A VC

ITP Spring Show

NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) has been pumping out amazing people into the NYC tech scene (and the worldwide tech scene) for almost 20 years now. I think ITP is one of the things that makes NY's tech/web community what it is. It's a combination of art/design/technology/media and it's a special place that turns out special people who do special things.

Every spring they do a "spring show" that gives each student an opportunity to present their work to the public. It last for two days and is open to the public from 5pm to 9pm. Last night was the first night and tonight is the last night. It's at 721 Broadway at Broadway and Waverly.

I try to go every year because it's such an awesome experience that fills me with pride and optimism. Pride because I am proud to belong to such a great technology scene that combines art and technology in such incredible ways. And optimism because these projects are going to be the basis for companies in the coming years.

John Geraci's FoundCity at the 2005 ITP Spring Show blew me away and I played with it for weeks. That work certainly led in part to Geraci's and Steven Johnson's Outside.in, which is a USV portfolio companiy.

I am pretty sure that a number of our other portfolio companies have roots at ITP, it's gotten to the point that ITP has pretty much infected all of NY's tech companies. And that's a good thing.

Not only are the students at ITP terrific, so is the faculty, including our friend Clay Shirky who was there last night in a suite and tie. Never seen that look from Clay before!

I took Josh with me last night for two reasons. First I knew he'd love it and he did. And second, his computer programming teacher Pravin was there showing off his work. Here's a cool shot of his art study on the words Mumbai and Bombay created with a 3D printer.

Here are some more photos of Pravin's magic with the 3D printer.

Make Magazine had a photgrapher there last night and he's got all of his photos up on Flickr now. If you can't make it to the show, spend a few minutes browsing these photos. I suspect you'll be enchanted and amazed as we all were last night.

Is Friend Connect Google's Answer To MyBlogLog?

Longtime readers know how much value this blog has gotten out of mybloglog (now owned by Yahoo!).

I've had the mybloglog faceroll widget on this blog for several years and there are 2,613 members in the AVC community on mybloglog. You can see the faceroll widget on the left siedbar just a little bit below the fold.

Today, Google has announced a service called Friend Connect. I spent a bit of time looking at Friend Connect this morning and this screen shot was the one I found most interesting.

I'll have to play around with Friend Connect and understand how it fits between mybloglog and ning and other things that it reminds me of. At first blush, I am not entirely sure what I'd use it for. Suggestions?

iPhone vs Blackberry - Survey Sample Size of One

My daughter Emily was passed down the iPhone I bought when it first came out. It didn't work for me so I gave it to her. That phone developed a small crack in the screen last fall but she kept using it. The crack got worse, propagated, and yesterday she dropped it again.

Now it's shattered, it's brains have been battered, splattered all over manhattan. Sorry about that, just couldn't resist a little Stones lyrics fun.

So I asked her if she wanted another iPhone. Surprisingly, the answer was no.

She wants the new crimson red Blackberry Curve.

Fortunately, it looks like I can get an unlocked one on eBay for between $100 and $200.

I wonder what this says? I realize it's a sample size of one, but I've heard that a bunch of her friends have also given up their iPhones in search of a better texting device which seems to be the one feature they value most.

Call Your Mother

Happy Mothers Day to all moms out there, particularly my wife the superhero known as Gotham Gal and my mom who reads this blog religiously so I know she'll read this post.

Tom Friedman has an oped piece in the Times today titled Call Your Mother. It's about his mom who passed away this past year at the age of 89. He ends it with the following line:

So on this Mother’s Day, if you take one thing away from this column, take this: Call your mother.

I sure wish I could call mine.

After reading that how could you not call your mom? I'll be making my call this morning once I am sure she's up.

The photo that anchors this post was taken by my oldest daughter Jessica who contributed it and two other of her works for a charity art show called Art Action that is running this weekend at 7 Mercer Street here in NYC. We visited the show yesterday.

I wanted to buy something to contribute to the causes that the show is supporting and decided to purchase the photo that anchors this post for my mom as a mother's day gift. It's called Lava Rock and it reminds me of my mom. Happy mother's day mom.

