Posts from April 2009

Judging from the run that the market has been having in the past month, including a successful tech IPO on the NASDAQ (a games company from China which says a lot in itself), you might think we are headed out of the economic doldrums.

I think that is wishful thinking and that this "bounce" is unlikely to be the cure for all the problems our economy is facing.

There are some positive signs; housing in some of the hardest hit regions might be bottoming, healthy banks are making money and sick banks are making money in their good lines of business, and consumers are not in as foul of a mood as they were at year end.

But the macroeconomic picture is not good. We've got a federal government running up staggering deficits, we've still got trillions of assets that have bid/ask spreads that are so wide we don't have functioning markets in some assets, and we've got an auto industry that at best is headed for a wholesale restructuring this year.

A rally was inevitable. People can't keep their money under mattresses forever. A small shift in sentiment can lead to big moves at the extremes.

My head is in the same place it was last October and November when "the world was coming to an end". I think we are in for a bad 2009 and a weak 2010 and maybe a better 2011. I also think we are going to see many large industries changed fundamentally by this downturn.

So what is an investor to do? First, I believe you must be investing, but carefully. Second, pick your sectors with care and stay away from sick companies, balance sheets, and industries. And third, have a defensive posture with plenty of cash in reserve.

It's certainly not as bad as many thought in the fall of last year and it's not as good as everyone secretly wishes it would be. We've gone from greed to fear to something else now. It's a better place but not necessarily a safer place.

The other day I noticed my son Josh was playing a game called iMob on is iPhone. I said, "do you like that game Josh" He said "yes, it's fun". I told him he should wait a few days and get the real thing on the iPhone. His wait is over.

Mafia Wars, the massively popular Facebook game (9.2mm monthly players according to Facebook) is now on the iPhone. You can get it here. It's free.

Here's a short (2:20min) video that explains the game and the game play

I'm pretty sure Josh is going to love this game and so will many of you.

Disclosure: Our firm Union Square Ventures is an investor in Zynga, the developer of Mafia Wars.

I delivered the keynote talk this morning at the Ad Age Digital conference and I have to say that the feedback you all gave me on the first draft was super helpful and made the talk so much better. I changed up the presentation a bit, but the delivery (which I always do live without notes) was vastly improved because I had our conversation about the first draft resident in memory.

Here's the final version of the presentation. I used slideshare's youtube embed feature to get the two videos into the sliedshare presentation. I was unable to show these videos live this morning because I built the deck on mac Powerpoint and used mpeg4s and the windows version of Powerpoint they were using at the conference didn't like them. Oh well. I think the videos are fun and make the presentation livelier and better. As usual, please let me know what you think.

On Sunday night the Gotham Gal and I went up to the MOMA to see a showing of We Live In Public, a documentary about the life of Josh Harris, "the greatest internet pioneer you never heard of". The Gotham Gal has a great review of the film on her blog.

The film is everything I thought it could be. Ondi Timoner did an incredible job and earned all the accolades the film has received, including Best Documentary at Sundance.

The Internet scene in NYC was a unique time and place and nobody was pushing the envelope harder and faster than Josh Harris. Though I could never get comfortable investing in Josh, for reasons the movie will make adundantly clear, I have tremendous respect for him and everything he accomplished. He is a brilliant person who sees the future as clearly as anyone I have met.

The biggest treat of the night was seeing Josh, who is living in ethiopia, and Ondi together. I got the opportunity to say hi to both of them and watch the two of them talk about the film after the screening.

After the screening ended, I noticed Josh standing next to me. So I jumped up and said hi. He asked me "did you like it" And I said "yes, it's awesome". The Gotham Gal said "what do you think Josh?" And Josh said "I haven't seen it". The Gotham Gal said "really, why?". And he said, "if you were me, would you see it?"

Josh has a point there. See the movie and you'll understand.

Last week I wrote a short post titled "What Is An Aggressive Tech Agenda?" where I advocated open spectrum as the best way to achieve ubiquitous broadband in the US.

