A VC

Thoughts on 2007 from 2008

It's mid-day Jan 1st here in australia. I'm not much for looking back but I do feel the need to reflect a bit on what 2007 brought us.

We got the social graph as a platform from Facebook and now everyone else who has some sort of social graph to offer the Internet. Developers have jumped on this new social platform with a vengeance and I think we are going to see so much new innovation from this that its hard to imagine. I am looking forward to see how Google and the other webmail providers react to this opportunity in 2008.

We also saw the future of the mobile device in the iPhone. Too bad Apple missed a huge opportunity to open the device to all networks and all apps. As a result, we are only seeing a small fraction of what's possible from a mobile broswer on a mobile computer connected to a mobile network. In 2008 this is gong to change as we'll get an SDK from Apple, new iPhone like devices from RIM and other mobile device innovators, and a truly open mobile device in Bug.

Another big deal in 2007 was the emergence of a truly open web to mobile to web communications system called Twitter. I know I am talking my own game here, but I think an open api based web and mobile notification system that functions much like the facebook mini feed is something everyone who is building web and mobile apps should tap into and so many have. As Jack Dorsey, the ceo of twitter, said in his happy new year twitter update, 'I think 2008 is going to be a great year for Twitter'

Finally, and maybe most importantly, we saw both the consolidation and the opening up of the internet advertising business. Large third party ad networks and ad infrastructure have been assembled by the big internet companies and we saw AOL walk away from the content business in favor of its ad network opportunity. But at the same time we saw Right Media and ad exchanges in general become mainstream. With the emergence of advertiser side campaign management systems like Clickable that use the apis of these ad networks, we are going to see the online ad business become a true marketplace in the next couple years.

So what does all of this mean for 2008 and beyond? The web is becoming more open, more mobile, more social, more playful, more intelligent, and more monetizable every day.

Happy new year everyone. Let's get busy because there's so much opportunity out there I almost can't believe it.

PS I posted this from my blackberry to this blog, facebook, and tumblr with one click while sitting on a beach in the great barrier reef off the coast of australia. If you want to see the new world, you have to live it.

Top 10 Records Of 2007 - Number 1

I wrote a long post extolling the virtues of my top pick, Because Of The Times, by Kings Of Leon, on the flight from Melbourne to Cairns, but its stuck on my laptop as there's no Internet service here in Dunk Island.

But there's good cell coverage so I am posting this from my blackberry.

Because Of The Times is the third stellar record in a row from the best young american rock band. And I mean rock band. These Followhill kids (yes KOL is a family act) deliver the kind of roots based rock and roll that launched the art form back in the late 50s/early 60s. Their sound is a bit more modern, but they've got the basics down

Top tracks include On Call, Ragoo, Fans, and Arizona.

I wish I could post some music for you all to sample but you'll just have to head over the the hype machine (hypem.com) and search for kings of leon and hit play and turn it up loud

Rock on.

The New Wave

Becky Buckman has a WSJ piece on new-style VCs who invest smaller sums of money, work within a network of known entrepreurs, are more entrepreneur focused, and she claims, are 'shaking thing up in silicon valley'. Here's a link to the piece

http://mobile2.wsj.com/beta2/htmlsite/html_article.php?id=1&CALL_URL=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119889558568757053.html?

Sorry if this link is bad. I am doing this from my blackberry.

Becky's right that there's a new way of doing deals. We've done about half of the investments in our fund this way.

And I suspect the more traditional established firms will start adopting some, if not all, of these techniques

The fact is it costs less to start a web company these days which put the founder(s) in a stronger position

But that doesn't mean that the venture business is at risk. Like all businesses you need to adapt to a changing market environment. We've done that and I exoect most VC firms will do the same

Top 10 Records of 2007 - Number Two

When I first put pen to paper and listed my top 10 records of 2007, this record was in the bottom half of the list. But over the past couple weeks, as I have been listening almost exclusively to my top 10 list, I've moved this up, and up, and up. The reason is simple. Hissing Fauna is the most complete record on the list. It is a record that works best listened start to finish. Sure there are standout tracks, like Suffer For Fashion, She's A Rejector, Faberge, Heimdalsgate, and several more. But when I listen to any of the tracks solo, I expect and want to hear the next track at the end of the song. That's a record.

For those who don't know, Of Montreal is based in Athens Georgia and is the handiwork of a talented musician named Kevin Barnes. He's the front man for the band and he did all of the songwriting on this record. Maybe that's why it flows so well from start to finish.

The music is neo-psychedelic pop. Think Beach Boys meet Sgt Pepper with a bit of George Clinton and techo thrown in for good measure.

Here's one of my favorite tracks, called A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger

A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger - Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna Are You The Destroyer

Family Wine Touring

Since we were in South Africa three years ago, we've been taking our kids on winery visits. They love it and so do we. It's a great way to teach them to love wine and drink responsibly. We don't drive on these trips. We get someone to take us there and back. And we find a great place in the wine country for a nice lunch. We visited four wineries today; Chandon to see how sparkling wine is made, Yerra Station, De Bortoli, and Tarrawarra for lunch. We were going to hit Coldstream Hills on the way back, but we decided to go to the Sanctuary and see some koalas and kangaroos instead. All in all, a wonderful day.

Top 10 Records of 2007 – Number 3

Every year it seems we find at least one new musical force that stays with us for years. One year it's Josh Rouse, another year its Ben Kweller. This year it was Jens Lekman. I put a Jens track, The Opposite Of Hallelujah, on the post that kicked off this top 10 series and someone commented that it "just might be the gayest song I've ever heard in my life :)" Well that's the thing with Jens, it's an acquired taste. Like scotch, hip hop, uni, and other great things in life that I hated at first.

Jens Lekman is a crooner, but one who adds all kinds of cool samples, and the best quirky lyrics since Jonathan Richman. In fact, I think you might need to go through a Jonathan phase to truly appreciate Jens.

My friend Steve Greenberg turned me onto all sorts of great music when I met him in grad school. Steve went on to be one of the best new talent guys in the music business with his label, S-Curve Records. Steve's got great taste in music. So when I was sitting in the subway one day with my headphones on laughing out loud to Jens' Postcard To Nina, I just had to send it to Steve. He told me at our christmas party that it was his favorite single of the year. I knew Steve would love Jens as much as I do.