Three Reasons To Use Disqus

First, I'd like to be perfectly clear that our firm, Union Square Ventures, is an investor in Disqus. So I am clearly biased about what I am about to say. Second, I'd like to point out that the reason we made the investment is largely based on my experience as a Disqus user for the past 10 months and the result it has had on my blog/community. Sometimes seeing is believing and it certainly was in this case.

So, with that disclosure out of the way, here are three reasons I think every blogger, certainly every serious blogger, should consider switching to Disqus.

1) Threaded discussions - When you want to leave a comment that is actually a reply to someone else's comment, you click on the reply link and the comment/reply is indented right under the original comment. On any comment thread/discussion with a lot of action, this is absolutely necessary to make sense of the discussion. I am shocked that a popular blog like Techcrunch doesn't have this feature in its comments. Certainly it's possible for commenters to use an @sign to signify a comment that is actually a reply, but threaded discussion is so much better.

2a) Email Replies - Disqus emails every comment to the blogger. If the blogger wants to reply to the comment, he/she simply replies to the email and it is posted as a reply (with the indent described above). This feature, which I requested the day I met/saw Disqus for the first time, is the single best thing about Disqus and has transformed my blog comments because I can now participate in them in real time throughout the day as the conversation develops. This is a BIG DEAL.

2b) Email Replies for Commenters - It works the same way for commenters. If you leave a comment in Disqus and have given Disqus your email address, you will get an email when anyone replies to your comment. You can reply to that just like the blogger can. This is also a big deal and leads to much more active commenting and replying - ie discussion.

3) Shared profiles. As more and more blogs add Disqus (over 10,000 at this point), the profiles that commenters create in Disqus are shared across blogs. This is an important network effect that benefits the blogger and his/her community. For example, if you have a blog that is read by a similar audience as my blog, and you add Disqus to your blog, most of my commenters will already be recognized by Disqus the first time they show up in your comments. They don't need to set up a new profile. They''ll have the same avatar/icon and identity.

There are literally a dozen more reasons why Disqus is great (this guy lists 25 of them), and maybe you all will add them in the comments, but these are the big three.

Since I converted from TypePad comments to Disqus last August, the number of comments I regularly get have gone up by a factor of at least five and maybe ten. It seems that each week I have a post that gets over 100 comments (not this past week though). That never used to happen. And the discussions in the comments have improved dramatically.

If you want to give Disqus a try, go here.

Update: Here's a fourth reason, courtesy of flipbrad. There's a greasmonkey script that brings disqus comments and commenting right into Google Reader. You can get it here.

Geographic Balancing

I am fond of saying that what happened in the US in the second half of the 20th century will take place in much of the rest of the world in the first half of the 21st century. The end result will be vastly more geographic balance of wealth and prosperity than we had at the beginning of this millennium.

Today, in a NY Times article on Toyota (TM)'s annual profit guidance to wall street, I came across this comment by Toyota's President Katsuaki Watanabe:

“Our profit structure has become more geographically balanced, with growing contributions from resource-rich countries and emerging countries”

The Times goes on to say:

Toyota, now in a dead heat with G.M. to be the world’s largest car company, said most of its recent profit growth had come in new markets like Brazil, China and Russia. It said the growth helped offset sluggish sales in the United States, traditionally Toyota’s largest and most profitable market, and other mature economies like Europe and Japan.

This is consistent with comments I heard at the hedge fund event I attended on wednesday. The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and the middle east, are quickly attaining economic purchasing power parity with the United States and Western Europe.

I may have to amend the statement I started this post off with. It looks like it may not take 50 years for the balancing to occur. It's likely to happen in the first 25 years of this century.

Twittering A Hedge Fund Event

I went to an event yesterday that featured a number of people active in the hedge fund industry and the financial markets. Here is the series of twitters I sent during that event.

