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
Ideas for your elevator pitch
Sean has obviously read some of my ramblings on how to present your business succinctly…
October 18, 2006· 1 min read
A different take on the Google/YouTube deal
My partner Chris sent the following around. Its a more lighthearted way of looking at the Google/YouTube deal… YouTube is currently “delivering” 100,000,000 videos/day. I’m by no means a prolific consumer of YouTube content, but I’m going to guess that the average length of a YouTube video is about 1.5 minutes. That translates into 150,000,000 minutes wasted (or 2,500,000 hours) wasted each and every day watching YouTube videos (it would be interesting to know how many uniques that translates into). …
October 12, 2006· 2 min read
Are you in Boulder on the 19th?
The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art puts on a fantastic (and very fun) art auction every year. My wife, Greeley, and I have been regulars for several years and always have a great time. This year Greeley is even more involved as the event chair (putting on an art auction is an incredible amount of work!). I’m playing a more peripheral role as the stand-in event photographer (the regular event photographer is out of the country, so with the qualification of owning a brand new digital SLR camera – a birthday present from Greeley – the photo duties are falling to me). …
October 3, 2006· 1 min read
Quote of the day
“Successful people spend the majority of their time on major things. Unsuccessful people spend the majority of their time on minor things.” Relayed to me by my good friend Chris, who is dutifully following this advice…
October 3, 2006· 1 min read