This is interesting, because I find myself on the capitalistic (versus altruistic "teach a  man to fish vs. give him one) end of the how do you fight poverty argument.   Rob has an interesting take on how technology enabled participation in the global economy helps fight against the most extreme poverty.... and he's seen it firsthand.

Link: Software by Rob : Using Technology to Fight Poverty.

Nice post from Dave Cowan...   

Link: Who Has Time For This?: Consumer Investing (2).

That's why we believe that the formula for any successful consumer venture is to be as scrappy as possible until you see that exponential growth curve. Twist, tweak and test until you find the mark. Only then is it time to raise lots of money, hire expensive VP's, and "monetize" your users. (Be sure to read this excellent post from Brad Feld on finding the next killer app.) If Google taught the world anything, it's that you start with the customer experience, and then build the business only after you've got that one nailed.

You may have noticed I have a new little iKarma badge on the left column of my blog.  iKarma basically is PeopleTrust--a concept that I blogged about earlier this summer.  Its a distributed reputation system.  I'm curious to see the traction that it gets.

So, if you know me and want to leave a comment and rate me, click on the badge.  Tell everyone what you think of me.

I like this better than the rep system on eBay and LinkedIn because those are closed systems and I can't take my rep with me if I leave them or if I just want to maintain a consistant rep across all my digital identities.  I am concerned a bit that this might become another Y.A.F.P., but its hard to seperate out rep from network.  Anyway, it will be interesting to see who bothers to use this and how.

Some of you may have read about Flickr's proposed integration with the Yahoo! network that will require users to sign in to Flickr via a Yahoo! account.  Well, at this moment, 800 Flickr users have banded together in a FlickOff group that is threatening to leave Flickr because of the integration.

I'm sure I'll get some flack for this, but to all you FlickOff protesters:

Quit whining!

One user writes:   "I don't want to join with Yahoo, if I'd have known this was going to happen I would have never joined Flickr in the first place."

Gag.

Because you know what will happen?  If you have to sign into Flickr with a Yahoo! ID, men in black suits from Yahoo! will come to your house and implant Y! chips in your head.  They may eat your babies, too...

I think people have taken this a little too far.  Flickr is a great service made even better by the Yahoo acquisition if for no other reason than it now has a place to live where I don't have to worry about the darn thing going out of business.  Now, perhaps the integration and communication could have been a bit smoother, but changing the way you sign in to get your photos is no different than the bank giving you a new banking card when it merges with another bank... and I'm sure this has happened to most of these people before.  You never hear anyone go, "Had I known that North Fork Bank was going to give me a North Fork banking card when they bought Hamilton Federal Savings, I never would have put my money here in the first place."  At most, its a minor inconvenience with the tradeoff being a more permanent service.  As an independent company, there was nothing guaranteeing Flickr staying around or a plan B if Caterina and Stewart got hit by a bus. 

Remember way back when we used to get messages saying that AOL was going to start charging extra for IM?  Even recently, forwards went around Friendster that said that Friendster was going to turn people's profiles off if they didn't log in everyday or some ridiculous thing like that.

No, I believe that Yahoo! has some smart people there and that they didn't build a userbase of 200 million people accidently.  They're not going to shut Flickr off, hold my photos for ransom, or implant chips in my head.  This is just a minor step in the integration of two systems (Flickr is a BETA, remember??) and I'm fine with it.  Its a fantastic service--so far out ahead of anything else that the occasional hiccup won't bother me.

We've been thinking and talking a lot about working with entrepreneurs who bootstrap their companies to some pretty incredible accomplishments.  We love to work with companies who not only don't need our money, but will go ahead and build whatever it is they're building or go to that next step whether or not we fund the company.  The "give us money and then we'll build this" proposition is becoming less and less attractive in the face of entrepreneurs who say, "This is what we're doing and going to do next, do you want to be a part of it?"

Its kind of like dating.  For me, I'm very wary of women who need guys.  First off, any woman who actually needs a guy is probably grossly overestimating our value--and we'll probably just be a major disappointment to her if she gets one of us.  Second, independence and motivation are two of the most important characteristics of the woman I am looking for.  That, of course, begs the question of why the hell she needs me at all.

