I’ve been off instant messaging for years.  There was nothing about it that I found appealing or that added to my productivity. 

I realized this morning that Twitter has become my new IM. I publish what I’m doing (and as a result people know if they can reach me or not, whether to try me at my office or on my cell, etc.).  I stay in touch with my friends and colleagues by following what they are up to (and therefore know how to get in touch with them if I need to).  Through following and being followed I keep up with more people and don’t have to "check in" as much because I know what they are doing, where they are traveling and who they are spending time with.  And of course through Twitter’s direct message feature, I’ve literally replaced IM by enabling people to get in touch with me directly and quickly (and I pay way more attention to a Twitter DM than I ever did to IMs; they also show up on all of my computing devices so they are more likely to find me that IM, which seemed to route messages randomly among my various IM clients and whatever machines I had that happened to be "online" at the time).

Nicely done, Twitter.  Nicely done.

I was out at the Microsoft Mountain View campus a few weeks ago for an event hosted by their venture relations group.  I had the chance to meet Chris Liddell, MSFT’s CFO, along with 3 of their divisional CFO’s.  It was a pretty wide ranging discussion from how they are thinking about M&A to several strategic area of focus to how the divisions are working together on projects that cross divisional boundaries.

The thing that struck me the most was not the WHAT of their thinking, but the HOW.  I participated in a break-out session with Tami Reller, CFO of Platforms and Services division (which includes their search and online advertising properties).  There were about 15 of us in the group (including 4 or 5 from MSFT) and we quickly went deep on a few areas of particular interest to this division.  This is a $17.5 Bn (with a b) operating unit for MSFT. While I know that MSFT is as beurocratic as the next large software company, what really stood out to me in this conversation (and, in fact, the entire day I spent with MSFT management) was how fluid and innovative their thinking was (at least on these subjects).  They think about and talk about their business like many of our portfolio companies do – looking for market trends, leveraging existing assets and competencies and with a view to a return on their investment.  Sure – you have to tack on a handful of zeros to the numbers in their business plans, but at heart they are engaged in the kind of thinking (at least as it relates to their online properties) that is going on in conference rooms in venture firms and start-up companies all over the world.  It was a good reminder to me that even within large organizations you can think and act much more nimbly – at least if you want to.

Excuse the shameless pitch but I feel compelled to tell you about the new Soul Patch album, Sooner or Later.  Soul Patch is a band that includes my partners Ryan and Jason.  Sooner or Later is the band’s aptly named second album (aptly named because it was 6 years in the making).  The band’s music is a mix of classic rock, a bit of funk and soul spiced with great rhythm and outstanding musicality.  I really like their style and this new album is fantastic. 

Here are a few links to check out to meet the band, sample the music and buy the album:

Soul Patch Web Page, Facebook page and schwag

Sooner or Later Album Page

Buy the album at CD Baby, iTunes, Amazon

I don’t know what it is about the last few weeks – maybe the change of season; maybe something in the water – but I’ve been absolutely amazed at how often people have showed a complete lack of comprehension for who was in the room with them. 

This may sound more calculating than I intend it to, but I think its a good practice to always consider who you’re talking to before you start in on a conversation.  This is especially true when you’re negotiating for something, making a request or otherwise trying to drive to a specific outcome.  I’ve witnessed several pretty amazing examples of a complete lack of thoughtfulness around this notion of late.  From making idle (and counter-productive) threats, to inappropriate requests, to outright lying (which was sure to be uncovered). 

Stop and think…then talk.

[see the bottom of this post for an invite code to a new service that helps solve the problem I’m describing here]

It’s probably passe to say that we live in an information economy.  It’s also probably not correct anymore because really we live in an information NOW economy.  Staying on top of the topics that are important to you and your company has never been more important.  And with the explosion of media sources (particularly on-line) this has never been more of a challenge. 

Back in the day, large companies would outsource the function of knowing what was said of them and their competitors to various "clipping services", so named because they would line up the major new outlets of the day (mostly the large daily newspapers and national magazines) and literally clip out the stores that were of interest to their clients with scissors.  Every week they’d compile these clippings into a briefing and ship it off to their client.  These services weren’t very efficient and they were extremely expensive, but there was little other choice.  While these services have evolved in more recent years to incorporate technology, they’re still expensive and for the most part involve some 3rd party culling through the data to sort for relevance. 

Google Alerts is the most notable exception here – they’ve developed a service that in theory will let you know when any particular key word (really any search string) is crawled by Google spiders.  However in my experience Google Alerts quickly falls down. For starters, I get relatively few hits across my keywords and most of the hits I get are repeat ones (I can’t understand this at all – with probably 60 keywords I get almost no alerts and while I share keywords with some of my colleagues I rarely am sent the same hits that they are). I have other friends with the opposite problem with Alerts – their inbox is flooded with responses.  In some cases so much so that they had to turn the service off completely.  There’s also no good way to aggregate these alerts into any kind of trend data or manipulate them, group them, etc. 

