Posts from Web/Tech

We invest in a lot of marketplaces. When they scale, we often hear complaints from early adopters, amplified by the media, that the early adopters are getting hurt by the "mainstreaming" of the marketplace. You hear that kind of argument with other kinds of networks as well. When Twitter went mainstream, a lot of the early adopters complained that it had lost its soul.

I think most of this thinking is emotional, but not rational. A rising tide lifts all boats, or at least most of them. Kickstarter has published some data on this issue. I like this part from that post:

Spike Lee brought three decades of fans to Kickstarter when he launched his project. He introduced many of them to this new way of funding creative works, and to the thousands of other projects that are funding on Kickstarter. Of Spike’s backers, 47% had never backed a Kickstarter project before.

The Veronica Mars and Zach Braff film projects were similarly criticized for hurting other projects, but in reality were a windfall for creators. Those projects brought thousands of new people to Kickstarter who have since pledged more than $1 million to 6,000 other projects (film projects have received most of those pledges).

In the past 90 days alone, more than $21 million has been pledged to filmmakers on Kickstarter not named Rob Thomas, Zach Braff, or Spike Lee. Even without counting these projects, it’s been the biggest three months for film ever on Kickstarter!

Almost five million people have backed a project on Kickstarter, and more than a million have backed two or more projects. These repeat backers are responsible for 59% of the total money pledged to Kickstarter projects — a whopping $444 million. On average, 2,130 people a dayhave become new repeat backers this year. This is huge! Future creators will benefit from more and more people using Kickstarter.

We have seen a similar effect at Etsy. When a wave of new sellers came to Etsy as it became a mainstream marketplace a few years ago, the early sellers were concerned about the competition these new sellers would create for them. But Etsy has grown its gross transactions at between 70-100% per year for the past five years, a rate that is roughly the same as the rate of new sellers joining the service. For every new seller that joins Etsy, it seems that there is  a new buyer waiting to consider buying from them.

The cool thing about these marketplaces is that the sellers (or project creators in Kickstarter's case) are the primary marketing engine. Sellers bring the first time buyers. And then many of them stick around and transact again and again, often with sellers other than the one that brought them in the first place. It is a commons where everyone (or most everyone) benefits from the expansion of the marketplace.

I felt like explaining this because I read this opinion piece in the NY Times today about Kickstarter. While the title of the piece is awful (nobody has their "hands out" on Kickstarter), I like how they ended it:

The gentrification of Kickstarter doesn’t seem to be hurting its original inhabitants. It may even be helping them.

The only quibble I have with that line is the use of the word "may". I am certain it is helping them.

Getting information via email is so old hat in the age of social and mobile media. But I can tell you that many folks get AVC via email and they like getting it that way very much.

I just subscribed to Benedict Evans' email newsletter. He sends it out on Sundays and it talks about the week that was. I like the sound of that although I will probably read it on the web via my Nexus7. But at least the email is a reminder to go read it.

I use a service called Feedblitz to power my email service. If you want to subscribe to it, you can do that here. At this time, I have 4,433 email subscribers to AVC and the open rate hovers around 40%.

For comparison, 29,029 people have subscribed to my RSS feed. But only 4,724 read it on a daily basis in their RSS reader. And I get, on average, about 7,000 visits a day via web and mobile.

So this is the daily readership of AVC (approximately):

Web/Mobile Web: 7,000

RSS 4,700

Email 1,800

Total 13,500

Email is roughly 15% of my daily readership. And if I didn't hide the email subscribe button, I bet it would be a lot bigger!

Another email newsletter I highly recommend is Charlie O'Donnell's weekly NY Tech events newsletter. If you are new to town and want to get connected to the tech industry in NYC, you can't beat this resource.

I am sure there are other email newsletters out there that are worth subscribing to. And I am sure we will hear about them in the comments. Because email is old hat but it's still an important channel for content publishers that should not be overlooked.

I have tried unsuccessfully to use a task manager many times over the years. I must have tried to use Outlook's task feature a dozen times unsuccessfully before leaving Outlook for the Google Apps Suite.

With the advent of mobile and web apps, and the combination of them, I have tried again, hoping that the mix of web and mobile might change things for me. My most recent attempt was a mobile and web app called Wunderlist. I am sure some of you use it. And I am sure some of you use other task managers.

I know that I am a highly disorganized person and it is all that I can do to manage (badly) my email and calendar (with a lot of help). I have not been able to add tasks and notes to my workflow.

I do put tasks in my calendar all the time. In fact, I have one coming up in a few minutes that I am going to take care of this morning. But putting them in my calendar, I achieve two things; 1) add a time dimension which creates urgency and 2) decrease the number of apps I need to actively use.

