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Jeff Haynie's ramblings about business and technology is home at http://blog.jeffhaynie.us/.
May 2007
Wednesday May 30, 2007
Posted by: at 9:09PM EST on May 30, 2007
I talk with a number of entrepreneurs on a weekly basis and hear dozens of ideas about the “next big thing” each time. It seems like there’s a new Web2.0 company launching every hour these days and I can hardly keep up with TechCrunch to keep tabs on everything that’s happening. So, generally, when something interesting comes along - it’s a little easier to see - given all the clutter around. Today was one of those super special days when I heard about a product (via Twitter of course) and instantly got it - and within a few minutes of seeing it and trying it out - got really, really excited. To me, this is the next big thing on the Internet. And, sometimes, it’s the simple ideas that make it. Jason Calacanis, ex-Netscape fame, and his team today launched Mahalo (Hawaiian for “how may I help you?”). If you use it, you will immediately “get it”. At least, you should.
I think this site has the potential to change the way search works today - much like how google changed search many years ago. Will it change search in a way that will topple the giant? Probably not. Most likely, I predict, this company will be bought in the next 18 months. This is such a great idea - that it will disrupt search as we know it. The idea of human-powered search is so simple, but yet so brilliant. I’m slightly partial to what they’re doing. Last summer, after the Vocalocity acquisition, Nolan, Jared and I took a few months to experiment with search and social content. It was an area of research that I was particularly interested in and we had a very similar idea (but our implementation of the concept wasn’t nearly as good as Mahalo). We wanted to try and solve the “relevancy” problem. While Mahalo is still a ways away from completing solving that — they’ve done something close. And, with some personalization and social networking capabilities mixed in - you’ll be able to link up your friends and extended network into more friend-based Mahalo “guides”. Imagine “tipping point” roles combined in relevant user-driven, search-based content. This will be one company and product to watch evolve. And given the team, I’m sure it will be a success.
Posted by: at 12:04AM EST on May 30, 2007
A few weeks ago I put out a public challenge to a few local venture capitalists / angel investors:
Almost immediately I received a few emails and stirred up some interesting conversation about the value of VCs and blogging. The value of blogging is still wildly misunderstood - with the usual main reactions:
I guess anyone’s opinion of “what blogging is” is just that: their opinion. And everyone has a right to their opinion. From my experience, blogging can be more than the above — and can also include the above — and be successful, useful, interesting and valuable. It can also be a complete waste of time and sometimes not worth the trouble. Blogging is a long-tail implementation in the world-wide, social phenomenon kind of way. How blogging came to be and how it’s impacted the world is probably one of those Internet change agents we’ll look back one day and say “aha”. And the impact, as can happen with most technology trends, are not all positive. And they don’t have to be. You need to take the good with the bad in cases of innovation. Nuclear power can be both used for bombs and for energy. And both, sometimes, are appropriate and inappropriate in different contexts. For me, it was a hard transition from becoming an occasional hobby blogger to one with purposeful, serious intent - which happened almost a year ago. Before that, I had first started blogging in February of 2003. And, once the transition happened, magically, things changed for me in ways that can be hard to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it. But, the change wasn’t really difficult - it was almost obvious and once it happened it made a lot of other things that are occurring in web 2.0 much more easy to understand. I’ll stop there — since that’s a little too deep and probably justifies a longer post one day. So, the update on the VC blogging challenge? Alan Taetle, Partner at Noro-Moseley was the first to take the challenge - which I posted on my blog a few days after the challenge. Thanks, Alan for that nice post - and a topic that merits much community conversation. Knox Massey, Executive Director at Atlanta Technology Angels - has been raring to start blogging after I had lunch with him a couple of weeks ago. I setup a brand new blog for ATA a few days ago and I think that should launch soon with some great content from Atlanta’s premiere angel group. More to come on this… Stephen Fleming, Chief Commercialization Officer, GT Venture Labs - Stephen is such a geek and sent me this really nice email after I volunteered to help set something up a few days before: “I was in a conference this weekend with Wi-Fi and a couple of boring speakers (yes, I went to a conference over a holiday weekend!), I went ahead and set something up on Blogger. Turns out that Adobe Contribute knows how to speak to that, so it was pretty simple”. And, the best part is his 2nd post was done from his blackberry from the conference. Awesome. Well, 3 out of 5 isn’t too bad. And most importantly, this social experiment also demonstrated the power of community and blogging first hand.