Jens is most compared to Jonathan Richman, Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields, and Morrisey. Great company if you ask me. And this record, called Night Falls Over Kortedala, is the best thing he's done so far. Although his prior record, Oh You're So Silent Jens, is pretty great as well.

If you want to hear something new and old at the same time, that's a bit cheesy and also a bit out there, get both records. You'll either thing it's the gayest thing ever or one of the best records of the year. And either one is cool with me.

FlickrFan

For the past month or so, I've been one of a handful of people testing out some new software that Dave Winer cooked up. It's called FlickrFan it's now available for anyone who wants to try it out.

It connects your flickr account to your desktop, backs up your flickr photos, and connects them to your screensaver.

The thing I use most is to power a screensaver on our big flat panel HDTV screen with the flickr photostreams of my friends and loved ones. If you have a flickr account and a mac, give it a try.

Melbourne

Melbourne reminds me of LA. Not sure why I say that, but I've been here for over 24 hours and I feel like I'm in LA. Which is fine, of course.

Top 10 Records of 2007 – Number 4

We were watching the girls wait in line for the ferris wheel today at Luna Park and we heard the oh so familiar voice of Alex Turners sing, "you used to get it in your fishnets ..." and Josh and I started singing along to our favourite song of 2007, Fluorescent Adolescent.

The Arctic Monkeys put out my top record of last year and they may well have put out my top record of this year as well. But after thinking about it, I decided that Favourite Worst Nightmare is number four. Why? Because there are three records I like more, of course.

Alex Turner's going to be a crooner before his career is up and this record gives glimpses of it. The amazing last minute of Flourescent Adolescent, the singing he delivers on Only Ones Who Know, and If You Were There Beware, once the requisite Arctic Monkeys opening is finished.

This record rocks too. The opening number, Brianstorms, sets the pace and the first four songs pick right up from the debut record. But Fluorescent Adolescent marks the departure point and from there the record goes in several directions, all fantastic.

I know that there are many who think the Arctic Monkeys are a flash in the pan, including the band themselves - "in five years time, will it be who the fuck are Arctic Monkeys?". But not me. I love this band and Alex Turner in particular. He's the real deal, with his amazing songwriting, acid lyrics, and fantastic voice. In five years time, they'll more likely have five top 10 records on this blog.

Do Me A Favour - Arctic Monkeys - Favourite Worst Nightmare

Gawker Media Makes Our Trip To Oz So Much Better

Nick Denton has a reputation as a tabloid type. The blog world's Ruper Murdoch. Properties like Gawker, Defamer, Valleywag, and Jezebel are the reason for this reputation.

But there's a utlitarian side to the Gawker Media properties that gets less attention. And we've been taking full advantage of them during our trip to Australia.

Have you heard of Gridskipper? It's Gawker's "Urban Travel Guide". We became completely reliant on it while we were in Sydney.

Gridskipper does these great maps. Like the chocaholic's guide to Sydney. Or the Sydney Rock History map. Don't go to Sydney without an iPhone and Gridskipper!

And then today, when we got to our hotel in Melbourne, we were faced with a broadband connection we couldn't share with our little airport express. The Gotham Gal's laptop was connected to the single broadband connection and everyone else was stranded. What to do? Lifehacker to the rescue, of course. This Lifehacker blog post walked me through the three quick steps I needed to do to turn the Gotham Gal's laptop into a wifi access point for our whole family. Very nice.

I am writing this blog post from that shared connection. Thanks Lifehacker and Gawker Media for being there for us on our trip to Australia!

Thoughts On Sydney On The Plane To Melbourne

We spent five days in Sydney. The first two were a fog induced by serious jet lag.  We had a few days of iffy weather. And on Christmas Day, Sydney was a ghostland. So we could have come away with the wrong impression.

Fortunately we got a day to remember yesterday. We started at the Opera House which I posted on yesterday. What a magical place that is.

Then we headed out to the beaches and did the beach walk to Bondi and then headed back to Bronte for lunch.  Along the way we got a bird’s eye view of the Sydney to Hobart sailboat race from the Bondi cliffs. That was something to see. Then back to Sydney (we took the bus everywhere and it works great) to go out to dinner ,which we did on the docks in Pyrmont at Flying Fish. We sampled some amazing seafood and watched huge tankers get pulled by tugs through the harbor. The Gotham Gal has a much longer post on our last and best day in Sydney with pictures.

I love the way you can be in the city one minute and 20 minutes later you can be on one of the most beautiful beaches in the world.  We've been to other cities like this, Rio, Los Angeles, Cape Town, etc. They are all very cool places.

As the Gotham Gal said to me yesterday, we’ll be back to Sydney. The things I want to do when we come back is sample some of the over the top “mod oz” foodie places which were all closed during our stay, get the Gotham Gal to the top of the Bridge Walk, and see something magical in the Opera House. Too bad it’s a 24 hour flight and 16 hours of time difference from NYC.  It may be a few years before we get back to Sydney.

Top 10 Records of 2007 – Number 5

So much great music is coming from the UK these days, but the best new thing out of the UK this year was this record, Panic Prevention, from a young brit who calls himself Jamie T.

Corey, who I know from the UBO days, gave me this record early this year and it’s been a mainstay all year.

Josh and I dig this record big time. He likes the opening song, Bass Guitar. We’d get in the car, connect the iPod, and Josh would blast that song all summer long.

Like many debut records, there are so many great tracks on this record, including the single Sheila, the thumping bass line of Salvador, the two songs the Gotham Gal can take, Calm Down Dearest and So Lonely The Ballad, and my favorite, If You Got The Money. I also like Ike and Tina and Operation. Hell, all the tracks on this record are great.

The comparisons to Mike Skinner/The Streets is obvious, but Jamie T is something a bit different. The live performances I’ve seen on YouTube make him out to be more of a singer than a rapper.

If you want a record that will make you laugh, dance, and sing along, get this one. It’s a gem.

Operation - Jamie T - Panic Prevention

Sydney Opera House

We got a one hour tour of the Opera House this morning. What an incredible structure and place. And what a great story about how it got designed and built. It was the highlight of the visit to Sydney for me.

Top 10 Records of 2007 – Number 6

This record is at the top of most of the top 10 lists I've seen on the blogs this year and it is certainly at the top of many of my friends' lists as well. Neon Bible is a great record and Arcade Fire is a great band.

