Venture Geek

VCs and entrepreneurs have a classic conflict of interests. The VC has a portfolio of companies and wants each of them to behave in a value maximizing way, even when doing so requires taking tremendous risks and forgoing good but not great avenues for growth and exit. The entrepreneur has one company and often has their financial well-being tied up in the result. A scenario that puts $1mm in the pocket of the entrepreneur will almost always be attractive to the entrepreneur — in many situations the same situation might not be attractive to the investor. This phenomenon is known by all venture capitalists and by most entrepreneurs, yet it persists.

At the risk of coming across as horribly naive, I have been wondering lately why it is we never see funds that try to solve this issue by giving each entrepreneur in the portfolio a taste of the carry on the fund. I suspect the knee-jerk answer would be that it would damage the incentive of the entrepreneur to perform, but I’m not sure I buy that. I’m not suggesting that you make it easy to get rich just sitting back and waiting for the portfolio, but if the idea is align the interests of all parties around making decisions that maximize potential outcomes, it would be more like an insurance policy for the entrepreneur — a way to have some level of safety net (assuming, of course, that the fund actually has a decent return — a big assumption in this business).

I was talking with a friend of mine a few weeks ago about our differing opinions on self-disclosure on the web. I have a little personal web site that I made a few years ago when I was doing some consulting and needed a way for people to learn about me — since then I have kept it updated, and it serves as a way for folks who for whatever reason come to care who I am to learn something about me. I’ve gone back and forth on whether it’s hokey or a good respresentation of my professional self.

One of things I have on that site is a page with just about every virtual way to contact me — email, phone, and the various instant messaging handles. My friend said that eventually I’d starting getting IM spam (”spim” as it’s often called, though I hate the “sp_m” thing for every new kind of spam) and/or would just generally be unhappy to have disclosed so much about myself and how to get a hold of me. As someone who really came of age professionally during the rise of the Web, I have tended towards being “out there” as a good thing (in the mid-90s I was very active on various discussion groups and as a result my email address was spread far and wide, and I do get unbelievable amounts of spam to this day because of it — but, that’s a different topic).

Tonight I received a call to my Skype account from “Chris” (I originally was going to put his handle here, but I decided that was too snarky). I know several people named Chris, but none of them are currently on my Skype contact list. I sent an IM back explaining that it’s late here and I can’t talk — I tend to prefer text-based IM over voice chats for most short conversations anyway. Chris, though insisted that I talk to him, and after he kept calling again and again and again it became pretty clear that “he” is not actually one of my friends named Chris but rather some random person who for whatever reason really really wanted me to talk to him. The short of it is, for the first time ever I actively blocked someone from one of my IM services.

Obviously, this isn’t that big a deal, and it hasn’t soured me on IM or anything.  And I don’t think I’ll be taking down my contact page or blocking other people from finding me in the various directories.

Now that I’ve written this into a blog post, I’m not sure why you’d care, but hey, blogging is about first-hand experiences, right? Anyone else had unwelcomed IM interactions?

Two friends of mine, Jack Kloster and Pete Vlastelica, have been working their asses off (along with their excellent team) to start Yardbarker, and today they went to their first public beta. I have been an occasional advisor to Pete and Jack, and I am writing a case about them for the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, so I have to give some link love.

Yardbarker is a social media site for sports enthusiasts — “Sports 2.0″ as they like to say (though, I suggested they don’t say that, but what can you do?). The site is pretty slick, and given that it was built almost entirely by one person in a very small number of months is doubly impressive. I’m going long on Pete and Jack and their team — one to watch….

I have been a Flickr user for a while, but I really started using it heavily in the last few months to put up pictures of my kid. When he was born a year ago I was just using my .Mac account using the “Homepage” feature that integrated very nicely with iPhoto. “Homepage” was really not that nice a feature — it was extremely unflexible, had very limited choices for visual templates, and didn’t allow full-size photos to be uploaded. But, it was dead easy — you just choose an album in iPhoto, click the Homepage button, choose a template, and you were done. Even for someone like me, who has the technical skills to build my own photo publishing system or to install Gallery (both of which I have done — neither of which is as efficient as just clicking “Go” to get some photos up for the grandparents to see).

