My last post generated a bit of harsh comment (a few on the site, but many more in private e-mail and on a few other sites that picked up the theme).  Apparently I came off as pretty insensitive (perhaps ‘jerk’ would be an appropriate description) in how I described my approach to some of the “can I get 30 minutes of your time?” meetings that I seem to have a difficult time saying no to (note to commenters: I do see value in the meetings and as a general rule spending time getting to know as many people as possible. Hey – at least I TAKE the meetings . . .). Trying to roll with that theme, I’ve been thinking recently about how companies get rid of non-performers. I have a lot of visibility into the performance of most of the executive teams of the companies I work with and some visibility down the ranks.  One thing I’ve observed over and over and over again is that companies tend not to fire fast enough.  I understand that US employment law can make this difficult (I am NOT giving legal advice here, so don’t take this as such in any way shape or form), but regardless, companies tend to hold on to people too long.  This is true both in terms of mass lay-offs and more disturbingly in the case of non-performers.  This is true almost 100% of the time and often in the face of extraordinarily clear evidence that supports the decision to ask someone to leave.

I’m not trivializing firing  people – it is and should be hard (I vividly remember the first person I let go crying in my office; it was extremely uncomfortable and I felt terrible for this person who was a great employee, but whose position was being eliminated).  But if you really care about running an effective organization, own up to making a bad hiring decision and take out the red pen. Keeping people around too long ultimately only damages an organization (particularly when their lack of performance is obvious to all around them) and delays the inevitable.

I should probably do a better job of controlling my meeting schedule. I don’t and as a result end up with too many ‘networking’ meetings (i.e., where I’m on the receiving end of the networking).
I have two observations about these interactions:

1) Left to their own devices, people tend to ramble . . . ramble . . . ramble. The conversation lacks focus, direction and purpose. Sometimes this is fun; most of the time it’s a waste of time. 2) Most people don’t seem to know what they want to get out of meetings like these. This clearly contributes to the rambling – there’s no focus because there’s no clear end point or goal. To speed things along a bit, I’ve been starting these meetings of late with a simple question: “What do you want to get out of this meeting” Turns out this isn’t something that most people come prepared to answer, which I think explains why I was encountering the two problems described above and reinforces the need to start meetings this way.

I’m starting more and more meetings with this question (or the answer to it if I’m the one initiating the interaction) – not to be callous, but to get things started with an outcome in mind. Plenty has been written about how to make meetings more efficient, but for me, other than skipping them altogether (which tends to make them much more efficient – at least for me), this has worked better than just about anything I’ve tried to speed things along. Especially those pesky “networking” introductions . . . This post reminds me of my Networking 101 post from last year. Worth taking a look at if you haven’t read it yet. See point 3 for another description of what I’m talking about here.

My friend John Kembal recently started a company – HiveLive – that facilitates communication between groups (friends, co-works, clubs, associations, etc.). The system looks like a social networking site, but allows you to upload more relevant information to your “Hive” and control better how you share it (i.e., its both a personal organization tool as well as a tool for communicating and sharing ideas across a group of people – kind of a cross between a blog, social network and wiki). They are in beta, but John has set up a site for VC Adventure readers to sign up – http://hivelive.com/join/vcadventure (click on the link and you’ll be taken to the sign-up page).

You can e-mail me or John with your thoughts.

Note: Mobius is not an investor in HiveLive, nor am I affiliated with the company in any way other than being a fan of John and a user of the service.

In a recent note Bill writes: I love your blog, but if you’re going to use TLAs (three letter acronyms), you need to spell out the first reference so the uneducated (like myself) know what you’re talking about. When you write about NOLs, us neophytes from Colorado think you’re talking about spending three days alone in the wilderness. 😉 He’s right. I sometimes forget how insular venture/finance/technology can be. In one of my very first ever business experiences – a training session at Morgan Stanley – I spent an hour listening to a Morgan associate (who happened to be the assignments associate from the group I was about to start working with) talk about the “Morgan way of doing DCF analysis” all the while thinking “I’m totally screwed. There are 100 people in this room and I’m the only one who has absolutely no clue what DCF stands for, let alone whatever subtlety he’s talking about that is the ‘Morgan way’.” (Turns out DCF stands for discounted cash flow analysis – something I have gotten intimately familiar with over the years).

Thanks for the reminder, Bill. If people don’t understand what we’re talking about we’re not really very effective. Good to keep in mind.

