Attributes of a good venture capitalist

When I was interviewing for my job at Mobius I asked Dave Jilk interview not only with MDs and other associates, but also with portfolio – who had briefly been an associate at Mobius and was then (as he is now) running a portfolio company – what he thought the most important attributes of successful VCs were (as an aside, I don’t know that I appreciated at the time what a good sign it was that the VC I was interviewing to joined had me company CEO’s to get their take). Without hesitation he said that in a nutshell good VCs need to have attention deficit disorder. I laughed about it then, but I think its time that I acknowledged to Dave (and the world) that he was right. There are lots of attributes that are required to be good at this job, but the core of being a good VC is the ability to move from one thing to the next, often completely disconnected thing, quickly and without slowing down Rare is the time when I sit down and spend a few hours doing something (anything) without interruption.; so much so that I generally interrupt myself these days if I’m spending too much time on any one thing, but mostly because in any give day things just seem to come up constantly. With something like 8 companies that I actively work with these interruptions are all over the map – I may be helping one company sell its business, another raise capital, another plan for a strategic offsite and another with an executive search. Keeping all of this straight in my head is a bit of a task, as is shifting gears from talking about the tax considerations of a particularly merger structure with one company to looking at moving into a new vertical market for another. Its different than the jumping around I did in banking (where I would typically be working on only one or two projects very intensely at any given time) or when I was working for an operating business when my days were much less varied (and much more similar to every other day). …

September 29, 2005· 2 min read

What’s your million dollar idea?

Thanks to JB for pointing this out. Pretty interesting idea. I particularly like it from a data representation standpoint (see my post on that subject here). http://milliondollarhomepage.com/

September 26, 2005· 1 min read

Milestones

My daughter reached an important American milestone yesterday – her first credit card offer. Four months shy of her 2nd birthday I’m not entirely sure she’s ready to handle the responsibility, but I did send the response card in to see what would happen (I circled her date of birth and indicated her occupation as ‘pre-school student’). I’ll keep you posted.

September 21, 2005· 1 min read

Tagging

hAs you could probably tell from my last post, I’m getting more onto the tagging bandwagon (I haven’t posted about this, but have in the past expressed skepticism privately to a number of you in off-line exchanges). In case you missed it, NPR did a nice piece on tagging tahis evening. Here’s a link to the story. Props to del.icio.us and flickr who were both featured prominently.

September 20, 2005· 1 min read

Why Microsoft needs RSS

Everyone knows that Microsoft announced at this year’s Gnomedex their support for RSS in their Longhorn (now Vista) release. A quick search on Google or Technorati comes up with plenty of people who have already weighed in on the subject (I particularly like Nick Bradbury’s post here). Most of the talk, however has been around how RSS integrates into IE (see the IE blog post on RSS integration here) and the associated ease with which IE users will be able to subscribe to feeds, create feeds and some of the ways they are extending RSS to handle lists and a common data store, etc. The rest has been centered around Microsoft’s RSS effort for developers to enable them to more easily pull feeds from applications. All great stuff, but that’s not at all why I’m excited about Microsoft embracing RSS and since no one else was writing about it I thought I’d throw my 2c into the ring. Love it or hate it, the Microsoft Office suite is a critical part of most businesses (with apologies to Star Office . . . ). Unfortunately their organizational/search/storage/retrieva paradigm is all wrong. While trying to ease users into the computer age, Microsoft has unfortunately created programs that attempt to mimic how people use and store information in the off-line world (i.e., in logical hierarchies, folders, etc) – which limited the power of the new computing medium. This is true both within applications and between them; in our file folder hierarchies and in how we store mail; in how we save bookmarks to the admin of an LDAP directory. Anyone who has ever tried to search in Outlook for a contact for whom you had only limited information or for a file that you misplaced understands the limitation of this system – it works great for structured data, but not so great for unstructured data (i.e., if you know you’re looking for Joe Smith in your contacts you’re fine; if you remember meeting someone name Joe who was an investment banker and who you met sometime in the summer of 2003 you’re screwed). The current system is fine for storing basic information, but lacks the database like ability to assign attributes and then search on those attributes (there are some limited ways to do this both in outlook, in contacts and for files – i.e., you can create different categories of contacts or add certain information to file properties but neither is very powerful and neither is meaningfully searchable). Enter the Internet age and people have discovered the power of unstructured data. Google built an entire service around it in the form of Gmail (lots of storage is great, but their real innovation was the elimination of folders in favor of fast and easy search and what essentially amounts to the ‘tagging’ of conversations). Both Google and Microsoft recognize it in their efforts in desktop search. And companies like del.icio.us and social text really really get it in allowing us to control how we label and categorize information. Perhaps I’m stretching some or perhaps being a bit too hopeful, but I believe RSS can bring Office into the 21st century. Imagine being able to tag a contact or a file with various attributes that you can later quickly and easily search on. Imagine being able to subscribe to a shared document folder to know when someone in a workgroup updates a file (enabling shared folders to function almost as a wiki). Imagine being able to stop placing files in work folders altogether but rather tagging then with the pertinent information which will enable you to much more easily find them later (and remember what they were for). …