Tuesday May 29, 2007
Posted by: at 10:55AM EST on May 29, 2007
This weekend was a whirlwind. Early saturday morning we drove to American Adventures park for my oldest son’s seventh birthday party with some of his friends — lot’s of rides, pizza, a magic show and foam balls getting thrown all over the place. We packed up by 1:30 p.m. to rush back home to pick up our rental car (yea, another story, my car was still in the shop and wasn’t finished from maintenance in time) to head to Nolan’s wedding. Yea, that’s right - Nolan Wright got married on Saturday. One of our friends asked him a week ago: “Do you know who she is?” Nolan promptly stated that “in my tradition, you don’t meet the bride until the day of the wedding.” Good comeback. And apropos for his humor. We jumped in the car around 2:30 p.m. to try and make it to Easley, S.C. (just outside of Greenville) for a 6:30 p.m. wedding. No problem - 2 hour drive to Greenville with a quick stop at the hotel for a change of clothes and “we should be fine”. Of course, then again, not so according to Memorial Day traffic. As soon as we got on the other side of HWY 20 headed on I-85N - we got into a long, very long, line of traffic heading north. After about an hour and 3 miles later - we finally passed the problem — a jackknifed tractor trailer. After that, smooth sailing … and the best part, my wife really enjoyed the Hertz NeverLost GPS system the whole way there. Amazing what amuses you when you’re stuck in traffic on an interstate. So, we checked into the hotel and proceeded to get ready - only 45 minutes until the wedding. My wife put on her new dress - which she had specially alerted to fix a zipper problem just before the trip — and I put on my suit (oh, backstory, I had intended to wear my *new suit* but my wife “misplaced the pants”). So, we’re standing there getting ready — my pants for my older suit I haven’t worn in a few years and I could tell. They barely would zip up — I guess they shrank. We made it just in the nick of time - five minutes to spare. When we arrived, there were a ton of men and women in black tuxes — in the parking lot — directing people and traffic. My initial thought was secret service. I was now wondering “who in the heck is attending this party? Nolan’s a nobody like me!” Then, I noticed the local sherrif’s cars assisting with traffic. OK, now picture this: Easley isn’t midtown Atlanta, it’s the country, ya’ll. I kept wondering if this is where Grayson grew up. This was way back down winding roads and cow pastures to get to this farm. And, it’s a real farm (well, more or less a wonderful garden). What I quickly realized that this was just a big deal wedding back “in these parts”. And the parents of the bride (it was their farm) are well-known local doctors - both pediatricians to be exact. And, this was their one and only daughter - a wedding in the making for over 30 years. And, that’s cause for this type of celebration - especially in these parts of of the deep south. We parked our car (at the direction of a tall man in a black tux) and jumped out of the car and into a nice golf cart - nicely driven by a man and a women both in formal wear with walkie talkies. They shuttled us up to the front of the house and we arrived at the ceremonial grounds. And it was ceremonial — it was probably the nicest outdoor weddings (expect my own, which was on the beach in Ponte Vedra, FL but that’s another story) I’ve ever been to. It was like a magazine wedding. They had a 5-piece orchestra playing under a hand made wooden structure that was beautifully decorated with flowers. And, the wedding arch was also a hand made wooden trellis that was decorated with beautiful flowers and a hand-made old wooden cross. All the guests - probably 150 at least - were all seated in nice white chairs and the guests were served with lemonade or water just before the ceremony started - Southern style.
The ceremony was long - and very traditional. The ceremony lasted a staggering hour — but it was fine - and the weather was perfect. We only had a couple of roosters crow and a peacock or two join in the chorus. But funny enough, each was at a time that almost seemed rehearsed. After the ceremony, we were escorted to an incredible garden with big white tents and an incredible dinner buffet - and again, a full band and 2 separate full bars. My wife and I estimated that at least 50 people were working the wedding. The food was amazing — not your typical wedding foo-foo food. This was real food this Georgia boy likes - BBQ, ham biscuits, watermelon and chicken. Although, it was interesting eating ham biscuits in such an incredibly decorated and upscale place. My wife kept repeating to me all night: “I could live here”, “I could go for this place”, “I could see myself living here”, “I really love this place”, “I wonder if we could find a place like this?”. Hint hint I guess. The funniest part of the wedding was the band playing (and singing) “play that funky music white boy“. It was so appropriate in a weird way. The older white guys were playing it as if they had gotten lost in their surroundings - and they did a bang up job, given… So now, Nolan and Susanna are off to Italy for a couple of weeks — happily married. And, we wish them the best of luck.