Two stories hit my desk today that serve as a stark reminder that the Internet as we know and love it is not guaranteed to continue on indefinitely. The first was the announcement that the Senate Commerce Committee split their vote on proposed compromise language on Net Neutrality (the idea that carriers should treat every packet on the internet the same). Plenty has been written on this subject so I won’t repeat the arguments here, but suffice it to say that the failure to guarantee neutrality on the net is a huge loss to anyone who cares about the future of the internet (and has a clue). The second was sent by my partner Greg Galanos via Brad and pointed to the Wired blog post on how to detect whether your net traffic is being sniffed by the government. It highlights an analysis done by the EFF that concludes that the allegations of AT&T secret surveillance rooms are likely valid, that the program covers domestic traffic, not just international traffic and that the system is capable of looking at content, not just addresses. You can read the full EFF report here (its been redacted by the government for security purposes).

Nothing furthers innovation and progress like putting pricing control in the hands of ologopic carriers and spying on individuals’ use of technology. Party on!

NPR has the answer.

eBay jumped on the App Exchange bandwagon with an announcement from their development conference this weekend of a bunch of new APIs and development tools. This was a pretty broad announcement – Shoping.com, ProStores and even PayPal (who had traditionally been relatively closed) are participating in the effort – and expands their existing developer efforts significantly (see their developer site for more information). API’s are certainly nothing new – they are common ways for companies to allow access to their systems – but it seems to me that application exchanges are the new ‘it’ thing to do for platform companies (Salesforce.com, Google, eBay, etc.). This is a pretty new concept – companies in the past were extremely protective of their platforms and wanted to control almost every aspect of access to their systems (in this paradigm “open system” often meant ‘we’ll let you use our proprietary scripting engine to ‘develop’ to our platform). Companies have loosened this view in more years and moved to more open API’s (sometimes through a developer program; more recently completely open to anyone who wants to access them). The AppExchange idea is the next logical extension of this (the “Web 2.0 model for development”, if you will) and makes perfect sense: open your system, give support and help to those that want to develop extensions to it and give them a single home where users of your software can find these extensions. Its free development work, makes your platform that much more powerful and provides a nice sourcing ground for potential acquisitions.

Now we’ll just have to wait and see if the more embedded platform players swallow their pride enough to do the same. Are you listening Oracle?

Perhaps it’s just a sign of a bubble, but I’ve had several people (entrepreneurs, partners at venture firms and junior partners/senior associates) ask me in the past month whether I was thinking about leaving venture capital to join a company. Their thinking generally follows the logic that given the new Web 2.0 paradigm (presumably they mean the idea that you can build a net business relatively inexpensively, generate sometraffic and either cash flow it or sell it off) there’s a better chance to create wealth in the next 2-4 years by working on the operating side of the world than in venture capital.   Given how difficult it is to land a job in venture capital (not to mention how fun the work is), it may sound strange that people are even considering this, but in the course of these conversations a number of examples always come up of sr. associate/vp/principal level colleagues who have jumped ship for what is perceived to be the greener pastures of the company side of the fence.

I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon for the past few weeks – not because I’m actually considering leaving my venture job (note to Brad – the title of this post was rhetorical), but because I’m fascinated by people’s perceptions about opportunities. While I’m certainly convinced   that many companies that are currently in their formative stages will be successful I think there’s a perception that the world of the next generation web is easier than it really is. Couple that with the notion that G/Y/M/I are staring to pick up their acquisition pace and you can understand how people are getting stars in their eyes.

I personally don’t buy it (at least for me). But then again, I subscribe to David’s notion that most of this is about luck anyway, so maybe it doesn’t matter which side of the fence you’re on – as long as you’re working with people you like and having fun.

Companies –  and start-ups in particular – spend a lot of time working through market analyses, product positioning and the like, trying  to figure out how to tell the world what it is that they do (and differentiate that from what everyone else does). It is, of course, a very worthwhile and important effort.

One thing few companies spend much time on, however, is the opposite question – what do you NOT do. Not the broad question of what you don’t do (we don’t make toasters is not very helpful), but focusing in on the gray areas between what you clearly do and clearly don’t do and deciding where you draw the line. I watch companies struggle over decisions (product extensions, sales targets, delivery methods, etc.) or get slowly pulled off track as they chase down revenue and partner opportunities that are just a little bit off track (enough to reap havoc across an engineering or delivery organization, but not enough to be clearly out of bounds).
Have the conversation first – know what’s in bounds and what’s out of bounds and how to tell the difference.

Finally!  FeedBurner and TypePad are now integrated.  Before yesterday, if you had a TypePad blog (like mine) and burned your feed through FeedBurner you were only taking partial advantage of FeedBurner’s services (TypePad generates a number of feeds in different formats, and up to now, FeedBurner only captured one of these feeds).  Not only will this give you a better view of your subscriber base and their behavior on your blog, but it will also allow TypePad bloggers to take full advantage of FeedBurners’s advertising and feed management services.

You can read the FeedBurner announcement here and the SixApart announcement here (along with instructions on how to get your TypePad account fully integrated).