Posts from January 2008

I mentioned in my thoughts from the eliptical trainer post yesterday that I don’t like my iPod Touch. Several commenters asked why. Here’s why:

1) It’s 16gb. My former iPod was 60gb and you can now get 160gb iPod classic for $349 whereas the 16gb iPod Touch is $399.

2) My iTunes library is around 50gb. So when I synch the iPod Touch, I have to synch a single playlist. When I find new music, rip CDs, buy music on Amazon MP3, etc, I often forget to add it to my iPod Touch synch playlist. So I walk out the door and the music I want isn’t on it.

2) The user interface is completely different than iPod classic. It mirrors the iPhone music interface. Which I hate. Sometimes I get stuck in the screen listening to a song and can’t figure out how to get out. The buttons across the bottom for artists, songs, albums are so small that I often select the wrong one.  It took me days to figure out that you had to click on the screen a second time to see how much time was left on the song or change the setting from shuffle to regular play. And those shuffle buttons are so small it takes me forever to change them. The audio volume slider is not granular enough so I am always fussing with it for 15 or 20 seconds to get it right and I often blow out my ears as I make that selection.

3) I never use the wifi or browswer on it because I have a wifi blackberry curve and that is so much more useful because it has email, sms and google maps on it. I know that for a $20 upgrade you can put additional apps on your iPod Touch, but I don’t really care to do that anyway.

4) I find it hard to pause the music and lock the screen. I’ve been in meetings when my iPod Touch started playing through the earbuds because I leaned on it through my jacket.

The bottom line is that the iPod Touch suffers from not being a very good iPod and not being a iPhone. If you want an iPhone, get one. If you want an iPod, get an iPod Classic.

1) Wall street is in fear mode while silicon valley is still is greed mode. Can the two coexist peacefully?

2a) I have to get tickets to the magnetic fields sold out show at town hall on feb 24th. If you’ve got xtras, send me an email please

2b) The new magnetic fields record, distortion, is awesome

3) The ipod touch is a shitty product. Gotta get back to a real ipod not a toy

4) I am not sure the other social nets efforts to be a platform ala facebook will work. I tried bebo’s new platform and was underwhelmed with the integration of third party apps. I can’t even imagine what myspace platform would be like

5) If you have a web app that gets millions of uniques a month with 80pcnt plus from google and an avg time spent on site of less than 1 minute, do you have an audience? I think not. It might be a business though.

6) I hope mysql’s sale for 1bn puts an end to the question over whether open source is a good business model

7) Why am I not twittering these?

8) That workout was too short

This was the recurring theme in my day yesterday. It hit me as we were in bed last night watching the democrats debate in Nevada. The question was about strengths and weaknesses. Barack Obama volunterred that he wasn’t much of an operator and that his staff knew to give him the piece of paper at the last possible moment so he didn’t lose it. Apparently his desk looks like mine. Hillary on the other hand painted herself as the consummate executive. In command of every detail.

The Gotham Gal turned to me and said, "see he couldn’t run a candy store". Gotham (as Howard fondly calls my wife) is solidly in Hillary’s camp. I find myself torn. The visionary leader versus the consummate executive.

Obama argues that he can hire operating executives but you can’t hire visionary leaders. If my world is any measure, he’s dead right about that. Most of the people who come knocking on our door are visionary leaders and they are rarely consummate executives.

I am not going to get into why this was the theme of my day yesterday because it would mean diving into things which should remain private. But I can talk about a conversation I had with my former partner Jerry Colonna last week.

Jerry has always been incredibly insightful when it comes to people. He’s moved on from being a VC to being a life coach and if you are looking for a great one, send me an email and I’ll connect you with Jerry.

I was talking to Jerry about the classic visionary leader entrepreneur and the inevitable issues that arise inside the companies they lead. He pointed me to this excellent HBR article titled Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons.

For those of you not steeped in Freudian theory (count me in that group), there are three classic freudian personality types; narcissists, obsessives, and erotics. If self diagnosis is allowed, I am a narcissist. And so are the vast majority of the entrpereneurs we back. Narcissists are the visionary leader stereotype. Think Steve Jobs. Obsessives are the consummate executive. Think any top notch chief operating officer you know. And that’s just it. Steve Jobs is a famous person. Most top notch chief operating officers are not.

It turns out that there are  productive and destructive versions of all three personality types. What the visionary leader/narcissist needs at his or her side is a productive obsessive. Think Gates and Jon Shirley or Larry Ellison and Ray Lane.

But what happens when the leader is a productive obsessive? Well in my experience that’s fine if the company is operating in a relatively stable environment and the challenge at hand is largely related to heads down execution. But if you are operating in a dynamic environment when the risks are high, rapid decisions need to be made, and patience is not a virtue, find yourself a narcissist for the job and pair him or her with a productive obsessive.

So back to Barack versus Hillary. Could Hillary work for Barack? That would be one hell of a team. But it’s not likely. She’s done that job for one other president for not eight, but thirty years. And she’s most likely looking for the top job or nothing else. And I don’t blame her.

