A VC

HeyZap's Looking For A Strong Software Engineer In SF

Our newest portfolio company, HeyZap, is looking for the fourth member of their team. HeyZap is a platform for game developers to get wide viral distribution for their flash games and monetize them.

They are looking for:

The job spec is here and if you are interested please email them at jobs@heyzap.com.

Comments (View) | Posted July 3, 2009 in Listings , Venture Capital and Technology

Hacker News and the NoSQL Movement

I love Hacker News (aka news.ycombinator.com). I read it at least once a day and it sends this blog more traffic than anything other than Google and Twitter. This is the refer log for AVC for the past month.

But like every great web service out there, it's the community at Hacker News that makes it so great.

This morning I read a Computer World article about the "NoSQL" movement. It was interesting to me because we have an investment in this market sector, an open source cloud based document store called MongoDB (which is mentioned in the computer world story).

There are three comments at Computerworld.com and there's 43 comments on the story at Hacker News. If you are interested in database issues, you'll find the discussion at Hacker News interesting and informative.

The SQL vs NoSQL debate is important, serious, and deeply technical. I am not going to even attempt to weigh in on it (other than to say we've got an investment in a NoSQL data store). But plenty of people are weighing in on it at Hacker News right now.

Of course there are other tech communities out there where discussions like this one have been going on for years. I am not saying they aren't vibrant and important. But Hacker News brings that together with a "techmeme style" blog aggregator and focuses very much on the startup entrepreneur (which is why it drives so much traffic to this blog).

Hacker News is a great service. If you are involved in tech startups and you don't read it regularly, you should.

Comments (View) | Posted July 2, 2009 in Venture Capital and Technology

A Shorter Post Than I Planned

I just spent a half hour composing a longish thoughtful post on the art of saying no in the venture capital business. It was inspired by Brad Feld's post on the same topic a few days ago. However, when I hit save, Typepad forced me to re-login and after I did that, my post was gone. So I can't get back that half hour today and that post is gone for good. Maybe I'll try to do it again another day.

But in the interim, please do go read Brad's post. I agree with what he has to say about saying no. It's a big part of the VC business and doing it right is critically important.

And while you are at it, please also go read my partner Albert's post on a conversation we had at lunch yesterday (at the Shake Shack). We got to talking about mobile app development and why Android to date has missed an opportunity that Apple gave them and everyone else.

I'll be back tomorrow with something more than a couple links

Comments (View) | Posted July 1, 2009 in Venture Capital and Technology

What VCs Are Worrying About

A survey of VCs by Polachi Inc. has been making the rounds of the internet the past couple days. I was asked to participate in this survey but did not (not for any reason in particular).

I looked over the results (click on that link above to see them) and this slide caught my attention:

Surprise, VCs are not worried about deal flow and the management teams they work with, are a bit worried about their portfolio, and are a lot worried about exits.

We've talked about this issue endlessly here on this blog and elsewhere. The problem with the VC industry is that there is too much money in it, too many portfolio companies, weak venture firms, and a tepid exit environment.

There is no lack of good opportunities, no lack of talent (both entrepreneurial and management).

Nothing is wrong with the VC business and the startup ecosystem that a few years of weak fundraising can't fix. And I think we are seeing that and will continue to see it.

But the headlines like VCs Losing Confidence in “Broken” Industry overstate the issues in my mind. The VC business is not broken. Some of the participants in it are.

Comments (View) | Posted June 30, 2009 in Venture Capital and Technology

Trendrr - The Freemium Web Charting Service

Let's say you want to track how something you are working on is doing. You can look at it's web traffic on comScore, Compete, Quantcast, Alexa, etc. You can check out how it is doing on Google Trends. But if you want to do something a bit more sophisticated, you might want to try Trendrr.

Trendrr is a free service (for a limited amount of data tracking) that let's you track keywords across multiple data sets. Here's a screen shot of the basic service which shows how it works.

The cool thing about Trendrr is the charts that others build are shared in the service. It's a social charting system. Here's a chart someone called tvbuzz built for the monday night TV shows (note that this is an embed from Trendrr):

The Trendrr service was built by a NYC agency called Wiredset that focuses on social media and digital marketing for the entertainment business. And the categories in the service reflect that focus; Brands, Buzz, Film, Gaming, Music, Politics and TV. Wiredset was founded by Mark Ghuneim (aka Mediaeater), someone I've known for almost twenty years and one of the most digital savvy people I've come across in the music and entertainment business.

The big news today is that Trendrr has gone from free to freemium with the launch of Trendrr Pro. If you want to track more than 10 datasets at a time, then Trendrr Pro is for you. I like that, like Flickr, you can start off using Trendrr for free, and at anytime you can make your account a Pro account without having to set up a new account. Here's the pricing matrix for Trendrr:

You and I will start out with a free account and maybe over time migrate to the gold account. But the agency, record label, film studio, or game developer will likely opt for the elite offering and spend over $10,000/year with Trendrr.

That's the Freemium model in all of its glory. We can all click over to Trendrr right now and start getting value out of it. And if it works well for us, we can become paid customers without having to be sold. And some of the customers will turn into large users who pay a lot of money for the service. Nicely done Mark and Wiredset and Trendrr.

Comments (View) | Posted June 29, 2009 in Web/Tech