Brad, Jason and I are going to try something new in Boulder starting this fall – Community Hours at the TechStars bunker. We’re all fans of "random meetings" – taking meetings from people that have been referred to us or have taken the time to write to ask to get together – but sometimes struggle to fit them into our schedules (I’m particularly poor at this – scheduling them generally at random and breaking up many days with too many meetings and not enough time at my desk). With this in mind the three of us are going to try to set aside some concentrated random meeting time. We’ve set up a self-service wiki for people to sign up. The…
Posts By / seth levine
Email closings
I wrote a post a few years ago poking fun at how people (myself included) sign off on their email correspondence. Ben recently pointed me to a Post article on the same subject (written a little more seriously than mine). I continue to find amusing the myriad of ways people use to sign their emails – especially now that social media “coolness” has invaded the tech circles that I run around in (i.e., where there’s more pressure than ever to be seen as cool and with it in the tech world). This has only served to increase the craziness of email sign-offs. Here are a few of my favorites along with my interpretation of their meaning (updated with a few…
Are you a PPC expert? Read on…
One of our portfolio companies (a heretofore stealthy one at that) is looking for Pay Per Click stars (Google AdWords Qualified or SEMPO Institute training preferred) to join their crowdsourced PPC marketplace. If you’re a PPC marketing expert click here to find out more and sign up. Lots more on Trada (which we haven’t yet been talking about broadly) in the coming months as they really start to open up.
Finding your peeps
One of the companies I work with recently sent the following email to the CEO’s of a number of similar companies (I’ve redacted the email a bit to preserve the privacy of the company): I’m the CEO of [really cool portfolio company]. We’re a [insert company attribute/industry here] company as well I have been talking to a number of other [attribute/industry] players and I think we all are facing some similar issues as we try and both mature our businesses and the [attribute/industry] industry at the same time. I’m pulling together a private discussion group for a select set of these businesses where we can have open conversations with each other about issues we face and how we are dealing…
How much does Google really know about you?
In case you were wondering what goods Google has on you check out http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/ from the browser you typically use for web browsing and search. If you scroll down you’ll see what interests Google has you pegged for and get to see the data they have collected on you in your cookie. For me the most interesting part wasn’t the data they had on me, but looking through the Google interests taxonomy at the bottom of the page. There are specific tags for individual car brands, for your love of Bollywood movies, pest control, screensavers, etc. It’s an interesting glimpse into how Google thinks about the world (and more importantly into what categories Google thinks it can make money by…
Is serendipity lost in the digital age?
Damon Darlin argues in an article earlier this week in the Times that serendipity has become "lost in the digital deluge". His premise is essentially that through services like Twitter, Facebook and others we’ve essentially crow-sourced content discovery and lost is the beauty of discovering "something we never knew we wanted to find" (he uses the example of browsing a friend’s CD or video collection as something that the digital age has killed). Even services like StumbleUpon or UrbanSpoon, which are designed to surface information that users typically wouldn’t find themselves – Darlin argues – really just gravitate to the mean. What?!? The Internet that gives us almost unlimited access to almost unlimited information, which allows us to browse for…
Power to the people
Over the last 6 months I’ve noticed a large number of business plans that are incorporating some form of “crowdsourcing” into their business models. Crowdsourcing, popularized by James Surowiecki excellent book The Wisdom of Crowds, seeks to harness the power of the masses with the idea that the “crowd” can often produce a better result than any given individual (in the classic crowdsouring example a large group tries to guess the number of gumballs in a jar; typically the average guess is closer to the right number than any individual guess – the crowd as a whole is better than even it’s smartest individual member). There are some great business ideas around this – particularly ones that truly take advantage…
Test Engineers Needed!
Trada (one of our Boulder based portfolio companies) is looking to hire. They’re looking for a tech-skilled individual who thinks they can do just about everything, because they might be asked to. Primary role is testing their online advertising app but there’s a huge opportunity to contribute much more. There’s dev work; cloud systems admin; operations tasks; end-user support; and even customer facing account management tasks that can be added to the mix for the properly skilled (and properly motivated) individual. While still in stealth these guys are already rocking. Interested? contact Michael Lawless at mlawless@trada.com
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…