Category

General Business

How do you sign your e-mails?

For some reason I’ve been paying attention lately to how people sign their e-mails and thought I’d throw out a few thoughts. I’d be particularly interested to hear from people on the strangest sign-offs they’ve received. Below is a list of some of the more common sign-offs along with my take on what they really mean. Cheers! – I’m cool! Best – I don’t want to be locked into a specific sign-off – please interpret as you wish (best wishes, best regards, best cheers, etc.) All the best – When “Best” simply isn’t good enough Ciao! – I’m cool! and trying to act foreign Sincerely – I took this really great business writing class in high school Thanks – I…

Where was that you went to school?

I’ll admit that I have a bit of a complex about business schools. I never went (sorry – no “Seth J. Levine, MBA” on my business card . . . ) – probably because all of the schools I wanted to go to wouldn’t accept me for college, so I don’t see any reason to give them money for business school. Plus it was the rock and roll late 90’s and I still had dreams of getting rich in the internet bubble (which I did not, although I do continue to receive class action notices for various companies whose stock I owned at the time, much to my amusement). So with that as my clear bias, I have a pet…

Follow up to “What’s in a name?”

You can see from the comments to my post on company names yesterday that I actually heard from many of the companies listed (a few wrote me directly and don’t show up on the comments roster, but 3 commented directly). I was actually highly amused by the e-mail exchanges I had on the topic – everyone took it in stride (and thought it was extremely funny). It did get me thinking about how fast information travels in a WEB2.0 world. With one exception that I’m aware of, the people who contacted me were not a regular reader of this blog (despite my wishing that my reach was really that far . . .). Still within a few hours, they had…

What’s in a name?

At the risk of throwing stones from a glass house, what’s up with the names of next generation web companies? Catching up on some of my TechCrunch reading this morning I was struck by how crazy the company names were. Here are just a few from posts in the last week: YouTube Kaboodle Tinfinger Fleck YubNub Podzinger Eurekster Nuvvo As Charlie Wood points out – say them together and these names sound “like an incantation.” Now I know that it’s hard to find domain names these days, but wow – these names are really out there. Remember the good old days when company names actually told you something about what they did?

More information = good

Here’s a great idea: David Jackson has started posting transcripts from company conference calls on his web site (he’s actually been this for a while, but now has pretty extensive coverage of tech company earnings calls). I try to listen to a handful of earnings calls each season, but invariably I get to fewer than I want to, or miss the key moment of a call – even when I’m listening to the replay (which is almost always what I end up doing).  I’d much rather peruse the transcripts. Much easier to consume quickly.  Much easier to search.  Much easier to quote from (if you’re into that sort of thing). Thanks David.  Nice work.

Should you be a good employee?

When I worked at Morgan Stanley there was a running debate among the analysts about whether it was better to be a good analyst or a bad analyst. The theory went that if you were a great analyst you were rewarded with more work (but not much more pay, given how few analysts actually made it to the “outstanding” category at bonus time) and if you were a mediocre or bad analyst you were passed over for projects and had a much much better lifestyle (i.e., you worked 60 hours a week instead of 90 or more). Banks never really fired analysts, so one could pretty easily coast by for the time of their indenture.My own views on this are…

Networking 101 Expanded

Josh Kerbel wrote me with a good question to my Networking 101 post and my follow up post to that one Here’s how you do it that I thought I’d post along with my response (with his permission). Josh Writes: A while back you wrote a post about networking and you referenced Ben Casnocha as an example of a great network, the type of guy who writes people letters and goes out and meets them. Being that I depend on networking for most of my deal flow and just to build up a network of contacts, I am always looking to talk with people, new people and old. So I tried a little experiement, I mailed letters of congratulations (I…

Morality and China

Tony Perkins posted a cautionary piece on China yesterday to AlwaysOn entitled “Chinese Youth, Unite  A moral view of China”  In it he argues that we (silicon valley) are being perhaps too quick to look past some of the moral and ethical issues with the Chinese government while we give them what he terms a “gigantic money-fisted hug”. My parents just returned from a two week vacation in China and dad sent around his reaction to Perkins piece with his recent on the ground observations as his perspective. I’m printing it here, with his permission. __________________________ I’d like to offer a (limited) bottoms-up view to complement Tony’s top-down view. I strongly agree that the economic, political, and ethical issues are…

Networking 101

Networking – To interact or engage in informal communication with other for mutual assistance or support (from Dictionary.com) I talked about networking in my recent post on How to become a venture capitalist. In it I said that I’d put up a separate post with more detailed thoughts on the subject. I don’t pretend to be the final source on the matter, but I do regularly engage in the art of networking – on both the network-ing and network-ed side of the equation. As with all my posts, comments are welcomed (and appreciated). Sorry in advance for the length of this one – I tried cutting it down, but couldn’t get it to work that way . . . Step…