Venture Geek

I have formed a strong dislike for vacation email messages over the years — mostly because of the kinds of email I do outside the “normal” inbox fare like listserv admin and the huge volume of email generated by Nicenet. And, given the number of people who read this blog with any regularity (and to be clear, I’m not even totally sure that class of people exists) I don’t know that anyone will care that I’m going to be gone for a week and thus not blogging much. Off to Wisconsin to see family. Can’t help but give props to my Dad for his quote in the local paper about love vs. money as motivators.

I always say the best blogging is about first-hand experience, but I’m not sure a week in Wisconsin will yield much of interest for this forum….

My friend Pete (co-founder of the new sports social media site Yardbarker) pointed me to an article about the NCAA’s take on student athlete blogging. This quote from the article will give you a flavor:

…a few dirty words won’t land a school in trouble with the NCAA. Unfortunately for compliance officials…the Internet offers plenty of other avenues for potential violations. And college sports’ governing body doesn’t seem interested in relaxing its rules to accommodate the technology boom…Meanwhile, more electronic methods to run afoul of the NCAA are being invented every day. Unfortunately,…the grown-ups in charge are typically among the last to know.
(my emphasis added)

While some of what’s happening here is a simple case of gray areas in the rules of the NCAA — like the rules governing the types of overtures a school can make towards athletes — a lot of this, from my perspective, boils down to top-down institutions realizing the new nature of bottom-up media and basically freaking out about it. For instance, suddenly the plausible deniability about underage drinking on college sports teams is tougher and tougher to pull off when kids are posting pictures of themselves and others doing keg stands (one of the examples from the article). Student athletes being recruited to these schools are interacting directly with the student bodies at those schools and sharing what that experience is like in a very public way. Old people have been freaked out by the culture of young people for a very long time — certainly in the modern era back to the dawn of Rock’n'Roll (hard to remember that a mere generation ago it was downright unacceptable for Elvis to shake his hips on television).

I’m helping a friend of mine put together an academic article on peer publishing as an emergent social movement — the basic premise being that the advent of peer publishing has dramatic impacts on the way people relate to the media (more on this in a future post). This article about the NCAA is, in many ways, right at the heart of that premise. What used to be tightly controlled now is not tightly controlled. What used to be unexposed is now exposed. I love it when people claim that MySpace and Facebook are the cause of teenage “problems” — the lifestyle of teens is now right out in the open for anyone to see (assuming they have the ability to do a search on the Internet for what their own kids are doing — a skill that, based on recent media reports, I should not assume parents have), and that scares the shit out of many adults. It does mean that kids growing up today will need to learn new ways to be media savvy. No longer is media literacy just about understanding how commercial mainstream media is trying to manipulate you — today you must learn how the broader communities interact with each other and what the implications of disclosure may be in and outside your immediate community. The first MySpace generation will continue to generate stories about the long-term consequences of full disclosure of socially (in the “adult world”) unsavory parts of their lives. But, before long that same generation will be making the hiring decisions — do you think they will still care that they can Google someone and find pictures of them having too much fun? I suppose time will tell.

Brad Feld posted a request for resources to help teenagers learn to program on his blog, and after writing my comment I got to thinking about my own history doing software development. Brad’s question has been one on my mind lately because my cousin’s 15-year-old kid (my first cousin once removed for those keeping score at home) has been wanting to learn to program applications on his iBook for quite some time. His Dad knows some other people who have given him pointers, but more than a few times in the last couple years we have had lengthy IM sessions about his frustrations in trying to get the machine to do something meaningful. I have pointed him at several resources, and I think he’s starting to get into it, but the bottom line is that programming computers involves a lot of mundane and often maddening minutiae. Trying to start with building Cocoa-based applications on the Mac as your first programming task is probably the wrong way to go, but my attempts to get him to start with javascript in a web browser (where he’d get much more instant gratification while learning some basic concepts of variables, looping, conditionals, functions, expressions, etc.) have failed.

Mind you, I am not what I would consider a “real” programmer. Sure, I have several years of hands-on experience building database-driven applications on the web. I can get my hands dirty with most web-related technologies and just about any RDBMS, and I have decent experience in application architecture, software lifecycle, and various other trappings of the software developer. But, it would be downright disrespectful to the talented software engineers I have had the pleasure to work with over the years to think of myself as a true peer. My schtick has generally been more to know enough about the nuts and bolts to have a meaningful conversation (and to be an effective manager) but then be able to cross over and go deep on market positioning and brand strategy discussions (something that most of the software engineers I know would avoid like the plague).

