one of my Age Question posts during intermission:

I am a first time entrepreneur, I am a mother in my 40s and I have four
children. My business partner, whom I have known and worked with for 20
years is also a mother in her 40s. We are as young, and new and open to
ideas as anyone, without ANYTHING holding us back. We came to be
“founding mothers” of our internet company after years of a combination
of high level corporate America and the motherhood place of infinite
possibility where we are now. I feel like my business partner and I
operate on an exciting, healthy, smart, fresh slate. There is nothing
that will get in our way, except, maybe – from what it sounds like –
the fact that we aren’t guys in our 20s and everyone thinks we should
be.

That hit me hard. I’ve been talking about age a lot in the past couple weeks and this woman’s reading sex into my posts. And why not? Every founder in our portfolio is a man. That was pretty much the case with the Flatiron portfolio too (although I think there may have been one or two women founders in that one).

Here’s my feeling on this one. Age may be a factor in the trajectory of an entrepreneur’s business. I think, after posting, thinking, and reading on this topic for the past week, that young entrepreneurs may have a higher likliehood of home runs and older entrepreneurs have a higher batting average. It makes sense when you think about it.

But sex has nothing to do with how good an entrepreneur is, what kind of entrepreneur they’ll be, and whether they’ll get funded. The sad fact is that less than 5% of all entrepreneurs who walk in our door are women. With the kind of numbers we operate on, that’s going to lead to very few getting funded. We’d have to do at least 20 deals, on average, to generate on funded woman entrepreneur.

I don’t know exactly why that is. But it was the same with my class at MIT. Women were the minority at MIT in 1979 when I showed up on campus. But they were far more than 5% and I’ve heard they are close to 50% of the class now.

So it can’t just be a technology thing. It certainly also has to do with the life decisions women are forced to make. Stop working and raise a family versus give it all to the career and find another way to raise a family, or possibly don’t raise a family at all. These are agonizing choices and I’ve watched the Gotham Gal go through them, a number of times. She’s going through this family and lifestyle versus career thing again right now. I think it’s just one of many burdens a woman must bear. It’s frankly a lot easier to be a man in the business world.

But that doesn’t mean that women can’t be great entrepreneurs. I can think of quite a few that have been. But there should be more. I’d like to fund a woman before we get to twenty companies and are done with this fund. But we are not going to compromise anything to achieve that. We are capitalists and we invest in the very best opportunities we can find. Let’s hope one of them has a woman behind it before too long.