Enter Filtrbox.  Filtrbox was one of last year’s TechStars companies and the the one with which I worked most closely (after the summer TechStars program I participated in their angel financing round).  They’ve developed a system that if you had to describe it in a single sentence is "Google Alerts on steroids".  That said, it’s almost unfair to compare the two as Google Alerts just isn’t designed to provide users with the accuracy, level of coverage, ability to tune and provide feedback to alert terms and the overall representation of data that Filtrbox provides – even now in the relatively early version of the Filtrbox platform.  Filtrbox allows me to set up a series of "filtrs" that contain various keywords so that I can organize the things I’m looking to track.  Every morning I get a "daily briefing" email that lists all the hits from the last 24 hours and online I can use their dashboard to see up-to-date hits in list and graphical form, manipulate the data, adjust the sensitivity of the report (so I see fewer, but more directly relevant hits) and tune the system by providing it feedback on the information it provides me.  Below is a snapshot of their dashboard to give you a sense of what I see every day (in true Web 2.0 fashion, everything in the image below will give me more information as I mouse over it and I can adjust the data I’m seeing on the fly by checking and unchecking keywords or entire filtr groups or adjusting the sensitivity (the slider in the top center of the page).

The service is in private beta, but they’ve given me an invite code that I can use to let people try the system out.  For smaller users, the service will be free (you’re limited in the number of keywords you can use and by the length article history).  For larger users there will be paid "pro service" ($20/month) and for teams of users a group account that enables some additional sharing and other group related functions (for $100/month for the team).  You can sign up for the beta at https://www.filtrbox.com/signup.php?code=foundry.  If I’ve run out of invites, drop me a line and I’ll try to make more available. 

We have a great partner dynamic at Foundry. We’ve all worked together for at least 7 years (in some cases over 10 years) and are close friends as well as colleagues.  We also have pretty varied styles and opinions.  Case in point – Brad’s recent post on his travel habits.  I couldn’t be more different in how I approach travel.

Heading to the west coast, Brad likes to get up insanely early and take the 6am flight to SFO so he can start his meetings at 8:30.  I’ve done that about a dozen times and finally realized that I just can’t deal with the 22 hour day that results from it.  I was doing it a lot on Mondays and it pretty much assured that I was a few steps off for the rest of the week.  Instead, I prefer to either fly in the night before (there’s a late Frontier flight that still lets me have dinner at home with my family before heading out) or on the 8:30am flight in the morning (from that flight I can make a 10:30 meeting pretty much anywhere on the peninsula or in the city).

Flying east, Brad likes to take the afternoon flight and get in to New York after midnight.  I did that one time (actually on a flight with Amy, Brad’s wife), got delayed, ended up at my hotel at 2:30am, woke up at 7:00 for a meeting the next morning and decided that was not the way I like to travel.  I’ve found that taking a morning flight east (leaving around 8:00am) is right for me.  I get 3 hours of productive time on the airplane and am in the city in plenty of time for an afternoon meeting and dinner.  I never feel like I’ve wasted a day when I do this because I always get a lot done on the days I travel east between clearing out my inbox and catching up on my reading on the plane and having meetings the same day I get to the city.

Which brings me to my main travel difference with Brad (and what I suspect is ultimately at the heart of our different travel preferences) – the plane as an office vs as a bed.  Brad can sleep on any flight, any time.  I noticed this years ago when we used to travel more often together.  It’s actually pretty uncanny (and a nice skill to have).  I don’t share this air-narcoleptic ability with Brad. I really don’t like sleeping on planes (can’t, really) and prefer to work when I’m in an airplane.  With no incoming calls, no new emails and my headset plugged in to some background music I find it an incredibly productive environment for plowing through a ton of work.  Airplanes freeze time (well – not really, but they make you feel like they do) and I love the productivity that results from that.

Different strokes for different partners, I guess….

My partner Chris just put up a post on the Foundry blog about our geographic (actually non-geographic) approach to investing. 

We’ve talked in past posts about how we organize our thinking about potential investments into "themes" that we use to guide our focus.  One of the important precepts of taking a thematic approach to investing is that we don’t create artificial boundaries that limit where we’ll follow an investment theme – we let the theme guide us to the best companies that we can find, regardless of where they are located.  In the past this has taken us to Chicago, New York, the Bay Area, Orange County and many points in between.  It does mean that there’s more time spent on the road, but we think it also allows us to seek out the most promising companies.

As an aside, its only fitting that I’m writing this from a hotel room on the west coast. . .

My partner Brad Feld was interviewed yesterday on NPR’s Talk of the Nation on the topic of how companies make money online. You can listen to the broadcast here.  The key take-away ultimately is that is you aggregate enough traffic you have a handful of options for turning those eyeballs into cash (probably worth of a full post about the pros and cons of these various models, but no time today to get that down on paper). 

Brad did a great job and I’m psyched that I now know someone who’s been on TOTN!

A 1995 article by Clifford Stoll has resurfaced on the Newsweek site: The Internet? Bah.  Hype Alert: Why cyberspace isn’t and will never be, nirvana. 

Of course its fun (and easy) to make fun of pundits with the benefit of hindsight, but this one is particularly juicy with its sweeping – and as it turns out completely off base – prognostications. 

Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

How true. . . . how true . . . <g>

 

Hat tip: Advertising lab