My greatest musical regret of 2007 was missing the Arcade Fire shows at Judson Church at NYU this winter and their show at Radio City this spring. I also missed them at Randalls Island this fall. So I missed them three times this year. Maybe if I had seen them live, something I've been told is a transformative experience, this record would have been number one on my list as well. Seeing a band live often takes me back to a record for another run. Unfortunately, this record's run lasted until the spring for me and then it petered away. Not true for any of the top five on my list.

I'd be remiss if I didn't say that Neon Bible is missing the intensity of Funeral, Arcade Fire's amazing debut record. There's nothing on this record that can touch the ferocity of Rebellion, for example. Arcade Fire is headed into U2 territory, not Modest Mouse or Pixies territory. That's good for them and their pocketbooks. But maybe not for my love of their music.

All that said, Neon Bible is a great record and deserves to be at the top of many best of 2007 lists. Just not mine.

Antichrist Television Blues - Arcade Fire - Neon Bible

Facebook's Not Over

But I sure like the rest of this column in the Guardian.

I think Facebook's got a great run ahead of it based on my observation of how important it has become to my kids' lives and how many great new apps are being created for it every day

But I do love that The Guardian lists two of our portfolio companies, Etsy and Twitter, as the leaders of the next crop to watch

Sweet

Thoughts On Sydney, Four Days In

Sydney Australia is one of the most beautiful cities I've visited. It's up there with Rio and Cape Town. Our home, New York City, also sits in the middle of a major body of water, but the way Sydney sits on the water is so different than the way New York does. It's like Sydney's harbor is the equivalent of our central park.

We are staying downtown in the central business district, but we've ended up spending most of our time in the eastern neighborhoods; Darlinghurst, Paddington, Potts Point, Woolhara, and today we visited Bondi Beach. We also enjoyed the southern neighborhoods of Waterloo and Surry Hills. These neighborhoods remind us a bit of the various neighborhoods of San Francisco. Like SF, Sydney seems like a very liveable city.

My favorite moment so far was our ferry ride and day at Manly Beach. That's probably because the weather was great that day and has been kind of crappy every other day. We came all this way in search of sun and warmth and haven't had a lot of that so far.

The jetlag was also a bitch for me for the first couple days. The 16 hour time difference is not something I was able to just blow through as much as I was hoping to. I took me a couple days to feel normal and even now, I'm not 100 percent.

We are in Sydney for one more day and then headed to Melbourne on the 27th. I've been doing more "microblogging" of this trip on tumblr and twitter than anything else so far. I expect that will continue to be the case.

Top 10 Records of 2007 – Number 7

I find my music in lot's of places these days, but one of the best is in the comments to this blog. And that's how I found out about Patrick Wolf. Josef left this comment to my post celebrating Ben Kweller's prodigious songwriting talents:

I love Ben - been friends with him since he was 14.
I would also say Patrick Wolf if one of the greatest of his generation as well.

I know Josef has great taste in music, but I didn't know he's been friends with Ben since he was 14, and more importantly, I had never heard of Patrick Wolf until I read that comment.

RIght then and there I went to the Hypemachine and typed in Patrick Wolf. I was introduced to a song called The Magic Position that has become one of my favorite songs of the year. So I got the record of the same name and have been listening ever since.

The Magic Position is not a perfect record by any means. It has three or four tracks that I barely like. But for some reason I don't skip them. I think it's because the record flows so well. It has a mood which is delivered over the entire record and I enjoy the experience even though some of the songs don't really grab me.

In addition to The Magic Position, there are several other standout tracks including Get Lost, Accident and Emergency, and The Stars. I think this guy has serious talent, kind of David Bowie-esque. I hope he continues to develop. He could be something really special.

Septembers of Shiraz

One of the best things about these two week trips our family takes around the year end holidays is that I get to read books, something I've always loved to do and don't make enough time for. Thankfully the Gotham Gal reads a book or two a week so I just ask her to recommend the best five books she's read all year and I get some great reading in on vacation.

I just finished her first pick for me, called Septembers of Shiraz, a story about a jewish gem trader in Tehran who is imprisoned in the wake of the revolution. It's a semi-autobiographical novel written by Dalia Sofer, whose own father was imprisoned and whose family left Iran when she was ten.

It's a powerful novel in the vein of Kite Runner which is one of my favorite recent novels. This line, which I quoted on my tumblog a couple days ago, really sums up the story for me:

Back in his cell Isaac thinks of Reza and the thousands of revolutionaries like him - men and women who thought they were part of something big, much bigger than their daily lives - who thought they were changing the course of history. And here they are, having replaced crowns with turbans.

Top 10 Records of 2007 – Number 8

The number five record of 2005 may have been the best record of 2005, that being Howl Howl Gaff Gaff by the Shout Out Louds. If our family has a house band, it's this super cool band out of Stockholm, Sweden (actually it might be Belle and Sebastian now that I think about it some more). But regardless, we love the Shout Out Louds.

So when Our Ill Wills came out this spring, Jessica took one listen and reported that "it's not anywhere near as good as Howl Howl". And upon first listen, I would agree. Fortunately, we didn't listen to this record just once. We ended up listening to it all year.

And then Jess, Emily, and I went to see them at Bowery Ballroom which was a memorable night in and of itself.

Our Ill Wills is a great pop record and I suspect that in 2009, I might be saying that number 8 was too low as well.

Hard Rain - Shout Out Louds - Our Ill Wills

Flying Foxes

We were walking down the path in the botanical gardens in Sydney this morning and all of a sudden Jessica starts flipping out. "Dad, are those bats?", she asked. "Nope", Emily said, "they are flying foxes". Correct Emily. The flying foxes are pretty wild looking things for sure.

They were all over the place in the botanical gardens.

And then when we walked out of the garden and into the Art Gallery of New South Wales (a great museum), we saw this installation in the lobby.

The Flying Foxes were all over the place this morning.

Is There An Increasing Marginal Utility Of Data?

My partner Brad wonders whether data has increasing marginal utility in this post on the Union Square Ventures weblog. One of the commenters suggests that it does not. Interesting discussion.

