Posts from 2007

For most of this week, I’ve been getting this message when I try to send a message from my phone to twitter:

Service is temporarily down. Please, try again later.

At first, I thought the problem was Twitter and I contacted the company. They told me the problem was with T-Mobile. The story hit the blogs this weekend and has been on techmeme today.

Twitter has a short post up on their blog explaining that they are working on it.

I sure hope they get it fixed soon because I send most of my twitter updates via my phone which explains why I’ve been a bit quiet this week on twitter.

I was looking up some information on The Funded on Alexa yesterday and came across a chart that showed Elf Yourself was on fire. So I did some comparisons to see exactly how much traffic Elf Yourself has.

If this Alexa chart is correct, then Elf Yourself is one of the top 100 Internet properties this month, close to Bebo and Answers.com in traffic. That is pretty amazing. Elf Yourself is essentially a holiday advertising campaign for Office Max.

Our portfolio company Oddcast did one of these avatar-based promotions called Monkey Mail for Career Builder. By the time Monkey Mail had run its course, something like 75 million people had engaged with a Monkey Mail. When these things catch fire, they work. Compare the cost of doing one of these flash based interactions versus the cost of a 30 second TV commercial. And then compare the cost of buying enough media to reach 75 million viewers vs putting up a viral website. Expect to see more of this kind of advertising in the future.

Here’s my Elf Yourself in case you want to see my avatar dancing in an elf suit. Too bad they don’t have embed code.

I was up early this morning (as usual) and got to watch Jason Calacanis go through the awful realization at the airport that he left his passport at his paris hotel. That was just the beginning of the drama. He twittered his plight. Called around. Got someone at his hotel to retrieve his passport and hire a motorcycle delivery man. But would the motorcycle get their in time?

Read Jason’s twitter feed to find out the details. That was fun. And it was cool to get the posts in real time as the drama was unfolding. I love the web.

I got a call from Adeo Ressi yesterday. I hadn’t talked to Adeo since he started The Funded so it was nice to hear from him. We talked a bit about The Funded and he was surprised that our firm Union Square Ventures hadn’t created a  "certified profile" on the The Funded. Honestly I didn’t know what one was. Now I do.

I’ve been watching The Funded since it started and have linked to it a number of times. I have a knee jerk reaction to like anything that makes the venture capital business more transparent. Rate your VC is certainly a step toward transparency.

But I am also troubled by sample bias. Last month, The Funded selected me as the number one VC. Come on. That cannot be true. I am flattered by it to some degree. But it bothers me. I didn’t see Mike Moritz on the list. I didn’t see any partners from Accel, Benchmark, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Matrix, Greylock, Venrock, etc, etc. What I saw was a list of really terrific VCs, some of whom will be the superstars of VC someday.

I am also troubled by the list of top firms (that’s the list on the right). We are on that list. Again, I am flattered. But let’s step back and look at that list. There isn’t one brand name venture capital firm on that list. There are several that we invest with regularly and that I personally think are great firms, but there isn’t a limited partner in the world who would rate these eight firms as the best venture capital firms in the business.

And then let’s look at the number of votes that makes up each firm’s ranking.  The top two firms, Kepha and Mangrove, have 14 and 11 votes respectively. Our firm has 22. Is that enough votes to determine anything? What if I asked my entire portfolio to go vote at The Funded? We’d have 16 votes and they all be super high votes (at least I hope so).

And who exactly is voting and what do they know about these firms? Do any limited partners vote? They would be the best ones to vote on track record.

Do portfolio company CEOs vote? They would be the best ones to talk about  operating competence and execution assistance.

From looking at the comments, it seems that quite a few of the people using this site are entrepreneurs looking for money. It’s good to hear from them. If we are doing a bad job responding to opportunities that come in, if we are being obnoxious (as someone recently called me), then we need to hear that.

But if The Funded is going to be a resource we can rely on, it needs to have a much bigger sample size, it needs to be fairly balanced, and it needs to have some relationship to what we all know to be the truth. I have this gut instinct that it isn’t there yet.

So it begs the question, does The Funded have any traffic? Here’s an Alexa chart comparing The Funded to this blog.

I am very proud of this blog and work on it to make it the best it can be. But the truth is that it only has about 100,000 monthly uniques and about 150,000 page views per month. According to Alexa, The Funded has a third to half of that. And we have no idea how many of those monthly uniques take the time to vote, but using standard ratios, it’s certainly less than 10% of them and probably close to 1% of them.

