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 I think was clearly the right decision, but something that had we not stopped to talk about would have been pushed off and not dealt with for at least another month. In the second case a similar discussion took an unexpected turn as we realized that the answer we were trying to come to wasn’t actually to the question that we needed to be asking. …
June 18, 2009· 2 min read
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things that are state of the art right now will seem as quaint as the technology in the video (and if they’ll seem as outdated as the technology in the video). Mind blowing.
June 16, 2009· 1 min read
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. …
June 15, 2009· 1 min read
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 like a statement of purpose. When a question of priority or direction comes up you can then bounce that idea off your mantra and see what happens. For example – “will this gain us more publishers” “will this make our advertisers more successful?” “will this help travelers share their experiences better” etc. I’ve found that doing this up front helps streamline decision making and have been in many conversations where we’re grappling with how to prioritize a series of tasks where we throw them up against our two or three mantras and what falls out is a clear priority of what needs to be done right away, what can be done later and what shouldn’t be done at all. …
June 12, 2009· 2 min read
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!” …
June 11, 2009· 1 min read
The Times or the Journal?
In a reminder to both follow my own 10 minute rule advice and to be more careful blogging on 4 hours sleep, it turns out that I misattributed the Bits Blog article I pointed to in my last post on young vs. old VCs to the Journal instead of the Times. Apologies on that one. I just corrected it, but it was worth noting in it’s own post (and no – this doesn’t count as today’s post!).
June 11, 2009· 1 min read
Are young VCs better VCs?
There’s a great post up on the NYT Bits Blog that asks “Do Young Venture Capitalists Have an Advantage?” While established (i.e., older) venture capitalists have more name recognition and therefore theoretically access to better deal flow, younger VCs are closer to the technology and have more in common with today’s set of technology entrepreneurs – according to the article – which makes them have an advantage in today’s venture market. …
June 10, 2009· 3 min read
A post a day
I’ll admit (since it should be obvious to anyone who follows this blog) that I’ve done a terrible job this year of blogging consistently. I’m sure that much of it has to do with my schedule, but then again there are a lot of people who blog regularly who are plenty busy, so that’s not such a great excuse. I suspect that much of my problem is that I’ve just gotten out of the habit of regular blogging. What’s doubly frustrating from my end is that one of my explicit goals for the year for myself was to “blog more consistently”. So far, not so good on that front. …
June 10, 2009· 1 min read
Medialets
Today over on the Foundry Group blog, we announced an investment in Medialets – a mobile analytics and advertising company that helps mobile application developers track usage and other statistics about their applications and provides technology that enables them to monetize those applications via advertising. I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about Foundry’s “thematic” investing approach in the past (here’s the key post to read if you haven’t and you’re interested). It surprises people however, when they hear us talk about some of the investments we’ve made in online advertising not as “advertising” but as part of our glue theme. Specifically we view advertising through the lens of connective technologies – those that help advertisers connect with users and remove friction from the overall system (both AdMeld and Lijit are examples of companies in the Foundry portfolio that fit into this line of thinking). …
May 12, 2009· 3 min read
Foundry Group Invests in Gist
Today Foundry Group announced that we’ve invested in Gist and I couldn’t be more excited about what they are working on (see our blog post here; Gist’s post here). Gist has developed a powerful product that helps users find and sort information about the people, places and companies that are meaningful to them (“where your inbox meets the web”) . It’s an implicit service – they use information contained in your inbox, calendar and contacts to determine the strength of various connections and surface both public and private information about topics that are both timely and relevant for you. For example for an upcoming meeting Gist will organize not only news stories and social media mentions of the company and/or people you’re meeting with, but also organizes all of your correspondence with people from that organization (separating out email, attachments, etc.). I use it every day to help me sift through the mass of data and information that’s important to me (see my post on that subject from a few weeks ago here). For Foundry, the problem Gist is attempting to solve is right at the intersection of Email and Implicit Web – two themes that we’ve been involved with for many years. …
May 5, 2009· 2 min read