Syndicate – NYC
I’ll be at Syndicate NY next week. They’re actually giving me a speaking role (scary, I know – something about the future of Syndication . . .). Drop me a line of you’re going to be there too.
May 12, 2006· 1 min read
Feedback
There was a great article in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) that talks about the role practice plays in becoming truly great at something. They walk through research that suggest that while people clearly have some natural level of ability or affinity towards certain skills, it’s the hard work and dedication they put into the practice of their chosen art that ultimately sets them apart. There’s a feedback loop here – people tend to work harder at those things that they are good at (because they enjoy it more). There was one paragraph in particular that struck me and it relates to something that I’ve been thinking about that every business does, but most in my view do poorly. Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome. If you believe this, then you have to scratch your head at how most businesses and managers offer feedback to employees – through annual or semi-annual reviews. There are two problems with this approach: 1) the feedback is stale (and negative feedback easily rationalized by its recipient as memory fades and more importantly the time for correcting poor performance or reinforcing good performance has long passed); and 2) its generally tied to a conversation around compensation – either an annual bonus, pay increase or both. Rather than limiting the majority of feedback to a review period, try giving more consistent feedback (both positive and constructive) on a more regular basis. Get out of a presentation – talk about what worked and what didn’t; finish a sales call or demo, figure out what seemed to resonate with the customer and what can be improved; feel someone in the company did an outstanding job with a task – let them know why it worked so well. Equally important, reviews should be about reviews (and what I’m describing above shouldn’t replace a more formal review process, it should supplement and feed into it). Comp conversations should be about comp. Obviously they are related, but its much more constructive to review an employees performance when the outcome of that meeting isn’t about money (but rather about the improvement of performance).
May 12, 2006· 2 min read
now that’s helpful
Someone started ordering chai for our cafeteria and of course I had to check it out. Having never made chai from a package you can imagine that I had some concerns about whether it would come out right – what would I do if it was too hot? what if it wasn’t creamy enough? Not to worry – thankfully the package contained exremely helpful instructions (click on the image below for a better view). …
May 4, 2006· 1 min read
parlez-vous blog?
Dave Sifry from Technorati put up another in his ‘state of the blogosphere’ series. This one has some pretty interesting data on the language of the blogosphere. Being a narrow-minded American I naturally assumed that English was the dominant language of the blogosphere (it certainly was by far the dominant language of the early Internet). It’s not. Not even by a longshot. English doesn’t have anything close to a plurality in the blogosphere. It’s not even the most common language of blogging (Japanese is). Hmm.
May 4, 2006· 1 min read
Back on the wagon
Wow. Has it really been a month since I posted? Lots of excuses about being busy and traveling a lot, but I’ve done that before and not stopped blogging. Not sure what happened – sorry about that (for those of you that noticed, that is). One interesting observation about my unplanned hiatus: When I’m actively blogging, I often find myself viewing the world through the “blog lens”. Those of you that are bloggers will get this right away – what I’m referring to is the tendency to start looking at everything in terms of whether it would make a good blog post or not. Kind of a funny way to look at the world, but it happens when you blog a lot – probably a combination of looking for new content and more generally a rewiring of your brain to think about all things in the context of how you’d describe it to someone else. The halflife of thinking this way was probably about a 4 days. By week 2 of not blogging, I had kicked the habit – clearly reinforcing my not blogging. A good reason to not go more than a week without posting. . .
May 4, 2006· 1 min read
Lifescience blogging
Despite being in pretty much separate areas of technology investing, I continue crossing paths with Adam Rubenstein in a way that reminds me how small the Denver/Boulder business community really is. Adam is involved in a number of local bio related initiatives – MycoLogics, High Country Ventures and the Fitzsimons BioBusiness Incubator to name a few. We recently had an e-mail exchange on how he might encourage more thought leaders and venture capitalists from the bio-sciences to participate in the blogosphere and I suggested that he consider using his own blog as a platform and invite VCs and business leaders to write guest posts. You can imagine my surprise today when I saw that he actually took my advice and started a guest blogger series. The first entry in the series is by Harry Ross from Aweida Venture Partners. Harry is a well respected life sciences investor and always an interesting guy to talk with. You can check out his post here. Take a look at Adam’s full blog here.
