Posts from April 2008

A Lot Has Changed In A Century, But Not Everything

Randall Stross’ Digital Domain column in the NY Times is one of my favorite regular features of the Times. This week he tackles an issue near and dear to my heart: email overload.

For a brief period last year, I was the poster boy of email bankruptcy because the media picked up on this post and it percolated for a month or two, including landing in my parents home town paper. They got a chuckle out of seeing my name in their daily read.

Fortunately, the poster boys (at least for Randall) are now Mike Arrington and Mark Cuban. Based on the numbers that Randall cites for Mike and Mark’s incoming email, I can say that I do feel their pain, literally. I get that kind of volume too.

And let me tell you, there is only one workable solution that I’ve ever heard to deal with 1000 incoming emails a day that all want a reply. It’s turning your inbox over to an assistant or a group of assistants as Randall points out that Thomas Edison did:

This was the solution  Thomas Edison
used in pre-electronic times to handle a mismatch between 100,000-plus
unsolicited letters and a single human addressee. Not all
correspondents would receive a reply — a number were filed in what
Edison called his “nut file.” But most did get a written letter from
Edison’s office, prepared by men who were full-time secretaries. They
became skilled in creating the impression that Edison had taken a
personal interest in whatever topic had prompted the correspondent to
write.

I am not going to do that. I believe that if people wanted a note from my super nice assistant, they would send her the email not me.

I do forward many of the emails that come to me with new investment opportunities to Andrew who does a way better job than I do at replying to all of them. But even then, I don’t always get to every email so not everyone gets to Andrew.

20digilarge1
Randall talks quite a bit about HL Mencken who apparently answered every letter he received on the day he received it. I think a lot has changed in the century (or at least the half century) since HL was doing that.

First, the letters he was responding to were written once and sent. There was no write once, send many technology working it’s nasty effects on his inbox back then.

And the time delay between sending and recieving letters meant that letter writing was saved for things that were not urgent. We have the opposite effect at work now. Urgent emails are missed because of all the email that is not urgent and may not even be relevant.

And of course, I don’t do email with a cigar in my mouth. Maybe I should.

But there is one thing that Menken said that rings true to me and may be the source of my email anxiety.

“If I write to a man on any proper business and he fails to answer me at once, I set him down as a boor and an ass.”

I am sure that every day people are setting me down as a boor and an ass and that’s a problem. Without a solution as far as I can see.

#VC & Technology

As Usual Google Is The King Dog

Jason Goldman at Twitter used to be the Blogger product manager at Google. So when he saw the comscore chart on my wordpress vs facebook post yesterday, he asked what comscore’s numbers are for Blogger. Here they are. As usual Google is the king dog. 190mm unique people saw a blogger served page last month. That’s >20% of every Internet user in the world. Wow.

Blogging_platforms

#VC & Technology

Comments Are The Blog Spinal Cord

Great discussion yesterday about wordpress vs facebook. As always the post was just the kickoff of a wonderful discussion that is 75 comments long at this time. The big debate was whether blogging was truly social behavior and whether a blog platform could "know" anything about it’s readers.

On that there is no question in my mind. This morning I was working through all 75 comments and was floored by this one from PH Bradley. I’ve been marvelling at PH’s words in this blog’s comments for a while now. But enough is enough. Who is this guy? I need to know him, read him, follow him. Thankfully, all that one has to do when faced with that moment is hover over a person’s face in disqus and their profiles (note the plural) will be revealed. Like this:

Comment_based_social_net_2

I clicked on all of them, Phillipe is now a friend on facebook, a contact on linkedin, I follow him on twitter, and his feed is in my reader.

That’s the kind of adult social networking I was talking about in my post yesterday. Or as Phil said in the comment I linked to, comments are the blog’s spinal cord. Indeed.

 

#VC & Technology

The Difference Between Wordpress and Facebook

Is about $14.8bn according to the publicly available information about the most recent financings of the two companies ($15bn for Facebook and $200mm for Automattic).

But consider this comscore chart of unique visitors over the past year.

Fb_vs_wp

It’s a very similar growth trajectory, driven largely by the same phenomenon – the creation of personal spaces on the web by people who want to engage with others.