My partner Brad took this conversation a step further with a much more thoughtful and sophisticated post on the same topic on the Union Square Ventures blog titled "Open Spectrum Is Good Policy".

I am pleased that Brad's post is running on the Union Square Ventures blog because there are several policy positions that our entire firm is strongly behind and we are going to try to use our resources (mostly non financial) to push for them as hard as we can.

These include; open spectrum, patent reform, and ensuring that the best and brightest talent from all over the world can work and live in our country.

I spent some time this morning putting together the first draft of my talk on Tuesday at the Ad Age Digital conference. It builds on what I laid out in my post yesterday under the same title.

This is still very much a work in progress and will change as I collect some data, videos, images, and more comments and suggestions. So fire away in the comments please.

Note that the videos don't play in the slideshare version I am embedding here. Also, some of the text is not legible unless you go full screen mode (click on the second icon in from the right on the bottom of the player).

The discussion in the tech/media blogs this weekend is Rupert Murdoch's comment:

Ian Betteridge has a good post on this and says:

I agree with Ian that Rupert is as smart and sophisticated as they come and he has thought this through. But unfortunately for Rupert and News Corp and other newspaper owners, you can't take your toys and go home on this one.

News Corp can easily block Google from crawling its pages at the WSJ, NY Post, and elsewhere. They can also sue Google and litigate for a rev share or whatever else it is that Rupert wants from Google.

But here's the thing. Google is distribution. It is the newsstand. If Rupert or any other newspaper owner chooses to take its content out of the Google index, there will be plenty of content left that can take its place.

Look at the top of the page on Google finance right now:

On Friday, an asian online games company called ChangeYou went public here in the US and had a very successful offering. This is interesting to me on many levels as you might imagine. Google shows three stories on the ChangeYou IPO; the lead story from SeekingAlpha, a story from Forbes, and a story from the FT. Note that there is no story there from the WSJ.

And I could care less. I had the option of all three links and I selected the SeekingAlpha link. SeekingAlpha is a network of stock bloggers. It is slowly but surely building a brand as a trusted source of stock news and opinion.

Google is not News Corp's problem. Their problem is us. We know a lot. But we don't own a printing press. And that's a good thing. Because printing presses are expensive. But we do own a computer and many blogging services are free. The explosion of "user generated content" has created some very compelling news services in all sorts of verticals. Not just tech, but finance, fashion, music, travel, lifestyle, and on and on. And there are a bunch of companies like Seeking Alpha that are aggregating up the best user generated content in verticals and creating awesome news, information, and entertainment services.

Steven Johnson, the popular author and founder of our portfolio company Outside.in put it very well in his keynote at SXSW last month.

What’s happened with technology and politics is happening elsewhere
too, just on a different timetable. Sports, business, reviews of
movies, books, restaurants – all the staples of the old newspaper
format are proliferating online. There are more perspectives; there is
more depth and more surface now. And that’s the new growth. It’s only
started maturing.

More perspectives is the most important thing of all. News and information content is becoming much richer and better. And that is Rupert problem at the end of the day. It's not that he can't compete with Google. It's that he can't compete with us.

I spent the second week of our kids' spring break (a week ago) mixing work and family time in Los Angeles. The Gotham Gal's brother and sister-in-law live in LA with two wonderful girls and I always enjoy our time with them. On this trip, in addition to some high quality family time, I got an education from the Gotham Gal's brother Jerry on the subject of earned media.

Earned media is media you don't buy but earn the hard way. PR is an example of earned media. Word of mouth is another. Earned media has been around forever. But it has now gotten a lot easier, thanks to the Internet and social media, to earn media for your brand, product, or self.

I have earned a fair bit of media over the past five years. Google Analytics tells me that 120,000 people have visited this blog in the past 30 days, 45,000 of them by typing in this blog's address directly, and another 60,000 of which came from a referring link. 25,000 people find this blog interesting enough to subscribe to it in RSS. And 17,500 people have chosen to follow my posts on Twitter.