April 3, 2006· 1 min read
Progress
Newsgator announced a series of product enhancements last week (see here and here) along with their new website layout. Looking at the new site got me thinking about how far they’ve come since our initial investment. In the spirit of a picture being worth a thousand words, take a look at the following links to see just how much progress they’ve made. Newsgator’s current web site Web site from January 2004 – right around the time of our first meeting with Greg …
April 3, 2006· 1 min read
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 _C_iao! – I’m cool! and trying to act foreign Sincerely – I took this really great business writing class in high school Thanks – I really do mean thanks (when used correctly) / I can’t think of anything else to say (when used incorrectly, for example at the bottom of a flame e-mail) Hope all is well – Please DO NOT write back with details of whether you are well or not – I’m just trying to be polite Warm regards – I’ve just returned from my latest analyst session and am feeling pretty centered [nothing but your name] – S_ometimes less is more_ [not even your name – just your full signature] – I’m so efficient/important/etc. that I don’t have time to even type in my name With my very cheeriest and best thanks and regards. Here’s hoping all is well …
March 29, 2006· 2 min read
Spring Break Reading
I hit a critical point on the vacation curve and last week took off to Mexico with my family for a respite. This one was a real break – no phone, no e-mail, no business contact of any kind. Along with relaxing on the beach and building sand castles with my daughter (mostly for the purpose of knocking them down right away), I was able to get quite a bit of reading time in. With that in mind I wanted to pass along two of these titles in case you’re looking to add to your reading list. The first is Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty. Sachs is an economist who has advised a number of developing nations on macroeconomic policy. He’s now the director of theEarth Institute at Columbia and a special advisor to the UN (advising on the UN’s Millennium Project). The book is extremely accessible – written for non-academics. For me, it challenged some of the notions I hold of Africa as a ‘lost continent’ and laid out Sachs’ version of how to Africa may be lifted out of poverty. I love macroeconomics (my college major) and in particular issues related to the relationships between economies. This book is very interesting reading. One word of warning – the last 1/5th of the book is essentially an advertisement for Sachs’ version of how to achieve the Millennium Development goals and got a bit tedious. The first 80% of the book was outstanding. The other recommendation is Captain Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone around the World. The book is, as you might guess, about Slocum’s journey around the world. He was the first to accomplish this feat solo – leaving Boston in 1895 in a 30’ wooden sloop and returning to Rhode Island more than 3 years later in mid-1898. The book is great – starting with the title (you can imagine that if this book was titled today it would be called “A historic voyage” or “Voyage of a lifetime” or something cheesy like that). Slocom’s style of prose is also reflected in the title – he’s to the point and comically matter-of-fact. …
March 28, 2006· 2 min read
smartfeed
NewsGator jumped deeper into the mobile app world with its recent purchase of mobile podcatcher smartfeed along with its companion mobile reader, smartread. They also hired the smartfeed/read creator, Kevin Crawley, to head NewsGator’s mobile product development. It’s a great move by NewsGator to extend their vision of ‘any time, any place, any device’. Greg Reinacker covered the key points about why we did this on his blog, and Kevin added some more background color in his, so I won’t repeat it here. The thing I like most about this story is how Kevin came to be hooked up with NewsGator – particularly relevant to a series of side-bar conversations I’ve been having recently on the value of VC blogs (thoughts on that topic from last year are here). Kevin apparently read something interesting in one of my blog posts and, since we were both Boulder locals, reached out to me. We met about 9 months ago for coffee and to talk about technology in general and RSS and podcasting specifically. It turned out that we knew a bunch of people in common, had common interests, etc (this being Boulder, it was pretty much a certainty that we’d have at least a dozen ‘one degree’ connections). Nothing specific came of the meeting, but we agreed to stay in touch, which we did over the months. Long story short, voila!, Kevin is working with NewsGator who now owns the IP from the project that we originally got together to talk about. Not where I thought that cup of coffee was headed, but a great blogging success story.
March 17, 2006· 2 min read