Here are a couple of high level thoughts on the Syndicate Conference held a few weeks ago in New York (ok – I’m weeks late getting this up, but the next Syndicate conference isn’t for another 6 months, so from that perspective I’m early!). First – Here’s the conference website Next – Here’s IDG’s marketing spin post conference (which does highlight some of the announcements that came out of the week) Finally – Here’s the conference blog site My quick 3 take-away’s were as follows: there was a lot of traditional media there (Hearst, USA Today, etc.) – early adopters but mainstream nonetheless there were a number of large companies poking around (for example both FedEx and UPS where there)…
Posts By / seth levine
What makes a great start-up market?
Here’s one take on that ubiquitous question (ubiquitous at least for those of us who live outside of the bay area). The simple answer is Nerds and Money, but the more complex answer is much more amusing. Link – http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html
Its just technology – comments
Andy had a good comment to my “its just technology” post, which I’ve been meaning to pull up to the front page. Here it is: I think this is a wider issue. I believe that most, if not all, early stage high tech companies suffer from the “what it is” versus “what it does” disease when selling their products. Only the early adopter prospect who “gets it” will respond to this sales approach. Many prospects that should be great targets may get excited about the hot technology but won’t understand how it benefits them or solves any problem they care about. They will relegate the offering to “nice to have” and won’t buy – often after pulling the salesperson through…
Syndicate – NYC
I’ll be at Syndicate NY next week. They’re actually giving me a speaking role (scary, I know – something about the future of Syndication . . .). Drop me a line of you’re going to be there too.
Feedback
There was a great article in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) that talks about the role practice plays in becoming truly great at something. They walk through research that suggest that while people clearly have some natural level of ability or affinity towards certain skills, it’s the hard work and dedication they put into the practice of their chosen art that ultimately sets them apart. There’s a feedback loop here – people tend to work harder at those things that they are good at (because they enjoy it more). There was one paragraph in particular that struck me and it relates to something that I’ve been thinking about that every…
now that’s helpful
Someone started ordering chai for our cafeteria and of course I had to check it out. Having never made chai from a package you can imagine that I had some concerns about whether it would come out right – what would I do if it was too hot? what if it wasn’t creamy enough? Not to worry – thankfully the package contained exremely helpful instructions (click on the image below for a better view).
parlez-vous blog?
Dave Sifry from Technorati put up another in his ‘state of the blogosphere’ series. This one has some pretty interesting data on the language of the blogosphere. Being a narrow-minded American I naturally assumed that English was the dominant language of the blogosphere (it certainly was by far the dominant language of the early Internet). It’s not. Not even by a longshot. English doesn’t have anything close to a plurality in the blogosphere. It’s not even the most common language of blogging (Japanese is). Hmm.
Back on the wagon
Wow. Has it really been a month since I posted? Lots of excuses about being busy and traveling a lot, but I’ve done that before and not stopped blogging. Not sure what happened – sorry about that (for those of you that noticed, that is). One interesting observation about my unplanned hiatus: When I’m actively blogging, I often find myself viewing the world through the “blog lens”. Those of you that are bloggers will get this right away – what I’m referring to is the tendency to start looking at everything in terms of whether it would make a good blog post or not. Kind of a funny way to look at the world, but it happens when you blog…
Lifescience blogging
Despite being in pretty much separate areas of technology investing, I continue crossing paths with Adam Rubenstein in a way that reminds me how small the Denver/Boulder business community really is. Adam is involved in a number of local bio related initiatives – MycoLogics, High Country Ventures and the Fitzsimons BioBusiness Incubator to name a few. We recently had an e-mail exchange on how he might encourage more thought leaders and venture capitalists from the bio-sciences to participate in the blogosphere and I suggested that he consider using his own blog as a platform and invite VCs and business leaders to write guest posts. You can imagine my surprise today when I saw that he actually took my advice and…
Progress
Newsgator announced a series of product enhancements last week (see here and here) along with their new website layout. Looking at the new site got me thinking about how far they’ve come since our initial investment. In the spirit of a picture being worth a thousand words, take a look at the following links to see just how much progress they’ve made. Newsgator’s current web site Web site from January 2004 – right around the time of our first meeting with Greg Web site from June 22, 2004 – the day after our first investment in the company