Thursday May 24, 2007
Posted by: at 12:33PM EST on May 24, 2007
Here’s some simple code to extract a thumbnail of a video from to a JPEG file using FFMEG:
You can also use PNG instead (although its much bigger in size):
Convert your movie to a flash player format (FLV):
Friday May 18, 2007
Posted by: at 11:12AM EST on May 18, 2007
Last night was the Atlanta Web Entrepreneur’s group meeting - which was held down at the ATDC, thanks to Lance Weatherby. The main discussion was “Selecting a Technology for your website”. I served on the panel as the representative for Ruby on Rails. The other panelists were:
Rusty Zarse was suppose to moderate but had a family conflict - so Alan Pinstein stepped in and did a fine job. I had met Alan the previous night at the Capital Connections event and his real estate web business is very interesting. We spent most of the night debating the merits and weaknesses of each of the different languages and frameworks. Much of the discussion blurred between comparing features of the language with the framework itself. The audience seemed to have a varying degree of backgrounds - some technical, some non-technical, others in the middle. It was challenging to talk about the pros and cons of specific frameworks and not get too geeked out. I think the main consensus we all seemed to get across was that (a) a technology platform and toolset is really about the people that are building the product/service and (b) it depends on the requirements of the business. Several of us made the point at different points that what really mattered the most was getting quality technical folk. If you did that, they would figure out the right frameworks to use. As in almost all technology discussions, I try and think about it from a total cost of ownership standpoint. And, that often conjures up thoughts of how much my hardware costs are and what the amortization of the upfront buy will be. And then, certainly, the cost of labor or contract services assistance. And training, etc. But, recently, I had a long conversation with a customer that had made a couple of bad technology selections - not because of the technology itself - but because they neither had any internal expertise (or just plain experience) with the selection nor did they have any access regionally to people on a contract basis that could be hired to bridge the gap. While both products they selected are open source, they’re both extremely complex and their codebases are impossible to learn on a whim - especially by an average programmer. In their case, they did the simple buy-vs-build equation and technology evaluation - but completely eliminated probably the most important part: who’s going to be able to “do this”. Several questions last night centered around a similar flaw in thinking: “Which framework should I as an entrepreneur make for my technical team?” Hello…. None. If you’re an entrepreneur with no deep technology background and you have a team — you shouldn’t be making any framework decision - they should. You need to provide the requirements, the financial working parameters and the support they need — and you should get out of the way and give them the ability to execute. If you’re an entrepreneur with a technology team, go fetch them pizza while they code their butts off. I promise you, it will go a long way — especially much longer than trying to make the decision for them. So, I thought I’d try and address in written form some of the questions that were asked last night: What kind of websites is your technology best suited for? Which is it not so well suited for? Ruby on Rails is really making a lot of debuts in more recent Web2.0 websites. This is partly because it’s the latest new thing. But, also, because it has a large concentration of libraries that have been specifically created for the next generation of capabilities such as tagging and geocoding. That’s not to say that you couldn’t build a traditional enterprise website in RoR, it can. RoR lacks support for some of the more enterprise integration tasks that some enterprises need - but there are plenty of backed in options like Active Messaging that allows you to talk with a JMS service for messaging. Support for web services and REST is also backed into to RoR - so it’s easy to integrate into a enterprise service bus or other SOA architecture. What famous web2.0 sites are using your technology? 