So why is Facebook worth $15bn and WordPress is worth $200mm? Well for one, Facebook controls the advertising inventory on the pages it serves and WordPress does not. And for another, Facebook has built a "soup to nuts" social network with powerful viral channels (which they are cutting back on) and WordPress has not.

But trust me on this one. The blogging revolution is the adult social network whereas Facebook style social networking is for teens and college kids. This gap will narrow.

#VC & Technology

Meetups

I’ve gotten a bit tired of going to events populated by all the usual suspects. I am meeting lots of new people through this blog, tumblr, twitter, etc but I have not been able to say the same thing about the real world events I’ve been attending.

So I’ve decided to do something about that.

Today I did two meetups that were both the kind of thing I want to do more of.

Open Coffee

At open coffee nyc

There are apparently open coffees all over the country and all over the world. Here in NYC, there is a New York Open Coffee for entrepreneurs every Thursday at 9:15am at Taralucci (what Peter Kafka of Alley Insider calls the "USV Cafeteria"). Nicholas Butterworth runs this open coffee and he uses Meetup to organize it. Here’s the meetup page if you want to join.

I liked this one a lot because I only knew two of the eight people who attended. The conversation was lively and the coffee at Taralucci is among the best in the city. It lasted an hour. There’s no way I can go every Thursday and it seems like most people don’t do that. But I do hope to attend at least once a month.

Shake Shack Flash Mob

Shake shack meetup

This one was my idea. Last week I wanted to go to the Shake Shack but nobody was around here in the office. So I twittered about it and six people showed up. We decided then and there to create a twitter account called Shake Shack. Now anytime anyone is in the same shoes as I was last week, they simply send a twitter to @shakeshack saying when they think they’ll be at the front of the line and everyone who follows shakeshack on twitter will be alerted. I did it again today and we had about ten people. It was a glorious day and the conversation was great. I hope these become regular events throughout the summer. It’s great because only one person has to stand in line and anyone can join as long as they are up for a group lunch with fun people and lively discussion.

If you know of other ideas like this here in NYC or elsewhere, please leave a comment so we can all start meeting new people and talking about new ideas.

#VC & Technology

Adding Intelligence To Search

Clearly Google’s been doing that for years. Their search just keeps getting better and better. But innovation in search is not limited to Google. Our portfolio company, Indeed, which operates the most popular search engine for jobs launched a new feature this week that showcases how searching can become more intelligent.

When people search for jobs, they want to put in a salary floor. They don’t want to see jobs that don’t at least pay a certain amount. Problem is most job listings on the Internet don’t include salaries.

What Indeed did was built a system that estimates salaries on all jobs. Here’s how they do that:

How do we estimate salaries? We use a proprietary methodology based on
an analysis of similar job listings that include salaries. We start by
extracting salaries from all job listings containing this information –
about a fifth of the total – and then estimate salaries for the rest.

So now for the first time, you can do a search for jobs across the entire web (or certainly as close to the entire web as anyone offers) and get only those jobs that meet your salary requirements.

Here’s a search for a CFO jobs in NYC that pay more than $200k per year. I love when companies make the web smarter than it really is.

#VC & Technology

General Georges Doriot

Creative_capital
Who is the father of modern venture capital? Surely someone from Silicon Valley in the late 60s and early 70s, right? Wrong.

The father of modern venture capital is General Georges Doriot who helped to form and run American Research and Development, the first modern venture capital firm in Boston right after World War II. Doriot also taught at Harvard Business School and was a mentor and teacher to the first generation of Boston VCs who operated in the 60s and 70s.

With all the focus on the bay area and its history as the center of innovation in information technology, Doriot’s contributions are often overlooked. But now we have a new book and a blog, courtesy of Spencer Ante of Business Week.

Ante’s Creative Capital is about Doriot and the start of the venture capital business here in america post world war II. I haven’t read it yet, but I just ordered it on Amazon. Here’s a short excerpt from the Harvard Business School blog. I suspect the readers of this blog are the perfect audience for this book so you should all go check it out.

