A VC

The Power Of Instant Approval

Back in the early days of web video, it wasn't clear who would win the competition for video upload to the web. There was YouTube, Vimeo, and the big dog was Google Video. I tried all of them. YouTube was by far and away the best experience.

Google Video required you to wait for days to see the video you uploaded. It was so annoying that I wrote this post exactly four years ago today (how's that for a coincidence?). This line sort of sums it up:

Posting stuff to the Internet has to be instantaneous.  What if wrote this post on Tyeppad and it took me 10 minutes to see the result?  What if I posted a photo to Flickr and it took a day to see it?

I was reminded of that post when I was reading Bijan's post on mobile apps this morning. Bijan makes the same point about developers and the iPhone app store:

Developers are getting extremely frustrated with the Apple App Store (understatement). I’m hearing it can take developers 4 weeks to get an update released. That’s dysfunctional.

The argument Apple makes about approving every app is similar to the argument Google made about approving every video. They want to make sure only quality stuff gets into their service. And I suppose it is even more important when we are talking about software running on your phone.

I'm not going to argue with the logic of those points of view, but I'll make this observation. Instant gratification is a very powerful force, for both consumers and developers. The web is full of success stories that have embraced the power of instant gratification and also full of failures that made people wait too long.

Comments (View) | Posted November 16, 2009 in Venture Capital and Technology

My Social Recruiting Summit Keynote Talk

On Friday I posted some of the key themes I'll be addressing tomorrow in my keynote.

I spent this morning assembling them into a deck that I'll use in my talk tomorrow. Here's a final draft. Please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions/critiques/copy edits, please leave them in the comments.

Comments (View) | Posted November 15, 2009 in Venture Capital and Technology , Weblogs

Twitter List iPhone Apps

When my son Josh got Tweetie on his iPhone, he simply went to Twitter.com and found every NBA player he could think of, found out if they had a verified account, and if they did, he followed them. That was his follow list (along with me and the gothamal).

But now with Twitter lists, it could be so much easier. TNT has put together this list of NBA players on Twitter. The Twitter iPhone app companies could simply create packaged versions of their apps with lists in them. Imagine the Tweetie NBA Player app. You download it, it comes preloaded with the TNT NBA list, and if that's all you ever want to do on Twitter, you are done. Of course, you can add more people, tweet, and retweet if you'd like.

Maybe this has already happened. If so, please point me to it. If not, I'd like to see someone do this.

PS - I'm not the only one thinking about lists this morning. Scoble has a really good post on lists on his blog right now.

Comments (View) | Posted November 14, 2009 in Web/Tech

Social Recruiting

I'm giving the keynote talk at the Social Recruiting Summit in NYC on Monday. I've been working on my presentation over the past few days and some themes are worth talking about.

1) Since we started Union Square Ventures in 2003/2004, we have only been involved with one retained search. Our portfolio companies have certainly used search firms, but our use of them has been extremely rare. We prefer to source candidates ourselves using our networks, and increasingly our social networks.

2) We sourced both of our junior investment professionals, Andrew Parker and Eric Friedman, with blog posts at USV.com.

3) We have sourced countless senior hires for our portfolio companies off of this blog and USV.com. I would bet that we've done a couple dozen successful hires that way in the past couple years.

4) Many of our companies have internal recruiters and we work hand in hand with them, sourcing talent, vetting talent, and closing the sale.

5) LinkedIn is a terrific place to find talent and to find references. When I want to check someone out, I invite them to connect to me on LinkedIn, I find who we know in common, and that is my reference list. Charlie O'Donnell taught me these LinkedIn tricks about five years ago and I use them all the time. 

6) Tracked.com is also a terrific place to find talent and figure out who they know. Let's say you wanted to find the top execs at LinkedIn. You can find them all in one place here.

7) Hunting for talent is necessary but not always sufficient. You need to get the word out. Like all things on the internet, there are free ways and paid ways to do that.

8) The best free way is get your jobs indexed by Indeed so they can be found by the over 10 million people a month who go there looking for jobs. We feature all the jobs in our portfolio on the front page of USV.com by running an Indeed stored query of all the jobs in our portfolio companies.

9) Social networks like Twitter and Facebook are also great free ways to get the word out. Post the job on your website and tweet it out, get it retweeted, searched, and discovered and the resumes will start coming in.

10) You can also pay to get your jobs "sponsored" in Indeed. You can post job ads via Facebook's self serve ad system and target them at very specific locations and job types. And we'll see more social media/networks offer paid systems like this in the next year.

11) There are all sorts of niche communities on the web you should be hanging out in if you want to find talent. For tech/engineering talent, we like to look at Meetup groups on certain tech topics (there are eight Ruby On Rails meetups within 25 miles of NYC), open source projects, and niche communities like Hacker News and Stack Overflow. You can play the same game with communities for other kinds of job types. The key is you have to hang out there a bit, get to know the community and the people in it, and build trust and add value.

That last point is the big point. Social media is about showing up, hanging out, and earning trust. If you want to use social media to source talent, you can't fake it. You have to really participate in these systems. But if and when you do, they are incredibly powerful and are changing the face of recruiting.

I look forward to talking to the recruiting community about this topic more on Monday. And if you have ideas for other things I should be talking about, please leave them in the comments.

Comments (View) | Posted November 13, 2009 in Venture Capital and Technology

Tracked.com Gets More Social

I posted about our portfolio company Tracked.com a few weeks ago. In that post, I said:

Tracked.com is social. Users have a profile in the service and can send messages to each other in the service (and via twitter and facebook very shortly). Objects in the service (news, quotes, charts, public filings, companies, people) can be sent around like links in twitter and facebook.

That "very shortly" is now. Tracked released a bunch of social features last night which are live on the website.

Here are the ones I think are important to talk about:

All news items have a share link on them now. Here's the comScore recent news list. Note the share icons on the far right.

When you share a story in the service, you have the option to share it only inside Tracked or with Twitter (and Facebook soon). Here's the UI for that. Send to Twitter is not checked by default and you need to connect to twitter via ouath in the Tracked settings to get this functionality.

I used this feature this morning to share a story about our portfolio company Zynga. Here's the tweet:

You'll note that there are two bit.ly links in that tweet. The first is to the Business Week story I tweeted out. The second is to the conversation page in Tracked about the share which looks like this:

And of course, all of this activity shows up in your Tracked news feed:

One additional neat feature is you can send a tweet to @tracked that will get posted to your Tracked profile messages. I did that just now and it works great.

So that's the gist of how this stuff works. I'd love everyone who is interested in this stuff to give it a spin and let me know what you think.

And to remind all of you about Tracked and what it is all about, I've put up a new widget on the upper right sidebar. This Tracked widget shows the companies and people I am tracking and if there are any new stories on them. You can click on the company or person's name and stay in the widget or you can click on the number of stories and be taken to Tracked.com in a new browser tab. I'd also like to know what you think of the widget.

Comments (View) | Posted November 12, 2009 in stocks , Venture Capital and Technology , Web/Tech