37Signals has made RoR not only possible, but popular, based on its nice utility software-as-a-service applications such as Basecamp, Campfire and most recently, Highrise. But also, the more recent challenges at Twitter has also proven that RoR based applications have a way to go to get to massive scale. What does it cost to use your technology (e.g. hardware, software and support)? RoR is open source and free. Hardware is not. Support is based on the community model - and I’m sure you can find a number of people who will support your rails effort if you really need it. Like almost all technology decisions, the largest factor in cost is people cost. Not just their salaries, but how efficient and productive they are. Most frameworks are chosen to help solve this problem - and RoR really succeeds in making development not only pleasant and fun again, but also extremely productive and hassle-free. How steep is the learning curve for newcomers? I’ve found that RoR is a little harder to un-train developers that have a lot of Java experience - simply because RoR (and Ruby itself) is just plan straightforward. It supports traditional syntaxes like the for-loop. Let me illustrate: In most traditional languages, you can iterate over a loop such as:
In ruby, you can do something much easier:
OK, certainly that was a very trivial example. But let’s take another simple one. Let’s say you need to pass in a number of milliseconds to represent how long you should sleep before you wake up. Unless the unit of time is very simple, most people have built or used libraries to assist them in calculating the value. Not in RoR:
Any integer value in RoR supports any number of time unit conversions automatically. Is that enough to choose RoR over .NET? No, of course not. But, it’s pretty easy to pickup and exteremely fast to get proficient in it. It’s also one of those rare frameworks that you have moments of fun finding new ways of doing things - and when you do, you say “yes, of course, that’s so obvious!”. How easy have you found it to find skilled people? How about in Atlanta? Finding skilled people in RoR has been a little challenging - but that’s simply a function of time. There are certainly way more Java and .NET shops in Atlanta and the greater world than there are Ruby shops. How much support is there for your technology? Who have you found to be reliable? Support is amazing on the web for RoR. If you think you have a need for something, it probably already exists as a Ruby Gem on RubyForge. What issues (if any) did you encounter being an evangelist for your technology in your organization? How did you overcome them? For us, it was simply a matter of two variables: (a) total cost considerations of RoR - which was fractions of the Java alternatives and (b) pleasure of working with it. For our customers, it’s not that easy. We have to adapt to what our customer environments and constraints are - and in all cases to date, that’s still Java. For our own projects, we’re now 100% RoR. What add-ons, plug-ins, tools, etc. would you recommend using? For RoR, I’d recommend the following:
What are some sites you’d recommend? Some RoR sites I read often: All in all, I think the biggest problem with RoR is the fact that it’s new and hasn’t been hardened to the point of Java, .NET and PHP. However, that will come in short time I believe. In my previous business, we were one of the first Java based products in the telecommunications software industry. We spent many years pleading with our customers and partners that Java would scale - and it did fine. Now, there are a large number of Java based telecom products. RoR has a long way to go and a short-time to get there.
Wednesday May 16, 2007
Posted by: at 9:27AM EST on May 16, 2007
Tomorrow in Portland, Oregon, the Ruby on Rails Conference organized by O’Reilly called RailsConf 2007 kicks off. I wish I had signed up to go. I heard the other day from Nate Clark at Wamily that he was going out this week - I’m so jealous. I’ll be presenting the Ruby on Rails portion of tomorrow’s Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs Group meeting. If you’d like to know why I like RoR, check these fun videos out: Rails vs. Java Rails vs. PHP Database Rails vs. PHP Organization Thanks to the guys at RailsEnvy for these awesome videos. They’re suppose to have one more video coming out tomorrow. Maybe sure you check their site for the last video in the series. Tuesday May 15, 2007
Posted by: at 10:08AM EST on May 15, 2007
Post Comments: This post was published on behalf of Alan Taetle, General Partner at Noro-Moseley. Alan and Noro have been very active investors in the southeast venture community for many years. I’d like to thank Alan for the time to put together his thoughts in response to my earlier post. -Jeff