  Headed to the semi annual meeting of a hedge fund of funds. Expect to get some insights and will twitter them

  Observation: great hedge fund managers have come out of goldman, tiger, and michael price's firm

  Has the financial system crisis run its course? Most likely yes if banks and the fed keep doing what they are doing

  Has housing in the US bottomed? Maybe not, but the bottom is nearing. Watch for change in expectations, not prices

  What about the US economy? A tale of two cities. Not like past recessions.

  Inflation? Watch out, its here and more is on its way driven by massive global liquidity of capital

  Regional banks: look for a wave of regional bank failures. Fed won't bail them out

  To clarify that string of tweets and what follows: these are opinions I am hearing at a hedge fund event

Systemic risk is largely gone from the markets but economy risk remains. Market knows how to price the latter but not the former

  @tweetipFH oil (and food) prices are creating big problems in parts of the economy

Hedge fund manager singing the praises of aapl. He's right of course. But his framework is based on the world as it exists right now

  Had to leave the hedge fund event. I hope you enjoyed the twitters

Neil Young on Stage at Java One

I am going to get every one of his "dumps"

Triangulating For Insight

I am a huge fan of triangulating. I don't think anyone or anything can give you the insight you need to truly understand things. Whether it's visiting comscore, compete, alexa, hitwise, and quantcast to get a more complete picture of a web service's usage, or reading a conservative oped page and a liberal oped page to get a broader view of a political issue, or reading a wide array of tech blogs to make sense of the microsoft/yahoo breakup, triangulating is the best way I know to break the logjam in my mind and get to insight.

I've been subconsciously triangulating three posts for the past couple weeks;

1) Jeff Nolan's rant on incrementalism and the new thing:

As I survey the landscape of consumer and business focused software and service providers I am struck by how much incrementalism there is at the moment.

2) Tim O'Reilly's keynote at Web 2.0:

At the end he recites a poem called The Man Watching by Rainer Maria Rilke which contains this line

When we win it's with small things

3) Dave Winer's post on a decentralized Twitter in which he states:

I always work in bootstrapping mode, addressing the first big issue, solving the problem, then advancing to the next one. It's why so many of the ideas I've worked on have become popular modes of communication. Big-bang approaches always fail. I've spent decades arguing with people who want to reinvent the world in one stroke. They always try anyway and always fail. Bootstrapping is the only way that works.

Jeff is right, the web/tech world is full of incrementalism right now and that's why I am so bullish on  the sector and our portfolio which is stock full of incrementalism.

Tim makes a passionate argument for "tackling big hard problems" in his keynote. But Dave is correct in his assertion that the best way to do that is one step at a time.

Think about the way Linux was built and continues to be built. One step at a time. Each one looks trivial. Taken together it's awesome. Same with wikipedia. Or a social net like Facebook. Or the web itself.

We're rapdily reaching the adulthood of the web in a sense. The business architecture of the net now mirrors it's technical architecture. Massively distributed nodes that collectively create immense value, but if any one fails, nobody notices. Of course, it's not entirely true. If Google went down, or even S3, we'd be unhappy campers. But DNA of the web was set a long time ago and there's no fighting it. It's a sustainable network built on the principles of massive redundancy and no central choke point.

And because of that, at least on the web, if you want to tackle hard problems you are going to need to do it collectively and in bite sizes. We are not in an incremental phase. We are in an incremental system.

A Blast From The Past Quiz

Brad Feld posted a picture of him and a friend at MIT when he was 19 on his blog last week along with a quiz question. The minute I saw that photo, I thought "I should post the picture of us from Harvard Square in 1996." So here it is:

So here's the quiz. Name all six people in this photo. Hint: Five are active VCs and one is a retired VC.

The one rule is that nobody in the photo can participate in the quiz.

Extra credit - who is on the cover of Business Week in the magazine stand we are all standing next to?

The CBS Digital Radio Network

Yesterday I attended a launch event that really impressed me. As I watched it, I sent this twitter message:

          Watching a killer presentation on the cbs digital radio network. These guys have nailed it

I got a bunch of replies asking for more, but I've been offline for most of the past 24 hours and couldn't get around to posting about it.

