Posts from January 2010

Mark Suster has a great post up on his blog called Productivity Hacks. He lists three things he's done to improve his productivity:

• Eliminate Voicemail with Google Voice or even better PhoneTag
• Stop foldering things: ie move to gmail and start tagging your email
• Each day put three things you want to get done on a 3×5 card

I've done two of these three things. 

I stopped using voicemail and moved to PhoneTag (fka Simulscribe) about three years ago and have never looked back. PhoneTag intercepts my voice mails, transcribes them, and emails them to me. I get your voice mails, but I get them via email. It works great. Google Voice offers a similar service but the transcription is done by machines, not humans, and the results look a bit like my "dictated blog post" last weekend. Google Voice is free, PhoneTag works out to be about $10/month. I've learned that voicemail transcription doesn't have to be perfect for the message to get thru (as long as name and phone number are captured accurately). So you may be able to make do with Google Voice. If not, get PhoneTag and pay the roughly $10/month. As I said in my initial post on voicemail transcription, it's a lifechanger.

I stopped foldering email when I moved from outlook/exchange to gmail last year. I've also stopped foldering paperwork for the most part. I just keep an electronic copy and tag and or label it and make it accessible easily with search. This seems like a small change, but in actuality it is a huge productivity enhancer. You can tag/label and save so much faster than you can folder things. And folders don't scale. Tags and labels do.

I have not tried the three things on 3×5 card idea. I am going to start doing that right away. I've never been able to make a "to do" list work for me because it gets so damn long I can never get them all done. I really like the idea of three a day and no more. I may not need the 3×5 cards but I am going to try them anyway. It may be fine just to put them into a calendar entry at the start of every day. We'll see. I'll report back on this one.

The answer to that question is no. They had their chances. In the early days of the Internet, when dial-up was king, the telco companies were in the driver's seat. They had the customer relationships. They had the on-ramp to the Internet. But they did not create Google, Skype, Facebook, or even TCP/IP.

Why am I talking about this? Because on Thursday of this week the comments on the FCC's notice of rulemaking on Net Neutrality are due.

And here is what is at stake: the architecture of the Internet.

If we let the providers of Internet access control what runs on their pipes, we will cripple the elegantly layered architecture of the Internet where access is decoupled from applications. And it is that elegantly layered architecture that begat Google, Skype, Facebook, and so very much more. 

Don't sit on the sidelines in this debate. Make your voices heard. You can start right here in the comments if you'd like. 

My partner Brad wrote an impassioned plea for an "Independent Invention Defense" for patent infringement claims. He starts his post with this observation.

Almost a third of our portfolio is under attack by patent trolls. Is it possible that one third of the engineering teams in our portfolio unethically misappropriated technology from someone else and then made that the basis of their web services? No! That's not what is happening. Our companies are driven by imaginative and innovative engineering teams that are focused on creating social value by bringing innovative new services to market. Our portfolio companies are being attacked by companies that were not even in the same market, very often by companies they did not even know existed.

We can argue about software patents or patents in general. I'm not a fan. I don't think they encourage innovation in many sectors, maybe most sectors. But I recognize that they play a role in protecting inventors from others blatantly stealing their innovations.

But anyone who has spent a significant time in technology based businesses will understand that two groups working completely independently from each other will often solve a problem similarly. One group is not copying or ripping off the other group. They are simply coming to similar conclusions about how to get something done.

In these cases, it makes no sense to protect one group from the other. Nobody has taken anyone's "intellectual property." Both groups should own their inventions outright without having to license technology from the other.

That's not how it works today and as a result, our portfolio companies and entrepreneurs and startups all over this country are paying a very high tax on innovation. Read Brad's post for more details on the costs of bad patent policy and what we should do about it.

We have Mac Minis connected to all the TVs in our home. I've been using a RF-based keyboard/mouse combo device for several years and not loving it. So one of my new years' resolutions was to find a better approach for our family. Last week, I went out and bought an Apple Wireless Keyboard (bluetooth) and a Gyration Air Mouse (RF). I figured I'd try to fix our main family room setup first and then roll out the solution to the rest of the house.

I had them shipped to my office and was taking them home on Friday. I showed the Gyration Air Mouse which is super cool looking to Andrew and he casually said "I like the Mobile Air Mouse app on the iPhone". I filed that away and went home with my hardware excited about what I had purchased.

I got the Apple Wireless Keyboard to pair with my mac mini and it works well. But like many bluetooth devices, I had some weird pairing issues on reboot and other times and it wasn't as reliable as it needs to be in our family room. And I completely failed on the Gyration Air Mouse. I could not get it to work on my Mac Mini or on my Mac laptop either (I tried that just to see if there was something awry with the Mac Mini). I am not sure if the Gyration Air Mouse issue is operator error (me) or something wrong with the one I bought. Who cares at the end of the day? I could not get it to work.

So in frustration, I pulled out the iPod touch we use as a Sonos and Boxee remote in our family room and downloaded the Mobile Air Mouse app from the iTunes store for $1.99. You have to download free "server software" for the device from the Mobile Air Mouse website as well.

