Earlier this week at our portfolio company Flurry‘s conference, SourceDigital13, I sat down with Spencer Ante and talked about mobile and some other stuff. @boonsri was in the audience and filmed it with her iPhone and posted it to the web. She also edited the video to keep it short. The talk was something like 30mins but this video is just under 10mins.
I was talking to a friend yesterday about how I process random inbound email and I thought I ought to share this with everyone. So here it goes.
I get a ton of unsolicited inbound email from people I don't know. If the mail is from a person, it generally gets into my priority inbox and I see it. I expect that I get between fifty and a hundred emails in my priority inbox every day that are unsolicited and from people I don't know.
I do not try to reply to all of these emails. If they are not replied to after three or four days, I archive them and get them out of my inbox.
But I do try to reply to at least ten of them every day. And on some days I reply to twenty or twenty five of them. It just depends on how much time I have for email each day.
My process for determining which of these emails I reply to is a bit random and I like it that way. I want to give every unsolicited email some chance of getting a response. But it is not totally random. Subject line matters. As does the content of the email. Brevity is better. A long email that goes on and on is a lot less likely to get a response from me. And, of course, the more relevant the email is to my life, the more likely it will get a reply. I do open a lot of email and then just archive it because it's not relevant.
I want to remain open to randomness. I believe there are great ideas and people out there who have no better way to get my attention than to spam me. So I open that kind of email and reply to it. But there is a seemingly endless supply of it out there and I can't and won't ever be able to reply to all of it.
There are many who suggest that I have an assistant or two reply for me. Or forward it to one of our analysts for a reply. My belief is that the person who sent me the email wants me to see it and getting a reply from an assistant or an analyst is not the desired outcome for them. So I don't do that and probably never will.
I hope this is useful to folks who are sending me email and expecting a reply. You may get it. You may not. That's how it is and I am OK with it.
As we were debating in our monday meeting yesterday about our brand, USV vs Union Square Ventures, I made the point that our URL is our brand and we use usv.com.
I am a fan of the three letter domain. Two is too short for me. Four is too long for me. I like three.I feel the same way about kids, but I do digress.
My mind started to wander in our monday meeting and I started thinking about how many three letter .com domains there are. I thought 26^3 = 17,576. But what I missed what that you can't repeat, so the correct answer is 15,600.
In either case, there are a finite and relatively small number of three letter .com domains. And I own one of them (avc.com) and our firm owns one of them (usv.com).
The story behind usv.com is about a team member taking initiative and doing an amazing thing without being asked to. Eric Friedman worked at USV for a few years at the tail end of the last decade. One monday he came in and told us that he had bought usv.com over the weekend for $10k. He didn't ask permission, he just did it. We were ecstatic and thought it was a steal. And it was. I have thanked Eric for that a few times, but I feel like thanking him again. Thanks Eric.
I like what Sarah Lacy is doing with these monthly talks called Pando Monthly. I am going to do one on June 13th. Last week Sarah talked with John Doerr, who has been a role model for me for many years and someone I have looked up to for a long time.
It’s a long talk, more than two hours. But if you can put it on this morning and let it run, there’s a ton of good stuff in here.
I hate it when companies try to run the table on a market.
Like Microsoft tried with desktop computing.
Like Apple tried with mobile computing.
Like Facebook tried with social networking.
And like Google is trying with the entire fucking Internet.
The good news that the market stops them. Apple and the Internet stopped Microsoft. Google stopped Apple. Twitter stopped Facebook.
Who will stop Google?
If you want to watch here, hit play and go to 47 minutes in. Or click on this link which will take you to you YouTube and get you to 47 minutes in.
No, I am not blogging about India Pale Ale, although I must say that I am a big fan of it.
I am writing about one of the best patent hacks I have seen in the decade that I have been working to find relief from the ridiculous patent system in our country.
Twitter came up with a concept last year called the Innovator's Patent Agreement (IPA) and put a draft IPA up on GitHub. They have gotten a ton of feedback and have iterated and improved the concept since then.
The basic idea of the IPA is that it is a contract between Twitter and the engineer(s) and designer(s) who developed the IP. The contract says that Twitter will not use the patent offensively nor will anyone who acquires the patent from Twitter. It goes on to say that Twitter or a subsquent owner could use the patent offensively with the engineers' and/or designers' approval.
Twitter announced yesterday that it had entered into an agreement with Loren Brichter, the author of the pull to refresh patent that will subject that patent to an IPA. They also announced that they will subject all of their patents to the IPA. They went on to say that Jelly, Lift, StackExchange, and Tell Apart have agreed to adopt the IPA for all of their patents.