I remember when we were selling the first company I started (an asset sale, to be specific). At the time my partner and I were still writing most of the code for our clients, and the Managing Director of the firm acquiring us (our new boss) had a talk with us about the choice we would face about stepping out of hands-on development work. Basically he was saying that once you head down the path of management you have to accept that your technical skills will become progressively obsolete and eventually be all but useless. I’m not sure I totally agree, and I do try to get my hands dirty in code once in a while just to try out new stuff, but his basic point is certainly valid. As I have moved on to various non-technical roles I have found that my hands-on experience is still invaluable in helping me to understand the implications of various management decisions around software projects. Such an understanding is far too often lacking in those making such decisions around software projects — ask any developer you know if you doubt me. I even once started writing a book that was a primer on the software process and culture for non-technical business managers (hmm, perhaps fodder for future blog posts…). Hopefully my natural geeky tendencies will give me enough lasting street cred to avoid PHB syndrome….

(By the way, for those of my readers not steeped in geek culture, the title of this post refers to, well, you should see it for yourself [and don’t miss the remix])

A few years ago I was brainstorming business concepts with my brother, who is a brand manager at a very large consumer packaged goods company. He was encouraging thinking about things that could be made “premium” that had never been so before. My big idea at the time: premium ice. Yeah, that’s right — how often have you had tap water ice dumped into your otherwise pristine beverage? And yes, I’m aware that bottled water is Bullshit, but I must say that having moved from San Francisco to San Jose, I’m sorely disappointed with how the tap water tastes down here. Besides, I like to maintain my Purity Of Essence. Anway, the point of this post was that this crazy idea of premium ice has apparently become a reality in just about exactly the crazy way I had imagined by a company with the very creative name of Aqua Ice and other product called Ice Rocks (Ice Rocks ups the ante on snootiness by claiming their water is “secured”). I’m now rooting for these products, despite the fact that I long ago decided that premium ice was not a business I actually had any interest in. Guess I missed my window.

Hat tip to Kieran for pointing me to the WSJ article about this.

Sphere is a relatively new service for searching and understanding what’s going on in the blogosphere. Now, you might say that the world hardly needed Yet Another Blog Search Engine — and in many ways you’d be right. But, Sphere has some interesting twists, most notably they seem to focus on notions of time — the ability to get up-to-the-minute information on what’s happening and search based on time frames.

I have no affiliation to Sphere, but they recently won me over with some excellent service, so I figured I’d share that story.

One of the features of Sphere I like is the custom RSS feed — I can set up a standing query and get a feed of results for that query. Thus, I can work it into my existing habits of RSS consumption. In my case, I was curious to know when people blog about Nicenet, the small non-profit I started many years ago with my friend Ben. Nicenet is a side project for us, but it’s a labor of love, and it grows purely on word of mouth — so, you can see why I might be curious to see when and how it gets mentioned on various blogs.

But, the custom feed I set up for Nicenet was getting an inordinate amount of spam. And worse, it was all porn spam. RSS spam — what is our world coming to? Anyway, needless to say it was upsetting to click through to a site thinking that some teacher was praising our little pet project only to be presented with hardcore action shots (and my wife was left wondering what exactly it was that I was doing on my computer that evening). Now, why porn sites are using the term “Nicenet” in order to attract people to their site is the subject of another post, but it pisses me off.

So, I wrote to Sphere. Not only did they get right back to me, they hooked me up with their experimental anti-spam filtering feeds, where you can set how strict you want your filtering to be. That feed got rid of almost all of the sites promising me hot stud-on-stud and barnyard action (I can’t wait to see the kinds of new Google searches that turn up this blog with that sentence on the page).

Of course, small companies are more able to address individual complaints because they don’t have to scale to thousands of such complaints. But, it’s surprisingly hard to even get a response to a query out of many web companies, so it’s always nice to see a new company take the time to give personal attention to an end user, and I think it’s worth giving a virtual pat on the back with some link love.

So, I think Union Square Venture’s attempt to find a new employee by doing the job search on their blog is fascinating. I’m surprised by the lack of the meta-discussion about the implications of it. There have been a couple posts, mostly about the risks associated with posting your name on a public forum where you current boss could see it. But, I suppose that’s part of the point for them — if you aren’t someone who feels like they can let it all hang out on webland, you aren’t the kind of person they are looking for.

But, there’s another angle to me posting about that — and forgive me now for doing a bit of blogging about blogging, as I know that lots of people out there hate that (and if you do, this is a good time to stop reading this post). When I started this blog I did so mostly just because I believe in the power of peer publishing, but having such a “public” face certainly has implications for one’s career and reputation. Blogs, of course, tend to cluster — that is, most blogs you read tend to be part of a community of blogs — or a number of different communities of blogs in some cases. One obvious manifestation of that is the blogroll — something I haven’t bothered to have, as I’m not sure the world needs another random list of blogs (I have found other people, though, who think it’s actually rude to not have a blogroll!). Another manifestation are the people who comment and link to your blog — even on blogs about purely personal topics I tend to find the same small group of people doing the bulk of the commenting and that forms a de facto community of sorts. In professional cirlces I tend to find a few blogs at the “center” with many others on the “branches” — you know it’s the center based on how many people are reading/commenting/linking. This blog is not the center of anything by that criteria.

