Posts from January 2008

I am testing out the new Yahoo! music player that I swapped in for the delicious playtagger.

This song is called The Nun’s Litany. It’s on the new Magnetic Fields record, Distortion, that is due out this coming week. I love the Magnetic Fields and this song is terrific. It’s about a nun who secretly wants to be the opposite of what she is. Enjoy.

The Nun’s Litany – The Magnetic Fields – Distortion

So I am going to blog about something that happened a month ago. In the world of tech blogging, that’s like talking about ancient history. This won’t get on Techmeme because all the linking to Ian’s talk happened a month ago. But honestly I didn’t get around to reading Ian’s talk until the flight out to SF earlier this week.

I have never met Ian Rogers. That must change. He’s made the same mistakes I’ve made. He loves music as much as I do. He sees the path forward pretty much the same way that I do. And he enjoys skiing the cat on the backside of Aspen as much as I do.

Almost two years ago, I wrote a post called Abundance in which I argued that scarcity is not possible in digital media and abundance is the dimension you must play on if you want to succeed. In that post, I talked about how my friend Steve Greenberg was trying to break a band called The Jonas Brothers using embedded videos on MySpace. That tricked worked out pretty well and the Jonas Brothers are now a huge act for Disney.

Ian makes that same point in his Aspen talk.

Winners leverage scale. That’s right. There’s only one way I’ve ever seen to win big on the web and it’s to leverage scale. I honestly can’t think of a big Internet company built on the concept of scarcity. If you can, please leave it in the comments and I’ll try to get my head around a scarcity model.

Ian also talks about Umair’s snowball vs. blockbuster meme. This is really important. Elf Yourself may have been the web blockbuster of 2007. 31mm unique visitors in December alone. But would you rather be Elf Yourself or Addicting Games? You choose.

But possibly the most important point Ian made in his talk was about the lack of native audio (and video) support in the web. As Ian says:

While there’s an image tag in HTML, there isn’t an audio or a video tag

Flash makes this a but less of a problem. But Flash isn’t a standard. It’s a proprietary standard owned by Adobe. Just yesterday I heard of a major radio company that is standardizing on silverlight for its web music player. What are they thinking? We need audio and video to play anywhere and everywhere on the web no matter what device and operating system you are using. And it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen anytime soon.

So this past week Yahoo!, where Ian runs the music business (at least I think he does), introduced a browser based music player. As most of you know, I use the delicious playtagger to play mp3s on this blog. That uses flash and I think most everyone has flash and is able to use it. And since Yahoo! bought delicious, they own that tool too.

I’ll add the new Yahoo! music player code to this blog, replacing the delicious playtagger. Let me know what you think. I really love the simplicity and elegance of the delicious playtagger so if the new Yahoo! player isn’t univerally loved, I may well go back to the playtagger.

Google may be the Internet company with the most mojo, but they’ve never done anything interesting with music. Yahoo!, on the other hand, seems to be up to some really interesting stuff and Ian’s Aspen talk has me rooting for them.

A reporter sent me an email yesterday;

Fred, are you investing in seesmic?  We’ve been covering the company a lot.

First, no we are not investing in seesmic, at least not any time soon. Loic has plenty of money and fantastic investors. He doesn’t need money. He needs more users and he’s going to get a bunch more when I get to sending out all the invites you all have requested at some point this weekend

Second, I would never disclose that we are considering, making, or have made an investment on this blog or to a reporter until the company has announced it

I believe the venture business needs more transparency and have been pushing that envelope for the past four and a half years on this blog and elsewhere

But deals and dealmaking is a private matter and should remain so. So please understand that some things are off limits

I think some of you may have misinterpreted my post from this morning

I do intend to continue to blog about music on this blog and when I do I’ll certainly imbed a mp3 for those who like to sample the music

But I am posting an mp3 almost every day on tumblr. As do others like Bijan, Joelaz, Rach, and several others. Its become a great little music community that I enjoy being part of.

I’d link out to their tumblogs so you can check out their music too if you’d like. But I am posting this on my blackberry so I can’t

The good news is that a reader has hacked together a streampad style player that will aggregate all my tumblr mp3 posts and I will put it on the sidebar next to streampad

So this blog is not going silent. Sorry if I gave the wrong impression about that. Its just that I am music blogging elsewhere these days and I wanted you all to know that

All you music fans who are used to getting several mp3 posts a week may be wondering what’s going on.

I’ve moved most of my mp3 blogging to fredwilson.vc

I am looking for a way to bring those posts back to this blog (via RSS or a widget or something) but haven’t found the right solution yet.

So if you are looking for music from me, best to visit fredwilson.vc

I had the opportunity to spend some time with Loic Lemeur yesterday who is the founder of Seesmic. Many of you probably know or know of Loic. He’s the man behind the LeWeb event and is a well known blogger and twitter community member. Loic is building a new company called Seesmic which is esentially video chat in twitter style.