Paid Content has a post on the event that does a good job of "play by play". But it really doesn't capture what went down.

Ad Age did a slightly better job with their coverage, but also missed the big point.

And that point is this. CBS has launched a single flash player that showcases all of their terrestrial stations' internet streams, all of their internet radio streams (like the new WNEW), all of AOL's internet stations (which CBS now operates for AOL), and best of all allows the listener to create their own custom radio stations that are also available on the player.

And that flash player can be launched whenever you visit a CBS radio station's website, whenever you play an AOL radio station, and whenever you play a custom station you or your friends create using the new CBS digital radio network.

Think about this. They have rolled out the entire spectrum of what radio might be on one single player. You want to listen to WFAN? You can do it on the player. You want to listen to AOL's indie rock stream? You can do it on the player. You want to create and listen your own station? You can do that on the player. I suspect it won't be long before you can listen to any last.fm stream on that player too.

And here's what really got me. When all of this audio content is being delivered in a single network, CBS can move you around the network when it makes sense. If you are listening to the AOL indie rock stream and Wilco is playing in the WXRT studio, the CBS digital radio network can alert you in the AOL stream and give you one click access to the Wilco live performance.

As my friend David Goodman explained, when the next Eliot Spitzer moment happens, you can go from the wonderful WNEW stream to 1010 WINS to get the news and then go back, all in a single state of the art flash player.

As I said in my twitter, these guys have nailed it.

What is this? [o:p][/o:p][/span]

I have no idea what those strings of HTML code do or mean (and I substituted [ for <), but they messed up my feed for the past couple days.

They got into my feed because I cut and pasted some text from microsoft entourage.

When I decided to figure out what was wrong with my feed, the clue was "did you edit your posts in MS Word?"

I learned a long time ago not to do that.

Now I know to avoid all Microsoft software when it comes to publishing on the web.

Distributed Polling

The poll I did yesterday on Yahoo!'s closing price has been taken almost 2,200 times in about a day. How did it get so many takers? By being distributed on many blogs at the same time. The poll has a share tab with embed code and I asked my readers to embed it on their blogs. And I left comments on some of the most popular blogs suggesting they do so. As of this morning here's the list of blogs that picked up the poll code and reposted it.

http://blog.hubdub.com/2008/05/05/what-price-will-yahoo-close-at-on-monday-may-5th/

http://gigaom.com/ http://gigaom.com/2008/05/03/microsoft-yahoo-bid-over/ http://hexia.net/frettavefur/technology http://laurent.pierssens.com/2008/05/04/microsoft-walks-how-low-will-yahoo-close-tomorrow/

http://mp.blogs.com/

http://seekingalpha.com/article/75643-where-will-yahoo-close-today

http://www.alleyinsider.com/ http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/play_the_where_will_yahoo_s_stock_go_now_game_yhoo_ http://www.collierclan.net/mark/index.php/2008/05/04/yhoo-stock-price-poll/ http://www.contentmatters.info/

http://www.contentmatters.info/content_matters/2008/05/microsoft-ends.html http://www.stoweboyd.com/message http://davemartin.blogspot.com/2008/05/if-all-else-fails-immortality-can.html http://www.buzzya.com/2008/05/04/microsoft-to-yahoo-take-a-hike/ http://mojo-ramblings.blogspot.com/2008/05/microsoft-and-yahoo.html http://amaappendagy.blogspot.com/2008/05/spliced-feed-for-social-media_04.html

http://technology.nuovoportale.com/microsoft-to-yahoo-take-a-hike/ http://swik.net/Technology-News/GigaOm/Microsoft+to+Yahoo:+Take+a+Hike!/b4tv2 http://nobosh.com/s/play-the-where-will-yahoos-stock-go-now-game-yhoo/57824/ http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/fredwilson/newwith/me/?eid=1209917398_17_48186561 http://aware11.com/play-the-where-will-yahoos-stock-go-now-game-yhoo/

I love this concept. We can work together to figure stuff out. Instead of each of us hosting a small poll on our blogs, we can collaborate on one large one. As for whether the poll was accurate, too soon to know. The wisdom of the crowd was around $22/share this morning before the market open. So I lobbed in a limit order before the market opened at $22 for the day. As of now, that order has not been filled.