#VC & Technology

A Twitter Add-on That I Need

Two of my favorite twitter add-ons are Tweetscan, which I check at least once a day for twitters that have my name in it (ie messages being sent to me), and Twitlinks, which I check throughout the day for interesting links being passed around on twitter.

What I need is a mashup of sorts between the two that shows me all the links that have been sent to twitter with the @fredwilson in it. I get a lot of links passed to me with the for:fredwilson tag in delicious. But I am getting even more coming in via twitter now. And I need a single page on the web where I can see them in reverse chronological order. Ideally a single page that I can merge for:fredwilson with @fredwilson links. That would be killer. I can probably do that in a tumblog by importing RSS feeds. Hmm. Now there’s an idea.

#VC & Technology

It's A Blog, No It's A Radio Station, Wait It's Something Altogther New

CBS Radio re-launched their legendary NY rock radio station WNEW recently. It’s a group blog about music, it’s a last.fm group (built by the combined scrobbling history of all of the group members), it’s an internet radio station, and it’s available over the air on HD2 at 102.7 (you need an HD radio to get it).

Let’s start with the music. I’ve been listening for the past 20 minutes and this is what I’ve heard so far.

Cowboy Junkies covering Sweet Jane
Van Morrison live at the Bottom Line in 1970
Jack Johnson – Upside Down
B52s – Love Shack
Led Zepplin – Kashmir
more live Van Morrison
John Mayer
Talking Heads – Naive Melody (i love that song)

One cool thing is this station is going to play lots of their live archives:

Perhaps the most
unique aspect of WNEW.com is our incredible
audio archives, featuring historic
concerts and live performances from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, as well as
timeless interviews with a remarkable roster of rock immortals. We’ve
gathered and digitized hundreds of
amazing moments from the airwaves of some of America’s great rock radio
stations, most notably our namesake WNEW-FM, which ruled the airwaves
in New York City for four decades. On-air visits were
commonplace by members of the Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, the
Who, the
Dead and virtually every superstar you could imagine.

I’ve talked at length about radio on this blog over the years and I always get comments from readers who think that radio is clueless and will never get it’s magic back. Maybe the golden years of the 70s and 80s are long over, due to the iPod and other forms of portable music and the changing dynamics of the music industry. But I think radio does understand what it has to do in order to hang onto its audience and bring new listeners (younger more technologically inclined) into the fold.

Full disclosure, I know the team at CBS Radio who launched the new WNEW and I am big fans of them. I am also an investor in iBiquity, the company that makes the underlying technology for HD Radio. I am also an investor in Targetspot, the company that will sell a lot of the audio spots that run on WNEW. So I am vested in the radio industry and it’s future. And stuff like this new WNEW makes me quite bullish on it.

#My Music#VC & Technology

Ten Questions About Entrepreneurs

I was interviewed yesterday by a journalist who is doing a television-style series on entrepreneurs which will be broadcast on the web starting this summer. He asked me somewhere around thirty questions about entrepreneurs. I didn’t take notes but here are ten questions I remember and a short quick summary of my answer.

What is entrepreneurship?
It’s the art of turning an idea into a business.

Can entrepreneurship be taught/learned?
I don’t think so. It’s like a personality disorder. You are born with it.

Is entrepreneurship limited to small companies? No. Some of the best companies in the world are run by enterepreneuers, like Apple/Jobs, News Corp/Murdoch, and Microsoft under Gates.

Are entrepreneurs "control freaks"? Yes.

What do you look for in entrepreneurs? First and foremost, they need to be magnets. For talent. For money. For attention. And for much more.

Is there an ideal age for an entrepreneur?
No, although most start at a young age since they don’t belong in big companies. But once an entrepreneur always an entrepreneur. We’ve got one entrepreneur in our portfolio who is approaching 60 and working on his fourth company.

Are there many women entrepreneurs? Sadly, the answer in the tech/web business is no.

Do entrepreneurs have balance in their lives? Often the answer is no. But as they age, it gets better.

What skills would you advise an entrepreneur to acquire?
Technical and product skills. Focus on the core offering. Let others worry about the rest.

Are entrepreneurs happier than others?  This one stumped me. I gave a half assed answer. Since many of you who read this blog are entrepreneurs, why don’t you answer this one in the comments.

#VC & Technology