So what to make of The Funded? Well its a good idea to bring some transparency to the VC business. But I am not sure The Funded is bringing transparency just yet. It’s bringing opinion but that opinion may not be a valid opinion. Yahoo stock message boards bring opinion to the world of stock investing. But does anyone rely on them? I sure hope not. The Funded is way better than Yahoo stock message boards, but it suffers from some of the same problems.

Here’s what Adeo needs to do to fix them

1) Have two tiers of voters. Certified and regular. Certified voters are people with real knowledge of the venture capital business. Included in that group would be long time limited partners in the venture capital business, entrepreneurs who have started three or more companies, all of which have been venture backed, and VC’s themselves. Get the certified voters to vote actively and regularly and weight their votes higher than regular voters.

2) Categorize the commenters. If someone has been funded by XYZ Ventures and they slam them, that’s more meaningful than someone slamming XYZ Ventures because they didn’t like the way they behaved in a pitch meeting. Make it easy for an entrepreneur to filter the comments  in any way they want to.

3) Get a lot more traffic and a lot more comments and a lot more votes. I think a firm should have to have at least 100 votes, with a significant number of them coming from portfolio company CEOs and limited partners, to be able to be on the list. The Funded needs to work hard to get more people who actually know something about the venture business to participate on the site.

I hope The Funded can become a reliable resource for entrepreneurs. Last week, one of our portfolio companies who is going out for a second round of funding, sent me an email about one of the VC firms he is talking to. He said, "they have a strong rating on The Funded". I replied, "so what". I hope that someday soon, I can say something different.

We saw a Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde performance from one of my rock gods last night. Neil Young walked out and sat down alone in the middle of these guitars last night and did a one hour acoustic set. He started with Hank To Hendrix and ended with Heart Of Gold. The highlight for me was when he grabbed his banjo and did Mellow My Mind. Thanks Neil, I needed that.

Then after a 20 minute intermission, he came back with his black Les Paul strapped on and unleashed a torrent of rock and roll that is still ringing in my ears.

The finish was a 10+ minute version of Hurricane that proved to me that Neil has lost nothing. I was blown away.

Here’s a photo I took of Neil wailing away during one of about five solos during Hurricane. It’s something to see a 60 year old rocker go at it like that.

Buy handmade. And take the "buy handmade" pledge while you are at it.

My Generation – The Who

So just as I was settling into the notion of supporting Hillary, I get this link in a comment from Michael Beckner on my Scar Tissue post. It’s Andrew Sullivan’s piece on Hillary vs Obama (and boomers vs my generation) in this month’s Atlantic Monthly.

I was born in 1961, 16 days after Barack, at the hospital at the US Military Academy at West Point. I lived through the vietnam era (my dad was there for a year in ’68/’69) but I am not defined by it. I do not consider myself a baby boomer although technically I suppose I am on the bubble.

Andrew eloquently argues that the US has been trapped in baby boomer politics since the vietnam war and it’s ossifying our country and forcing decisions around dimensions that are increasingly irrelevant. This is the single best argument for an Obama presidency that I have read, including a face to face meeting with the man himself several months ago.

It’s got me thinking again about Obama. Good thing I don’t have to go to the polls today. Look for my favorite quotes from the piece on fredwilson.vc a bit later this morning.

It’s been a rough couple of days. We lost our dog Lucky which The Gotham Gal details in this wonderful post.

So I am in need of some release and tonight’s the night for it because Jay, Jackson, Rod, and I are going to go uptown to see Neil Young who is going to play one of my all time favorite Neil songs if the set lists are  any guide. Here’s a great version from 1976. I love when he plays the banjo like a bass. What a genius he is.

The auction of my brand new 1.1.2 firmware iPhone on this blog worked. I didn’t set the rules particularly well, but you all got the gist of what needed to happen.

I know that Edgeio is now dead, but I still believe in the power of the blog to be a commerce platform. It’s all about audience. If you have the right one, you can sell stuff. I sold the iPhone and four tickets to the Neil Young show yesterday. Pretty cool. I don’t plan on turning AVC into eBay, but I like to use this blog to try stuff out from time to time and yesterday was a good day for selling stuff.

So here’s the deal on the iPhone. It’s going to flynch for $375 plus shipping. He bid $399 but that was after the midnight cutoff, so I am accepting the $375 offer. If flynch flakes out and doesn’t come through then I’ll go with the next best offer.  I’d like flynch to send me an email today (email is on the left sidebar) and we can work out the details.

There was a higher bid from Gilbert. It involved making a $251 gift to the charity of his choice and reading his pitch. Gilbert, send me your pitch. I’ll read it and if I like it, I’ll give $251 to the charity of your choice.

But flynch is getting the iPhone. For his wife.  For Christmas. I love turning lemons into lemonade.