You should date and/or take on VC money for strategic, not financial reasons.  If all your VC brings to the table is money, then its probably going to be an unsuccessful relationship--the same way that dating someone just to fill an emotional hole in your life won't provide the happiness you're looking for.  You should partner up in either situation because the person you're dealing with brings a fresh perspective, exposure to a new set of opportunities to improve yourself--be it an interest in art or a relationship with Google, and an interesting experience that you find valuable and want around as you face the unknown future.  No one knows what tomorrow will be like--all you can do is decide who you want on your side of the table when it comes and brings new challenges.

PS...  If anyone knows any single women, I am happy to provide a business plan and executive summary of myself.

Do you want to make money in your own home?

Forget real estate scams, tupperware, or becoming a spammer.

Create your own Web 2.0 company NOW!!

Its easy.  Just follow these 10 simple steps and you, too, can be seen in fine dining establishments like Jamba Juice and speaking on panels for conferences like Distribucate 2.0, Fred, Bloggerstock and Elfdex.

1. Solve the smallest possible problem (that is still big enough to matter) for the user and know exactly what problem you're trying to solve. Google's first and primary job was very simple:  Help people find stuff.  They didn't start layering on everything else until much later.  Brad calls this the "narrow point of the wedge."  Its the easiest, simplest version of what you're trying to do... the smallest bite your users will ever have to chew--small enough to get hooked on very easily.

2. Get a responsive and chatty audience using the product.  The del.icio.us community eats new features like piranhas.  They pour over the service, discuss it, promote it, and complain when they don't like stuff.  You couldn't have hired a better, more thorough, or more passionate group of alpha testers.  Don't rush to get the service so easy that my dad can use it, because he's not going to really be helpful to you in the early days when you need really hardcore Beta testing.

3.  Launch.  Now.  Tomorrow.  Every day.   Don't wait until its perfect to put it out in the open.  No more closed invite-only betas.  Your idea of perfect may not jive with your users' ideas of perfect.  Put whatever you can out there and get people using it as soon as possible.  Feed them daily with new features to keep them interested and coming back.  No one likes waiting six years for new releases.

4.  Distribute.  Distribute.  Distribute.    Don't force your users to play on your site in a walled garden.  Let them take the service and use it wherever they want.  (See Flickr badges, Google Ads, Amazon affiliates, Indeed jobrolls, del.icio.us linkrolls, moblogging, RSS, e-mail alerts, etc., etc....)  Instead of building it so they will come, go out and get them by placing little bits of your service everywhere on the web.  Be where they are.

5.  Don't hold users against their will.  If they want to leave, let them pick up with all of the content they created while they were on your site and leave... for free.  Charging $0.29 to get back each of the hi rez photos you uploaded to the site (See my upcoming Snapfish post) is thievery.  You have to let the barn door open and focus on keeping your customers fed, so they want to come back, instead of coming back because they're stuck.

6.  Be mindnumbingly simple.  Extra clicks are deadly.  People just won't do it.  Indeed:  One search, all jobs.  Two boxes:  What job and where.  You can't get any easier than that and all it takes is for someone to put one search in for people to go, "Wait...what's this... links to Monster AND Careerbuilder??" 

7.  Get people hooked on free.  Craigslist wouldn't have become Craigslist if it wasn't free for so much for so long.  Even now, they're very profitable and they're only charging for just a few small pieces of their service in just a handful of their 120 markets.  The world is changing.  Service is cheaper to provide now than ever and users are expecting to get more for free than ever before.  Its hard for a lot of big companies to accept that.  I just had lunch recently with a couple of friends from a music publisher.  They were signing some bands to "incubator" deals for just a couple of songs to test the market with them.  I said, "And you're giving those songs away for free, right?"  They nearly choked on their food.  :)    Well, why the heck wouldn't they?  Give a few songs away for free, generate buzz, get lots more people to buy future albums.  Seth Godin did that with his books, releasing e-books that generated buzz around hardcover sales.  Free sells.  Do you think the Facebook would be the Facebook if you had to pay for your smooches  like you do on Match?