Many of you know that we at Noro-Moseley have spent the past year raising our sixth fund. We have had met with at least 70 groups in the U.S. and in Europe. What you’re looking at above was one of the questions most posed to us. After all, we are a regional early-stage and early-growth venture fund focused on the region - who better than us to know? Venture capital investing is pretty much based on the theory of ‘black swans‘ posed by Nassim Taleb in his most recent book (he is a great author, by the way; this and his first book, ‘Fooled by Randomness’, are must reads for anyone who invest for a living). The black swan is the outlier success story that provides insane returns. Google is the primary example in the last 5 years. Where are the black swans in our region? I am going to give you an example of the challenge we faced when fund raising when we were asked to prove what is world class. Let’s first look at one area where some of the big wins have been in the IT space in the Southeast and where investment dollars seem to be going. First there is Internet Security. Tom Noonan and Chris Klaus created a mini black swan company with over a $1 B in economic value and just as importantly, Tom Noonan has invested and mentored other entrepreneurs to pursue opportunities in this space. Companies like SPI Dynamics, one of the leaders in web application security, would not exist if it weren’t for ISS. The Georgia Tech Information Security Center has cranked out new interesting technologies like what’s found in Damballa, a company built to combat the botnet problem. We also have Jay Chaudhry, who started one of the first security consulting firms and then one on to build Ciphertrust and Air Defense. In total, there are well over 15 start-ups in the security space in the Atlanta area many of whom were started by ISS alumni. Secureworks, one of NMP’s companies, will be the next major player to be noticed given its scale. What I wrote above sounds like its a great world class story save for three things. First none of the companies remain public. ISS will not be Cisco. It’s now part of IBM. Ciphertrust is part of Secure Computing. All of the major public Internet security companies are based in the Valley. Second, why is RSA, far and away the largest trade show for Internet Security, in San Francisco? Why isn’t RSA located in Atlanta, the home of Internet Security? Third, what has our region done to market itself as a center of excellence for Internet security? Nothing that I’m aware of. If we want to really move to the next stage of venture evolution with more capital invested, more start-ups and most importantly, more black swans, we are going to have to market our region more systematically on what we are world-class in. Excellent quality of life alone will not do it.
Thursday May 10, 2007
Posted by: at 9:44PM EST on May 10, 2007
One billion dollars is quite a significant amount of capital invested in startup and emerging growth companies - and those are all ATDC companies. By the numbers, that’s 160 deals in 75 companies from 138 venture investors. The average deal size is $6.7M for each ATDC company. Deal makeup stats:
Interestingly enough, many people think that ATDC is only about Georgia Tech. However, 76% of the ATDC companies have had no affiliation with Georgia Tech. Only 24% have had a GT affiliation. 32 of the companies raised from $0-5M. Only 10 companies have raised more than $25M. Top deals in 2006. Air2Web came in at $25M and Cardiomems just behind them at $22.5M. Jacket Micro Devices raised $12M and iVivity $10M. ATDC represents a significant portion of all investments in the State of Georgia with 21%. The remaining 79% of state investments are non-ATDC affiliations. 2 Major firms sponsored the event today: DLA Piper and HIG Capital. DLA Piper is an elite technology venture law firm. They’re helping companies secure capital as well as structure their growth. DLA Piper ranks #3 in venture deal volume - with #1 being Wilson Sonsini and #2 being Cooley Godward. DLA Piper did 246 venture deals in 2005; 397 deals were done in 2006. Of the top firms, DLA Piper is the only firm currently that has a presence in the Southeast U.S. Of their deals, GA ranked #3 with 8 deals behind Boston with 7 and California with 13. Interestingly enough, Jeffrey Leavitt of DLA Piper reported that Noro-Moseley toped the GA investments with 7 deals in Georgia. HIG Capital is an early to growth stage venture fund out of Miami, FL that has an Atlanta office. HIG Capital has $4B of total capital under management with investors such as Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, MIT, Morgan Stanley, Stanford, Verizon and Yale University. HIG has around 100 investment professional and has invested $50M in 7 ATDC companies. Their latest fund of $300M. HIG is a strong partner of ATDC and has only invested in 1 non-ATDC venture. From Fred Sturgis‘ perspective, “ATDC is the crown jewel of the souteast from a technology investor perspective because of the marriage of tech & commercilization”. Fred said that ATDC “is a hub of bringing capital into the region”. With $1B raised in its companies since its inception, that’s apparent. ATDC has also had a dramatic economic impact for the State of Georgia by contributing $12.7B in revenue and has contributed 52,000 employment years. The State of Georgia has yielded $100M in profit from ATDC companies. The goal of ATDC is to “increase the technology business base in Georgia by helping entrepreneurs launch and build successful companies.” 