Given the title of the blog and the subject matter thus far, I suppose I’m making a statement about being part of the VC/entrepreneurship community — and, indeed, that is where my professional interests have been and will continue to be. In that light, it’s almost silly to post about the Union Square Ventures ploy to find a new employee because everyone in that community probably already knows about that — Union Square Ventures is firmly in the “center” of their blog community based on the readers/links/comments they get. But, given how new this blog is most of people reading it are still just people who happen to know me, and many of you have little interest, or at least little exposure, to that world.

I’d be curious, though — how many of you already knew about what Union Square Ventures was doing?

Jeff Nolan’s post about DabbleDB and how it portends the much-predicted shake-up in enterprise software (the increasingly grating “2.0″ suffix is used here as “Enterprise 2.0″ by too many people of late, though not by Nolan) got me thinking about pricing and targeting of the various new offerings in webland. I have looked at DabbleDB’s site a few times in the last several weeks, but I haven’t yet delved into trying it out (navigating the dizzying array of web applications hoping to take over various office features is a daunting task to say the least). But, in looking at their pricing I couldn’t help wonder what the conversations that must have gone on behind the scenes were like. DabbleDB’s pricing looks like this (looks much nicer on their site):

First thing I noticed was no “unlimited” option. But, more importantly I got to thinking about whether $10/month was really worth it for me. Not a lot of money, of course, but given my predilections I could easily sign up for dozens of things that are $10/month on the web, so I have to be cautious. And the “try for 30 days” is all well and good, but you have to know what the price is going to be (and, to DabbleDB’s credit, they at least make it fairly easy to find out what it will ultimately cost after the trial period, which is more than I can say for many such web-based offerings).

Now, this post isn’t about whether I want to spend $10 — it’s about what this pricing says about DabbleDB’s view of their market and of their customers’ needs and value calculations. Notice that a “corporate” account costs an order of magnitude and a half more than the individual account. Seems like a big jump, I suppose, but in real dollar terms it’s not really that much different. I mean, if you really have a business where more than 15 people need to use these tools, is $150 even something you’ll think about as a line item? OK, so for many small businesses it will be, but my point is that the proportionality seems off to me. Of course, the very fact that the “Corporate” account is for 60 users and costs so little speaks volumes about the fact that DabbleDB is hardly going after the “Enterprise” market. No, they are yelling loud and clear that this is an SMB/SME play.

But, back to the price difference.

So, at $10/month per individual user DabbleDB is saying that they expect there to be a non-trivial number of individual users to represent any meaningful revenue. Or, perhaps they are saying they don’t want to go with a freemium model and give away the individual accounts because they don’t want the unwashed masses of individuals gunking up their support channels and such. I think the overall positioning implied here could hurt DabbleDB in the future. In some ways the mere presence of the individual option and the corporate option together on the same page, offering essentially the same thing, dilutes the message to both of those audiences from a pure targeting perspective.

So, at this point I figured I’d do something that most bloggers get critiqued negatively for not doing: I asked DabbleDB for their take on it. Avi Bryant was nice enough to share some of his thoughts. On the issue of whether they really want lots and lots of individual users, Avi had this to say:

We’re certainly not trying to scare anyone off. On the Personal end of the spectrum, we think the pricing is comparable to what someone would pay for other equivalent tools; how much is a single-user license of Filemaker, for example, and how much would you spend on upgrades every couple of years? It’s true that on the Corporate end we come in at a lower price point that some other options, and I can share some rationale there: we’re intentionally trying to keep the price down to a level where an individual could make the decision to purchase Dabble on a credit card rather than having to go through an elaborate purchasing process. We believe that keeps us focused on the real users and on improving the product rather than on selling to management.

So, their thinking is that on the personal side they’ll come in comparable to existing options but on the “corporate” side they will be cheaper, and his arguments for keeping the price point below a typical threshold for what a middle manager can spend without lots of nasty clearances up the chain makes lots of sense. Not sure how many single-user licenses of Filemaker actually get bought each year, but I have to believe it’s fewer than the number of customers that DabbleDB would really like to have. I suppose there’s an open question about whether a freemium model would work better here — get the individual hooked on their home applications, so they come back to work and get a corporate license for their workgroup.

