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)

very few VC’s showed up; I only saw the group from my panel presentation. not sure if this was due to location (NYC) or lack of start-ups (although there were several there, some of whom were venture backed already, some of whom were not), but interesting to note.

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

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 a several months-long sales cycle.  I think this failure to move from product-centric to customer-business-problem-centric underlies the problem getting sales traction that a lot of new companies have – even though they are selling great technology.  So, it’s a survival issue not only for new technologies but for the companies that develop them.

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.

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 business does, but most in my view do poorly. Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome. If you believe this, then you have to scratch your head at how most businesses and managers offer feedback to employees – through annual or semi-annual reviews. There are two problems with this approach: 1) the feedback is stale (and negative feedback easily rationalized by its recipient as memory fades and more importantly the time for correcting poor performance or reinforcing good performance has long passed); and 2) its generally tied to a conversation around compensation – either an annual bonus, pay increase or both. Rather than limiting the majority of feedback to a review period, try giving more consistent feedback (both positive and constructive) on a more regular basis. Get out of a presentation – talk about what worked and what didn’t; finish a sales call or demo, figure out what seemed to resonate with the customer and what can be improved; feel someone in the company did an outstanding job with a task – let them know why it worked so well. Equally important, reviews should be about reviews (and what I’m describing above shouldn’t replace a more formal review process, it should supplement and feed into it). Comp conversations should be about comp. Obviously they are related, but its much more constructive to review an employees performance when the outcome of that meeting isn’t about money (but rather about the improvement of performance).

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).

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.

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 a lot – probably a combination of looking for new content and more generally a rewiring of your brain to think about all things in the context of how you’d describe it to someone else. The halflife of thinking this way was probably about a 4 days. By week 2 of not blogging, I had kicked the habit – clearly reinforcing my not blogging. A good reason to not go more than a week without posting. . .

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 started a guest blogger series. The first entry in the series is by Harry Ross from Aweida Venture Partners. Harry is a well respected life sciences investor and always an interesting guy to talk with. You can check out his post here. Take a look at Adam’s full blog here.

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