ATDC today also announced it’s new venture catalysts: Lance Weatherby (ex-Mindspring and Cipertrust) - Atlanta ATDC also has a strong Enterpreneur-in-Residence program which helps facilitate the collaboration of startups and seasoned enterpreneurs. Ron Curtis (founder of Webtone) and Jeff Hoffman (founder of Priceline) are the current EIR. Interestingly enough, two-thirds of EIRs join or start ATDC companies. This year’s ATDC champions included:
And speaking of clapping, it would take the entire room to clap straight for 16 days to total one billion claps. With a $1B, you could give every website in the world $10. Tony announced what was on the horizon for ATDC:
The ATDC advisory council:
And, now - on to the graduates. The graduates were split up into 2 categories: Venture Lab graduates and ATDC graduates. Venture Lab is run by Stephen Fleming and the goal is to start successful companies based on GT research. It’s been around for five years and Stephen says that “if ATDC is an incubator, Venture Lab is neo-natal care.” Much of the available pre-seed funding available through the Georgia Research Alliance. Some of the prior Venture Lab graduates have included CardioMems, Nuventix, GTronix, Orthonics, JMD, QCept, Stheno, Radatec, Virtual Aerosurface Technologies. Today’s Venture Lab Grads: Asankya, Scott Ryan CEO Damballa, Steve Linowes, CEO Innovolt, Suresh Sharma, CEO Medshape Solutions, Kurt Jacobus Sentrinsic, Mike Orndorff, CEO Vivonetics, Gang Bao, CEO WiSPI.net, Dave Kelly And, the ATDC graduating class of 2007: Cambia FTrans Jacket Micro Devices (JMD) QCept Racemi ScanTech Tony outlined some of the ATDC learnings that are expressed in it’s graduate lineup:
All-in-all I thought the event was very enlightening and encouraging to see so many interesting companies doing a variety of different market segments. The “official presentations” from Tony are below:
Wednesday May 9, 2007
Posted by: at 11:20PM EST on May 9, 2007
We had a great turnout tonight at our YnR entrepreneurs mixer - the first one for the North Atlanta crowd. OK - not exactly North Atlanta, Sanjay, that was ITP. But, a great location: Five Seasons Brewing - the one just off Roswell Road. That alone made it worth it. When I got there, Ken Grisnak was hunkered down over his computer in the pool room area and there were probably 30-35 entrepreneurs in active discussions. Fun, I like seeing entrepreneurs talking about what they’re up to and what’s happening around town. A couple of cool things I heard: Biodiesel — yeah, that’s right. Low-tech/high-tech startup that David Ratajczak is doing. David’s got a new startup that’s focused on building these machines that can basically refine diesel fuel from bio products like oil fat - or something like that. Completely out of my league - but something green and something quite interesting. What was probably the most interesting to me was how the business was being financed - basically, from hedge funds. Yep, that’s right - those high-risk, cash rich funds that are seeming to creep in to startup venture deals more and more these days. Interestingly enough, I met one young woman that had graduated last year from Harvard Business with her MBA and had relocated to Atlanta to work for a $20B hedge fun. Her segment focus: technology. Why is she floating around a entrepreneurs mixer ? …. hmmmmmm. David Cummings / Wayt King - David’s like your protege smart kid that started his first business when he was like 4 years old. I think he was born with a silver term sheet in his pocket. The guys got more things going on than 5 entrepreneurs combined - and he’s like 19 years old. He and Wayt have teamed up to get their new project off the ground - and basically validate something we’ve been talking about (and we’re both doing): can you launch a business and online product in less than 3 months with $50K? David has just hired 12 GA Tech / Emory students for the summer to build out his mid-market marketing product. It’s sounds really interesting - and potentially a LoopFuse killer. Sorry, Tom and Roy, the boy’s a stream roller and a successful software entrepreneur. And, best of all - he’s doing it with Ruby on Rails. It’s really hard to compare how fast you can build something in RoR over the traditional J2EE method. I can’t wait to get my hands on this product. What’s coming up next? Well, Scott Burkett has done, yet again, an amazing job and has pulled together an impressive list of people for his Capital Connections event - next week. It looks like around 125-150 people are RSVP - and a few out of town VCs are coming. I’ve already had a conversation with one active southeastern VC in Raleigh, and it sounds like a few others are planning on being there. I’ll see you there if you’re going. So…. why don’t southeastern VCs blog? Geez… that’s like the $1M question - literally. Scott Voight and I pondered this a bit over lunch last week. Scott had an interesting perspective when I posed the question to him: it’s cultural. In Scott’s thinking, it’s all about the way business is still largely