The Digital Dish

I stopped by and visited some friends at Business Week last week and they filed this short show with me in their conference room. I wish they had embed code so you don't have to click thru to their site to see it, but I couldn't find it anywhere. We talked about the economy, it's impact on tech, Facebook, bubbles, IPOs, and stocking wishes. It's about 7-8 mins long.

Top 10 Records of 2007 – Number 9

The New Pornographers are band made up of Canadian indie rockers who get together from time to time, make a record, and tour. Think Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young circa 2007. The frontman is AC Newman, but he shares the vocals with Neko Case, Kathryn Calder, and Dan Bejar. Like CSNY, the result is a diverse and wonderful sound featuring layered melodies.

This year they put out one of the best records of the year, called Challengers. My daughter Emily called it the record of the year. I am not ready to give it that label, but it's certainly in the top 10, number 9 actually.

One of the things I love about this record is the variety of songs on it. Dan Dejar's Myriad Harbour is certainly one of the best songs of the year. But so is Kathryn Calder's Adventures In Solitude. I would also add Unguided and Go Places as standout tracks.

This record was loved by everyone in our home and logged a ton of plays on our sonos system. If you haven't check it out, you really should.

Myriad Harbour - Challengers - The New Pornographers

Out of Office Auto Replies

I am getting a ton of them from my feedblitz emails (the service that emails out links to my posts every day).

They made me think about turning them on for my email address too

But funny enough between my blog post and twitters about being away, and everyone being on vacation, it seems uneccesary.

Top 10 Records of 2007 – Number 10

One morning this spring, I was doing my early morning thing; email, reading blogs, writing blogs, with the Hype Machine in the background and suddenly I was listening intently to a song that commanded my attention. That song, called Jesus For The Jugular, was my introduction to The Veils and their record, Nux Vomica.

I went through a period this summer where Nux Vomica was all I listened to. There is something urgent and intense about this music that comes directly from the leader of The Veils, the lead singer and songwriter, Finn Andrews. He’s very Morrisey-like in his writing, singing, and delivery. In fact, the bonus track, Night Thoughts Of A Tired Surgeon sounds like it comes right off of a mid-80s Smiths record. Maybe that’s why I like this band and this record so much.

But The Veils are not a Smiths clone. They’ve got their own vibe, their own energy. The Gotham Gal and I witnessed it first hand at Bowery Ballroom this summer and came away impressed.

If you like your music delivered with both melody and intensity, check out this record. I am sure glad I did.

Night Thoughts Of A Tired Surgeon - The Veils - Nux Vomica

Listen To My Top 10 List

On the left sidebar, about half way down, there is a player called Streampad.

It looks like the picture to the right.

That player allows you to listen to all the mp3s I post to this blog in a playlist.

And if you click on the icon on the lower right of the streampad player, it will popup into a new window and you can listen for as long as you like.

As I roll out my top 10 over the next couple weeks, the player will fill up with songs from my favorite records of the year.

GIve it a listen.

Top 10 Records of 2007 - Honorable Mention

A bunch of my favorite bands put out records this year that I really enjoyed but none jumped out at me as Top 10 material. When I looked at my last.fm play history and my rhapsody play history, it's clear that these records were a big part of my listening this year so I feel like I should give them honorable mention. So here they are:

We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank - Modest Mouse - Old school Modest Mouse fans would say they've mellowed, new fangled Modest Mouse fans would say it's not as listenable as Good News. I say that anything that Isaac Brock and crew do is just fine with me. And the addition of Johnny Marr makes them even better. Top tracks include Dashboard, Fire It Up, Missed The Boat, People As Places, and Invisible.

Fire It Up - Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank

 

Sky Blue Sky - Wilco - I've read a lot of Wilco fan bloggers who think this album was disappointing. It certainly is not as adventurous as Yankee Hotel or Summerteeth, but I really enjoy the 70s soft rock sound (think Steve Miller or Steely Dan). And I particularly like the growing importance of Nels Cline's amazing guitar playing in the band and on this record. I also love the way this record was the soundtrack to a series of volkswagon commercials. Top tracks include Either Way, Impossible Germany, Hate It Here, Walken, and What Light.

Impossible Germany - Wilco - Sky Blue Sky

 

In Rainbows - Radiohead - All the buzz is about how they released this record via a "pick your price" offer using the web. I loved the way they did it and wish every band would release their music via drm free mp3s directly from the band's website. What got lost in all the talk is that this is the best record the band has made in a decade and there are several songs that are classic Radiohead, including my favorites Weird Fishes and Jigsaw.

Jigsaw Falling Into Place - Radiohead - In Rainbows

 

Wincing The Night Away - The Shins - This record was on many of the top ten lists I saw in the past couple weeks. I was tempted to put it on my list too. But I was really into it last year (got a pre-release) and I petered out on it early on this year. My favorite tracks on this record are Red Rabbits, Split Needles, Phantom Limb, and Girl Sailor.

Red Rabbits - The Shins - Wincing The Night Away

Ga, Ga, Ga, Ga, Ga - Spoon - Another record that was on many top ten lists I've seen. I like their new funkier sound. And I'd really like to see them live. But the record is uneven and I find myself playing a few tracks off of it a lot more frequently than I play the whole record. The two tracks that I absolutely love are Underdog (from the movie soundtrack - I never saw it) and Cherry Bomb. I also really like the opening track, Don't Make Me A Target.

You Got Your Cherry Bomb - Spoon - Ga, Ga, Ga, Ga, Ga

Boxer - The National - This one is really tough to keep of the top 10. It was on the cusp along with two or three other records, but given that it kind of fit into "solid records by bands I love", it ended up here. It also pales just a bit in comparison to The National's prior effort, Alligator. But Boxer is a super record, and features one of the best tracks of the year, called Apartment Story. Fake Empire and Start A War are also excellent.

Apartment Story - The National - Boxer

Track Yourself On Twitter

I used to wait until I got back to my computer to check the replies to my posts on Twitter (via the replies tab).

But yesterday, I took Jack’s advice and started tracking myself on Twitter. I suppose hard core twitterer’s know this trick but somehow it had eluded me.

Now whenever someone replies to my post, I see it on my phone and can reply back.

In one day, Twitter has gone from a fun way to microblog to a full blown communication system. And it’s a world of difference.

