Posts from July 2009

HeyZap's Looking For A Strong Software Engineer In SF

Our newest portfolio company, HeyZap, is looking for the fourth member of their team. HeyZap is a platform for game developers to get wide viral distribution for their flash games and monetize them.

They are looking for:

a talented engineer with extensive experience; hopefully you have made
one or more sites that clearly illustrate your capabilities. You should
be a technical generalist, meaning you are comfortable and eager to
work on what is needed and learn what is necessary, in a fast-moving, dynamic environment.

The job spec is here and if you are interested please email them at [email protected].

#Listings#VC & Technology

Hacker News and the NoSQL Movement

I love Hacker News (aka news.ycombinator.com). I read it at least once a day and it sends this blog more traffic than anything other than Google and Twitter. This is the refer log for AVC for the past month.

Referral log

But like every great web service out there, it's the community at Hacker News that makes it so great.

This morning I read a Computer World article about the "NoSQL" movement. It was interesting to me because we have an investment in this market sector, an open source cloud based document store called MongoDB (which is mentioned in the computer world story).

There are three comments at Computerworld.com and there's 43 comments on the story at Hacker News. If you are interested in database issues, you'll find the discussion at Hacker News interesting and informative.

The SQL vs NoSQL debate is important, serious, and deeply technical. I am not going to even attempt to weigh in on it (other than to say we've got an investment in a NoSQL data store). But plenty of people are weighing in on it at Hacker News right now.

Of course there are other tech communities out there where discussions like this one have been going on for years. I am not saying they aren't vibrant and important. But Hacker News brings that together with a "techmeme style" blog aggregator and focuses very much on the startup entrepreneur (which is why it drives so much traffic to this blog).

Hacker News is a great service. If you are involved in tech startups and you don't read it regularly, you should.

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#VC & Technology

A Shorter Post Than I Planned

I just spent a half hour composing a longish thoughtful post on the art of saying no in the venture capital business. It was inspired by Brad Feld's post on the same topic a few days ago. However, when I hit save, Typepad forced me to re-login and after I did that, my post was gone. So I can't get back that half hour today and that post is gone for good. Maybe I'll try to do it again another day.

But in the interim, please do go read Brad's post. I agree with what he has to say about saying no. It's a big part of the VC business and doing it right is critically important.

And while you are at it, please also go read my partner Albert's post on a conversation we had at lunch yesterday (at the Shake Shack). We got to talking about mobile app development and why Android to date has missed an opportunity that Apple gave them and everyone else.

I'll be back tomorrow with something more than a couple links

#VC & Technology