done in a lot of older communities in the south like venture capital. Well, probably, there’s something valid to that theory. I honestly am not fully sure why, personally. I know there are some young, up and coming investors like Jason Caplain who are blogging - heck, even Jason’s blog probably is somewhat representative of the entire VC blogging community (the title is Southeast VC). But where’s everyone else? Is blogging necessary to be a good investor? Well, no and yes. Blogging is an interesting medium. Some traditionalists have a hard time understanding the value of blogs. I also continue to hear that blogs are “all about personal things nobody cares about.” Sure, that’s probably one way of looking at it — and quite naturally, one that doesn’t surprise me. But, what’s valuable? One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. If you’re not blogging, you’re not participating in the conversation. And, for everyone that says they don’t need blogs, I would bet 95% of them are reading blogs. I’ve had people tell me that “don’t get the blog thing” and when I talk with them about what they read online and where they get information, well - it naturally comes back to some of the same popular blogs that we all read and love: TechCrunch, GigaOm, etc. To be a good investor, you have to be connected with what’s going on - even if you don’t fully embrace it or understand it. Twitter is a good example. If you’re not groking Twitter - regardless of it’s long-term value - you’re not going to get Web 3.0. You might as well start looking at the stock market or mutual funds for your investment strategy - or get back to low-tech. The world is changing so fast — and common people are part of the evolution — that if you’re not actively trying to follow it and understand it — you’re going to completely miss the next Google and Youtube. It’s going to sit on your desk, you’re going to talk one-on-one with the enterpreneur — and you’re going to completely miss it. You might as well do like some others have done and hang it up. Isn’t all this web2.0 stuff just a flash in the pan like all the web1.0 companies that went down in flames? Sure. Lot’s of crap being slapped on the virtual Internet wall…. that’s for sure. Many, many things out there today are absolute crap and will fail - like almost all businesses and most ideas. But, that’s not the point anymore. The anatomy of the deal is changing. Businesses are being created, absent of traditional capital sources, and with real value, real revenue and with a lot less capital. This is the age of the solo, lifestyle entrepreneur. That’s not to say that venture capital is in trouble - it’s just changing, quite rapidly. Smart venture investors are adapting and figuring out how to be relevant. Others, the dinosaurs, are going to become extinct. There memories forever lost in the web1.0 bone yard. Web2.0 represents more than just a shift in technology and the rapid socialization of communities and micro social networks - it also represents the changing face of business and the rapid globalization of transactional commerce. The new age of entreprenuership is about creative value and building a business - in some cases, with no startup capital. So, why don’t VCs in the southeastern U.S. blog? Well, probably because they don’t understand the value. Partly, because it’s un-natural for them to talk about what they’re doing in a public forum to an unknown, uncontrollable audience. Partly, because they’re not participating in the Web2.0 evolution. Partly, because they’re still trying to figure it out - and the world is changing more rapidly than we all can understand. I honestly don’t know. The good news: there’s largely an open field for some of them to step up, take the lead and starting participating in the conversation. If you’re reading this and you’re an investor and you don’t blog — tell us why. Join the conversation with me.
Saturday May 5, 2007
Posted by: at 10:50PM EST on May 5, 2007
I got a pleasant gift a few hours ago when I received the following email from Tim O’Reilly and team:
WOW! How cool. I had some indication a couple of months ago that I might get an invite, but hadn’t really heard anything since then. The idea of FooCamp is really pretty neat. It’s sort of an unconference of people from different technology and business areas — I guess people that O’Reilly wants to get together — and help facilitate conversations. This is the first time I’ve been invited and I look forward to meeting some interesting people - especially given that I’m sure most people who are invited won’t be from the south … Represent. |
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And my wife — well, her dress zipper wasn’t fixed like they had claimed. Luckily, she had a backup dress (smart girl) and I had to suck in my gut big time. So, now, we’re less than 30 minutes before t-time. We’re speeding through S.C. to a backwoods farm in Easley to make the wedding … you can’t really be late to a wedding.
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