8. Don't waste any money on marketing.   Word of mouth has never ever been easier or less expensive in the history of human communication.  Things go viral in a hurry... when they're good.  Ever see a Skype superbowl commercial?  No, but they've had 146 million people download it.  If you don't have the service and the quality to back it up, no amount of fancy marketing is going to help... and people are so quick to share cool stuff, because they want to be the person "in the know".  When they're satisfied, they'll blog about it and e-mail everyone they know.  And they'll tag it furiously on del.icio.us, too.

9.  Don't overfund.  Do you know how many times a day I see companies get funded on Private Equity Week and I'm like, "What the heck are they going to do with all that money??"  Underfunding a company can be a problem, too, but thinking that more money makes you better is a fallacy.  It probably makes you a bit sloppy and fuzzies your focus.  When you raise $2 million, you're much more likely to have a clear sense of exactly where that money is going to go than if you raised $20 million.

10.  No one sucks.  I hate it when someone says that a whole service sucks.  Now, I say it myself, I'll admit, but what that does is it teaches you to discount and generalize, and probably miss a lot of small opportunities that add up.  Now, I think Ofoto sucks versus Flickr, but people still use it.  Why?  There's got to be something there.  AOL sucks... or does it?  They still have 20 million users, so it can't entirely suck.  You should look at every competitor and take the best of what they do right and do it yourself, even if that's only one thing and the rest of their service sucks. 

We're looking for a cross platform way to present meetings over the web.  We don't need that much online Q&A, but that's nice, but basically we want a sturdy, glitch proof way that dial-up people to our meetings can look at presentations over the web behind a password. 

Which service to people recommend?

A lot of these free trials have ten person limits, too... that sucks.

Nivi, ever the web services innovator, is calling for a groupcast via del.icio.us of Bay Area tech events.  He also highlights a potential use not only of del.icio.us, but of RSS in general...   So, now I'm adding another slick app to my "Things that I want" post...  Give me a little widget that subscribes to RSS event feeds.  It should be a holding tank for things I might potentially want to go to, and let me just click "yes" or "no" as to whether or not I want to go to them.  When I click yes, it should automatically populate Outlook.  Evite needs to get on that, too.  I'm tired of copying and pasting event data to my outlook and getting events in my e-mail.

PS... I'd love to hear your "Things that I want out of Web 2.0".  If you blog a list, trackback to my original post here.

Link: Nivi : Introducing: The Bay Area Technology Event Groupcast.

"P.S. Wouldn’t it be cool if

   1.

      We entered event information (like time and place) in the del.icio.us “extended” field.
   2.

      Then ran the del.icio.us feed through some kind of hcal web service that automatically translates the “extended” field to hcal format.
   3.

      And finally subscribe to the hcal-ified feed with a calendering program?

Answer: Yes, it would be wicked."

Link: Investments and More: VC's - Top Brass Solid, Others not.

Such an outcome is significant to the industry. From my perch, the partners of most tier one (i.e., Sequoia Capital and Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson) and tier two (Mobius Venture Capital) venture capitalist firms are "worth their salt". The principals and associates are hit and miss jobs. Usually, the associates are the worst, with huge egos and usually spotty operational, idea, and strategy skills. The associate is usually from some power investment banker outfit. They are deal guys. They know how to get a deal done and that is about all. They usually possess little vision, strategy, or operational capability. Some make it, some don't - others succeed because of luck or politico.

This is just too funny. 

Here's a test...

Ask 10 people in the venture capital industry to name the top 5 VC firms not named Sequioa or Kleiner...    there will probably be very little overlap.

Even harder...   ask them to name the top 10 VCs that don't work at either of these firms.  There will probably be next to no overlap.  That's because there is no "best" VC.  There are "appropriate" VCs for your business and then there are varying network sizes, experience, etc. 

For example, John Doerr is by far not the best VC...   

...for a company making next generation semiconductors.

Mike Moritz is a terrible partner... 

...for an early stage biopharma deal.

Fred Wilson?   Wouldn't let him near my company...

...if my company was a based in India.

You get the picture.  Find the right person for your company and stay away from other people's lists of the "best" VCs.

Link: Genuine VC: How Yummy are Cookies?.

David quotes Jupiter saying that 60% of internet users delete cookies.

These are the same people that push the already lit-up elevator button after I'm obviously standing there waiting:  Paranoid to the put that they inconvenience themselves.