If you are like me and slow to pick up stuff like this, give it a try. I think you’ll find it to be a great way to talk to your friends on twitter throughout the day. Just make sure you have unlimited text messaging.

In case you've never used track, just send a text message to twitter that says:  track yourtwittername

That should result in a message back telling you that you are now tracking your twittername.

Off To Australia

The Blogging On The Road category returns. For the next two weeks, I'll be blogging from Down Under.

Our family boards a plane tonight at 5:30pm and a day and a half later, we'll be in Sydney, Australia.

As usual, I'll be blogging the trip, but this time, it will be a mix of blogging here, twittering, and tumblloging at fredwilson.vc. But mostly, I'll be hanging with my family, relaxing, and enjoying the sights, sounds, and tastes of Australia.

Top 10 Records of 2007 - Honorable Mention

Jessica has taken on the role in our family of finding new bands to fall in love with. She found The Shout Out Louds a couple years ago and they've become a staple in our home. This year she found a bunch of bands and two that stand out are Bishop Allen and Vampire Weekend. Vampire's new record is amazing, but since it doesn't come out until January, it won't be on this year's top 10 list.

Bishop Allen's The Broken String is a fantastic record. It might have been in my top 10 except for the fact that we just started listening this month and I just don't know how it will stand the test of time.

I heard The Decemberists, Ben Kweller, and The Magnetic Fields in their music. It's smart pop and it's easy on the ears. This is the kind of record that you listen to a few times and then all of sudden you find yourself singing along.

The catchiest song on the record is Click, Click, Click which I blogged at fredwilson.vc. Give it a visit if you want to hear that song.

For those looking for a taste right here, here's a song called Rain.

Rain - Bishop Allen - The Broken String

Thanks to The Leather Canary for hosting that mp3 for Rain. It's one of dc's top songs of the year.

How To Get A Flood Of Traffic

Blog about Elf Yourself

The Story of 2007

The economic story of 2007 isn't Facebook being worth $15bn, its not the subprime mess and the resulting credit crunch, its not the fact that the US economy seems eerily similar to where we were in 1975.

 The economic story of 2007 is where the money is coming from. The capital that is propping up our companies and economy is coming from China, The Middle East, and Russia. On Monday we learned that middle east capital was required to shore up the balance sheet of Related Companies, one of NYC's largest real estate developers. Today, we learn that Morgan Stanley is getting bailed out to the tune of $5bn from China Investment Company.

Its been happening for a while, but we are seeing it in droves now. If you need capital, lots of it, don't look here in the US. Money is tight and assets are cheap in the US these days. Go to China, Russia, or the Middle East. That's where the capital is and when they look at the US, they see a bargain.

I could talk about the boneheaded economic polcies that got us into this situation, but I am not in the mood. We are where we are.

Its time to admit that the US is a global superpower in hock to parts of the world that should make us nervous. That's the story of 2007.

Top 10 Records of 2007 - Honorable Mention

It's that time of year again. Each day between now and the end of the year, I"ll post one record (I am dating myself with that word)

The next several days are honorable mention days. And we'll start with the boss because I heard his version of santa claus is comin' to town on the radio this morning on the way to the gym

This is the second year in a row that Bruce has a record in honorable mention. I think that says something about my view of his work these days. It's good but not the thing I put on every day

Magic is the best rock record Bruce has made since The Rising. My son Josh's band is playing Radio Nowhere. Its a great cover song, a straight up rocker

My favorite track is Livin' In The Future and I am also partial to Girls In Their Summer Clothes, I'll Work For Your Love, and Terry's Song

I have friends who love Bruce and think Magic is among his best. They are annoyed that it was ignored by The Grammy's. I would be annoyed if any of my top 10 made The Grammy's. Its pathetic to see what goes for popular music these days. Unless its The Boss. Who has remained relevant for almost 40 years

Magic is one of the best records I bought this year. It's not magical like some of the records to come on this list, but its solid and at times reminds me of the younger Bruce who laughed while singing about Santa Claus. I think that Bruce is long gone, but the one we've still got made a solid record this year and I'm happy about that.

Gotham Gal's Top Records of 2007

I haven't begun my annual countdown and I better get busy. Only 13 days left in the year, so I can post 13 records (I always do several honorable mentions). I've been thinking a lot about my list, but I've been having a hard time putting pen to paper (now that's a metaphor isn't it?)

In the meantime, the Gotham Gal posted her top 10 records of 2007 (and another 10 for good measure) on her blog today. I know all of these records by heart since we take turns in our house with the sonos controller. I agree with many of her choices, but not all of them. Hopefully this will spur me to get busy.

My girls read the post and their comment was "mom, we need to teach you how to post a mp3 to the web, you have to give your readers a taste".

They are right. So here's a taste from my upcoming best of 2007, my favorite track of 2007 (as measured by last.fm)

The Opposite Of Hallelujah - Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala

You Get What You Give

My brother in law has a saying, “you get what you give.” Every time he says it, I just nod my head.

In the late 90s, after I started my first venture capital firm, I was working like a dog and had a young family, a wife and three kids. At an offsite that I attended, there was a psychologist who talked about work life balance. He said, “you’d better pay attention to your kids when they are young, build the connections early, because if you don’t, when they become teenagers, you won’t be able to reach them and you’ll have missed your opportunity”. I made a point to get home earlier and pay more attention on the weekends. You get what you give.

Working with entrepreneurs is a lot like being a parent. If you are attentive, work hard to build a connection, if you are there when the entrepreneur needs you, then they’ll listen to you. Otherwise, they’ll just end up “managing you” and you’ll never have the impact you want to have on the company. You get what you give.

Living in a community, being a neighbor, belonging to an organization or a school is the same way. You can stick to yourself, make your own way, focus on your own needs. Or you can get involved, roll up your sleeves, and give of yourself in whatever way you can. The latter approach is so much more rewarding. You get what you give.

And it’s no surprise that blogging works the same way. I put myself, my thoughts, my experiences out there for all of you to read and react to. And everyday I get a host of comments that teach me something. You all take the time to educate me back. And I am so much better off because of it. You get what you give.

Wesabe Gets Some Link Love

Our portfolio company Wesabe  was the first company to market in the web-based personal finance sector, which has gotten quite hot lately with the launch of competitors Mint and Geezeo.