In spit of all that, I had never met Loic. I know it’s hard to imagine, but true. He works in the same building as my friend Mark so I stopped by yesterday and within seconds, we were setting up a Seesmic account for me and doing some video chatting. Here’s my first Seesmic post. My seesmic username is fredwilson so if you use seesmic, you can follow me.

In that first seesmic post, Loic offered to give seesmic accounts to any of my friends and followers and the requests have been coming through via email pretty fast and furious. I’ll get to all of them but probably not until I get back to NYC this weekend.

I haven’t talked much about HD Radio lately on this blog. Longtime readers know that I’ve been an investor in iBiquity, the developer of HD Radio technology for almost 10 years. It’s been a long time coming and a lesson in how hard it is to move an old medium into the digital age. But this year at CES, iBiquity showcased three things that I think are critical to consumer adoption of digital radio technology.

As the WSJ discusses in this article in today’s paper, iBiquity announced a big automotive deal with Ford, an iTunes relationship, and the coming availability of mobile and portable HD radio devices.

The reality is people don’t buy radios anymore. They buy cars, iPods, and mobile devices. When HD radio is in the car, or the iPod, or the phone, then consumers will be able to tap into the thousands of new free radio channels that have been launched using HD technology in the past couple years. And when they do that, they’ll see how great digital radio is.

At 8am this morning I am going to address the monthly breakfast group of CTOs here in NYC. I haven’t prepared any remarks and it’s time to spend a few minutes thinking about what to talk about. Might as well think out loud on this blog.

I am going to use the words CTO and VP Engineering interchangeably in
this post, I realize there’s a difference, particularly in large
companies, but in the world we live in, the CTO or VP Engineering is the person who manages the development/engineering team.

CTOs are among the most important people in the companies we back. Many of our portfolio companies don’t have CTOs when we invest and we often are involved in recruiting one to join our companies when they get large enough that the dev team needs a manager. My partner Albert (who was a CTO at one point in his career) wrote a good post called "Hiring A VP Engineering or CTO for Non-Techie Founders". That’s a good read, including the comments we got on that post.

The last point that Albert made in his post is if you find the killer VP Engineering but it’s going to cost you more than you want to spend (cash+equity) to get them on board, you should do it anyway. I totally agree. I have seen first hand the benefits that come from having a rock solid CTO in a company. And I have also seen the disaster that can result from not having that person on board.

First and foremost, I see the CTO as a manager. Great managers are hard to find in any line of work. But managing developers is even harder. The better the developer the harder they are to manage. I assume its a bit like managing high maintenance entertainers. The best developers are artists who are often moody, are anarchists who have bursts of creativity and equally long periods of uselessness. They are strong willed people who will fight with their colleagues over anything and everything. The people who have mastered the art of managing these kinds of people are a rare breed and every great technology-based business needs one of them.

I have found that for young companies a "player/manager" often works best. If you can find someone who is or has been a world class developer who also has the ability and more importantly desire to manage a team of at least ten developers, do it. That person, by virtue of their engineering talent and prowess, will be able to manage a small group effectively. And they can contribute to the development too which at crunch time is incredibly valuable.

As companies get bigger, you really need a full time manager. The best ones, like all things in startups, have done it several times before in high growth startups. As Albert said in his post, it’s not usually a great idea to hire a CTO from a super big company for a young growth company. Companies growing from 10 engineers to 50 engineers to 100 engineers over a 2-3 year period are a unique situation and you really need someone who has lived that situation a few times. Again, it’s incredibly hard to find a person like that.

I think being the CTO of a early stage growth tech company is a great job. There are several things going on in technology right now that make the work incredibly exciting. First and foremost, we are witnessing a new infrastructure for web apps getting built. We have open source infrastructure (the lamp stack) that is now a pretty mature and inexpensive and ideally scalable architecture to start with. Then we have new technologies like server virtualization that make many new things possible. And we have things like Amazon’s web services as a platform to build on. I suspect we’ll see something along the same lines from Google as well. So all these new tools, systems, services provide a new sandbox to innovate in. The CTOs job, among other things, is to work with the engineering team to make sense of all of this and figure out how to use it to make the business work best.

On top of that, we have the emergence of web apps as a platform in and of themselves. Each and every web app should have an api so that other web apps can be built on top of them. And most web apps should take advantage of the existing apis that are already out there so that they can build on top of other apps. This is a new world with lots of challenges and lots of opportunities. I see it as a natural evolution from the world of open source and reusable software. The web apps themselves are like pieces of code that others have written that can be used to extend a service. For example, when seesmic built their video dashboard service, they chose to use twitter as the notification system instead of building their own right away. Now they can eventually build that functionality directly or they can continue to rely on twitter for notification or they can do both. But it allows them to get to market more quickly and more importantly immediately reach a whole base of users that they don’t need to recruit themselves.

