Musings of a VC in NYC

Native Advertising Event

This Thursday from 1pm to 6pm, our portfolio company Zemanta is co-hosting a summit on native advertising here in NYC. 

I've written and spoken a fair bit about native advertising so regular readers will likely be quite familiar with this topic. However, from what I am seeing out there, native advertising is really hitting its stride as social platforms and mobile consumption become the norm. If you are a marketer or an entrepreneur working in the advertising/marketing space, you should be paying attention to this trend.

I will be kicking off the event at 1pm with a brief talk and some Q&A.

If you want to go, here is a link to get a 50% discount on the event for readers of AVC.

This is Internet Week in NYC and I am making a number of public appearances in addition to this native advertising summit. Here's the whole shebang:

Last night - introducing the Gotham Gal at the MOUSE 15 Annivesary Event

This morning - Opening the CMSummit with John Battelle at 9:10am

Wednesday evening - March For Innovation (immigration) event at AppNexus with Brian O'Kelly

Thursday mid-day - The Native Advertising event

Thursday at 4:30pm - OpenCo Festival event with John Battelle and Dave Morgan at Simulmedia

It's a busy week but with a Vespa scooter and a mind full of things to say, it shouldn't be too hard. I hope to see you all around town this week.

Success Has A Thousand Fathers

Back in the early days of AVC, I did a thing called VC Cliche Of The Week. There was an RSS feed of all of them powered by Delicious, but it is broken and most likely can't be fixed. You can find some of them on gawk.it.

One of the cliches I posted about is "success has a thousand fathers." I thought I would re-run that post. Here it is.

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You can count on it - when a deal works out spectacularly everyone involved will take credit for it.

This behavior is particularly annoying to the entrepreneurs who put the sweat, blood, and tears into the Company.

They watch the VCs take credit for the big success and it grates on them.

I have a couple rules that I try very hard to live by in this regard:
1- the management team always gets the credit.  VCs don't do the dirty work and should not get the accolades when things work out.
2 - don't gloat.  it's not becoming.  humility in times of great success is a very becoming characteristic.

But it's really hard to follow these rules when things work out well.  Because success doesn't come that often, and when it does, it has a thousand fathers.

Congratulations Indiana

We talk a lot of NBA basketball in the comments but I don't post about it. This blog is supposed to be about startups and tech, for the most part. But the Knicks lost last night in Indiana and my season is over. I will root for the Grizzlies and the Pacers now but I doubt I will watch many games.

This photo sums up the Knicks Pacers series. Actually it sums up the entire season for me.

Carmelo Anthony is an incredible talent. He has upped his defensive game in the past year and he carried the Knicks as far as he could. But he doesn't have a second superstar at his side and he could not beat Indiana all by himself.

Roy Hibbert played a great series. In the end, Roy and the Pacers were too much for Melo.

I went to something like twenty five Knicks games this year, almost all of them with my son Josh. I had a great time. We saw some incredible games. And I remain a diehard Knicks fan. My season is over.

I wish Roy and his mates the best of luck with Miami. I will be rooting them on.

Video Of The Week: SNL's Take On Google Glass

This is pretty funny.

Fun Friday: Morning Joe

It feels like its been a while since we did a fun friday around here. So here goes.

How do you like your morning cup of coffee?

I go with the Cortado, ideally in a shot glass. Here's one from Kava, the coffee shop near my home in the far west village.

So how do you take your morning cup? Photos please.

S4 Running Stock Android

Google announced so many things yesterday that it makes my head spin. Goodness all around in Google land.

But there is one thing that really caught my eye. Google will start selling a Galaxy S4 running "stock android" in the Play store on June 26th.

When folks ask me what Android phone to buy, I am always torn between the S4 which I believe to be the best Android handset in the market right now and the Nexus 4 which runs stock android but has no LTE support (the phone I currently use).

Now, or at least in a month or so, I will have a good answer. Get the S4 running stock android. If you can afford it. It's $650 unlocked.

A Day Late And A Dollar Short

So RIM has decided that it is time to make Blackberry Messenger (BBM) cross platform. They announced yesterday that by this summer BBM will be available on iOS and Android.

The time to do this was in 2008/2009 when BBM was huge and everyone was on it. The core users were beginning to leave for iOS and eventually Android and if RIM would have let them take BBM with them, they would now own the biggest cross platform messenger out there. BBM is great and everyone knew how to use it and was comfortable with it.

But RIM execs waited four years to make this move. When BBM hits iOS and Android this summer, they will face dozens of cross platform apps that people use to message each other, one of which is in the USV portfolio. My bet is this won't help RIM or BBM much at this point.

This is a classic case of the innovator's dillemma. RIM felt that letting BBM out in the open would make it easier for Blackberry users to leave. So they kept it proprietary. For way too long. Now they no longer have a dominant smartphone franchise or a dominant mobile messenger franchise.

You cannot fight innovation and opening markets. You have to go with the flow and adapt to the new reality.