Wesabe's taken a bit of a backseat on the visibility front in light of its competitor's launches, so it was nice to see that Lifehacker really likes Wesabe.

This is a very big market opportunity and we think there is room for more than one large company in this category. As Dave McClure points out in a comment to Tim O'Reilly's post pointing to the Lifehacker review:

Wesabe targets more advanced users who want more control over their financial details & security; Mint probably works better for folks who want a simple solution that doesn't require a lot of effort. Both have significant merits over previous generations of online financial services.

I am not sure that Wesabe is only a "power user's" service. But as Lifehacker points out, Wesabe has a strong mission, sense of community, and is hyper-focused on security:

I stayed with Wesabe because I love their mission, community, and their desire to continually improve the site. I am confident in their privacy policy, believe they will protect my data, and like that I can take my data with me if I want.

Regardless of the competitive dynamics of this market, we are very pleased to be an investor in this category because the things that make the web great; transparency, community, utility, and usability are going to transform the way people manage their money. And Wesabe is at the forefront of that movement.

Bug Meetup In NYC Tonight

If you live in NYC but haven't had a chance to see Bug, the SDK, and meet the Bug team, then tonight will be your last opportunity this year. Here's the note from the Bug Blog:

Bug Labs is celebrating a fantastic 2007 by bringing BUG+ back to our native New York. We are hosting BUG+NYC on Monday, December 17 between 6-9pm at Verlaine, a Bug Labs favorite located on the Lower East Side. Come by, see the BUG and SDK in all their working glory, chat it up with your fellow tech chums, and have a drink on us. This is our last BUG+ gathering of 2007, so we hope to see you one more time before the holidays consume us all.

Have Fun With Your Configuration Pages

Configuration pages are among the most boring parts of a web service. Most users don't spend much time on them, some spend no time on them.

This morning I had a good laugh when I went to my disqus comment system configuration page to increase the size of the faces in the comment system. Here's the preview pane that changes when you modify your settings:

It's Back To The Future on the disqus configuration pages. Very nice guys. I love it.

Why I Just Bought Amazon (AMZN)

Back when I set up my Covestor portfolio, I thought long and hard about tech/web stocks and couldn't come up with any that I wanted to own. The two large cap Internet companies that I really like are Amazon and Google. I subsequently bought Google (GOOG) in late October at $672 and it's up a bit since then.

Google trades at 33x next year's earnings and I suspect, as usual, that the street is underestimating Google's earnings power.  So in my mind, Google is not that expensive as many other Internet stocks are.

Amazon (AMZN) is harder for me to get comfortable with.  It's trading at 100x this year's earnings and 55x next year's estimated earnings. And with so much of its earning power tied to its core retailing business, that seems expensive to me.

But there are two reasons I love Amazon. The first is that our family buys everything that we can on Amazon. If we want to purchase something, we first visit Amazon. If they have it, we buy it there. It's because Amazon already has all of our payment and shipping information (all the various incarnations) and because they have never let us down. Amazon has nailed the online shopping experience. It's the Wal-Mart of the web (without all the negativity that surrounds Wal-Mart).

But being the Wal-Mart of the web has never gotten me that excited about Amazon the stock. There is something else going on that does get me excited about Amazon the stock. Amazon is slowly but surely building a platform for web applications and services that is superior to anything out there. Almost every new company we see these days is using Amazon's platform (S3 and EC2) for some part of their service.

We had a conversation at our portfolio CEO summit last month about Amazon. There were some questions about how reliable Amazon would be. One of our CEOs, a very capable software engineer in his own right, pointed out that if Amazon runs on it, why isn't it good enough for a startup? That was a good point that got more than a few nodding heads.

For those who don't know, S3 is a storage system for the web. If you have images, audio, video, or just files you need to store, you can open an S3 account and store them there instead of on your own servers. It's highly scalable and very cost efficient. EC2 is a virtual server. If you'd rather provision a server in Amazon's data center than get your own server and put it into a colocation facility, it's a relatively simple thing to do with EC2.

This week, we got to see the next card in Amazon's hand. They introduced a web database service that works with the rest of their platform. Just because you can store files in S3, doesn't mean you can make easy queries to them. For that, you need a database layer. A database for the web. It's pretty interesting that with all that the web has brought us over the years, we don't really have a native database for the web.

My friend Dave Winer describes this new database that Amazon is delivering to the web in a post yesterday. Here's what got my attention:

Today, when a company raises VC, it's probably because their app has achieved a certain amount of success and to get to the next level of users they need to spend serious money on infrastruture. There's a serious economic and human wall here. You need to buy hardware and find the people who know how to make a database scale. The latter is the hard problem, the people are scarce and the big companies are bidding up the price for their time. Now Amazon is willing to sell you that, to turn this scarce thing into a commodity, at what likely is a very reasonable price. (Haven't had time to analyze this yet, but the other services are.) Key point, the wall is gone, replaced with a ramp. If you coded your database in Amazon to begin with you will never see the wall. As you need more capacity you have to do nothing, other than pay your bill. 

Further, the design of Amazon's database is remarkably like the internal data structures of modern programming languages. Very much like a hash or a dictionary (what Perl and Python call these structures) or Frontier's tables, but unlike them, you can have multiple values with the same name. In this way it's like XML. I imagine all languages have had to accomodate this feature of XML (we did in Frontier), so they should all map pretty well on Amazon's structure. This was gutsy, and I think smart. 

Now let's think about what happens when thousands of web startups start using Amazon's database system to support the services they build. Thousands of web applications using a common and shared web native database. That's going to allow some very interesting things to develop. It may become necessary at some point to build on top of Amazon's database if you want to get a level of interactivity with other similar services. Is Amazon building a data API? I don't know because I am not technical enough to truly understand all of this. But it sure smells like a big deal to me.

The funny thing about Amazon's platform play is that it feels like something Google would have done. But they didn't (or at least they haven't yet). Amazon is out googling Google.

That makes me want to own this stock. And so I bought some shares today. Amazon and Google now make up about half my Covestor portfolio. The rest is oil and commodity plays and Toyota which is a hybrid engine play.

I have always loved Amazon and now I have a good reason to own it. And maybe you do too.

Etsy In NY Times Magazine

The NY Times Magazine has a long article on Etsy this weekend.  It talks about the DIY/crafting movement, how Etsy tapped into it, and how they built a vibrant marketplace and community to serve that movement.

