Posts from VC & Technology

I just bought fakefredwilson.com. It’s pointing to this blog although it may take a few hours for the DNS records to update.

I think this fakeperson.com thing has legs. I love reading fake steve jobs and this Alexa chart shows that Fake Steve Jobs already has more traffic than Jeff Jarvis’ Buzzmachine, a top 100 weblog.

Like everyone else, I’ve been wondering who Fake Steve Jobs is. My money is on Nick Denton. It would be just like Nick to create a fake blogger and then engage in a hunt to find out the real identity. Or possibly
John Heilemann who clearly has Steve Jobs on his mind and this post almost outs John as FSJ.

But beyond the identity of Fake Steve Jobs, there lies a bigger question. Can this fake person dot com thing turn into a real media opportunity? I believe that Federated Media and FeedBurner together can make FSJ over $200k per year. But is there an even bigger opportunity?

I remember in th early days of Weblogs Inc, they had the Official Apple weblog, The Official Microsoft weblog, The Official Google weblog, etc. Those blogs had/have some readership but not anything like FSJ.

Would it be better to build a network of company specific weblogs with Fake Steve Jobs, Fake Steve Ballmer, Fake Sergey Brin, etc, etc. I suspect that would be a much more popular set of weblogs if they were written as well as FSJ. Of course, that is a big if.

So back to what I did this morning. I don’t think that fakefredwilson.com is a particularly interesting media opportunity but given that I was going to write this post, I figured it would be smart to own the domain.

Look at fakejasoncalacanis.com. Here’s the domain name record. Maybe Jason owns it. Maybe not.

Bottom line. fake person dot com is something to pay attention to. If you don’t want someone blogging as a fake you, buy the domain.

Yesterday afternoon, 5pm, I saw a email alert in the lower right of my laptop screen, a WSJ email alert, Yahoo was turning over the Company to Jerry Yang. We all knew that Semel was in trouble and that a leadership change was likely. The surprise was the choice of Jerry Yang. I stopped what I was doing and blogged my reaction to the news.

When you blog a news story, you need an anchor post. I went to the WSJ, but they didn’t have a story, just a "breaking news headline". Plus I always worry about linking to a WSJ story because its a paid site and my link could be dead. So I went looking for something more authentic. I went to Yahoo’s press release page, found the release, and linked to it. Seemed like the logical anchor. I also ganked the cool photo of the Yahoo! guy in the chair reading the paper from that page.

As I was hitting submit to my post, I saw Bradley Horowitz pop up on Twitterific with this:

  Jerry Yang new Yahoo CEO

I replied to all that I had just posted on the news. An interesting discussion ensued on Twitter.

Then I went to Techmeme to see what was going on there. I saw that Jerry Yang had a blog post on his new role. I figured that was the better anchor link for my post and I changed it to Jerry’s post. I also read  all the links to Jerry’s post and some of the links to the PR Newswire story. I went back to Techmeme a couple more times last night and read the WSJ’s story, the Times’ story, Valleywag’s take, and Arringtons’ take as well as a dozen or so interesting links.

By the time I went to bed last night, I’d read everything I wanted to read on that news.

This morning, I logged into Techmeme for my morning dose of tech news to find the Jerry Yang story still front and center. Here’s the top of Techmeme right now:

I know that Techmeme is not the sole arbiter of whose take on the story is the most important, but frankly it’s the arbiter that I pay the most attention to these days.

Gabe’s got Jerry’s post as the top take on the story. As it should be. He’s in the hot seat now. Let’s hear what he has to say first. Then the official release. Then the WSJ (still the paper of record for the business world even though they still refuse to play nice on the web). Then Valleywag followed by The NY Times. Has Valleywag taken over the Merc’s role as the Valley’s paper of record????

Below the fold on Techmeme, you’ve got Rafat, Om, Kedrosky, cnet, CNN, and a few more stories. All good reads for sure. And there’s literally close to 100 links to posts like mine you can read if you want to know everything the blog world is saying about this story.

That’s how news breaks and then takes in my world. I am sure most of you who read this blog do it the same way I do. I am equally sure that we are the minority and that most people are going to read the news for the first time this morning in their local paper. But I think the way it goes down in our world is the way of the future and services like Techmeme are going to be the new arbiters of how news takes.

That’s my take.

Read this.

I know this blog is dangerously close to a Marc Andreessen linkblog. But he’s just killing it right now.

I just saw the news that Terry Semel has stepped down and Jerry Yang is taking over as CEO of Yahoo!

As a longtime Yahoo! fan, I see this as good news. Jerry is smart and connected to the medium in the way that Terry never was. I think Terry did a good job turning Yahoo! around in the aftermath of the Internet bubble and making decisions like buying Overture and focusing on both search and display advertising.

The question is whether Jerry and Sue Decker, who was named President, will be focused on the long term or if the Jerry/Sue team is a caretaker management team focused on finding the right strategic partnership for the Company.

It’s clear that Yahoo! is seen as a value play by most Internet investors, particularly with its large holdings in Yahoo! Japan. It would be pretty easy for Jerry and Sue to focus on getting a deal at $40 to $50/share and claiming victory.

