RSS – Hot or Not?
A recent Nielson/NetRatings poll (story here) showed a huge gap between the have’s and the have-not’s. Specifically they asked respondents about their usage of RSS and found that 66% either hadn’t heard of RSS or didn’t know what it was used for and that only 11% of web log readers used RSS to monitor blogs (less than 6% of users overall use RSS according to a Pew Research study from January). There are definitely some implications for those (increasing number) of us who are investing in and trying to grow RSS related businesses (and we’re clearly still in the early stage of the adoption curve for RSS enabled technologies – see Bill Burnham’s great post on the subject here) …
August 30, 2005· 3 min read
Josh King and the corporate development perspective
HHere’s today’s shocker – VC’s don’t have all the answers. Those of you who are not VC’s have known this all along, but for people on the inside it’s a slow process of realization (I think I’m on about step 8). Seriously, though, as much as its amusing to poke fun at VCs (and our increasing propsnsity to blog), I do really like to see new non-VC folks throw their hats in the ring to talk about the world of operating growing businesses. Because of my background, I’m especially fond of reading what people in the corporate development world have to say (which is in part why I encouraged Daniel to write a guest post for my M&A series). …
August 26, 2005· 1 min read
Fun or Funny
I’ve had a few frustrating things going on this week and my attitude around them forced me to remember an old adage that I used to use when I was guiding back-country hiking trips (when inevitably we’d get rained on or someone would have forgotten something and people would get upset). It’s either fun or funny. Choose. Depending on my mood my response can range from laughter to “fuck you – it’s neither and I don’t want to play this game” (talking to myself, of course). Of course most times it really is either fun or funny (or feels better when put in one of those categories) and when forced to choose it typically puts me in a better mood.
August 26, 2005· 1 min read
Lost in translation
I love playing around with Google Translate – mostly to look at web sites or read blogs that are written in other languages. I’m also a big cycling fan and after this year’s Tour I decided to write to the German cyclist Jan Ullrich – one of my favorite riders and the third place finisher in this year’s contest. I wrote my note in English but also translated it into German using Google. I had forgotten about this note until a few days ago when I actually received a note back from Jan (I’m actually pretty sure it was really from him – it certainly made my day!). I translated it back to English also using Google, but decided that it was too important to leave to chance, so I forwarded it to a German friend of mine in Frankfurt for a second opinion. Turns out Google did a pretty nice job translating his response, but was apparently too literal in translating my original note. I found it pretty amusing and thought I would repeat it here – a good lesson in lexical vs. conceptual meaning. …
August 22, 2005· 2 min read
Putting a stake in the ground
Back from vacation and quite refreshed . . . One of the things we did in Maine was visit the LL Bean outlet (ok . . . we’re tourists . . .). Going there provided an example of making your threats real – in this case a positive one. LL Bean is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. No exceptions. They are so serious about this that they actually don’t have locks on the doors to their store. Pretty powerful example of putting a stake in the ground about something they believe strongly in.
August 22, 2005· 1 min read
Zero. Zip. Nada.
The US personal savings rate fell to zero in June – its lowest level since the latest spending binge started (post 9/11) and the 2nd lowest since the Great Depression. You can read the full government report here (be sure to check out some of the tables – very interesting information). Yes, the economy grew at a healthy annualized rate and clearly the Fed is still worried about inflationary pressure (we still have 50-100 basis points left to move in the fed funds rate) . But still – personal savings rate of 0%? We already lag behind the rest of the world in our ability not to spend pretty much all of what we earn (see here for a chart of US savings rates by quarter for the past 5 years) , and this trend shows no sign of improving. …
August 3, 2005· 1 min read
We still have a long way to go
I’m leaving for a week’s vacation tomorrow (see my vacation curve post – I’m past the inflection point again) and I’m not planning on checking my e-mail regularly. To keep down on e-mail clutter, my secretary is going to monitor my mail and delete or move things out of my inbox that are not important or that don’t have immediacy. To make sure the right stuff stays and goes, I’m making a list of things that I would like her to keep and things that she can move or throw out. This process has highlighted for me how many things I get delivered to my inbox that should be sent via RSS – all the updates, tech dailies, vc weeklies, investment banking research reports, etc. My list of things to discard is shockingly long. All of this is really unnecessary – everything in that group should really be delivered via RSS (I already subscribe to a long list of update or keyword search type feeds through RSS, but the ones on this list are not available in that format yet), which would allow me to be in better control (the Outlook filtering functions aren’t very reliable) and not have to bug someone else with my e-mail clutter. …
August 3, 2005· 2 min read
More thoughts on Occam’s Paradox
I’ve been re-reading my Occam’s Paradox post as well as the comments and trackbacks (which are excellent – please click through them if you have a minute). I fell a little short of really saying what I originally intended for the post, which was that I think that we have a tendency not only to make things more complicated than need be, but also to focus on too many things (and therefore the wrong ones). As a result we try to assimilate too much data to make decisions (not recognizing the massive diminishing returns on this effort) and try to pay attention to too many things. I wrote a post a while ago about trying to cram too much information into financial models that argued that more complex models are not necessarily better or more accurate. I’m realizing now that I’m connecting the dots here that this is exactly the type of behavior I’m talking about in Occam’s Paradox. [By the way, there’s an entire post to be written about how VC’s play into this in their decision making (how many customers do we need to talk with, how many models should we run, etc before we make an investment decision?) – but I don’t think I should go there in this post]. …
July 29, 2005· 2 min read
Occam’s Paradox
Remember Occam’s Razor? It’s the principle (that you probably learned in high school physics) that states that the simplest solution to a given problem is probably the best. I’ve been thinking recently about complexity in business and in life and think there’s a corollary to Occam’sRazor that perhaps should be called Occam’s Paradox – the propensity of humans to make things more complicated than they need to be. I don’t pretend to know why this is, but I notice it all the time (both in my own life and with other people). I guess it’s just easy to start down the road of dependency mapping (i.e., making everything you do a part of a larger matrix that has many interdependencies). I watch this tendency in the companies I work with as well. Lots of dependency mapping; lots of “if’s”, “but’s” and “its not that simple”. Now – I get that life and business are complicated. But I’m talking about how we react to that complexity. We have the choice to either drown in complexity or to cut through it, because although the challenges we face in life and business are clearly complex – the solution to those challenges generally are not (generally the difference is in recognizing what you control and what you don’t control and not wasting a whole lot of time on the latter – perhaps a subject for a future post). …
July 26, 2005· 2 min read
Cheese
Today is the 36th anniversary of the first moon landing (July 20, 1969). Moon’s almost full, so you’ll get a great look at it. Google put up a moon site recently – www.moon.google.com. Be sure to zoom all the way in .
July 20, 2005· 1 min read