Posts from May 2007

CBS announced today that they are purchasing Wallstrip.

Here’s the story as I see it. Howard Lindzon is a scrappy investor and sometimes entrepreneur from Phoenix, Arizona. He got hip to blogging several years ago and started networking around via blogs. He’s as good at that as anyone I know. He connected to me via blogs and we’ve become fast friends. Howard started watching videoblogs and figured there ought to be one about stocks.

But instead of just thinking about it, he did something. He got on a plane, came to NYC, hired a couple of awesome video producers named Adam and Jeff (aka Bright Red Pictures), they hired a wonderful host named Lindsay, and Howard also roped me and a bunch of other bloggers into helping him fund the show. He set out to make a funny short video about Wall Street five days a week for less than $1000 per show.  Adam and Jeff figured out how to do that and they’ve been online every work day since October 16th of last year.

Along the way Howard, Adam, Jeff, Lindsay, and a few other brave souls they hired figured out a bunch of stuff that is key to a successful web video show. Like how to get the show on every video service quickly and easily. How to tag and promote the show on each and every service so it actually gets seen. How to measure and track all the views. How to reconcile all the different measurements you get. How to get subscribers in iTunes, FeedBurner, and YouTube. How to make a web site that communicates what the show is quickly and easily. How to do advertising in a way that doesn’t get in the way of the viewer. How to get the show indexed by ticker in the major finance portals. And most of all, how to keep it short, fun, and funny.

So many of the comments on the rumor last week were about the show itself. It was good, it was bad, it was funny, it was silly, or whatever else.

But here’s the thing. It’s not entirely about the content on the web. Sure it has to be good enough to attract an audience. But right now, its about way more than the content. Just figuring out how to make a show on a cost basis that can make a profit is hard. How to do it every day is even harder. And figuring out all the other stuff that I listed above is critical. Not many people have figured all that out. But if you don’t know how to do all that stuff, you can’t build a business in web video.

Howard, Jeff, Adam, Lindsay, and their small team figured most of that stuff out. And they’ve been rewarded with a nice payday for nine months of work. But more importantly, they are going to be doing way more than Wallstrip for CBS. They are part of CBS’s new internet strategy that recognizes you can’t just make content and expect the audience to find it. You’ve got to get it where the audience is.

That’s what Howard did best with Wallstip. And that’s why CBS wants Wallstrip on it’s team.

I really enjoyed this short run. It was profitable too. And that’s always a good thing in venture deals. But more than anything, I got some amazing lessons from this one. And I expect they’ll pay even bigger dividends in the coming years. Thanks Howard, Adam, Jeff, Lindsay and the rest of the Wallstrip gang. It sure was fun.

The Wall Street Journal says that a concert series is planned for the Hamptons this summer called Social that will have five shows; Tom Petty, Billy Joel, Dave Matthews, Prince, and James Taylor. You can’t go to each show individually, you have to go to all five shows. And one seat for all five shows is $15,000. So the Gotham Gal and I would have to lay out $30,000 to do this. Not happening.

I think we are basically the target market for this. We love to go see live music. We’ can afford the nutty ticket price. We’ve got a house on the east end and are there most every weekend in the summer.

But this is so far from what I’d ever associate myself with. It makes me sick. First the price. It’s outrageous. Gatsby all over again.

And the acts? Prince is cool. I’d see DMB too. And Tom Petty is basically a rock god. But Billy Joel and James Taylor haven’t done anything good in decades.

How about The Shins, Decemberists, Wilco, Josh Rouse, and Lucinda Williams the last three weekends in July and the first two weekends in August at Maidstone park for $500 total. Now that’s a killer idea.

Social is silly. But I bet it works. It’s the Hamptoons after all.

Here’s the follow-up I promised in my post on this subject last week.

Fathead says that Kings Of Leon is playing a free show for 300 at the Apple Store in Soho on June 8th. Oh yeah.

Now who’s gonna sleep on the streets of Soho the night of June 7th to get me into that show?

Arizona – Kings Of Leon – Because Of The Times

Get The Record Now

My partner Brad Burnham posted on the union square ventures weblog about the editorial process on the web, where the work happens after the publish button is pushed, not before it.

Interesting insights and the comments are great.

I think Facebook is the most interesting company in Silicon Valley right now, more interesting than Google.

That’s because they are still young and innovating on a single dimension and doing it better than anyone.

All you have to is watch how they roll out new features to see that they have impeccable taste in technology and execute it beautifully.

They watch what others do and then do it better, taking advantage of the very real social network that’s at the heart of Facebook.

Sure MySpace and Beebo have social nets too. But based on my observation of my kids and increasingly my own habits, Facebook is the kind of service, like Google, that you build your web around.

Of course every single web service I know of would like to tap into that network. Build widgets that run on Facebook like the ones that run on MySpace and Beebo and elsewhere.

But Facebook hasn’t been keen to that model. And according to today’s WSJ, Facebook is going to open in a different way.

Instead of the wild west model that exists elsewhere in the social net world, companies that want to play in Facebook’s sandbox will be offered the opportunity to build services in Facebook but in a way that works for Facebook.