But if Jerry really wants to do a Steve Jobs and turn Yahoo! around and build something much bigger, I think he can do it. But that’s going to require making some hard decisions that won’t be easy to execute.

I really hope that the latter scenario plays out because right now Google is killing it (like Microsoft did in the late 80s/early 90s) and we really could use a counterweight and Yahoo! is the obvious choice.

John Heilemann’s big piece on Steve Jobs, Apple, and iPhone is in this week’s NY Magazine. I don’t know if Apple has peaked, that’s a tough call, but I do think John is raising the bear case on AAPL to a new level.

I’m quoted briefly, singing the praises of streaming music, which will be no surprise to anyone who reads this blog frequently.

I am also long AAPL and not yet convinced to sell the stock.

Though I am serious about the end of posting about age, I agree with Dave that the conversation it sparked is the beginning of something. It always is.

So yes, Dave of course I’d love to learn more about Hypercamp, Checkbox News, Podcast Player and Social Camera.

This whole dustup reminds me of the time Jackson insulted Ethan in the comments to my Free Music post and by the end of that flame war they were trading CDs of bands they’ve recorded.

Blogging is the adult Facebook and Dave’s search for an open network will start in the blogs. It already has.

So yesterday I pissed off Dave Winer, Scott Karp, Steven Hodson, and a host of others who have weighed in heavily in the comments.

I guess I knew it was gonna happen because I was uneasy about writing the post in the first place.

I’ve been reluctant because I don’t want to pick at this scab of a
meme. I really don’t want to be the guy who made it harder for anyone
older than 30 to get funded in the web services market.

It’s also a bit frustrating to me to be so misunderstood. Yesterday’s post was the third in a series of musings (yes, that is what they are) on the age question.

It all started with a post where I mentioned several conversations with mid life entrepreneurs I know well who are struggling with "what to do next" issues.

That post was also misinterpreted as a "young is better" post. It wasn’t. In that post I pointed out that in our portfolio, there are more 40 and 50 somethings than 20 somethings.

But because I was unhappy with the way people interpreted that post, I followed with one where I said age is a mindset and encouraged entrepreneurs of all ages to go for it. Clay accused me of "waffling" with that second post.

I guess I should have left it at that. But Brad and I were talking on Friday about the sheer volume of young entrepreneurs we are seeing that is unprecedented in my 20 years in the VC business. Contrary to one of the comments from yesterday, this is not like what happened during the bubble. Back then it was newly minted MBAs starting companies out of greed. This is different. This is 15 to 20 year old kids building and launching authentic web services that fill a real need in the market.

Let me re-emphasize a point that I’ve now made three times but seems to be ignored by all the people who I’ve annoyed. We have funded only one 20 something entrepreneur in close to 15 investments we’ve made so far in our fund. I am sure we’ll do more but we are not going to be a fund focused on 25 year olds and younger as Scott Karp suggests.

Dave Winer has been a frequent recipient of praise on this blog for inventing the concept of syndication that drives the whole distributed media model. He knows that I think his contributions to the Internet and web services are huge.

So to Dave and everyone else I’ve pissed off, please take a second to read everything I’ve written on this subject. I am not an ageist. I would gladly back an entrepreneur who was 80 if they were doing something interesting.

This blog is about transparency – sharing with everyone what I am seeing and thinking. I am seeing way more super young entrepreneurs than I’ve ever seen. That’s a fact. End of story. No more posting on this topic.

Brad suggested I write this post. I’ve been reluctant because I don’t want to pick at this scab of a meme. I really don’t want to be the guy who made it harder for anyone older than 30 to get funded in the web services market.

But I’ve been thinking about all the young entrepreneurs we are seeing walk through our offices. I’ve been thinking about Mark Zuckerberg, Rob Kalin, all the ycombinator entrepreneurs, and the 15 year olds who are hacking up facebook apps. You can’t ignore it. There is something fundamental and important going on.

The answer lies in Marc Andreessen’s words of wisdom about the web:

After an initial phase of the Web as a medium, in which lots of people attempted to make the Web look like a newspaper, or a magazine, or a TV channel,
we as an industry have recently been collectively developing a much
clearer idea of what the Web is really like as a medium in and of
itself.

This has led to broad realization of a set of design patterns for how Web services and Web companies often get built and used.

Who is developing this "clearer idea"? Who is developing the set of "design patterns"? It’s the younger generation. And its important to understand why.

It is incredibly hard to think of new paradigms when you’ve grown up reading the newspaper every morning. When you turn to TV for your entertainment. When you read magazines on the train home from work.

But we have a generation coming of age right now that has never relied on newspapers, TV, and magazines for their information and entertainment. They are the net natives. They grew up in AOL chatrooms, IMing with their friends for hours after dinner, and went to school with a Facebook login.

The Internet is their medium and they are showing us how it needs to be used.

Now don’t get me wrong. We’ve only funded one of these net natives out of close to fifteen portfolio companies. We’ll certainly fund more. There’s a lot more we look for in an investment than a 23 year old design whiz.

But the truth is that some of the most interesting things I’ve seen this month and this year are the creations of kids who barely shave. And it’s not an accident.