The best CTOs get that web apps need to be constructed so that they’ll get viral adoption. Technical decisions like the one seesmic made to use twitter as its notification system have huge implications for adoption and it may make sense to do something for adoption issues that makes the engineering or scaling job more difficult. Many of the old rules are going to have to go out of the window in this new world we are in.

We had a long discussion of using Amazon’s web services at our Portfolio CEO Summit in November. Many of our companies rightly want to be in control of their infrastructure so that they can respond to scaling issues directly. That’s certainly been conventional wisdom. How can you think about relying on a third party for your most basic infrastructure. But as one of the CEOs in the room said, why wouldn’t you want to run on the same infrastructure that Amazon runs on. It’s battle tested, scaled to a huge level already, and doesn’t go down very often. Think about that argument when Google gets into that business.

So I’ll end this long rambling post that has now given me my talking points for this morning with the following observation. If you are a world class CTO, our companies need you badly. And you need just as badly to be working for one of our companies (or at least a company in the sector we invest in). Because it’s such an exciting time with so many opportunities and so many challenges and so much money to be made too. I’ll see you all in a couple hours.

I know that I mostly irritate people when I write about politics. I frequently get comments from readers who say something like "how can you be such an idiot when it comes to politics?". To that I say that this blog is at some level about me. I am who I am. And I am not going to hide my politics. In fact, I’ve been totally open about them for as long as I’ve been blogging and that’s not going to stop just because my politics are incompatible with those of many of the people who read this blog. At worst, I’ll irritate you and you’ll stop reading this blog. But at best, we’ll have a conversation and I’ll learn something. One of the most frequent commenters on this blog, Steve Kane, almost always disagrees with me on politics. But his comments make me think hard about my beliefs. He hasn’t converted me to his beliefs, but he’s moved me a bit over the years.

Anyway enough justification for posts like this. The Gotham Gal and I (and Josh until he went to bed) watched the votes come in last night for almost four hours. We watched the pundits talk and talk and talk. Man was that annoying. But we also got to see speeches from Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, brief remarks from Rudy, and speeches from John Edwards, Barack Obama, and finally Hillary Clinton.

I am very happy with the way that New Hampshire voted. Of the republicans, John McCain is by far the best candidate. He’d make a fine president. I don’t agree with him on many positions, but I think he’d be a fine leader for this country. He’s certainly earned the right with his service of our country over the years and he’s got the experience to get the job done. I wish he’d be more vocal about campaign finance reform. He used to be so strong on that issue. Now you almost never hear about it from him. Oh well. He’s become more of a politician in the past eight years which is probably good for him.

But the big story for me is the democrat race. There you’ve got two incredible candidates in Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. I am certain that Hillary will make a fine president for our country. She’s spent her life working for this moment, she’s been in the white house, she’s advised her husand for thirty years, then has spent the past eight years building her on political career. What we finally saw in NH was the real Hillary, who spoke from the heart about why this means so much to her and why she’s given her entire life to this goal. People see Bill and Hillary as totally fake polticians who will do anything and say anything to get elected. Who are washington insiders and establishment politicians. All that is true at some level, but I for one am a big fan of both of them and I think Hillary is well prepared to be the first woman president of our country and I’d like to see her get there.

On the other hand, there’s Barack Obama, who is certainly among the most gifted democrat politicians of the past 50 years. I see so much Jack Kennedy in him (and no I did not know Jack Kennnedy, I was two years old when he was killed). He has the power to lead our country to a new place in the world and I don’t see that in any of the other candidates on either side of the aisle. I have my doubts about Barack’s ability to get anything done and worry that he’d be Jimmy Carter instead of Jack Kennedy, but given the option to vote for him in the Nov election, I’d pull the lever for sure. As Andrew Sullivan said in this piece in The Atlantic about Barack (which to me lays out the best argument for an Obama presidency):

Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution.

I look forward to the Ali-Frazier-esque heavyweight fight we are going to watch between these two. As should be the case, they are going to have to fight for the nomination now, from the northeast to the southwest, from conservative states to liberal states, and we’ll find out who has the mettle to go the distance, who is most electable, and who can make the best case to be the next president of the United States.

I say that because the republican field is a mess. None of the candidates look capable of pulling together the three wings of the party (religious right, national security, economic conservatism). McCain is probably best suited to the job, but he can’t and won’t rally the religious right to his cause. My gut says he’ll be the nominee and he’ll be like Dole in ’96. A good man, who would do a fine job in the White House, who will inspire few (his speech last night sucked), and who will not win.

The rest of the republican field is a bunch of flawed candidates who don’t have a shot.

My gut tells me its a democrat year in 2008, and we’ll have Obama or Hillary as our next president. So the next month is where its at and I for one will be watching closely.