That’s not entirely an open model and may not be what third parties would ideally like. But its better than what exists today and it’s big news.

We’ll be watching this development closely as will our portfolio companies.

I’ve been using Quicken since April 7, 1988. I know that because Quicken sits open 24/7 on a windows desktop in my office and I just checked to see the date of the first transaction. I remember that time well. It was the spring of 1988 and the Gotham Gal and I had gotten married after living together for five years and had just purchased our first home, a one bedroom apartment. It was time to get serious about money and at that time (the mid 80s), getting serious about money meant Quicken.

Quicken’s taken us a long way, from two kids who had to borrow money from our parents to come up with the down payment for that apartment to two middle aged adults with three kids and the financial freedom to do what we want. The financial controls we put in place and managed with Quicken got us through some tough spots when we had no money and at ton of expenses.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the age question, particularly in light of Clay Shirkey’s post where he said, "In the last 15 years or so, I’ve had to unlearn every one of those things and a million others". I am a child of the desktop software era, not the web era. I grew up playing with Radio Shack, Apple, and IBM desktop computers. That took me to MIT and on to the VC business. The Googles of my generation are Microsoft and Apple.

But I know one thing, the web changes everything. It’s a better platform. And so we are moving on from Quicken. To a service called Wesabe. The Gotham Gal blogged about it earlier this month and I’ve been meaning to do the same ever since. Wesabe is a web based financial management service. It allows you to upload all the accounts you transact in (checking account, credit cards, etc) and manage your spending on the web. There are other services like Wesabe and more are coming, but right now Wesabe is the best fit for our needs.

Wesabe is a social tag-based web app and in that statement lie to the two reasons I think its vastly superior to Quicken.

Wesabe is social meaning that it’s not an island of information sitting on my home desktop computer. I certainly don’t want others seeing my personal financial information and Wesabe is obsessed with data security, maybe a tad too much for my taste. But it is still a social app. When it sees that I am spending $100 per month at Astor Wines, it makes the connection to others who frequent the same wine store so we can connect and talk about what we like and don’t like and possibly find other places to buy wine in the neighborhood.

Wesabe uses tags to categorize information. Most accounting services use the standard hierarchical accounting conventions that every transaction has to be placed in a single category. The dinner we had on vacation with my brother in law has to be placed in either dining or vacation, or possible the dining subcategory of vacation. In Wesabe, you just tag it with as many categories as you want, dining and vacation for sure, and maybe also my brother in law’s name and sushi and fantastic to boot. You never know when you are going to need that info. It’s a fundamentally different way of organizing data and once you’ve gotten used to tagging instead of foldering, you can’t really go back.

Here are some screen shots that show what I am talking about. These are a few transactions from my American Express account.

You’ll see that each of them has multiple tags. I use the tag FB to symbolize my personal budget. The Gotham Gal and I have managed our discretionary spending since the early days of our lives together with two budgets, hers and mine. Each have a monthly number attached to them. Beyond staying in budget, we manage our discretionary money the way we choose without recrimination from the other side. It works like a charm and I recommend it to everyone. But you’ll also see that the transactions have other tags. While Emusic goes into my budget, it’s also a music expenditure and a monthly subscription. You’ll also note the tips. When Wesabe sees others who use the same vendor, they generate user tips. They can be really helpful.

Here’s some more detail on the Emusic vendor.

This showcases the social side of Wesabe. You can see that Wesabe knows a lot about Emusic and is sharing that with me. I love that and hope they do more with this aspect of the service over time.

We are using Wesabe and Quicken in parallel right now. Old habits die hard. But I can feel it already. Quicken’s toast. It’s just a matter of time before we pull the plug on that windows machine in my office and don’t replace it. The web’s a better platform for everything, managing your personal finances included.

I can’t stop listening to this record. How did I not find this when it came out a year or so ago? I guess my social music discovery system is not failsafe. I’ll have to plug the holes.

But regardless, I wake up with these songs in my head and just want to listen some more. It reminds me of Exile because its raw, raunchy, based in american roots music, and it rocks.

I want to find two reasonably priced copies of the clear vinyl version of this record so I can send them to Jackson and Tony Alva and prove them rock is not dead.

Here’s a taste of the record. If you like what you hear, go get the whole shebang. It’s awesome.

Soft – Kings Of Leon – Aha Shake Heartbreak

Day Old Blues – Kings Of Leon – Aha Shake Heartbreak

This conversation has legs (it even made the NY Times yesterday) and the latest post weighing in on it comes from Clay Shirky.

Clay says my first post was correct and my hedge in the second post was a "kind lie".

This is a classic Clay Shirky post, full of academic explanations combined with real world examples. But I still don’t totally buy the argument that age/experience is a disadvantage for startups at the cusp of new technology.

I grew up getting my entertainment from the TV and my music from a turntable. And yet I’ve adopted the web as a native user and I think my instincts about where video and audio on the web are headed have been pretty accurate.

I don’t think it’s totally about age, it’s about a mindset. If you are willing to throw out old habits and start anew, you can compete with anyone. But Clay is right that you have to unlearn a lot of things in order to do that.