Posts from VC & Technology

I blogged my take on the NYT/About.com deal last week.

Since then, I’ve read two takes on it that I think are must reads.

First, Jay Rosen does an excellent job of explaining what this is all about (no pun intended).

And second, if this deal is about search, as many think it is, then you have to read John Battelle’s take on it as well.

I am not sure I really like this title since I don’t think venture capital needs to be fixed, but it seems to get a lot of activity, so I think I’ll keep using it.

My basic thesis about venture capital is that its fine the way it is, but there are bad VCs and uninformed entrepreneurs and the result is things get messed up a lot more than they should.

This blog and others should help the entrepreneurs become more informed.  That’s a really good thing.

Outing the bad VCs is more complicated. I don’t intend to say anything negative about my colleagues in the venture capital business on this blog and my guess is very few others would either. In this regard, I think entpreneuers need to do a lot of checking around.

Entreprenuers themselves are blogging now and that should be a great source of information about the VC/entrepreneur relationship.

Tom Evslin is going to blog his Nine Lessons on Dealing with VCs over the next couple days.  I expect they’ll be very interesting.

I recently received a call from an executive recruiter who was handling the Tivo CEO search.

I didn’t return the call because I am not interested the job and frankly I don’t know anyone who is.

But it got me thinking about what I’d do if I had to do that job.

OM Malik has a post up on what he thinks Tivo needs to do.  He thinks Tivo needs to emulate Apple by retrenching and focusing on serving the needs of the Tivo enthusiasts, called the Tivoted.

I think some of OM’s ideas are correct, but if I took the job, I’d do pretty much what Mike Ramsay, Tivo’s founder, has been saying he wants to do. 

I’d walk away from the cable and satellite operators who only want to commoditize Tivo and focus on building a low end version of a Media PC that allows people to bypass the cable and satellite operators and get their entertainment directly from the Internet. I’d build it on Linux and low cost hardware and use the Tivo brand to generate demand for the product.

I’d also get into the content aggregation business ala Akimbo and others to provide programming on this device.

As Steve Jobs has said, selling to the cable and satellite operatos is a no-win proposition.  So Tivo has to walk away from that business and find a new one they can serve.

That’s what I’d do if I took the job.

So I finally found some time to check out Google maps.

They are, as everyone has said, amazing.

My point of reference is Yahoo! maps, which I’ve been using exclusively for all my mapping chores outside of my car for the past five years.

Google maps has a better and cleaner interface.  The maps are better, clearer, crisper.  They are much faster to load and to move.

The driving directions are right there on the map when you want them.

The only thing that Google maps lacks, and a big reason why I won’t move to them completely, is the "Smartview" technology that Yahoo uses to let you quickly find food, entertainment, transportation, ATMs, etc right from the map.  That’s a really handy tool that I use a lot.

Hopefully, Yahoo! will look at Google’s maps and learn from them.

Let the map wars begin.

Found this via Jeff Jarvis who found it through Henry.

Jon Stewart gives us his take on blogging.

It’s hysterical.  You gotta watch it.  Jon can’t stop laughing.

Yesterday, the Gotham Gal blogged her frustration with eBay and PayPal.  And Meg Whitman replied.  For those of you who don’t know, Meg is the CEO of eBay.  That’s impressive, even if it wasn’t Meg herself who did the replying.  This is customer service in action.  eBay must be using pubsub or blogpulse or something else to crawl the blog world and then they have a proactive outreach program to deal with stuff like this.  You gotta love that.

Gotham Gal’s PayPal account and and mine somehow got messed up.  Neither one of them work on eBay anymore.

I had to open a new PayPal account with a new email address and a new credit card in order to pay for a gift that Jessica bought the night before.

I can tell you that both of us were incredibly frustrated with the Pay Pal through this entire process.  We’ve now got a PayPal account that works and we can delete the old ones and hopefully life on eBay will be better again, but the whole thing did leave a really bad taste in our mouths.

But the reply from Meg certainly takes some of the sting away.

I’ve been reading lots of good stuff about Google Maps so I figured it was time to try them instead of my favorite of the moment which is Yahoo Maps.

I am on my Powerbook in the kitchen where we do most of our “local search” in this house.

Well guess what, Google Maps doesn’t work yet on Safari or IE running on OSX.

That means we’ll keep using Yahoo Maps in the kitchen for now and I’ll have to check them out on my laptop later.

Matt Blumberg on why RSS won’t impact email.

Brad Feld on the RSS/blog world entering the "me too zone". If you are involved with or interested in VC and blogging, you really must read this one. 

Tom Evslin on evolution and extinction from dinosaurs to disruptive technologies and everything in between. I know Tom is linked to on every must read post, but I just call them as I see them.

As was rumored and mentioned in my previous Blogging 1.0 post, The New York Times announced its acqusition of About.com yesterday.

First, I’d like to congratulate our friend Martin Nisenholtz and his team over at the New York Times.  This was a very smart buy as I’ll explain in a minute.  I know that Martin and his team have been working on this for a while and faced some significant competition for this deal and so they should feel very proud about coming out on top.

So, why was this such a good deal for the NY Times?  First, they got one of the web’s most interesting properties at a very good price.  About.com is a bigger and, I’d argue, a better business than Marketwatch and that sold for 60 times EBITDA last year to Dow Jones.  The NY Times only paid 30 times EBITDA for About.com. 

Second, and much more importantly, the NY Times is constructing something that I think is very powerful in the emerging digitial world we are living in.  It’s a network where creativity and advertising happen both centrally and on the egdes.

I had a long brainstorming lunch with two particularly savvy media guys yesterday and we spent a lot of time on this notion of a network where creativity and advertising happens on the edges.  That’s About.com with its guides model of content creation and its Google-like CPC revenue business model.  There are literally hundreds of businesses emerging on the web that look like this and they are very powerful business models because they cost very little to operate.

If you look at the economics of Marketwatch vs About.com, you’ll see the benefits of this edge business model.  Marketwatch’s EBITDA was 10% of its revenues at the time it was purchased.  About.com’s EBITDA is 33% of its revenues.  That’s operating leverage and operating leverage makes growth much easier.

I pointed out to my friends at lunch that if you combine a network like that with a traditional centralized network, you get something even more powerful.  The two can feed each other and create even more value.

And that is what Martin and his team have put together.  It will be very interesting to watch them execute this acquisition.  If the content that is created on the edges starts to show up in the middle and the content that is created in the middle starts to show up on the edges, that will be a big deal.  If the ads sold by the central sales force start to show up on About and if the CPC ads start showing up more on NYT, that means they’ve done it.  I sure hope they make it work because it will be a model for the rest of the traditional media world to emulate.