Clarity

I was on a call recently where I had to ask someone 4 times to repeat what they were saying using more exact terms. It’s a major pet peeve of mine and so prevalent I’m losing my ability to be nice about it. Perhaps it’s a result of being a kinder, gentler society or maybe it’s just because we’ve all sat through too many PowerPoint presentations or maybe we’re all testing our political-speak skills, but whatever it is the result is the absolutely maddening trend of people not saying directly what they mean and forcing the rest of us to play 20 questions to tease it out of them. …

February 3, 2007· 1 min read

When you know it’s not right, it isn’t

_When you know it’s not right, it isn’t. _ A fellow board member said this to me the other day and I wrote it down as something I wanted to remind myself of every once in a while. She was referring to the human tendency to act slowly in the face of clear evidence and in particular to venture capitalists’ reluctance to be decisive. A good thought to ponder.

January 26, 2007· 1 min read

Children

I suppose this is a pretty obvious statement, but children really need (and deserve) homes. This hits close to the heart when you visit an orphanage and are immediately surrounded by kids yelling “mommy? mommy? mommy?” as they look up at you with their arms raised so you can pick them up. I wish I could find a way to explain in words what it’s like to step out of a van into a sea of smiling children, all with their arms outstretched. Obviously my wife and I are inclined towards children, as we were there to adopt our daughter, but I think it would be hard for anyone to experience this and not want to leave with every child that they came in contact with (note: in most adoption programs you do not arrive at an orphanage and choose your child – you are matched with a child by your agency and travel to pick him or her up; this was the case with our adoption as well). I’ll post more about this soon, but these experiences made knowing how difficult (and expensive) the adoption process is even more upsetting (clearly it would be best if there was no need for adoption and every child in the US and the rest of the world had a loving home, but until this happens it sure would be nice if more of the tens of millions of children who need a home could find one more easily). …

January 26, 2007· 2 min read

Who do I work for?

In a recent post I pointed out how autonomous the venture business can be. If that’s the case, then, who do I work for? Brad hired me and I spent several years working directly for him (i.e., supporting him in his investments). He’s still my boss, although we don’t have a traditional reporting relationship (I’m a junior partner – a Principal in our nomenclature – and he’s a senior partner – a Managing Director). I use him as a sounding board and advisor a lot but we don’t really have much of a boss/employee relationship. To some extent I work ‘for’ the other Managing Directors of Mobius but more in the same way someone at a company works ‘for’ their board of directors or their investors. Certainly I work for our investors – my job is to return them more money than they gave us and I have a direct responsibility to be a good steward of their money and trust in us. …

November 29, 2006· 2 min read

Why are VCs so indecisive?

Ever notice how indecisive many VCs are? Maybe I’m just quick tempered, but it bugs the hell out of me that so many of my venture colleagues can’t seem to make a decision. Sometimes this shows up in overanalyzing a prospective investment (just to turn it down later for a completely unrelated reason which came up in the first week of their diligence); sometimes in the line “we’re waiting to see if any other investor is interested in this deal before deciding to pursue it”; sometimes in a delay taking an action with a CEO when its clear something needs to be done; sometimes in simply not having a definitive opinion on any issue – ever – until someone else has spoken out. You get the picture (and I’m sure many of you have lived through it). I’m not at all saying we should say ‘yes’ to everything; nor am I suggesting that sometimes its not ok to simply have no opinion. But sometimes. . . perhaps most of the time . . . being definitive (even if you are definitively wrong) is better than being non-committal (and therefore noncommittally neither right nor wrong). Grrr.

November 27, 2006· 1 min read

Any Ethiopian readers?