That's a fair bit of media and I earn it every day by posting something thoughtful or thought provoking on this blog or twitter or tumblr or somewhere else on the web. If I stopped doing that, the media would slowly flow away from me to all of the rest of you who are earning media every day.

I am giving a keynote talk at the Ad Age Digital Conference on Tuesday morning. The agenda says I am going to talk about "Bridging the Gap: How Venture Capitalists and Marketers can Create Meaningful Relationships and Innovation." I'm not entirely sure how that came to be the title of my talk but that's not what I am going to talk about after spending a week with Jerry. I am going to talk about earning media, how you do it, and why it's such a great strategy for marketers.

When we landed in LA, Jerry (who just recently got hooked on twitter and blogging) told me "you have to follow kogibbq on twitter". So I whipped out my blackberry and typed "follow kogibbq" and sent it to twitter. Shortly thereafter, I got a tweet on my phone that said:

And I thought "genius".

late night street life-48
Originally uploaded by kogibbq.

See, KogiBBQ are two tacos trucks serving korean barbeque tacos throughout Los Angeles. They drive around and twitter their locations. They've got 13,500 people who are following them on Twitter. The picture on the right is the "Verde" truck at night outside one of the nightclubs they frequent on the late shift.

Not only does KobiBBQ twitter, they also have an amazing flickr stream, and a blog that will make your mouth water if you click on this link.

KogiBBQ is all about social media. After I twittered about kogibbq a few times while I was in LA, I got a tweet back suggesting I talk to Mike Prasad. So I did.

Mike told me that KogiBBQ was the creation of Mark Manguera and a team of food professionals who come out of some top restaurants. They were totally taken by the energy and quality of urban street food and had this idea for a taco truck selling korean barbque tacos.

What they did not have was a way to get the word out quickly and build a brand. They found Mike and he explained social media to them and they loved it. The blog, the photos, the tweets, and mostly the tacos did the trick. KogiBBQ is such a big hit that they increase the revenues at the clubs they park outside of at night by more than 2x. And the lines are Shake Shack lengths. People often wait an hour or more for one of these tacos.

The point of telling you this story is that earned media is both powerful and free. But you must earn it. KoqiBBQ posts photos to flickr every day and tweets all day long. They reply to tweets as well. They are active in their "earned media".

This is one of several stories I plan to tell in my talk on earned media on tuesday morning. I plan to start building the talk tomorrow and I will, as usual, post it as soon as I've got it in draft form. I am sure you all will help me make it even better.

I've had a new analytics service called Chartbeat running on this blog for a while now. You haven't seen it until recently when I put this widget on my right sidebar.

The cool thing about Chartbeat is that the stats are real-time. They tell me what is going on right now. If you click on the button on the upper right sidebar that says "Traffic Stats", you'll get a page that looks like this:


I publish all the publicly available stats on this blog that I normally track (I wish I could do this with Google Analytics but can't or don't know how). The top link on that page is now Chartbeat so anytime you want to see what is going on here in real-time, you can click on it. This is what you'll see:

There's actually a lot more data on the page (and the additional tabs) but that's all that I could capture with my screengrab.

Chartbeat combines a very slick and appealing UI with lots of real-time data that I've never been able to get on this blog until now.

You might ask "why do you care what is going on at any moment in time?" That's a good question and the truth is many times I don't. But sometimes I do. Chartbeat also sends me email alerts when the traffic on this blog goes well above the monthly average. I get those emails about five or ten times a month and it's very interesting to go look at this page when that happens. I also get alert when the page load times degrade significantly and also when the blog is down.

But beyond all of this, the thing that is most intersting to me is the bundle of real time services that Betaworks is building. They built bit.ly, they invested in tweetdeck, they built Chartbeat, the invested in and then sold Summize to Twitter. Betaworks gets the real-time web and they are building a portfolio of interesting services on that insight. Well done Betaworks team and particular congrats to Billy Chasen, the talented developer behind Chartbeat.