A VC

A Lot Can Happen In Five Years

There's a saying I heard recently from someone in the tech business that goes something like this:

Things take longer in the short run but they happen faster in the long run

I am sure I've bastardized the quote but the point is important. Nothing happens as fast as you'd like but if you have a longer term horizon, it is amazing what you can accomplish.

I was reminded of this today when I saw the news of our portfolio company Indeed's five year anniversary.

Indeed.com launched five years ago. I have no idea how many job searches or visitors it had that day, but I can assure you it wasn't many. Five years later, they are the leader in the jobs industry online. Check out these stats:

• The #1 employment website in the US by job search unique visitors and page views (comScore Media Metrix, Oct 2009).

• Websites in 19 countries and 10 languages.

• 24 million unique visitors and one billion job searches per month worldwide.

• The leading pay-for-performance recruitment advertising network.

• The source of thousands of success stories from job seekers andrecruitment advertisers.

• A leading data provider, including Job Analytics, job trends, industry trends, job market competition, and salaries.

Comments (View) | Posted November 28, 2009 in Venture Capital and Technology

Looking For An Expert In SEO/SEM/Online Direct Marketing

Our portfolio company Targetspot is looking for an experienced online direct marketer to "own" and manage their self serve advertising business.

This is a fun job for the right person because it is an opportunity to run and grow a small business inside a bigger business. If you are an "entrepreneur" looking for a chance to show what you can do, this job is probably a good fit for you.

Targetspot's self service ad business is growing nicely and we want to invest and grow it using classic online direct marketing channels and measurement systems.

The right candidate will have significant experience in:

• Knowledge of Google Analytics and ability to test results on campaign landing pages.
• Experience in SEO, SEM or both (either as an affiliate, or as part of an e-commerce site).
• Internet media buying.
• Online direct marketing.
• Webmaster experience.

The job description is here and if you are interested, please email targetspotjobs@gmail.com with "Self Service" in the subject.

Comments (View) | Posted November 27, 2009 in Listings , Venture Capital and Technology

Some Things To Be Thankful For This Year

1) The economic meltdown/panic of 2008 is largely over. The economy is still weak but markets are functioning and buyers are buying and sellers are selling.

2) The FCC has submitted a proposal for rulemaking on net neutrality.

3) Android looks to be a winner and will give the iPhone a much needed competitor to keep Apple honest.

4) Bing is showing some signs of life and may give Google a much needed competitor to keep them honest (this one may be wishful thinking).

5) Venture Capital investing is bouncing back:

6) The NY Metro venture investing market is bouncing back even more sharply:

7) Programs like Y Combinator, Techstars, Seedcamp, etc are expanding all over the country and now the world, turning out newly minted entrepreneurs by the thousands.

8) A secondary market for founder stock, employee stock, and angel and early stage investor's shares is emerging, offering the possibility of a third way to get liquid on startup investments.

9) The NASDAQ's Internet Index is up 128% over the past year suggesting that wall street loves the internet sector again. Can a vibrant Internet IPO market be far away?

10) It's thanksgiving day, a day to forget all of this stuff and spend it cooking, eating, watching football, and hanging with good friends and family. That's what I plan to do and I hope all of you do too.

Note: The charts on venture investing in this post come from the PWC Money Tree survey for Q3 2009.

Comments (View) | Posted November 26, 2009 in Venture Capital and Technology

Presentations vs Discussions

We've been doing our Union Square Sessions events for almost as long as our firm has been around. We pick a topic, like Hacking Eduction, that interests us and we invite about forty people to sit around a big open table and talk about the issue for four to five hours. There are no presentations. We have amazing discussions at these events.

A presentation is like a TV show. It's a lean back experience. A discussion is like an online chat room. It is a lean forward experience. They are not the same thing and in many cases they work against each other.

This is particularly instructive when it comes to board meetings as I learned last week. We did our annual Return Path Board annual planning session last week. It is a grueling day. Roughly eight hours of review and planning discussions, both operational and strategic. In prior years, we'd work through a deck of well over 100 slides during the day.

Not last week. As Matt Blumberg, Return Path's CEO, explains in this post, we went without slides for the whole day. The Company did prepare a lengthy package that everyone reviewed prior to the meeting. But once we were in the room, the projector was off and the conversation was on. Matt managed the clock and made sure we got through the agenda. Everything else was impromptu.

It was a huge success as Matt explains:

We thought that the best way to foster two-way dialog in the meeting was to change the paradigm away from a presentation -- the whole concept of "management presenting to the Board" was what we were trying to change, not just what was on the wall.  The result was fantastic.  We had a very long meeting, but one where everyone -- management and Board alike -- was highly engaged.  No blackberries or iPhones.  Not too many yawns or walkabouts.  It was literally the best Board meeting we've had in almost 10 years of existence, out of probably 75 or 80 total.

"Changing the paradigm away from a presentation" is the point of this post. Presentations are important. I do a lot of them and post all of them on this blog in advance. I am not saying they don't have a role. But if you want to foster real engagement and real discussion, they are not helpful and in fact I think they are hurtful.