We announced another investment on the Union Square Ventures blog this morning. It’s called Zynga Game Network. The New York Times also has a story on Zynga this morning.

Zynga is the first investment we’ve made in a company that has no website (that will change today I think). To date, all of Zynga’s properties are social networking apps, specifically casual games that run on Facebook, Bebo, and Friendster. Zynga is the largest social gaming network and one of the largest app developers on all of Facebook.

I described our investment thesis in detail in the Union Square Ventures blog post. If you are interested in the logic behind this investment, go check out that post.

One of our companies is looking for an IT/Sys Admin in San Francisco. Either part time or full time would work.

Does anyone out there have any good recommendations?

Dave McClure has a post on Facebook’s potential business models. He lists three new ones that are not on Chris’s list or my list.

1) FeedSense

2) FeedSearch

3) FanPageApps

If you want to get the details of these three business models, please click thru to Dave’s post. I am getting paid a CPC from him (that’s a joke).

I am very bullish on feed-based business models. I think the news feed has emerged as the second most powerful attention aggregator after the search result page and I think it will become an incredibly valuable monetization vehicle if it is not abused.

Chris Anderson of "Long Tail" fame has a blog post up where he quotes me (thanks Chris) and then submits a list of various web media business models and asks for other ideas. Here’s his list so far:

• CPM ads ("cost per thousand views"; banner ads online and regular ads in print, TV and radio)
• CPC ads ("cost per click"; think Google ads)
• CPT ads ("cost per transaction"; you pay only if the customer brought to you from a media sites becomes a paying customer. Here’s an example.)
• Lead generation (you pay for qualified names of potential customers)
• Subscription revenues
• Affiliate revenues (think: Amazon Associates)
• Rental of subscriber lists
• Sale of information (selling data about users–aggregate/statistical or individual–to third parties)
• Licensing of brand (people pay to use a media brand as implied endorsement)
• Licensing of content (syndication)
• Getting the users to create something of value for free and applying any of the above to monetize it. (Like Digg or our own Reddit

• Upgraded service/content (ed: aka "freemium")
• Alternate output (pdf; print/print-on-demand; customized Shared Book style; etc.)
• Custom services/feeds
• Live events
• "Souvenirs"/"Merchandise"
• Co-branded spinoff

To that list, I’d add:

• Cost Per Install (popular with top Facebook apps who can help others get installs)
• E-commerce (selling stuff directly on your website)
• Sponsorships (ads of some sort that are sold based on time, not on the number of impressions)
• Listings (paying a time based amount to list something like a job or real estate on your website)
• Paid Inclusion (a form of CPC advertising where an advertiser pays to be included in a search result)
• Streaming Audio Advertising (like radio advertising delivered in the audio stream after a certain amount of audio content has been delivered)
• Streaming Video Advertising (like streaming audio but in video)
• API Fees (charging third parties to access your API)

I am certain there are at least dozens more, but I am off to the gym. I’d like to see us all compile as exhaustive a list as possible. So please leave your additional business model comments on either Chris’ post or this post, or write your own post and tag it in delicious with the world "webbusinessmodel". Thanks.

I hear that the hypemachine is working on something cool with year end top 10 lists. But it has to be a single post. So here is a single post of my top 10 (actually closer to 20) records of 2007 with an mp3 selection for each. This post shows off the awesomeness of the new Yahoo! player which I installed yesterday. If you click play next to any of these tracks you’ll launch a player that lets you listen to the entire list and you can fast forward through any you don’t like (but that’s not gonna happen!)

Number 1 – Because Of The Times – Kings Of Leon. Selected Track: Fans

Number 2 –  Hissing Fauna – Of Montreal. Selected Track: A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger

Number 3 – Night Falls Over Kortedala – Jens Lekman. Selected Track: Postcard To Nina

Number 4 – Favourite Worst Nightmare – Arctic Monkeys. Selected Track: Fluorescent Adolescent

Number 5 –  Panic Prevention – Jamie T. Selected Track: Operation

Number 6 –  Neon Bible – Arcade Fire. Selected Track: Antichrist Television Blues

Number 7 – The Magic Position – Patrick Wolf. Selected Track: The Magic Position

Number 8 –  Our Ill Wills – Shout Out Louds. Selected Track: Hard Rain

Number 9 – Challengers – New Pornographers. Selected Track: Myriad Harbour

Number 10 – Nux Vomica – The Veils. Selected Track: Night Thoughts Of A Tired Surgeon

Honorable Mention – The Broken String – Bishop Allen. Selected Track: Rain

Actually, there are a bunch more honorable mentions, but I got tired of cut and pasting. If you want to see the rest of my honorable mentions and the entire set of top 10 records posts, here’s the entire list.

I promised I’d send out the requested seesmic invites this weekend and I have just done that. If for some reason, you asked me for one and didn’t get it, please send me an email and I’ll fix that.