Posts By / seth levine

An army of one

One of the reasons I started this blog was to try to give readers some insights on life as a venture capitalist. I was reading some old posts and realized that I haven’t written on this topic in a while. Funny thing about venture capital – something I’ve really noticed as I transitioned from supporting other partners on their deals to exclusively managing my own portfolio – it’s a pretty lonely business. I have an extremely close relationship with my partners and of course bounce thoughts, ideas and questions off of them on a regular basis (something I think we at Mobius we are extremely good at doing). But for the most part, I spend my days doing my own…

Do you ‘get’ new media?

I had the chance last week to speak to a group of non-profit executive directors from about 80 local Denver/Boulder/Longmont non-profit agencies as part of a session sponsored by the United Way on “Getting the Word Out – a Mass Communication Seminar”.  I sat on a panel with a bunch of local newspaper editors which consisted of an hour of the editors talking about the best way to fax or e-mail them stories so they’d get their attention followed by 15 minutes of me saying that instead of all of that, their organizations could actually be their own media, that there was larger conversation going on across a much broader community which they could/should tap into, and that perhaps rather than…

Blogging stats

Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati, has another of his series on the evolution of the blogosphere up on his site.  Most interesting to mere were the results on the dominant languages of blogging. Here are his key takeaways (quoted directly): Technorati is now tracking more than 57 Million blogs. Spam-, splog- and sping-fighting efforts at Technorati are paying dividends in terms of the reduction of garbage in our indexes, even if it does seem to impact overall growth rates. Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size approximately every 230 days. About 100,000 new weblogs were created each day, again down slightly quarter-over-quarter but probably due in part to spam fighting efforts. About 4% of new splogs get past Technorati’s filters,…

A different take on the Google/YouTube deal

My partner Chris sent the following around.  Its a more lighthearted way of looking at the Google/YouTube deal… YouTube is currently “delivering” 100,000,000 videos/day.  I’m by no means a prolific consumer of YouTube content, but I’m going to guess that the average length of a YouTube video is about 1.5 minutes. That translates into 150,000,000 minutes wasted (or 2,500,000 hours) wasted each and every day watching YouTube videos (it would be interesting to know how many uniques that translates into). Assuming a 40 hour work week and 50 work weeks per year (2,000 work hours/yr/person), that means that there are 1,250 “man-years” wasted watching YouTube videos–that’s each and every day.  And people say that technology hasn’t boosted productivity… I didn’t…

Are you in Boulder on the 19th?

The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art puts on a fantastic (and very fun) art auction every year.  My wife, Greeley, and I have been regulars for several years and always have a great time. This year Greeley is even more involved as the event chair (putting on an art auction is an incredible amount of work!).  I’m playing a more peripheral role as the stand-in event photographer (the regular event photographer is out of the country, so with the qualification of owning a brand new digital SLR camera – a birthday present from Greeley – the photo duties are falling to me). Here’s the event flier (see link below).  If you’re around Boulder on October 19th, I’d highly recommend coming…

Quote of the day

“Successful people spend the majority of their time on major things. Unsuccessful people spend the majority of their time on minor things.” Relayed to me by my good friend Chris, who is dutifully following this advice…

Letting go

Everyone deserves to have one truly outstanding dog sometime in their lives. For us this dog was Beau – our 100lb yellow lab. Beau was a truly sweet dog.  It’s hard to describe what this really means to those who never met him, but Beau was gentle despite his size and sweet in a way that sets him apart from all of the other dogs we’ve known.  His favorite pastime was to present people with a series of toys (typically stuffed bones and animals) when they walked into the house while vigorously wagging the entire back half of his body – just before making several laps between their legs.  Much to our amusement and unlike most labs, Beau didn’t enjoythings…

First round valuations

I get quite a few questions sent in by readers and am going to make more of an effort to post some of the ones that I think would be of general interest (please – keep them coming). Recently Jonathan asked: Do you have any reference regarding recent pre seed, seed, and first round valuations for B2C companies? We had several back and forth e-mails about this over the past week and I thought they were worth summarizing here. First, some additional background from a subsequent e-mail from Jonathan: I am actually doing two simultaneous rounds: one for 125K and another for 1.4 million. The first one aims at testing the viral potential of the application. We will focus on…

Linking around 8/15

Here are a few links worth taking a look at: Google Trends – www.google.com/trends (thanks to Jason for the pointer).  I played around with this a while ago – they’ve improved it so you can compare search trends for different terms at the same time and also see what region the searches are coming from. Woot – Think you can’t make a business based on one product sale at a time? See www.woot.com. splunk’d – You may have heard that AOL released their search database (that actually had customer identifying information attached to the search terms – oops).  www.splunkd.com will let you search against this database to see what people were actually looking at – compare your searches to the…