Archives / June, 2009

The Hajj in 3 Minutes

In case you don’t have 12 hours to actually do the Colorado Hajj yourself, Walker has conveniently condensed the trip into a ~3 minute video. Enjoy!

Venture capital is dead! Long live venture capital!

Dan Primack sited a study on PE Hub today that found that over 50% of VC professionals believe that the VC industry is “broken”.  My response: WHO CARES? Seriously. It seems like the venture industry these days spends more time lamenting its future than actually working towards a future that’s different.  And they couldn’t be more short term in their perspective.  VC sentiment has started to become like consumer sentiment – something that moves on a monthly basis. Are we forgetting that our business is about spotting long term trends and funding business cycles that are measured in years, not months?!?  It’s possible I’m simply in the wrong demographic (almost 85% of the respondents were east- or west-coast VCs), the…

Sounds of silence

Years ago I wrote a post about M&A negotiations in which I stressed the importance of using listening in the negotiation process. Last week I was talking about the importance of listening with Micah (not in the context of M&A – just in the context of life in general) when he said to me that he felt that listening, like many things in business, was an acquired skill (i.e., the harder you practice it the better you get). I couldn’t agree more. There’s a real art to listening effectively and completely – one that’s harder to do effectively than it seems but can be pretty obvious to everyone around you when you’re not. I had a colleague once who had…

Denver to the top of Mt. Evans take II

Last year was my first joining Walker on his annual “Colorado Hajj” trip riding from the state capital building in Downtown Denver to the top of Mt. Evans (a 14,000ft mountain west of town) and back. It’s a pretty insane ride, but extremely fun and the kind of challenge that once you’ve tried it, it’s hard not to crave doing it again. This year’s ride came significantly earlier in the season’s than last year, meaning that legs and lungs were that much less prepared for the massive undertaking. Last year, Walker and I did the ride alone, but this year we had a gang of 8 to make things more interesting (and provide better drafting during the early ride). To…

Foggy

  Clear announced last night that they had shut down. The note on their website says the following: Clear Lanes Are No Longer Available. At 11:00 p.m. PST on June 22, 2009, Clear will cease operations. Clear’s parent company, Verified Identity Pass, Inc. has been unable to negotiate an agreement with its senior creditor to continue operations. It goes on further to say that customers will not be able to receive a refund “because of it’s financial condition”. With over 250,000 customers (each paying between $100 and $200 annually) it’s a little surprising to me that they couldn’t figure out a way to make this work. I suspect (as does my partner Jason Mendelson). that the airports were charging more…

Getting to getting to

I was reminded once again this week of the importance of the deliberative process vs. outcome. Or perhaps better put, I was reminded that sometimes the best outcome is simply the deliberation itself. In business one is often extremely focused on solving problems and moving on – sometimes at the expense of valuing the discussion around the problem. This week I was in several meetings where instead of pushing through to a quick decision on something we stopped and had a longer conversation. In one case this resulted in people having the chance to voice an opinion about a matter that we almost blew by without realizing that there were such strong views around the table – eventually reaching what…

There’s "something called the Internet"

There’s a clip that’s been making the rounds in the last week of a Tom Brokaw spot from the mid-90’s on "the Internet". I love the quick clip with Eric Schmidt (then of Sun) and the casual walk around with Bill Gates.  I also really like the pitch for the IBM notebook that’s "4 pounds". The amazing thing to consider is not how quaint some of the technology appears in this video, but how far we’ve come so quickly. This video is only 15 years old. After the video ended I sat back in my office for a bit and considered how pretty much all of the things that are state of the art right now will seem as quaint…

Is your early stage business stretched? Good!

Most early stage companies feel stretched. While they don’t lack for ideas, they typically lack for resources (money, people, time, etc.). In my book this is a good thing. Scarcity of resources forces starker choices and ultimately results in better decision making. I sometimes joke with companies about the occasional over-funded competitor and tell them to use their relative lack of funding as a “competitive advantage”. What I mean is that lacking endless resources (or seemingly endless resources – in many cases even gobs of money eventually runs out) will force them to focus on what’s important, not what everything that’s possible, probable or half way interesting. To me this discipline results in better decisions and ultimately better companies.

What’s your business mantra

One thing that comes up early on in many of the companies that I work with is the question of how to build a framework through which to make decisions about product and business direction.  Because it’s easy to get sidetracked (or just blinded by all of the possibilities out there) I often suggest to companies that they come up with a “mantra”. It’s oversimplified and doesn’t work for every situation (and of course needs to be revisited as the business changes over time) but the idea is to boil the key drivers of the company down to a sentence or two – maybe some broad categories that define they most important areas of focus or possibly something that looks…

Where are you on the Tweetire Curve?

I tweeted today about conference I spoke at this morning on the subject of the role of social media in venture capital and private equity (not from an investment perspective, but how VC and PE professionals can use social media – blogs, facebook, twitter, etc. – to be more successful investors; more on that idea in a separate post).  I joked in two tweets after the event: “one person in today’s crowd (of 150) had a twitter account. i definitely had my work cut out for me!” and “forgot to mention that i was also the only person in the room wearing jeans (not that this fact was all that surprising to me)…” The 2nd inspired Theo Skye from Medialets…