Many of the best companies we work with are based around both a profit motive and a "change the world" motive. Etsy has that in spades and you can get a good sense of it in the article.

The past couple of months have been a breakout moment for Etsy and it's great to see the "buy handmade" ethos take off  this holiday season.

Twitter's T-Mobile Problem

For most of this week, I've been getting this message when I try to send a message from my phone to twitter:

Service is temporarily down. Please, try again later.

At first, I thought the problem was Twitter and I contacted the company. They told me the problem was with T-Mobile. The story hit the blogs this weekend and has been on techmeme today.

Twitter has a short post up on their blog explaining that they are working on it.

I sure hope they get it fixed soon because I send most of my twitter updates via my phone which explains why I've been a bit quiet this week on twitter.

Elf Yourself

I was looking up some information on The Funded on Alexa yesterday and came across a chart that showed Elf Yourself was on fire. So I did some comparisons to see exactly how much traffic Elf Yourself has.

If this Alexa chart is correct, then Elf Yourself is one of the top 100 Internet properties this month, close to Bebo and Answers.com in traffic. That is pretty amazing. Elf Yourself is essentially a holiday advertising campaign for Office Max. Our portfolio company Oddcast did one of these avatar-based promotions called Monkey Mail for Career Builder. By the time Monkey Mail had run its course, something like 75 million people had engaged with a Monkey Mail. When these things catch fire, they work. Compare the cost of doing one of these flash based interactions versus the cost of a 30 second TV commercial. And then compare the cost of buying enough media to reach 75 million viewers vs putting up a viral website. Expect to see more of this kind of advertising in the future.

Here's my Elf Yourself in case you want to see my avatar dancing in an elf suit. Too bad they don't have embed code.

Real World Drama On Twitter

I was up early this morning (as usual) and got to watch Jason Calacanis go through the awful realization at the airport that he left his passport at his paris hotel. That was just the beginning of the drama. He twittered his plight. Called around. Got someone at his hotel to retrieve his passport and hire a motorcycle delivery man. But would the motorcycle get their in time?

Read Jason's twitter feed to find out the details. That was fun. And it was cool to get the posts in real time as the drama was unfolding. I love the web.

What To Make Of The Funded

I got a call from Adeo Ressi yesterday. I hadn't talked to Adeo since he started The Funded so it was nice to hear from him. We talked a bit about The Funded and he was surprised that our firm Union Square Ventures hadn't created a  "certified profile" on the The Funded. Honestly I didn't know what one was. Now I do.

I've been watching The Funded since it started and have linked to it a number of times. I have a knee jerk reaction to like anything that makes the venture capital business more transparent. Rate your VC is certainly a step toward transparency.

But I am also troubled by sample bias. Last month, The Funded selected me as the number one VC. Come on. That cannot be true. I am flattered by it to some degree. But it bothers me. I didn't see Mike Moritz on the list. I didn't see any partners from Accel, Benchmark, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Matrix, Greylock, Venrock, etc, etc. What I saw was a list of really terrific VCs, some of whom will be the superstars of VC someday.

I am also troubled by the list of top firms (that's the list on the right). We are on that list. Again, I am flattered. But let's step back and look at that list. There isn't one brand name venture capital firm on that list. There are several that we invest with regularly and that I personally think are great firms, but there isn't a limited partner in the world who would rate these eight firms as the best venture capital firms in the business.

And then let's look at the number of votes that makes up each firm's ranking.  The top two firms, Kepha and Mangrove, have 14 and 11 votes respectively. Our firm has 22. Is that enough votes to determine anything? What if I asked my entire portfolio to go vote at The Funded? We'd have 16 votes and they all be super high votes (at least I hope so).

And who exactly is voting and what do they know about these firms? Do any limited partners vote? They would be the best ones to vote on track record.

Do portfolio company CEOs vote? They would be the best ones to talk about  operating competence and execution assistance.

From looking at the comments, it seems that quite a few of the people using this site are entrepreneurs looking for money. It's good to hear from them. If we are doing a bad job responding to opportunities that come in, if we are being obnoxious (as someone recently called me), then we need to hear that.

But if The Funded is going to be a resource we can rely on, it needs to have a much bigger sample size, it needs to be fairly balanced, and it needs to have some relationship to what we all know to be the truth. I have this gut instinct that it isn't there yet.

So it begs the question, does The Funded have any traffic? Here's an Alexa chart comparing The Funded to this blog.

I am very proud of this blog and work on it to make it the best it can be. But the truth is that it only has about 100,000 monthly uniques and about 150,000 page views per month. According to Alexa, The Funded has a third to half of that. And we have no idea how many of those monthly uniques take the time to vote, but using standard ratios, it's certainly less than 10% of them and probably close to 1% of them.

So what to make of The Funded? Well its a good idea to bring some transparency to the VC business. But I am not sure The Funded is bringing transparency just yet. It's bringing opinion but that opinion may not be a valid opinion. Yahoo stock message boards bring opinion to the world of stock investing. But does anyone rely on them? I sure hope not. The Funded is way better than Yahoo stock message boards, but it suffers from some of the same problems.

Here's what Adeo needs to do to fix them

1) Have two tiers of voters. Certified and regular. Certified voters are people with real knowledge of the venture capital business. Included in that group would be long time limited partners in the venture capital business, entrepreneurs who have started three or more companies, all of which have been venture backed, and VC's themselves. Get the certified voters to vote actively and regularly and weight their votes higher than regular voters.

2) Categorize the commenters. If someone has been funded by XYZ Ventures and they slam them, that's more meaningful than someone slamming XYZ Ventures because they didn't like the way they behaved in a pitch meeting. Make it easy for an entrepreneur to filter the comments  in any way they want to.

3) Get a lot more traffic and a lot more comments and a lot more votes. I think a firm should have to have at least 100 votes, with a significant number of them coming from portfolio company CEOs and limited partners, to be able to be on the list. The Funded needs to work hard to get more people who actually know something about the venture business to participate on the site.

I hope The Funded can become a reliable resource for entrepreneurs. Last week, one of our portfolio companies who is going out for a second round of funding, sent me an email about one of the VC firms he is talking to. He said, "they have a strong rating on The Funded". I replied, "so what". I hope that someday soon, I can say something different.