There is a Kik card called Remember The Beer that does something pretty awesome and that is allow me to easily share tasks. I create them in the card and then Kik them to the Gotham Gal, one of my colleagues, or one of my kids. It's lightweight, easy, and social and viral.

I think that's the only way tasks are going to work for me. And as I talk to others about tasks, I have noticed that a lot of people are like me and don't use task managers. I think if someone was able to make task sharing lightweight, viral, and social, they could change this dynamic and convert the large group of us who want to but can't use a task manager.

Back in 2008, when I gave my talk at Web 2.0 on the recent history of the NYC tech sector, I said that Red Burns was responsible for restarting the tech sector in NYC when she created ITP at NYU in the late 70s.

The entire slide show for that talk is here.

Many of you know this sad news already. Red passed away this past week. She was an incredible woman who left NYC with the gift of a resurgent tech sector and a community of passionate makers and entrepreneurs. It is her legacy as much as anyone's.

Here are some links to the best posts I've seen on Red this week.

The New York Times

The Gotham Gal

Dennis Crowley

Clay Shirky

Wikipedia

ITP

I have found it increasingly difficult to find blogs and blog posts by regular bloggers who are talking about things that are interesting to me. The big aggregators (Hacker News, Reddit, Techmeme) sometimes surface interesting posts, but where do you find about the every day blogger who is writing about tech stuff? The idea of a blog roll seems to have come and gone. I stopped running a blog roll here at AVC at least six or seven years ago.

So starting today, I am participating in a new service operated by our portfolio company Zemanta called Tech Circle. There will be a widget at the end of every post with some links to posts by bloggers who are similar to me. 

If you want to join the Tech Circle, let Zemanta know here. And if you'd like to start a different kind of circle, you can let them know about that too.

I am excited to give this a try. I hope all of you are too.

As I was biking this morning, I was behind a black Ford truck that was delivering papers. I got to thinking that this was a very expensive way to get a paper to a reader. The driver's time, the depreciation on the truck, the gas, the printing press, the paper costs, etc. And that got me to thinking about what I would do if I was Bezos and just bought a business with a big cost structure around printing and distributing a physical product.

And speaking of Bezos and Amazon, I just read this Nicholas Carr post about the slowing growth of e-books relative to physical books. This jumped out at me:

E-book prices have not fallen the way many expected. There’s not a big price difference between an e-book and a paperback. (It’s possible, suggests one industry analyst, that Amazon is seeing a plateau in e-book sales and so is less motivated to take a loss on them for strategic reasons.)

So back to my bike ride. As I watched the truck deliver the paper to driveway after driveway, it occurred to me that many people prefer to get the paper in physical form. The Gotham Gal does and so does her sister. But my brother in law reads it on his iPad and our daughter Jessica reads it on her iPad mini. I prefer to read it on the web.

Different strokes for different folks. But clearly there is a large and important customer base for the physical product and it is not going away any time soon. Many of the early adopters of ebooks and tablets to read books and the newspaper have made their move. The diehards aren't going to make that move it seems, or they are going to take their time.

So what to do? The obvious move seems to me to price the physical product at a significant premium to the digital product reflecting that the marginal cost of a digital product is zero and the marginal cost of a physical product is not. That will either drive more adoption of the digital product where the profits are likely to be higher or it will drive the margins up on the physical product because the diehards will accept the price increase and keep reading the paper and/or book in physical form.

But we have not seen this happen in the book market and I am not sure we have seen this play out completely in the newspaper market. Is the market and the companies that make it up behaving rationally? Or are they protecting the physical market at the detriment of the digital market?

I realize things are never this simple. But that's the question I was wrestling with on my bike ride this morning. And so I thought I'd share it with all of you so we can discuss it. So let's do that.

This talk is about all the stuff we have been talking about and thinking about at USV lately. It’s awesome.

During the OpenCo event/week in NYC a month or so ago, I sat down at cocktail hour at Simulmedia with Dave Morgan and John Battelle. We had a great chat and the folks at Simulmedia edited it down to about 18mins. It's a fun talk.

We've got two girls traveling around the world this summer. One has a pocket wifi from Xcom Global (asia) and the other has a pocket wifi from Tep Wireless (europe).

I've become a convert to the pocket wifi in the past year. I used to be a fan of swapping sim cards but these pocket wifis have gotten better recently. The cost has come down and the coverage has gone up.

I don't have a complete report from the girls yet. I will get a full download when they are back and write up something with the pros and cons of both. The one thing I know for sure from our trip to Japan is that battery life is the big issue with pocket wifis. If you get four hours, you are doing well. I always charge up two batteries so I have a backup when I'm out and about.

I am curious if there are other vendors out there that I should know about. I'm getting ready to head to europe for a week of business in four countries and I am planning to get a Tep unless there is something better out there I should know about.