Becoming a verb
You’re on the right track when your company becomes a verb. Just add a “d” to your name and you’ve got an idea what I’m talking about. Google is the best example of this – as in “Have you Googled that?” A couple of the companies I work with are on their way (at least in the markets they play in). I take it as a good sign that they are becoming important enough with their customers as to actually enter their lexicon (as in “Have you Quova’d this IP address?”).
April 18, 2005· 1 min read
Making the RSS world a more user friendly place
I’ve been thinking about the ways that I interface with feeds that I read. Specifically, how I parse through information, how I figure out what I want to read and subscribe to and how I’d like view different types of information. I see a couple of problems with the proliferation of information brought upon by the explosion of RSS. Specifically, with so much noise, how does one cut through all the chatter to focus on what you really want to hear? The issue is not just how do I figure out what blogs or news feeds to subscribe to (that’s actually pretty easy) – it’s the broader question of how do I manage those feeds; how do I capture information on topics I care about that are published in feeds I don’t care about; and how can I organize my information capture so I spend more time reading what I want to read vs. figuring out what I want to read. …
April 18, 2005· 4 min read
21
I was talking to a friend of mine recently who was telling me about the weekly meeting that he used to have with his boss in which he was asked to talk about his top 21 priorities. 21 priorities – seriously. Talk about getting defocused. . . .
April 12, 2005· 1 min read
Taking 100% responsibility
I have a concept about relationships that I really like (even if I sometimes forget to follow its teachings): In any meaningful relationship (business, personal or otherwise) each person should be 100% responsible for that relationship. I used to think that a relationship involved each of the parties to be responsible for 50% (i.e., and therefore the total 100% would be taken care of). I guess that works in theory, but if you think about it, your relationships will be much more meaningful (and fulfilling) if you take 100% responsibility for them. This plays well into my recent post on communication. If each person in a relationship is taking 100% responsibility for the communication in a relationship that communication is likely to be much more frequent and meaningful than if each person is waiting for it to happen ½ of the time (which is, of course, what happens if each person only takes 50% responsibility). …
April 11, 2005· 2 min read
Media media everywhere . . .
No question we live in a world of ever expanding media opportunities. From the AP: The Global Language Monitor, which scans the Internet for the use of specific words or phrases using Roman characters, found 35,000 new stories on the pope in the 24 hours after his death Saturday. I did a search on “Pope” at Technorati and got over 85,000 hits (over 21,000 when searching for “Pope death”). Conclusions: 1) the Pope was clearly an important (and well talked about) person 2) the proliferation of media continues
April 7, 2005· 1 min read
Communicate! Communicate! Communicate!
I was reminded (again) today of the importance of clear, open and honest communication. There’s no substitute for it. There seems to be a 1:10 rule about communication such that it takes about 10 times the amount of energy/effort to communicate something after the fact (i.e., after a communication break-down) than doing it up front. Not to mention the potential hard feelings, bad karma, etc. With all the ways to get in touch these days (e-mail, phone, cell phone, sms, etc.) it seems like this should be pretty easy. …
April 7, 2005· 1 min read
Now I’m Really ‘Burned’
I’ve posted a few times about my desire for better users stats (most recently on April 1st but also way back in January). Well – now I’m doing something about it. FeedBurner announced today the closing of a new investment lead by Mobius (yours truly and Brad Feld – Brad will take the board seat and I will be the board observer), with new investor Sutter Hill and existing investors Portage and DFJ. …
April 4, 2005· 2 min read
Burn me!
I complained a while back about how much the feed stats in TypePad suck. I then proceeded to do absolutely nothing about it, I guess figuring that site stats were something that would be high on their priority list and they would somehow figure it out. Well, they haven’t so I have a request to make. The basic problem I have with the TypePad stats is that they don’t provide me good data on who is subscribed to my feed. About a week into writing this blog I started using FeedBurner – which has much better information about who is reading my posts. The problem is that my FeedBurner stats only capture people who subscribed after that first week – and I know that a bunch of people subscribed in the first few days after I put up my first post (a result of some shameless self promotion I did). …
April 1, 2005· 2 min read
A day in the life of a VC
One of the most common questions I get asked from people outside the VC industry is “what’s a typical day like?” It’s a good question, but a hard one to answer – my days are extremely varied (this is one of the things I really like about my job, in fact). The type of work I do on any given day is very dependant on what’s going on with the companies that I work with (financing, m&a, planning, putting in place a bank line, rolling out new products, etc.), and every day (or hour) seems to bring something different. I’ve tried a few approaches to answering this question – typically some variant of “on average I spend x% of my time on sourcing new deals; y% on financings; z% working with portfolio companies on operations; etc.). The problem with this is that, while it may provide some insight into how I spend my time in a typical month (or quarter), it doesn’t really answer the question, nor give much of a real flavor of what Ido day to day. Since one of my goals with this blog is to write about the experience of being a VC I thought I’d try to do a better job of answering this question by writing about a couple of different days that I think typify the VC experience. The idea here is not to generalize, but rather to report on a couple of days that feel are ‘typical’. I had one recently (that inspired me to try to tackle this question) – it went something like this: Early Morning: Spent the morning working up a term sheet for an investment that had recently been approved by the firm. It actually wasn’t my deal, but the principal who had sponsored it was on a business trip and I was helping out by pulling the term sheet together. To do this I had to work up a version of the company’s cap table that I could play around with (I had one from the company, but the structure of it didn’t allow me to manipulate it in the way that I wanted to). I also spent quite a bit of time with the financing docs from their last round – Series A term sheets are much easier to write than term sheets for follow-on financings where I need to account for the existing cap structure as well as understand what terms I want to keep the same vs. change from previous rounds. The whole process took several hours, after which I sent it off to the partner involved in the deal and our general counsel to take a quick look before sending it to the company. …
March 31, 2005· 5 min read
How do you view your news?
As an investor in an RSS aggregator (Newsgator – far and away the best of the reader platforms out there; although I suppose I’m biased) I pay attention to how people use syndication services and how they use, manage, manipulate and read their news and blog feeds. I’ve played around with some of the different technologies in the space – most of which are variations of the same theme (very effective for reading individual posts, not as effective for sorting through large amounts of information). …
March 28, 2005· 2 min read