Getting Blown Away

  String octet 
  Originally uploaded by ruralroots.

We saw a Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde performance from one of my rock gods last night. Neil Young walked out and sat down alone in the middle of these guitars last night and did a one hour acoustic set. He started with Hank To Hendrix and ended with Heart Of Gold. The highlight for me was when he grabbed his banjo and did Mellow My Mind. Thanks Neil, I needed that.

Then after a 20 minute intermission, he came back with his black Les Paul strapped on and unleashed a torrent of rock and roll that is still ringing in my ears.

The finish was a 10+ minute version of Hurricane that proved to me that Neil has lost nothing. I was blown away.

Here's a photo I took of Neil wailing away during one of about five solos during Hurricane. It's something to see a 60 year old rocker go at it like that.

If You Can't Figure Out What To Get Someone For Christmas

Buy handmade. And take the "buy handmade" pledge while you are at it.

My Generation

My Generation - The Who

So just as I was settling into the notion of supporting Hillary, I get this link in a comment from Michael Beckner on my Scar Tissue post. It's Andrew Sullivan's piece on Hillary vs Obama (and boomers vs my generation) in this month's Atlantic Monthly.

I was born in 1961, 16 days after Barack, at the hospital at the US Military Academy at West Point. I lived through the vietnam era (my dad was there for a year in '68/'69) but I am not defined by it. I do not consider myself a baby boomer although technically I suppose I am on the bubble.

Andrew eloquently argues that the US has been trapped in baby boomer politics since the vietnam war and it's ossifying our country and forcing decisions around dimensions that are increasingly irrelevant. This is the single best argument for an Obama presidency that I have read, including a face to face meeting with the man himself several months ago.

It's got me thinking again about Obama. Good thing I don't have to go to the polls today. Look for my favorite quotes from the piece on fredwilson.vc a bit later this morning.

Mellow My Mind

It's been a rough couple of days. We lost our dog Lucky which The Gotham Gal details in this wonderful post.

So I am in need of some release and tonight's the night for it because Jay, Jackson, Rod, and I are going to go uptown to see Neil Young who is going to play one of my all time favorite Neil songs if the set lists are  any guide. Here's a great version from 1976. I love when he plays the banjo like a bass. What a genius he is.

iPhone - Going, Going, Gone

The auction of my brand new 1.1.2 firmware iPhone on this blog worked. I didn't set the rules particularly well, but you all got the gist of what needed to happen.

I know that Edgeio is now dead, but I still believe in the power of the blog to be a commerce platform. It's all about audience. If you have the right one, you can sell stuff. I sold the iPhone and four tickets to the Neil Young show yesterday. Pretty cool. I don't plan on turning AVC into eBay, but I like to use this blog to try stuff out from time to time and yesterday was a good day for selling stuff.

So here's the deal on the iPhone. It's going to flynch for $375 plus shipping. He bid $399 but that was after the midnight cutoff, so I am accepting the $375 offer. If flynch flakes out and doesn't come through then I'll go with the next best offer.  I'd like flynch to send me an email today (email is on the left sidebar) and we can work out the details.

There was a higher bid from Gilbert. It involved making a $251 gift to the charity of his choice and reading his pitch. Gilbert, send me your pitch. I'll read it and if I like it, I'll give $251 to the charity of your choice.

But flynch is getting the iPhone. For his wife.  For Christmas. I love turning lemons into lemonade.

Neil Young Tickets - Thursday Night - Two Tickets Available

If you are a Neil Young fan, you probably know that he's playing three shows this week in NYC, wednesday night, thursday night, and saturday night. I have tickets to wednesday and thursday night and need to unload two tickets to thursday night. Here are the details:

Neil Young
Thursday, Dec 13th, 8pm
United Palace Theater, Orchestra Left Center
Row X, Seats 5 & 6
they are two seats in from the center aisle, near the back of the orchestra
here's the seating chart for United Palace

I paid $117.75 per ticket. I'll take any reasonable offer. Please send me an email if you are interested. My email address is linked to on the left sidebar of this blog.

UPDATE: I sold these tickets. Got face value. Thanks for all the interest.

Heartbroken

Josh and I are heartbroken that we can't be in London for tonight's Zepplin show. We had killer tickets for the show when it was the monday after thanksgiving but had to give them up when the show was rescheduled. I hope all my friends who are there have a blast tonight and I hope the band is good enough to get them to take the show on the road. Zepplin at MSG anyone?

Heartbreaker - Led Zepplin - Led Zepplin II

The News Feed - A Powerful UI Innovation

Google's decision to put a single search box all by itself on the front page of google.com was a stroke of genius. Doing that signaled that they were all about search and that they had the confidence that they could get you what you wanted with nothing more than a word or a phrase. Its been oft-imitated since then and search has taken its logical role on most every web page that I use regularly.

Similarly, Mark Zuckerberg's decision to make a wall street style news feed the central feature of the home page and the profile page at Facebook has been a huge reason for its recent success (and might also be the source of its growing pains).

Being able to quickly parse through what your friends are up to, in line, and in reverse chronological order is the cleanest and simplest way to navigate a social net.

And its been imitated all over the place these days. My days on the web start and end in three places: twitter, tumblr, and disqus. That's where my social net is talking to me (and everyone else). All three of them include a facebook style news/friend feed as the central element of their user interface

Twitter does the best job of respecting the news feed. The entire service is basically a news feed/friend feed with a posting box at the top. I'd argue that this lightweight UI and the bias toward simplicity over feature creep is the biggest reason for twitter's success to date.

I suggested everyone go set up a tumblr account in my friday post because that's currently the only way to see the dashboard. Twitter may have nailed the simplicity of their feed, but the tumblr dashboard showcases the power of this UI in a social blogging system. Right from the dashboard/news feed you can read, reblog, follow, and see who is reblogging who. Its a killer interface that I have become addicted to in the past month.

Disqus is slowly but surely turning into a social net for comments. You can follow me on disqus and see all the comments that all your friends (including me) leave on disqus powered blogs. It's that last line that bothers me. We need the owners of every comment system on the web (typepad, blogger, and worpress please pay attention) to open their apis so that they and disqus and others can create comment driven social nets

But that's a digression. This post is about the news feed. Its simple, powerful, elegant, and will be coming to a website near you soon.