When I graduated from college I worked on Wall Street for a couple of years as an analyst for Morgan Stanley. While a valuable experience, especially for someone such as myself who had never even considered taking a business or finance course (I was an econ and psychology major), the job pretty much sucked. While I enjoyed the finance aspect of it and, particularly in my second year, had great access to the CEOs and CFOs of the companies I worked with, a lot of my job involved staying up until all hours of the night (morning, technically) preparing analysis and putting together ‘pitch books’ for use in presentations the following day. Not particularly glamorous work. Nor was it generally…
Archives / January, 2005
eWork CEO Hans Bukow on OutsourcingTV
Ok. I can’t say that I’ve ever heard of OutsourcingTV.com but apparently it exists and they did an “interview” with Hans Bukow, the CEO of eWork on the recent eWork/ProSavvy merger (see my last blog post). You can check out the interview at the following link: http://www.outsourcingtv.com/ot/index.jsp?movieid=13688&channel= I’m in the middle of writing a post on whether blogging means an end to traditional media and, not to steal my thunder, but I think this interview backs up the point I’m going to make – there’s lots of room in the world for niche media (or point media) to exist along side more traditional media sources. Clearly enough people care about the outsourcing market for there to be a website that…
eWork/Prosavvy Merger
One of the companies that I work with closely, ProSavvy, announced this week that it merged with eWork (the combined company will keep the eWork name). The merger creates perhaps the largest private company in the workforce management/services procurement/payroll services business. As part of the merger, Mobius led a new round of financing into the combined business. You can read the press release here. In layman terms, the combined business offers products that allow businesses to manage various aspects of procuring, managing and payrolling temporary employees (contract laborers) and what are called fixed project deliverables (consulting projects). The combined business has three main products: eWork Enterprise – a enterprise software platform for managing contract work (whether that be contract labor,…
Finishing what you start
One thing I’ve noticed since I started blogging is that starting a blog entry is a lot easier than finishing it. There are plenty of things to write about and I find it pretty easy to start a new blog (I usually do this in my head first and try to think it through before committing it to paper). It’s a lot harder to finish them, however. My blog draft file is full of ½ completed blogs that are waiting for me to finish up. I’ve been thinking about this a bunch recently and trying to figure out if this is specific to blogging (or any forming of putting thoughts to paper) or if it is just a part of the human condition –…
Venture Capital Deal Algebra
I’m intending this blog to be a mixture of my personal thoughts on being a venture capitalist (and my travels through the maze of the VC world); thoughts on life more generally; and what I’ll call VC 101 tips and pointers. One of the things I’ve noticed (and this is something that I’m happy to say the TypePad statistics really do a nice job of, my rant about them last week aside . . .) is that my VC 101 posts get a lot of traffic (and cross-posting/track-backs that drive this traffic). The impetus for my starting this blog was to capture my personal thoughts on being a VC, however I want to be sure I mix up my content…
Board Observer vs. Board Member
Venture capitalists generally participate in boards in one of two fashions – either as actual board members or as board observers (see Brad and Jason’s post on Term Sheets – Board of Directors — for more information on how we take positions on boards). As an associate at Mobius I was not able to take actual board seats, so I took the board observer position in the companies I worked with (note that generally this isn’t an official designation – although I have seen board agreements that require the venture firms to specifically designate the board observer; more commonly its just a seat at the board table reserved for someone from the venture firm other than the board member). As…
Dr. King
I was thinking today (as I’m sure many people are) about the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. One of my favorite quotes is from Dr. King (although I’m afraid to say that I couldn’t find it quoted directly on-line – apologies for not giving a direct link). To paraphrase is goes something like this: Those who have succeeded have yet to find something great enough at which to fail Like the story of throwing your hat over the wall, this quote inspires us to reach for great things. True in business and in life.
The Power of Branding
Ross and Dave sent this link over to me today. Parody – a strong sign of flattery. Clearly Apple has marketing down – we could all take a lesson. . . https://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/images/iProduct.gif
I need better user statistics
I just set up FeedBurner on my site to start tracking readers. I should have done this a long time ago (where long time = 7 days ago when I started my blog). I’m pretty bummed with the stats that are available on TypePad. By pretty bummed, I mean that the stats are essentially useless. They don’t have any information on click-through nor do they tell me either what aggregators are hitting my site (although I can see a little of this in the referrers section, which is pretty much the only part of their statistics that I find useful) and they definitely don’t tell me how many underlying readers there are for my site because they can’t surface information…
Go Sox!
One of the things I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been sitting down to write is the balance I’d like in my blog. My intention was to write a professional blog, but with a personal twist –not a blog just about the mechanics of being a VC, but my personal observations of the VC world and my growth as a venture capitalist. A few people have written in and reminded me not to forget about writing some posts about me with the idea that my VC observations will be more meaningful if I occasionally write posts that have nothing to do with being a VC, but give some background about how I got here and what else is important to…