Guess what? Andrew was right. It works very well. And you get a trackpad and a keyboard (iPhone style keyboard) all for $1.99.

The Apple keyboard was roughly $80 and the Gyration Air Mouse was about the same. $160 down the drain. The $2 solution was better.

Of course, for this to work you'll need to have a $200 iTouch handy. But honestly, I could have spent $200 on the iTouch and added $2 for the Air Mouse and it would not have been much more than what I spent on the keyboard and mouse.

Bottom line for me: apps beat devices. Lesson learned. Relatively cheaply.

I am dictating this blog post via my google phone. I’m doing its name is a test to see how easy it is to do something like this. I don’t plan on taking my blog posts in the future very often what is pretty neat that you can do this

I been dictating text messages to my kids and email via gmail on this phone that also works pretty well

The speech recognition is in the cloud not on the phone c a good 3g connection oregon better wifi connection for this to work really well

My friend brad feld says we won’t even use keyboard input in 10 years i’m starting to think is right

The results you see are the results i got a didn’t edit a thing i’d like to know you think

My friend Wil Stephens posted his thoughts on his first day on a Nexus One just now. If you click thru and read it, you'll note the similarity with the review I posted last week. I am not suggesting Wil was influenced by my review, I'm simply pointing out that we've had very similar experiences and both of us moved over from a Blackberry Curve.

In Wil's review, he says:

Cube, like many companies I guess by now, have Gone Google. My Calendar, Mail, Docs, Contacts are all hosted on Google. This made the setup and transition to the Nexus very easy. I entered my Google credentials and within seconds, my mail, contacts and calendars were all synced up and ready to go. Which, unintentionally or not, makes this a seriously good business phone.

I've spent the past year migrating from Outlook/Exchange to Google's Apps. I've done it gradually, in fits and starts, as our firm is still on Exchange. But I just could not get Outlook or any other Exchange client to scale to the size of mailbox I operate. And so I had to move to a more scaleable solution. That solution was Gmail and now that I've been on Gmail for almost a year, I am so happy.

Most people and companies move to Gmail for different reasons, mainly cost. But regardless of why this shift is happening, it's a very important one to pay attention to. Because it leads to other changes.

Like what phone you want to use. Blackberry is the perfect phone for someone with an Exchange setup. The Blackberry Enterprise Server for Exchange is a great product. If you run that alongside your Exchange server, setting up a Blackberry to be a full blown Exchange client with mail, calendar, and contact sync is a breeze. That's how we've been doing it at the venture firms I've helped manage for over a decade now.

But as Wil points out, if you are on the Google App suite, turning on an Android phone is even simpler. You simply login to the phone with your Google credentials and you are done. And the native Google apps on Android are extremely well done.

So, for good and for bad, I believe Blackberry is attached at the hip to Exchange. As Microsoft loses share to Google in the enterprise, something I believe is bound to happen, Blackberry will lose share to Android as well. Wil and I are cases in point.

Our portfolio company Boxee has been having a great CES. First they generated a ton of buzz with this cool TV remote with a full QWERTY keyboard.

But that was just the warmup to the big announcement yesterday in which they released the beta version of Boxee to everyone. The beta version of Boxee is available on Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu Linux (including 64 bit). It will be available for Apple TV shortly. The beta includes a ton of new content, a more stable code base, and an entirely new UI. Here's a screen shot of the main screen which showcases the new UI.

You can download the beta version of Boxee here.

And Boxee announced that the "Boxee Box" that is built by D-Link is powered by the Nvidia Tegra 2 (T20) processor, the first of its kind to run flash. They also announced a few more details of what is inside the Boxee Box. If you are a hardware geek, click here and see what's inside.

But as exciting as all of that is, I am most excited about a smallish announcement they made yesterday that might get lost in all of this other stuff. Boxee has a bookmarklet that you can put in any browser toolbar. Drag this link (add to boxee) to your browswer toolbar and you'll be adding videos you find around the internet to your Boxee. Right now the bookmarklet supports thirteen different video sites but Boxee will be adding more soon.

Last June, on this blog, I promoted the concept of a "watch later" service and a number of developers responded to the call with various services. Many of them included Boxee apps. But now with the Boxee bookmarklet and queue, this concept of "watch later" will be native in the Boxee service. I'm really quite excited by this.

If you are like me, you are seeing links to videos in email, twitter, facebook, blogs, etc all day long. It's time consuming to stop what you are doing to watch them. Now you can simply click on the boxee bookmarklet and watch them at home on your TV set after dinner while you are winding down from the day. It's a killer concept. Thanks Boxee.

One of the questions facing venture capitalists in the internet/web sector is how big a portfolio is optimal. The economics of internet/web startups means the capital requirements for each investment are often lower and the best ones get profitable on one or two rounds of investment. That leads many venture capital firms participating in this sector to conclude that they need to build larger portfolios because the investments per portfolio company will be smaller.