This is the feature list, in no particular order, I want in my life.  Who develops on, on what platform, with what technology is totally irrelevent:

1) Walking into a store and asking, "Do you carry men's wallets?" is archaic.  I want a local search down to the individual SKUs at the local deli.  I want to know right this very moment who carries both Fuze and dental floss.

2) I want to be able to listen to any radio, XM or otherwise, and push a "buy this song" button.  Also, I'm waiting for iTunes to switch to an all you can eat model.

3) When I download a bands music, I should automatically get a feed of their upcoming concert dates in time for me to actually buy the tickets.

4) I want ONE profile...and it should be linked to everyone I touch via IM, e-mail, calling, etc. and they should move up or down in my "top 25 people contacted" list for easy reference accordingly. 

5) I should be seemlessly connected to all of the people in my activity groups...without me doing anything and without me needing to invite people to anything--Fordham alumni, Regis alumi, the Downtown Boathouse, Zog Sports, etc.

6)  I'd like my calendar linked to appliances and other electronics.  Like, my alarm clock should always wake me up either at 6:45 or 2  hours and 15 minutes before my first appointment of the day...  15 minutes to get out the door dirty, 45 minutes to bike to the gym, 40 minutes to work out, and 20 minutes to get showered and back to the office and 15 minutes of lost time that I can't figure out where it goes in this process. 

7) Tagging recipes in del.icio.us should queue up the ingredients in Fresh Direct...  in other words, there should be a standard protocol/schema around food.

8) WTF are location based search services taking so long?  I should be able to push a button on my Treo to find the nearest Citibank ATM, because those punks charge me $4 for a non-Citibank ATM transaction.  The same thing with Jamba Juice.  In fact, I'd like the button to just say, "Jamba me, baby"  (The same way my browser buttons currently say "Blog me, baby", and "Tag me, baby."

9) I'd like a wireless carrier to "open up" and let people pay month to month, change their plan whenever they want, and just spend gobs of money on customer service.  Why am I paying $90 a month to make a phonecall a day if I'm lucky, 4 texts a day, and get wireless internet that Good can sit on?  I'm getting hosed.  When does the carrier price war start??

10) Does Outlook need to be so damned clunky?  It takes me forever to switch back and forth between e-mail and calendar...   God forbid I want to check my sent mail.  Can someone invent a better front end for Outlook?

I don't know what Google wants to be when it grows up, but I'll tell you one thing it shouldn't waste its time on along the way: Google IM.  Sure, they did a great job with GMail, but e-mail is different.  There are no network effects with e-mail.  It doesn't matter what e-mail you use...your friends can always reach you.  Instant messager is different.  Trillian aside, you need to all be on the same system to instant message your friends.  It remails the stickiest app on the web... and probably the only thing keeping a lot of people at AOL.  I'll always use AOL IM because that's where all my friends are.  I might use Yahoo, too, but only with Trillian.

Now, there have been rumors that Google will develop its own IM client, but I doubt this will take off.  Perhaps they will offer Trillian like functionality--interoperability with other clients like MSN and Yahoo, but I doubt the other players will give up IM share that easily.  While AOL and others seems to have stopped trying to block universal clients, they might start being defensive again if someone like a Google tried it... which is why I'm not advocating that Google just byuy Trillian. 

But the #1 IM client in the US will be up for sale soon.  Its only a matter of time before Time Warner waives the white flag and gives up on AOL.  AOL would give Google a sticky IM client, and lots of content properties to run Google ads on... including all of those people still using AOL mail.  Plus, given Google's stock price, I think now would be  a good time to start using that capital for a big splash. 

I think Google is probably the right company to take a shot at doing AOL the right way.  All of their apps, be it AdSense, Maps, Gmail, have had a lot of time spent on them to make them as user friendly as possible--so from a user experience, I think the intentions are very similar.  Remember, AOL is what introduced a lot of us to the web in the first place--we just grew out of it because of broadband.

Any thoughts on who else makes a good mate for the little yellow guy?

Robert May from BusinessPundit is trying an experiment.  He's trying to create a fully opensourced business, from plan to execution.  Register so you don't miss the first "corporate" vote tomorrow!  This is pretty cool and I'd love to see some high profile people pickup on this and start following it.