Comments (View) | Posted November 25, 2009 in Venture Capital and Technology

Boxee Beta Unveiling - Dec 7th, Williamsburg, NYC

Dec 7th is "a day that will live in infamy" as FDR famously stated about Pearl Harbor day. It may also be infamous for what will in all likelihood go down at at the Music Hall of Williamsburg at 7pm on December 7th of this year.

Our portfolio company Boxee will be unveiling the beta software that they have been working on for the past six months. They will be showing off new content, new features, and new platforms.

And they will have some help from various friends of Boxee.

The last time they did an event like this in NYC, this past March at Webster Hall, it was a great time and Avner Ronen, Boxee's CEO, has promised to do even better this time.

So I encourage all of you who want to see the future of television to get on the L train and head out to Williamsburg. 

Please RSVP using this link. There's a competition among the management team and board members to see who can drive the most RSVPs. I plan to win that competition and get a Boxee branded Burton Sleeper Hoodie for my cross country trips. I appreciate all the help I can get.

Comments (View) | Posted November 24, 2009 in Venture Capital and Technology

Looking For Product and Marketing Talent

Our portfolio company Covestor is looking for a VP Product and a head of marketing. Both positions are in New York City.

Covestor has created an entirely new form of investment product - people powered investing. With Covestor you don't buy stocks and you don't buy funds. You "follow investors" with your capital. I've been investing this way since the summer and it's a very interesting new way to manage your money.

These two job openings are opportunities to help define this new form of investing, from the product side and the messaging side. 

If you are looking for a new challenge and the opportunity to change the game in an important industry, then these positions might just be the thing for you. If you want to learn more, click on the links at the top of this post and if you want to send in your resume, email it to jobs1009 [at] covestor.com.

Comments (View) | Posted November 23, 2009 in Listings , Venture Capital and Technology

The Story Of My Avatar

 I saw this tweet when I got up this morning:

hey @fredwilson - whats the story behind ur avatar?

While longtime readers know it, I figure many of you don't. So here it goes.

Starting about four years ago, Howard Lindzon started commenting actively on this blog. He was funny, he was smart, and I enjoyed our banter in the comments.

One march vacation, our family made a short stop in Phoenix, where Howard used to live. He emailed me and offered my son and me two tickets to the Suns game. We took him up on that and that's how we met for the first time.

It turned out Howard was hatching an idea for a web show for investors. Think Rocketboom meets Jim Cramer. I told him it was a good idea and encouraged him to do it. Howard would fire ideas at me and I would give him feedback on them.

Out of that came Wallstrip. Here's a post I wrote a little over three years ago announcing the launch of Wallstrip.

One of the original ideas for the show that never really worked out was that there would be a dozen well known bloggers who would write short posts about each daily show. Howard asked me to do that and I agree to do it at least once a week.

So that's how the avatar came to be. Howard asked his friend Jenny Ignaszewski to draw up avatars for all dozen of the stock bloggers using photos of them that were available on the web. The first time I saw my avatar was when Wallstrip launched and there it was along with Howard's and a bunch of others.

From the minute I saw it, I liked it. It uses my favorite color (green) as the backdrop and the eye color (my eyes are sometimes blue and sometimes green and sometimes something else). It looks like me, but not too much.

So I began to use it a bit here and there around the web as I set up new profiles. But by no means was it the only profile picture I used. For corporate oriented services like LinkedIn, I'd use my Union Square Ventures headshot. For social nets like Facebook, I'd use a regular headshot. I used a photo of me taking a photo on Flickr for a long time.

But then I started to realize that the Wallstrip avatar was becoming my online identity. People would comment about it all the time. Around the time we sold Wallstrip, Howard asked Jenny to do a real painting of it which I now have in my office at Union Square Ventures. It's a real conversation starter.

Sometime in early 2008, I just decided to go with it everywhere. It's at the top of this blog and everywhere else I have an online identity. It's my online brand now.

Like this blog, this was not planned. It just happened. That's the way most of the important things in my life have come to be.

Comments (View) | Posted November 20, 2009 in Venture Capital and Technology , Weblogs

Ten Meetings Per Day

I was explaining how I go about finding deals yesterday to a friend of mine and I thought I ought to explain it to everyone.

I write this blog. It's like a broadcast channel of "what is interesting to me." I market it every way I know how and I get somewhere between 70k to 100k unique readers of it every month between web, rss, and mobile.

As a result, I figure entrepreneurs and others have a pretty good idea of what I want to see and what I don't. And I believe they can self select. And for the most part, they do a great job of that.

Given that dynamic, I take meetings, as many as I can. I went back over my calendar for the past few weeks and it seems that on average I take ten meetings a day. I don't filter my calendar that much to be honest. I try to meet with as many people as I can.

I know that if I filtered my calendar more carefully, I'd get a better successful meeting ratio. But instead of spending time on vetting meetings, I spend time taking them.

So maybe I have a 70% success rate, seven good meetings per day, three bad ones.

If I spent a considerable part of my day reading business plans, referencing people on the way in, I might be able to take five or six meetings. But even if they were all successful, I'd still get less successful meetings that day.

So I don't bother too much about vetting meetings. I just take them as much as I can.

That's how I do it. Thought you should know.

Comments (View) | Posted November 18, 2009 in Venture Capital and Technology

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