In their infinite wisdom, Apple decided that when they launched iWeb as part of iLife that they would get rid of the Homepage integration in iPhoto and replace it with iWeb integration. iWeb, though, is more complicated — not that it’s complicated as a way to make web pages, generally (my Mom uses it!), but it added extra steps to just get photos up on the web. Add to that complication the fact that Apple provided no way at all to import your previous “Homepage” pages into iWeb (which is an issue because you want people to click around the auto-generated navigation of all your “Homepage” pages) and I was ready to look elsewhere.

I had played with Flickr in its early days, and there are some nice 3rd party tools integrating Flickr with iPhoto, so I decided that was where I’d look. Flickr also has the nice feature of storing full-resolution photos, which is nice for people who want to make prints. And here is where they start to blow it.

My wife was looking at pictures on my account this morning to send some prints to people. She couldn’t see the button to make prints, which was frustrating for her. No problem — I just went into the options for my account to let anyone make prints. But, that’s not actually an option. The most lenient option is to allow any Flickr user to make prints. On face, that’s not a big deal, but then I went back to see what it means to become a Flickr user — what it really means is getting a Yahoo account. And this is where they are blowing it. You see, in order to become a Yahoo user you have to fill out a lengthy form which requires that you share, among other things, your gender, your birthday, and your zip code. It also tries to get you a Yahoo email account by default. I fill in such forms all the time, as a person who basically lives on the web. But, when I think about my relatives having to go through that just to order some prints of photos, I picture a lot of them basically saying, “fuck it”. Not to mention that most of them wouldn’t even know they had to do it in the first place to make prints (that’s something I have to figure out and tell them myself). Why, oh why, would Yahoo want to put barriers up to monetizing Flickr? I would have thought ordering prints wasn’t a “premium service” that warrants people giving up their information goods just to get in the door. I wouldn’t have thought that making prints was something that Yahoo would want to make a complicated process for the uninitiated. But, they did. No wonder PhotoBucket has been getting all the press lately.

I moved to the Bay Area 9 years ago and never looked back. I knew this was the place I belong. And that despite the incredible cost of housing (having come from the Midwest, it was truly staggering — now I’m numb to it). Today I was reading a thread on the BACFUG email list (a group I ran from 1998-2002) prompted by someone from outside the area asking about relocating here. It prompted a flurry of folks sharing stories about how the increased cost of living is well worth it. My friend Nancy Tubbs summarized it so nicely I couldn’t help but post what she had to say:

While deep down people are people, at least on the outside people _are_
nicer here (even I’m nicer here). It helps not to be jammed into each other
on the subway/bus every day. Many are fulfilling a dream by being here so
are in a good mood overall. It’s easy to get a breather by getting into the
nearby open space preserves or the beach. People are healthier, fruits and
vegetables are fresher. Work can be stressful, with long hours and
unpredictable plans, but in general it’s more challenging and interesting as
we are building new products, vs maintaining mature ones. There are daily
opportunities to hear about new technologies and ideas, and the area is full
of creative, brilliant people who are curious and open to new things. Some
of the world’s best minds are here, and they have no interest in office
politics or posturing (although they might be a little nuts in other
interesting ways).