Random question, but I have received e-mails from readers across the word. I’m going to be in Addis Ababa later this week and was wondering if I had any readers there. You can e-mail me here

November 27, 2006· 1 min read

The kindness of strangers

The world is full of people who have gone out of their way to be helpful to me over the years. I’ve been reminded of how powerful kindness can be in the past few weeks as a relative stranger – a ‘friend of a friend’ who I’ve actually never met in person, just over e-mail and phone – has gone out of their way to help me out and as a result is making something extremely important to me much easier. …

November 22, 2006· 1 min read

An army of one

One of the reasons I started this blog was to try to give readers some insights on life as a venture capitalist. I was reading some old posts and realized that I haven’t written on this topic in a while. Funny thing about venture capital – something I’ve really noticed as I transitioned from supporting other partners on their deals to exclusively managing my own portfolio – it’s a pretty lonely business. I have an extremely close relationship with my partners and of course bounce thoughts, ideas and questions off of them on a regular basis (something I think we at Mobius we are extremely good at doing). But for the most part, I spend my days doing my own thing and generally have limited overlap with what they are working on (they manage their own portfolios; we intersect on fund management and looking at new investment opportunities, but that’s about it). My “colleagues” are for the most part other board members of the companies I work with and the management teams of those companies. I spend a huge amount of time with these two groups of people. I travel pretty often, but almost never with anyone else. My partners do the same. As a result we overlap in the office only one or two days per week. This kind of snuck up on me over the past years but I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the last few months. For my personality this works great – I love the autonomy and have never been the kind of person who wanted or needed close supervision. But it’s definitely different than any other work I’ve done and I can’t help but think how unusual a working structure it is – something I never considered before I got into the business.

November 21, 2006· 2 min read

Do you ‘get’ new media?

I had the chance last week to speak to a group of non-profit executive directors from about 80 local Denver/Boulder/Longmont non-profit agencies as part of a session sponsored by the United Way on “Getting the Word Out – a Mass Communication Seminar”. I sat on a panel with a bunch of local newspaper editors which consisted of an hour of the editors talking about the best way to fax or e-mail them stories so they’d get their attention followed by 15 minutes of me saying that instead of all of that, their organizations could actually be their own media, that there was larger conversation going on across a much broader community which they could/should tap into, and that perhaps rather than pitching stories to newspapers they should think of the newspapers as added distribution for the stories they’ve already created. Don’t get me wrong – I think print media is great and I enjoy reading (on-line, of course) many of the local papers in my area. But the power of new media is that it takes away the control that traditional media has on the flow of news (not to mention the determination of what is news-worthy) and puts it into the hands of the masses. And while a story in the local paper may reach one set of constituents, a well organized (but not very costly) web site (or even just an organization blog that doubles as its web site) can get multiple messages out to multiple constituents (i.e., flickr photos of a recent fundraiser; a MySpace page to recruit college-age volunteers, dynamic web site or blog for posting updates, responding to national stories, etc.). My message was really that there’s a whole lot going on out there that non-profits (or any organization) can tap into to raise the profile of their group or cause and ultimately spread their word more broadly. The key take-away for me, however, was not all the great things that organizations can do to broaden the reach of their message or influence the media related to their work, but rather how foreign this all was to this group of relatively tech savvy execs. Most had some kind of web-site, although the vast majority didn’t update the content on the site even monthly; and while more than half had heard of blogging (and other forms of new media), almost none had any experience either reading, commenting on or contributing. For me this was a fundamental disconnect and good to keep in mind for future conversations. I sometimes take for granted that this world in which I spend so much time has gone mainstream, but the reality is that it hasn’t yet. I was thinking of all these great Web2.0-ie things they could do to broaden their web presence, engage their constituents in conversation and generally spread the good word; they were thinking “what’s blogging again?” …

November 13, 2006· 3 min read

Blogging stats

Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati, has another of his series on the evolution of the blogosphere up on his site. Most interesting to mere were the results on the dominant languages of blogging. Here are his key takeaways (quoted directly): Technorati is now tracking more than 57 Million blogs. Spam-, splog- and sping-fighting efforts at Technorati are paying dividends in terms of the reduction of garbage in our indexes, even if it does seem to impact overall growth rates. …

November 6, 2006· 2 min read