We'll see if the stock gets to my $26 prediction. As of now, it's approaching $25. So much for the wisdom of crowds I guess.

Where Will YHOO Close Today?

I put up a poll on this blog yesterday and a number of other blogs picked it up or linked to it. The net result was about 1,800 responses as of 6am eastern this morning. You can track the responses (and the number of them) at this poll result page.

The wisdom of the crowd is the closing price today will be $22. I took the percent of vote at each price level and then multiplied them out to get that expected value. Here's the distribution of votes:

The look of this chart tells me that I should have let people vote for some lower prices and that $16 vote was chosen by a number of people who would have voted for lower prices. That would have brought down the expected price, but not by much.

So if my poll is correct, YHOO will be down almost 25% today and I suspect the biggest drop will be in the morning. That's $8bn of market cap lost.

As most of you know, I think Yahoo! made the right choice by walking away from Microsoft's bid. I think it was a wakeup call and they can and will deal with much of what ails them.

Yahoo! had about $2bn of EBITDA in 2007 before you add stock based comp charges. At $32bn ($22/share), Yahoo! will trade at 16x EBITDA and that's not including the impact of their cash, their Yahoo! Japan stake, and their Alibaba stake which together add up to $14bn of value or $10/share. If you back that out, Yahoo!'s a bargain at $22/share.

So if it gets there today, I'll be buying some. I still think it ends the day at $26/share, which was my vote that kicked off the poll.

Where Will YHOO Close At On Monday Afternoon?

Quizzes by Quibblo.com

I voted already and voted for $26/share. I think Microsoft has shown how much value Yahoo has and the market will reflect that once it thinks this through.

And please feel free to embed this poll in your blog. It's all one big poll so the more embeds the more votes we'll get.

My Thoughts On MSFT/YHOO

Reading the ms/yhoo news on my bberry via twitter. I know I'm in the minority but I think yhoo did the right thing. Great outcome

The Tow Pound

Its been about 20 years since I had my car towed. It happened today during my son's baseball game. The parking spot I used last sunday apparently is a tow zone the other six days of the week. A good reminder to check the signs every time you park

The tow pound is located on the west side highway at 38th street. It in the same place I went to get our mustang 20 years ago

Like many government run operations, its not particularly efficient. The line is long and full of pissed off people. No wonder the workers are behind bullet proof glass. It takes about 45 minutes from the time you arrive until you get your car back if you have all your paperwork. You must have your drivers license, your registration, and your insurance card if you want to get your car back.

It used to be you had to show up with $185 cash to get your car back. They take credit now. That's progress.

The coolest part of the tow pound is the pier full of cars and tow trucks. Its one of the biggest indoor parking lots I've ever seen.

And there are quite a few cars there which appear to have been there for quite a while. I thought the city took possesion after a short time and auctioned them off. Apparently not.

Ask For The Order

Words of wisdom from Steve Kane (actually Steve's dad):

btw, the best advice my old man gave, and the advice he drilled most emphatically and repeatedly was, ASK FOR THE ORDER. you'd be amzed how many people talk to customers forever and never actually say ask for the order...

I saw Steve's comment right after I read a long email from an entrepreneur (way too long, emails should be no more than three paragraphs) that went on and on about his business but never once asked us to consider an investment.

Ask for the order.

Listening To Your Customers Is Hard

My partner Albert says:

In building a business it’s generally considered a good idea to listen to your customers...  As it turns out though, listening to customers is a lot easier said than done.

And then he goes on to explain why that is so and what you can do about it.

And Who Do The Other 17% Think Will Win?

My other thought when looking at this chart was "if these were two stocks, what would people be doing with them?"