When my partner Brad and I started Union Square Ventures back in 2003, we constructed a model portfolio for a $100mm fund. We assumed we'd start with an average investment of $1.5mm to $3mm and that our average investment would be $6-8mm. We thought we would make 12-14 investments. We raised $125mm so the numbers are 25% larger, but we ended up making 21 investments. If we had raised $100mm, we'd have made 17 investments. So over the course of the four year investment period of our first fund, we increased the number of investments we decided was optimal by 30%.

When we planned for our second fund in 2007, we modeled a $150mm fund with 30 investments, an average of $5mm per company, reflecting a further 20% increase in the investments/fund ratio.

There's another factor at work here. All early stage VCs understand that there will be losses/churn in the portfolio. Longtime readers of this blog know that I like to talk about the 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 model in which 1/3 of the investments are wipeouts, 1/3 return capital but are underperformers, and 1/3 are winners that produce all of the returns. When you have an investment flow dynamic where the early rounds require very small amounts of capital but the later rounds in the winners can require a lot of capital (which is very much the case in the internet/web sector), then it behooves you to make lots of small investments, see which ones become the big winners, and then go "all in" on the winners.

There are quite a few experienced VCs making early stage investments in the internet/web sector now. And many of them have developed models that allow them to build and manage larger portfolios. Probably the best example of this is First Round Capital, which got started a year or two after Union Square Ventures but now has over 70 portfolio companies. But there are plenty of other venture capital firms, large and small, new and established, that have figured out that they need to make more smaller earlier investments in the internet/web sector.

The challenge all of this presents is how a VC should allocate his/her time. You can spend the majority of time hunting for deals (planting seeds) or you can spend the majority of your time working with the portfolio companies (tending the crop). Not all of the portfolio companies need a VC's help. Many entrepreneurs are highly self sufficient. That's a good thing. But every entrepreneur can use some help now and then and some need a lot. And the best VCs make it a point to be there when the entrepreneur needs you. And that is time consuming. It's very time consuming if you have ten or more portfolio companies and you make it a point to be a "valued added" VC.

I am "old school" in some things related to the venture business. It's probably because I got my apprenticeship in the mid 80s and have a hard time giving up old habits. One of them is "the portfolio comes first." I was talking to my partners the other day about the best use of our time. We have a great portfolio of companies that have created a lot of value and are poised to create a lot more. If we can spend time helping these great companies become more valuable, will that result in greater returns to us and our investors than doing more deals? Hard to say, but my initial instinct is yes. Again, that's my "old school" training coming into play.

So that's the never ending debate inside the head of a VC. And it is certainly the debate inside my head these days. This doesn't mean that USV is going to do less investing in 2010. And it doesn't mean I am going to do less investing. I spent a fair bit of time recently laying out exactly what I want to invest in this coming year. We generally make 6-8 new investments per year, roughly 2-3 per partner and I expect we'll do that again in 2010.

But it does mean that we will be working a lot with our existing investments this year and we may not be the most aggressive firm out there chasing new deals. That bugs me at times. But I think it's the right choice for us, our investors, and our portfolio companies.

Regular commenters know that yesterday's post's comment thread was not on Disqus. I tried something new (posting from typepad's mobile web app via the android browser) and in the process accidentally turned typepad comments on which turned disqus comments off. I figured it out too late and there was already a discussion going on so I left the whole post on typepad comments.

As one commenter said:

Wow, I didn't realize how much I'd miss Disqus commenting until it was
gone. Perhaps that's an unplanned benefit from this little glitch?

I said the same thing to Daniel Ha, founder/CEO of Disqus, via email yesterday and he replied back:

What are 3-4 things that you miss?

I'd like anyone who is interested help me answer Daniel. I'll post my 3-4 things here and please leave your thoughts in the comments. I'll make sure Daniel reads them, although that won't be tough.

Things I missed:

1) Threaded discussions. If you look at yesterday's comment thread, you'll see that I was replying (via email actually) to the comments but they are not shown as replies. I found it impossible to follow and stopped replying as a result.

2) Email reply. Typepad has email reply, at least for me, the author, but I don't think it works for the person leaving the comment when someone replies to them. And the reply is not shown as a reply in the thread. And it doesn't pick up my avatar when it shows the reply. Without those features, email reply really isn't useful to me.

3) No avatars. I've got so used to seeing people's avatars next to their comments. It really allows the community to thrive. The comment thread feels so empty without them.

4) Easy login. If you are a frequent commenter and are "logged in" as I almost always am, Disqus recognizes you and invites you to leave a comment. If you aren't logged in, you can log in right in the comment thread. Those two features mean that a lot more people comment.

Here's some data to show the difference between Disqus and Tyepepad's comment system. I average about 100 comments per post. I got 25 yesterday (though it says 49, I think some of the comments may be missing). Either way I got way less than normal. And yesterday was one of the biggest days ever on AVC with 19k visits and 22k page views, four times my normal traffic. Four times the traffic, a quarter to half the comments? That's the Disqus difference in action.

Ok, now it's time for everyone else to chime in (via Disqus thankfully).