USV has been talking to our portfolio companies about the IPA since Twitter posted it last year. They all know we are big fans of it and we hope they will choose to adopt it for all of their patents. We will not do more than that however. Our portfolio companies are independent of USV and can make up their own minds about their IP strategies.
That said, I would expect to see other USV portfolio companies join StackExchange on this IPA parade.
Twitter is an amazing company and I am very proud to be associated with it. The fact that they would take this extraordinary step and then show leadership in the industry to get others to join them is a testament to that. It's a proud day for Twitter and for me.
This Thursday from 1pm to 6pm, our portfolio company Zemanta is co-hosting a summit on native advertising here in NYC.
I've written and spoken a fair bit about native advertising so regular readers will likely be quite familiar with this topic. However, from what I am seeing out there, native advertising is really hitting its stride as social platforms and mobile consumption become the norm. If you are a marketer or an entrepreneur working in the advertising/marketing space, you should be paying attention to this trend.
I will be kicking off the event at 1pm with a brief talk and some Q&A.
If you want to go, here is a link to get a 50% discount on the event for readers of AVC.
This is Internet Week in NYC and I am making a number of public appearances in addition to this native advertising summit. Here's the whole shebang:
Last night – introducing the Gotham Gal at the MOUSE 15 Annivesary Event
This morning – Opening the CMSummit with John Battelle at 9:10am
Wednesday evening – March For Innovation (immigration) event at AppNexus with Brian O'Kelly
Thursday mid-day – The Native Advertising event
Thursday at 4:30pm – OpenCo Festival event with John Battelle and Dave Morgan at Simulmedia
It's a busy week but with a Vespa scooter and a mind full of things to say, it shouldn't be too hard. I hope to see you all around town this week.
Back in the early days of AVC, I did a thing called VC Cliche Of The Week. There was an RSS feed of all of them powered by Delicious, but it is broken and most likely can't be fixed. You can find some of them on gawk.it.
One of the cliches I posted about is "success has a thousand fathers." I thought I would re-run that post. Here it is.
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You can count on it – when a deal works out spectacularly everyone involved will take credit for it.
This behavior is particularly annoying to the entrepreneurs who put the sweat, blood, and tears into the Company.
They watch the VCs take credit for the big success and it grates on them.
I have a couple rules that I try very hard to live by in this regard:
1- the management team always gets the credit. VCs don't do the dirty work and should not get the accolades when things work out.
2 – don't gloat. it's not becoming. humility in times of great success is a very becoming characteristic.
But it's really hard to follow these rules when things work out well. Because success doesn't come that often, and when it does, it has a thousand fathers.
It's Monday, time for another lesson I've learned in the venture capital business. Today I will tell a story that I love telling. It has some of my favorite people in it.
Back in 2004, early in my blogging career, I heard about a service that had just launched called Feedburner. It provided a number of useful services for a blog's RSS feed. So I went and signed up and AVC became one of the first users of the service. I immediately liked the service and the idea. So I contacted the founder/CEO Dick Costolo, who has gone onto bigger and better things. I told Dick that I was interested in making an investment in Feedburner. My friend Brad Feld was also talking to Dick about the same thing so we decided to do the investment together.
As part of our investment process, we do a bunch of fact gathering/checking work that is called Due Diligence in the vernacular of the VC business. So my partner Brad Burnham and I put together a list of leading blogs and online publishers who had popular RSS feeds at the time. I think there were a dozen or so publications on that list. It included Weblogs (Engadget), Gawker (Gawker), NY Times, and a bunch more. We know most everyone who ran those operations so we called them.
What we heard was surprising. Not one of them was willing to hand over their RSS feed to a third party for analytics and monetization. We were very surprised to hear that and thought a bit about it. But, we decided, we could not invest in something that the big publishers would not support. So regrettably, I called Dick and told him we had to pass and why. Brad Feld went ahead with the investment and Feedburner closed their round without USV.
About six months later I ran into Dick at an industry conference. We decided to grab lunch together and during lunch he said to me "you know those dozen publishers you called?" I said "yes, what about them?" He said "every single one of them is on Feedburner now."
I was pissed. How could that be? So I said to Dick, "Would you consider letting us into that last round we walked away from." He said "No, but I will let you invest at a 50% increase in price". We did that and became an investor in Feedburner. And that worked out well when Feedburner was sold to Google a few years later.
So what did I learn from this lesson? First, trust your gut. I was using Feedburner and knew it was a very useful service. I felt that others would see that too. They did, but it took some time. Second, I learned that a service can get traction with the little guys and in time, the big guys will come along. I have seen that happen quite a bit since then. And finally, I learned that you can do too much due diligence. It's important to talk to the market and hear what it is saying. But you have to balance that with other things; the quality of the team, the product, the user experience, etc. You cannot rely alone on due diligence, particularly early on in the development of a company and a market.
