Archives / March, 2007

This is a unique approach

I was sent the following a few days ago: In order to give investors a sneak peak of what we’re up to, we’ve created a short video (4 mins): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9fiEu_TBdU I appreciate the effort behind stuff like this (as well as the novel thinking).  While we’re on the topic, if there’s ever something you want me to take a look at, tag it to my del.icio.us account (for:slevine).

VC Pitch “Rules”

I often get emailed requests to include content in my posts. While I can’t always oblige I do look for interesting content to repurpose or link to or build a large post around. Today I received the following links from Laura Fitton on a topic near and dear to my heart – giving effective venture presentations. One of my very first posts for VC Adventure was on this topic, and much of Laura’s advice corresponds well to my thoughts on the subject. Some of my personal favorites from her lists (I’m paraphrasing – see the links below for the full original): your powerpoint isn’t “your presentation” once you’ve cut down your presentation to its desired length, take out a few…

Perspective

Ben linked to a great post on how trained artists vs. trained psychologists look at the same picture.  The lines on the pictures below denote eye movements of the study participants as they viewed each picture. Artists are specifically trained to discern perspective in composition.  They do this by looking not only at the focal point, but also more broadly at the context around that focal point.  In the study this came out clearly in the differences between the focus behavior of the psychologists (who tended to focus on the primary subject of the picture – represented in the left set of eye movements in the pictures above) vs. artists (whose concentration was across the picture – the right set…

Is this an ad?

Plenty has been made of Google’s recently announced pay-per-action beta (where advertisers pay not for a user clicking over to their site, but only if they take some defined action such as filling out a web form, downloading a whitepaper or purchasing product). Few people (notable exception TechCrunch, although for some reason the thread doesn’t seem to have been discussed widely) are talking about something that was buried in the release: With this new pricing model, advertisers can create text or image ads in addition to using Google’s new text link ad format, which are brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher’s page. [emphasis added] So basically you can now disguise your advertising to look like…

The start-up office

I visited a company the other day that had a classic start-up office.  One big room with a ¾ wall separating out two workspaces, two guys, plastic folding tables for desks and a bookshelf that served as the printer stand, kitchen, library and server rack.  I love it!

The stupid things VCs say

Entrepreneur: “Yah, we’ve talked with Ryan about this” Me: “Oh. So Ryan already sat through this presentation” Entrepreneur: “Um, yah – something like that” Oops – that wasn’t what I really meant.