Over wo years ago Brandon Purcell posted a blog entry about converting iTunes M4P files to MP3 files (something anyone who wants to play those files somewhere other than iTunes or an iPod needs to do). Two years later the comments to that post keep coming, and since everyone on the thread gets an email every time a comment is posted, it has become a running conversation about the ins-and-outs of dealing with Apple’s DRM, an impromptu listserv of sorts dedicated to the aftermath of a single blog post. Now, don’t get me wrong, it has been valuable to hear about the various technical approaches to solving the problem of exercising fair use by violating the DMCA, but every time I get another message I can’t believe that 2 years later people are still commenting. In recent weeks the conversation has come full circle, with new people joining in (probably found it through Google searches, I suspect) chiming in with old suggestions (and often with bad advice — such is the nature of a blog comment thread that has been going on for two years — people don’t tend to read through the whole thing before commenting again). Based on his home page, Brandon seems to have stopped blogging altogether in April, but that one post lives on (and on and on and on).

I have you have ever been through the software development process, particularly around using consultants in large companies, this will amuse you (click for the larger view)…

(Hat tip to Rodrigo Munera who pointed to this on the BACFUG email list)

I’m clearly falling down on the blog social contract to post regularly, which I will rectify soon…. In the mean time, I couldn’t help but post this image, which demonstrates two different things on my mind recently. First, it shows that even in 2006 we are still dealing with browser compatibility issues. Second, I have been having a love/hate relationship with Safari for quite some time. I really like the built-in RSS support, for instance — in fact, it’s probably the only feature that really keeps me using Safari as my primary browser. I’ve tried using some of the Firefox RSS plugins, but they just don’t work as nicely (though, Safari seems to once in a while decide to “forget” which RSS articles have been read and makes everything as “new” again — which sucks). On the other hand, since I tend to have many windows open, each of which has many tabs, Safari has a tendency to get really bogged down and start to move…very…very…slowly. For some reason it often happens when typing into a TEXTAREA form field (or any form field, really). Often, if I close whatever tab has some Flash running it solves the problem, so I’m not sure I can really blame Safari per se. Between Safari, Shiira, Camino, Firefox, and Flock I have 2 WebKit-based browsers and 3 Gecko-based browsers, and I’m oh so close to moving to Flock full time (or possibly Camino) — anyone know of a really good RSS plugin that lets you put feeds in folders on the bookmark bar?

Program standards must be established corresponding to technical standards. . . . Technical standards are only a means to an end, whereas programs are an end in themselves. . . . Leave this matter to broadcasters and you will have more and more entertainment of a lower order, the kind of entertainment that appeals to the masses counted in millions; and you will have less and less entertainment of the kind that appeals to the intelligent, who are comparatively few; more and more of the blare of advertising and no educational programs worth mentioning.

George Henry Payne. Speech before the Second National Conference on Educational Broadcasting, Chicago, IL, December 1, 1937

Am I the only person who thinks is almost rude to hide your Contact List from your connections on LinkedIn? I’m not advocating opening it up to the whole world, but if you are going to have someone as a contact, isn’t it just part of the deal that you’ll let them look through the other folks you are connected to in order to, you know, do some possible networking with your friends-of-friends? I actually don’t much care for the “official” means of referring people down the chain in LinkedIn (why spend friend capital on such impersonal introductions?), but the ability to know who is “2-degrees” away and then make a personal request to have a personal introduction seems like the quintessential purpose of even being in LinkedIn in the first place. Though, when I think about my own use of LinkedIn it ends up just being primarily a glorified contact list of folks I want to stay in touch with, so perhaps “quintessential” is a bit strong. If you don’t trust someone to not abuse knowledge of whom you know, why have them as a “contact” in the system anyway? I would have thought it basic social software etiquette.

Tangent: I remember in the early 90s when the Internet was first getting attention with a “mainstream” audience there were all sorts of tutorials about “netiquette” — the idea being that if you were new to the Internet you might not understand how things are done there (here). It seems downright quaint to think of that now — even to think of the Internet as a single place with a single culture is so outdated that it’s hard to imagine it was only a decade ago things were so different (my, how quickly a decade can pass!).

So, if you are reading this and don’t allow your contacts in LinkedIn to see your other contacts, consider changing your settings. Or, consider helping me to better understand…