On why they have no unlimited plan, Avi says:

If someone truly needs an unlimited plan, they should contact us - chances are they will have other special requirements as well, and it’s best at that point to work something out tailored to the needs of the customer.

Hmm — I have to say that since they don’t actually mention this option on their pricing page they are, whether they like it or not, positioning themselves entirely out of the “Enterprise” marketplace. Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing at all, and given the way the entire DabbleDB site is done, I seriously doubt that the team is thinking that’s where they want to play, at least in the short-term.

So, what’s the point here? The point is that although I have no doubt there will be some uptake of DabbleDB, I think this will more than likely prove to be a case study in trying to be too many things to too many audiences and diluting the potency of your message for all audiences as a result. One of the most important lessons I used to try to convey when I used to work with people on issues of brand strategy and positioning (a topic I have been steeped in at a previous company but not something I can claim true expertise about) is that the essence of positioning is choosing what NOT to be — to choose which perfectly reasonable business opportunities you will forego in order to strengthen your business in your core market. The corollary is that this exercise requires balance lest you target too narrowly.

I have nothing against DabbleDB, nor do I want to suggest they are going to fail. I pick on them only because of a random blog posting I read and the very clear way in which they have laid out their pricing policies. The analysis here is quite cursory, of course, but the nature of blogging is often first-draft writing — even if it’s already too long.

In 1995 I first signed up for United’s miles program. At the time in their “Title” field on the registration form they listed literally dozens of different titles, which for reasons that now escape me I found rather amusing (I just checked, and they no longer have the long list). So, being a bit of a smart-ass I chose the title “Swami”. To this day, when I get things from United in the mail they are addressed to Swami Nathan Dintenfass. I chuckle every time.

Although the use of mashups and other “Web 2.0″ API goodness has gotten a lot more buzz than it has actual sustainable business models, I continue to be an enthusiast about the shear spirit of creativity and sharing that such efforts exemplify. Tonight I came across this page with lots of different ways people are using del.icio.us. If you haven’t used del.icio.us, it’s basically just a way to store your web “bookmarks” on someone else’s server, so you can get at them easily from anywhere. Of course, it’s so much more than just that, but either you already know all about it, you’re not actually interested, or you can just go learn about it for yourself.

I have been using del.icio.us for a while, but I only really started using it as my primary way of keeping archives of links in the last year — spurred by a group project I was working on about “Web 2.0″ where we used the tag ucbweb2 to designate everything interesting to the group (and I was then able to have an RSS feed of the links with that tag — whether having an obscure “custom” tag was the best way to do this or whether we should have used the “for:” tag is certainly questionable).

To give you a flavor, here’s the “tag cloud” for the tags I have created on my account:

As an aside, it’s interesting to think about who the readership of this blog is, since most of you are, no doubt, so familiar with del.icio.us that it seems almost silly to have to explain it, but I know for a fact that there are a couple people who visit here that likely have never heard of it.

Do you use del.icio.us? If so, post a link to your account in the comments….

Douglas Rushkoff: “…most of what we see in America passing for a generation gap is really just target marketing.” (from the comments to this post)

Andrew Fife courageously shares lessons from his recently failed startup. The main theme is thinking about founder equity clearly from day one.

(via Brad Feld)

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia asks folks to blog about his new vision for changing political campaigns. And to the handful of folks who read this fledgling blog, I’m happy to oblige. Personally, I think this kind of thinking is, at best, ahead of its time. Don’t get me wrong here — I am a big believer in the power of peer publishing to change the very nature of our collective media experience (and, thus, our entire culture and society), but I think the notion that “The candidates who will win elections in the future will be the candidates who build genuinely participative campaigns by generating and expanding genuine communities of engaged citizens” underestimates the continued power of “mass” media methods to sway the electorate. I want what Jimmy says to be true, and in many ways the organization of the Christian Right in this country proves his point, but maybe I’m just cynical. Maybe it’s my midwestern roots — when I go back there I realize just how much of a bubble we live in here in the Bay Area (and coastal urban areas generally) when it comes to technology adoption (let alone political leanings). Having just graduated from UC Berkeley business school, where despite the fact that most of the student body considers itself reasonably tech-savvy and certainly tech-interested, I suspect more than half the class couldn’t even tell you what a wiki is, let alone how it can be used as part of a new paradigm of political campaigning. So, I wish Jimmy and his crew all the best, and I will continue to do my small part to spread the gospel of peer publishing and media empowerment, but until the MySpace/YouTube generation starts making the decisions in the halls of power, we might have another few cycles to go with big-money, image-based politics. I hope I’m wrong.

An artisinal craft that cannot be “bottled”, or an industry in sore need of innovation and maturation?

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