Posts from May 2007

  East River Park 
  Originally uploaded by fredwilson.

I was riding in the east river park this morning and came across this scene which struck me as evidence of urban renewal and the challenges it presents.

A beautiful green baseball and soccer field looking out over the east river. What a nice gift from the parks department.

In the background is the shuttered Domino Sugar Refinery which was built by the Havemeyer family in 1880. It operated consistently until it was shut in 2004. When the refinery was built, New York refined over 60 percent of the nation’s sugar. How times change.

According to Curbed, the Domino site is the subject of a landmark fight between the preservationists on one side and the developers on the other. Nothing new there. That’s life in NYC in the early 21st century.

Although these fights can get contentious and nasty, I think New York is doing a decent job at balancing the competing interests. We need new parks, ballfields, and other improvements to a decaying infrastructure. But we also need to maintain images that define New York. And I think this is one of them.

I wrote a post about the recent ad network/ad infrastructure deals called 10x revenues several weeks ago.

Since then we’ve seen AQNT trade to MSFT (this morning) for $6bn which is 10x revenues.

But TFSM only got 3x revenues from WPP.

It’s interesting that market leaders like DLCK, Right Media, and AQNT get 10x revenues but second fiddles like TFSM get 3x. That shows the power of market leadership for sure.

Here’s the Microsoft release announcing the aQuantive deal.

Someone who reads this blog suggested to NY Magazine that they let me be a music critic. They bit and so did I. The punishment was having to listen to Hillary Duff and Avril Lavigne twice each. Hillary was so bad she didn’t even make the final cut.

Here’s my proverbial 15 minutes as a music critic. I am sorry that you have to page load five times to see the whole thing.

Jimmy Wales on Wallstrip says that making Wikipedia a non-profit was either the smartest thing he’s done or the dumbest and admits that if it were a for profit business it would be "worth billions".

This is worth the three minutes it will take to watch and do stay for the outtake at the end (my favorite part of Wallstrip).

I’ve been meaning to check out Slide. It’s been a while since I’ve played around with it. And I’ve been seeing big numbers for their photo widgets and I want to understand why.

I finally uploaded some of my Pebble Beach photos to Flickr (I was there for a couple days early last week).

And there was one sequence that was just dying to be turned into a slide show. On the 10th hole (the last of the water holes heading out to Carmel), I overclubbed and ended up with this ridiculous lie in between the back bunker and the fescue.

Here’s what ensued (~thirty seconds long).

For those not intimately familiar with life in a bunker, that last shot was the next shot I had to hit after the first shot went about four feet.

I walked into a minefield a couple weeks ago when I posted about the age of the entrepreneurs we’ve been backing. That wasn’t really the point of the post. I’d been thinking about my entrepreneur friends who are my age and have accumulated a lot of wealth in the past decade and what motivates them these days.

But the age question was the thing that got everyone’s attention. I mentioned that we have tended to back young entrepreneurs in their 30s and even in their 20s.

Well now Valleywag’s got a follow-up post (yup, they are drafting on me so I’ll gank an image from them), saying that mid 20s is the best time to start a company if you want to hit a home run.

It’s a sobering data set. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Google guys, Yahoos, Paypal, eBay, Skype. All founded in part or in whole by entrepreneurs in their 20s.

I don’t totally buy that age matters. I think, as I said in my original post, that age is a mind set.

But just last week I met with the son of one of the best entrepreneurs I’ve ever backed. The son is 20, and a junior in college. And he’s busting at the seams to go build something big and disruptive. Andrew pointed out to us in that meeting that most of the best and brightest kids he knew at Stanford were gone from school by senior year. The pull of the big idea was just too much.

Let’s recall that the Stones had made all of their great records (other than Some Girls) by the time they were 30. I have heard that the great scientific discoveries are almost always made by the time the person is in his/her 30s. Of course, there are exceptions to this pattern and painters certainly seem to get better with age as do many authors.

So I don’t know if youth is an advantage in the tech/startup world, but it certainly isn’t a disadvantage. And I see our job as being able to work with young entrepreneurs in a way that allows them to be their best while helping them where they need it. It’s something we are working very hard on perfecting.

The other thing you can take from that list from Valleywag is that many of those founders were at their companies for quite a while. Many still are. Most of the others stayed through the exit. Pushing founders out of their companies is something that is done way too often in our business. We need to figure out how to build companies around the founders, particularly these younger founders who might lack experience but have something even more valuable, a talent for building things that work incredibly well online.

So let’s celebrate youthful enthusiasm and the blind ambition that powers many of these companies. Figure out how to harness it and work with it. The results speak for themselves.

Whenever I want to buy something, I go to the Amazon search field in my Firefox browser and look there first. Why? Because I like the experience of buying on Amazon. We’ve been buying from Amazon for over ten years and it’s almost always been a great experience. It seems like there’s a box arriving from Amazon in our house almost every day.

Today I love Amazon even more because they are launching a digital music store that will ONLY contain DRM free mp3s. I already buy most of my music from Amazon in CD form. I’d rather buy it in DRM free mp3 form, but until now, I haven’t had that option. Now I do. Thanks Amazon. You made my day.

In my avatar audio this morning I suggested that people leave me comments (second button from the left on the avatar player). I got three comments so far and they all cracked me up. I figure I ought to extend the invitation to those who aren’t likely to hit the play button on the avatar.

Standing outside of Hammerstein Ballroom at 10 30pm on a muggy spring night in NYC watching about a dozen tanked brits chant football cheers.

  Arctic Monkeys At Hammerstein 
  Originally uploaded by fredwilson.

That’s what the Arctic Monkeys fan base is all about. Singing out loud at the top of their lungs, they know every word, and these are their boys.

And mine too. The Arctic Monkeys are high octane rock and roll. Somewhere between The Kinks, The Clash, and The Stooges.  But with something all their very own. That thumping bass line and the twin guitars driving every song.

The Gotham Gal says their songs sound the same to her. I suppose, but not if you’ve listened a hundred times to each of their songs in the past year.

Rocks’ not dead. It’s alive and well in Sheffield England in NYC tonight. And I for one am glad to have witnessed it (and the drunk lads too).