Link: The Business Experiment - Home.

The Business Experiment is a site meant to explore three concepts:  wisdom of crowds, open-source business, and the distributed nature of work.  The goal is to have the registered users of this site collectively start and run a real business.  Business plans will be written.  Financing will be sought (if needed).  Employees will be hired.  Systems of accountability will be put into place.

All major strategic decisions will be voted on by the registered users, and must be implemented by the employees.  This will test to see if "the crowd" is really wise or not.  Who do we hire?  The crowd will vote on the candidates.  What is our marketing strategy?  Vote on it.  How do we price our product or service?  Vote again.  It could be cool, or it could be foolish.  But either way, it's definitely different.

I get pinged with conference advertisements left and right.  By far, the most useful conference I've ever been to was the IPLA conference, where I got to network and exchange best practices with other LPs. 

GPs, however, play it a little closer to the vest.  They share deals with each other, but they don't exactly open the kimono the way an LP would, because competition for entrepreneurs is more prevelent than competition to get into funds.  Even when its a top tier venture fund, LPs don't really think of it as competiting against another LP.  I could tell you Mayfield is raising capital right now, but it doesn't really help you, because if you haven't already been talking to them, you'll probably get shut out.  Even so, a firm like that pretty much gets their pick anyway, regardless of how much you go knocking at the door.

That being said, I still have the urge to go to a conference, but so few of them look interesting to me.  I'd love to see more entrepreneurs, but a lot of these things are such VC pile-ons.   So what do I want?  I want to be enlightened, by my peers and by entreprenuers.  I'm there to learn and to meet people.  I don't want to be sold to and I don't want to sell myself. 

But this is a bigger issue--the issue of what professional services or just your own peers can do for you in general.  At Union Square Ventures, we want to figure out what we can offer entreprenuers that will help us attract the best ones and differentiate ourselves.  We also want to figure out what other kinds of firms are providing things that entreprenuers need, so we can network with those people to find the deals that match our thesis.

So, what do you want?  What are your needs?  As an entreprenuer, as a VC, as a technologist?  Are they being met?   How can a firm like ours be valuable?  How can I be valuable as a blogger, or am I just here for your own personal amusement?

What am I?  Some kind of clown?  Here to make you laugh?

Tell me how I can help you, or how Union Square Ventures can help you.  I'm curious what you people are out there looking for.  Be as general or as specific as you'd like.

Well, this is just hilarious...    Its an interview done from inside Halo 2.  First of all, can I remark about how ridiculously realistic video games have gotten since I was playing them?  Does anyone remember Contra?  To get extra lives, before the came started, you'd have to hit up up, down down, left right, left right, B, A and then hit start. 

Link: This Spartan Life - Episode 1 - Module 3.

Link: Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers.

Colin Powell got named a "Strategic Limited Partner" at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers today.   Apparently, all it takes it get into that fund is a unanimous confirmation from the Senate. 

And now, Bill Burnham (no relation to Brad) can move on to solving the next biggest VC mystery:  How can LPs actually get in to the next Sequioa and Kleiner funds?

Link: Burnham's Beat: Just How Much Did VCs Pocket On Google?.

I went to the New York Venture Summit this morning and someone mentioned to me, for the second time in a couple of days that since I'm the analyst at Union Square Ventures, I must be "doing all the work."  Its always meant jokingly, and often that's probably true at different firms, but ever since I joined USV, its been a real surprise how collaborative the effort has been.  Brad and Fred really roll up their sleeves--to the point where I probably have  a pretty visceral reaction to that insinuation, even though its probably meant jokingly.  These guys really get into the nuts and bolts of every deal... no outsourcing the due diligence to the analysts.   I know a lot of firms probably say that, but here its really true.  That's it... that's all I have for today.  Its quite busy here... for all of us.

Union Square Ventures is will represented on this list...  Joshua got listed and Fred got honorable mention.  Meanwhile, Brad and I are content to toil away in relative anonymity.  :)

Link: Introducing the AO/Technorati Open Media 100 :: AO.

More fun with Vimeo...   I made this little video on the ferry and added a little "You belong to the city" sax intro. 

Link: Vimeo / Downtown NYC Skyline from the Staten Island Ferry.