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I also think it’s a fantastic business tool.  I’m speaking on a panel to that effect next week in Denver along with Tim Higgins from Indigio, Jon Nordmark from eBags, Ken Klispie of Disaboom and David Gibbons of Zillow.  If you’re around and interested (or just want to come heckle) please come!

A little off topic, but if you’re in the market for a fun summer driver, I’m selling my fake Porsche 356 (not a kit but a "custom" build).  I bought it on eBay 6 years ago and am trying to sell it the same way.  I’ve had it up a couple of times – winner’s financing fell through the first time and it didn’t clear reserve the second.  I’ve taken out the reserve so if you’re interested or know someone who is . . . bid! http://tinyurl.com/4vp5xf

A few years ago I wrote a post on how to get a job in venture capital.  It was lucky enough to get broad distribution and remains my most viewed and linked to post.  I’ve had a number of questions about it over the years and have tried to respond to people who wrote in to ask my opinion about their VC job search.  One of the most common questions I’ve received runs something like: “I get it – finding a venture job is hard.  I still really want to try and I have a 5+ year outlook on this.  What should I do during that time to work towards my goal of landing a venture job?” Of course the…

If you are a regular reader of this blog you know that I love platforms in general and Facebook in particular.  And since I’ve been thinking about messaging recently (see my post yesterday on Twitter as my new instant messenger) I’ve been noticing the increasingly varied methods I use to communicate.  I’m curious if others have also experienced a trend away from old school email. In particular I’m seeing an increase in the volume of messaging on Facebook – from Jeff suggesting on my wall that I try out Twhirl (in response to a tweet about a Snitter problem I was having) to old high school buddies re-connecting through direct message. And I’m not even a heavy Facebook user. A…

I’ve been off instant messaging for years.  There was nothing about it that I found appealing or that added to my productivity.  I realized this morning that Twitter has become my new IM. I publish what I’m doing (and as a result people know if they can reach me or not, whether to try me at my office or on my cell, etc.).  I stay in touch with my friends and colleagues by following what they are up to (and therefore know how to get in touch with them if I need to).  Through following and being followed I keep up with more people and don’t have to "check in" as much because I know what they are doing, where…

I was out at the Microsoft Mountain View campus a few weeks ago for an event hosted by their venture relations group.  I had the chance to meet Chris Liddell, MSFT’s CFO, along with 3 of their divisional CFO’s.  It was a pretty wide ranging discussion from how they are thinking about M&A to several strategic area of focus to how the divisions are working together on projects that cross divisional boundaries. The thing that struck me the most was not the WHAT of their thinking, but the HOW.  I participated in a break-out session with Tami Reller, CFO of Platforms and Services division (which includes their search and online advertising properties).  There were about 15 of us in the…

My partner Chris just put up a post on the Foundry blog about our geographic (actually non-geographic) approach to investing.  We’ve talked in past posts about how we organize our thinking about potential investments into "themes" that we use to guide our focus.  One of the important precepts of taking a thematic approach to investing is that we don’t create artificial boundaries that limit where we’ll follow an investment theme – we let the theme guide us to the best companies that we can find, regardless of where they are located.  In the past this has taken us to Chicago, New York, the Bay Area, Orange County and many points in between.  It does mean that there’s more time spent…

A 1995 article by Clifford Stoll has resurfaced on the Newsweek site: The Internet? Bah.  Hype Alert: Why cyberspace isn’t and will never be, nirvana.  Of course its fun (and easy) to make fun of pundits with the benefit of hindsight, but this one is particularly juicy with its sweeping – and as it turns out completely off base – prognostications.  Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online…

We’ve just put up another in a series of posts the active investment "themes" that we’re pursuing on the Foundry Group blog (see earlier theme posts here and here).  Today’s post introduces a theme that we’re calling "glue".  Glue is our term for the web infrastructure layer that facilitates the connections between web services and content companies. As this ecosystem becomes increasingly complex and as web sites and web based applications rely on more underlying services, this “glue” layer of the Internet is becoming more and more core to overall web infrastructure. You can view the full post here.  And don’t forget to subscribe to the Foundry blog so you can keep up to date on what we’re thinking about.