September 20, 2005· 3 min read

Dogs on blogging

From the New Yorker . . . Blog_1

September 15, 2005· 1 min read

A little perspective

My dad sent me the following link that shows a map of the New Orleans flooding overlayed on a map of Boston (great UI). Being from Boston, this is a particularly relevant scale for me (particularly since I’ve spent a total of only 2 days in New Orleans in my life). Even if your’re not from the Boston area I think you’ll find the perspective helpful in understanding the true extent of what happened last week.

September 8, 2005· 1 min read

Accidents in North American Venture Capital

As a member of the American Alpine Club I look forward each year to the arrival of my copy of Accidents in North American Mountaineering. This is a book that the club publishes annually that documents climbing and mountaineering accidents that are reported each year in the United States and Canada. The idea, of course, is to educate the climbing community on things that can go wrong in the backcountry in an attempt to make everyone safer (as if the threat of dying were not enough, we also have to worry about being written up in Accidents. . . ). A typical entry might be titled: Fall on Snow – Unable to Self-Arrest, Faulty Use of Crampons and would then go on to describe how someone fell on a snowfield (in this case not far from Boulder, CO), dropped his ice-axe and wound up breaking his legs when he inappropriately tried to stop himself with his crampons (ouch!). Other titles this year were: Stranded, Exposure-Hypothermia, Inadequate Clothing/Equipment, Climbing Alone, Weather, Exceeding Abilities (apparently this guy got it all wrong); or my personal favorite: Stranded, Exceeding Abilities, Incompatible Partners – Poor Communication (I like that having crappy partners is an official designation of the AAC). …

September 7, 2005· 2 min read

Was Hobbes Right?

Louisiana are pretty remarkable. Gunmen targeting medical convoys. Widespread looting. Here’s some aerial photography that shows the water covering neighborhoods. Here’s a link to a photo series from the WashingtonPost (if this link doesn’t work for you there’s a link from the post home page). Its unbelievable to see what’s going on and disheartening to watch some of the behavior that is emerging in what has become somewhat of a lawless area (I’m not talking about people stealing groceries to live on – I’m talking about the people looting from jewelry stores and the like). Reports of the devastation in …

September 1, 2005· 2 min read

Less than Zero

I wrote a post a month ago about the US personal savings rate falling to zero in June – its 2nd lowest level since the great Depression. It’s worth reading the comments to that post, which pointed out the following: 1) people are stupid; 2) don’t get too hot and bothered about just one data point; 3) the savings rate was actually slightly positive – at 0.02% – not actually zero; 4) there’s hidden savings in the US in the form of R&D, education spending and gains in home equity values that, while not exactly putting money into a bank account, is the equivalent of ‘investing for the future’; and 5) higher savings rates don’t necessarily translate into economies growing more quickly (using Europe as an example, although Japan would be another prime data point for this argument). All very good points and well taken (particularly the point on ‘hidden savings’ – I hadn’t thought about that before). However while low savings rates clearly have short term benefits to the economy (in the form of more money going into the economy itself – on a macro level this is a key driver in Keynesian economics) they are probably not sustainable in the long term (certainly not at or near zero). Also, given the current administrations insistence on expensive outlays of capital and preference for tax cuts which are causing us to run quite a deficit, combined with our large current account imbalance, we’re reliant on someone’s savings to fund our economy (and if American’s aren’t saving, then we’re 100% reliant on other nations to fund our debt). Perhaps some economist readers might jump in here with their thoughts. …

September 1, 2005· 2 min read