I don’t know what happened to Google alerts, but I’m not getting anything from my alerts these days. I have maybe 60 alerts set up and get maybe a one alert every other day – I know I’m missing just about everything that’s really being written out there, but can’t figure out why. While they say that ignorance is bliss, I’m feeling less utopic than just uninformed. I was going to switch everything over to Yahoo! alerts but I thought that before I did that I’d poll you to see if anyone had suggestions on alternatives. Any ideas?

Check out socialmeter. It gives you the link count for any site (any specific URL actually) from Bloglines, Del.icio.us, Digg, Google, Rojo, Shadows, Technorati and Yahoo. It’s a bit blunt and it would be useful as a widget (rather than taking you off the page you’re visiting and to the socialmeter page) – not to mention if it had a way to actually parse the link sources – but it’s both fun an interesting.

Thanks to Paul at Blau Exchange for the pointer.

I had lunch with someone last week who truly personified a quality that I admire – humbleness.

I was surprised by this, not only because most people simply aren’t very humble, but also because despite being young (I’m not exactly sure his age, but it was likely 24 or 25) he had actually accomplished quite a bit – founding a finance firm, raising some capital and finagling his way into a handful of really interesting late stage deals (of course his perspective was that he really hadn’t done anything yet . . . but that was just him being humble).

When I was in my mid 20’s I don’t recall being particularly humble (actually, I recall being pretty pleased with myself). I really regret this. When I think back, with all of the perspective the last 10 years have brought me, it’s amazing how naïve I was (and how loathe I was to admit it). I hope these days I have a little more balanced perspective of myself.

I meet people all the time that have it all figured out – it was refreshing last week to spend time with someone who is so self-aware.

I was sent the following a few days ago:

In order to give investors a sneak peak of what we’re up to, we’ve created a
short video (4 mins): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9fiEu_TBdU

I appreciate the effort behind stuff like this (as well as the novel thinking). 

While we’re on the topic, if there’s ever something you want me to take a look at, tag it to my del.icio.us account (for:slevine).

I often get emailed requests to include content in my posts. While I can’t always oblige I do look for interesting content to repurpose or link to or build a large post around.

Today I received the following links from Laura Fitton on a topic near and dear to my heart – giving effective venture presentations. One of my very first posts for VC Adventure was on this topic, and much of Laura’s advice corresponds well to my thoughts on the subject.

Some of my personal favorites from her lists (I’m paraphrasing – see the links below for the full original):

• your powerpoint isn’t “your presentation”
• once you’ve cut down your presentation to its desired length, take out a few more slides (you won’t miss them and neither will the investors you’re pitching)
• always keep in mind the outcome – your entire presentation should be geared toward serving your audience and the result to which you’re trying to drive
• end by encouraging next steps (rather than the throw away summary “this is the greatest deal ever” slide)
• vary your tone, speed, inflection, etc.
• don’t memorize your speech (I love this one! I worked with an entrepreneur once who had a photographic memory; he would literally memorize his pitch and then read it back – you could actually see him reading in his mind while he gave the presentation. It was particularly fun to interrupt him mid-slide and then watch him read through what he had already said in his mind before starting to talk again – taking it from wherever he was interrupted!)

More at the links below. I don’t know Laura personally, so this isn’t an endorsement of her services (that’s entirely up to you), but I did enjoy reading the “rules” and thought I’d post them here for all to enjoy.

http://home.comcast.net/~pistachioconsulting/10ThingsPitch.htm

http://home.comcast.net/~pistachioconsulting/Break10Rules.htm

 
 

 

Ben linked to a great post on how trained artists vs. trained psychologists look at the same picture.  The lines on the pictures below denote eye movements of the study participants as they viewed each picture.

Artists are specifically trained to discern perspective in composition.  They do this by looking not only at the focal point, but also more broadly at the context around that focal point.  In the study this came out clearly in the differences between the focus behavior of the psychologists (who tended to focus on the primary subject of the picture – represented in the left set of eye movements in the pictures above) vs. artists (whose concentration was across the picture – the right set of eye movements).

It reminded me of another study that compared spatial recognition of chess players vs. non-chess players.  Each group was asked to memorize the positions of pieces on a chess board.  They did about the same when the players were positioned randomly, but when the pieces were positioned in a way that could have been derived by actually playing a game, the chess group scored off the charts (and the control group did about the same as when the pieces were random).

The point?  Our background, training and experience significantly affect the perspective we bring to a situation – even in ways that we don’t consciously recognize.  Part of being a good venture capitalist/entrepreneur/board member/lawyer/angle investor/etc is not only recognizing patterns across companies but also understanding what shapes our views and ability to recognize these patters so we balance our ability to share experiences across situations while making sure we don’t leap to conclusions because we’ve been trained to look at the world in a specific way.

Plenty has been made of Google’s recently announced pay-per-action beta (where advertisers pay not for a user clicking over to their site, but only if they take some defined action such as filling out a web form, downloading a whitepaper or purchasing product).

Few people (notable exception TechCrunch, although for some reason the thread doesn’t seem to have been discussed widely) are talking about something that was buried in the release:

With this new pricing model, advertisers can create text or image ads in addition to using Google’s new text link ad format, which are brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher’s page. [emphasis added]

So basically you can now disguise your advertising to look like a link on your site, embedded in the site itself rather than in its own clearly identified area (“ads powered by Google AdSense”).  While affiliate marketing links abound on many web pages (click on a book review from a blog and you can be sure the blog owner gets a cut when you make your purchase) I don’t like the step Google is taking here at all.

The idea behind pay-per-action is to fight click-fraud not to create more bogus clicks by masking what’s advertising and what’s not.

eor.

I visited a company the other day that had a classic start-up office.  One big room with a ¾ wall separating out two workspaces, two guys, plastic folding tables for desks and a bookshelf that served as the printer stand, kitchen,
library and server rack.  I love it!

Entrepreneur: “Yah, we’ve talked with Ryan about this”

Me: “Oh. So Ryan already sat through this presentation”

Entrepreneur: “Um, yah – something like that”

Oops – that wasn’t what I really meant.

I made a simple change in my life a few weeks ago that ended up being much more dramatic than expected.

For reasons extraordinarily practical – I wanted to keep my phone on at night when I was traveling without being woken up 30 times overnight with the ‘chrip’ of a new email – I turned off the email notification on my Dash. (I know – I could have created a new profile and programmed it to allow the phone to ring but I was in a hurry so I just modified my main profile.) A few days passed before I realized that I wasn’t constantly interrupting what I was doing at any given moment to check new emails as they came in – no longer a slave to the friendly ping of my phone happily announcing each new message as it arrived (like Pavlov’s dogs, I had lost my power to resist).

Brilliant. I’m much happier now.