Venture Geek

This is old news to lots of folks who might read this blog, but I just keep really enjoying Dick Costolo’s blog Ask the Wizard. If you are an entrepreneur this blog should be in your feed list…

I have had several conversations in the last couple weeks with entrepreneurs and VCs about whether early startups should write business plans. The topic first came up a few weeks ago when I was helping to recruit companies to participate in the local round of the Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC) at UC Berkeley. In the VCIC entrepreneurs come pitch to teams of MBAs, and the MBA teams then emulate VCs by choosing one to invest in and creating a term sheet. To make the VCIC work you need entrepreneurs who are actively raising Series A or substantial seed financing and who are willing to come pitch and share their business plans because the competing teams need enough material to evaluate the businesses in a very short amount of time. A number of the companies I talked to about the opportunity to participate simply don’t have business plans, and when I asked some folks at VC firms they agreed that most early deals these days get done without a full business plan ever being written.

Having been through the writing of a few business plans, I was happy to see Susan Wu’s take on the topic. I definitely understand that in the early days of a company time is in extremely short supply, so the time-intensive process of creating a written plan can seem like a waste of effort. But, I agree with Susan that the act of creating the written document can be a profoundly valuable way for a new team to come together in their thinking around a new idea, even if they know things will change (most business plans are at least somewhat dated the day they are “finished”). I think the more experienced the team is and the more clear in their collectives heads the plan of action and the vision are the less the need for a lengthy tome, but for any startup team that hasn’t worked extensively together and/or is working on a concept/plan that isn’t fully baked (in other words, the vast majority of startup teams) the act of going a level or two deeper than the bullets in your pitch deck is time well spent.

I mentioned to a colleague that I was hearing from VCs that “nobody is writing business plans these days”, and he got worried. “The last time I heard that,” he said, “it was late 1999.”

I have started to loathe the “2.0″ meme. When I started researching the Internet and its cultural and commercial impact in 1994 people were saying all the same things about peer production, changes to social relationships, and all of the (non-technical) tenets espoused as “2.0″. From my perspective, it’s just that it took the shake out and those who just kept going despite it for most of the rest of the world to wake up and smell the mediascape. But, in that context, I think Jeff Nolan makes a reasonable case for why “2.0″ actually has meaning, at least in the enterprise. And even if you don’t buy that, it’s a great blog post (despite the snarky coastism).

Will Price’s recent post about consumer confidence and macro-market trends and possible correlations to VC returns deserves some link love. I’m bullish on the power of the VC industry to fuel the economy, but I’m also one of those people who thinks we have probably already seen the zenith of American prosperity (especially relative to the rest of the world). A friend of mine has been living and working in China for the last 20 years or so, and he is convinced that Americans will ultimately have a hard time keeping up economically given our expectations of work/life balance (not to mention educational system). That may be a bit dour, but hubris and complacency aren’t a good combination. Let’s just say I think it will be important for my kid to learn other languages and other cultures if he wants to prosper — being fluent in Mandarin Chinese probably wouldn’t hurt.

New Macs Cheaper Than Equivalent Dell Machine. The juicy bit of the article:

The difference in price — and that it was in Apple’s favor — was so surprising that I contacted Dell to confirm that I had not made a mistake in configuring its workstation.

Dell spokesman Marco Pena suggested that the numbers might be closer after configuring the Mac to include a three-year warranty similar to the Dell offering. “But I think we’re still going to end up a little higher than the Mac,” he said.

“The results were a bit surprising to me, too,” he said. “But it is what it is.”

(Hat tip to Wil Shipley for the link)

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?

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…

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)

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

http://hosting.mansellgroup.net/enablemail/ThomsonNewLetter/HostedWires/NewsLetters/June29-06.htm

The world doesn’t need yet another blogger supporting Net Neutrality, so I won’t explain why I think it’s critically important — instead, I’ll just point to people like Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) who can speak to the topic with infinitely more authority than I. Now, that said, it’s not yet clear to me that the regulations being proposed will have the intended effect. The bottom line for me is that the end-to-end principle of “dumb” networks is one worth fighting for.

(via Lessig, where the discussion on the comments is perhaps more interesting than the original blog posts [as usual])

A little story on ZDNet’s Between the Lines caught my eye because as someone starting a new blog I can’t help but think a bit how what I write here will in many cases be the first (and perhaps only) impression of me that readers have (perhaps it’s just delusions of grandeur that anyone I don’t know will actually read this blog, but that’s a topic for a different time). As usual, when a topic of this nature is covered in blog/press format the interesting details and nuances are lost, but you can always dive into the publications on Judith’s (the woman the post is about) page.

Raph Koster has a nice little piece on the cyclical nature of audience behaviors in MMORPGs.