Anyone who feels like "There's too much going on...." should come to NYC.  Think of is like the Momma Bear.  We're not too big, not too small...  not too hot, not too cold...   we're just right.  It doesn't feel like a bubble in NYC, but it also feels like there's a lot going on. 

Caterina writes:

"There's too much going on. Every night there's a Mashup get together, or a TechCrunch party, or it's Tag Tuesday, or SuperHappyDevHouse or SXSW or this conference or that conference. And this stuff is fun. It's a real community. But all of these things are great by themselves, but terrible in combination. I see some entrepreneurs in photos from *every single event*. Who's talking to the users, writing the code, tweaking and retweaking the UI? It ain't the Chief Party Officer."

BusinessWeek says the founders of the Facebook are asking $2 Billion.

Now, my first reaction was "UFR", which is a term I've used a few times here before, so you should get to know it.  (First word utterly, last word ridiculous).

But that's what I thought about MySpace at $580 million.  Now, I kind of think MySpace might be a bargain.

Here's one way you could look at it.  If Facebook really does have the 90% penetration in the college market I've heard, and it is the "go to" place for communicating with friends on the web, then perhaps you could evaluate it like a sum of the potential parts.

What would you pay for the dominent college version of Monster, Evite, Typepad, Match.com, etc, etc. [name your service here]?

Facebook has the potential to be all those things.

HOWEVER, it faces the Craigslist issue.  If it becomes all those things or becomes full of ads, will it still be the Facebook?  That's just like when people say that Craiglist is leaving money on the table.  It might be, but it also wouldn't be Craigslist if it did charge for everything and felt too commercial. 

Secondly, they've got a major mobile challenge ahead of them.  I've talked to a lot of people doing mobile content and the question is always, "But will you be able to get Facebook on there" as if that's really hot content that will make your mobile service.

But frankly, a really kick ass mobile service (maybe Rave?) could be the Facebook killer.  If someone could tell me when my classes where, when my friends were at the bar, and help me poke/wink/nudge people via mobile that I see in the cafeteria, I think that would be the college category killer.

So, I'm not going to say that someone couldn't make a $2 billion dollar investment worth it, but its not a slam dunk by a long shot.

Got this question by e-mail...

Does the sustainability of the edge outweigh the opportunity in the mainstream audience? (e.g. IMO there is an enormous opportunity for AJAX desktops—especially if the web is the platform, but the existing ones don’t currently have a sustainable model; Edgeio has a very sustainable model-- decentralization, but I’m not sure there is a lot of opportunity seeing that they are cutting out the majority of internet users). The bigger payout is clearly with the mainstream audience (MySpace, search, etc), but there have been far more exits and successful businesses on the edge. Ideally there should be an equal emphasis on both—but which is more important?

My answer:

I disagree with your assertion that there has been far more success on the edge...    Just look at the big companies... they're the things that everyone uses...  Google, AOL, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon.. etc...     I don't really consider Writely flipping to Google a [huge] success.

I think we're looking at edge/mainstream the wrong way...

its about influencers and non-influencers...  and those groups happen to correspond to edge/mainstream.

So, if you're building a startup, if all users have equal value, then its all about cost and ease of acquisition.  Acquiring me means acquiring 5% of my friends and 2% of their friends and so on and so forth... getting you closer and closer to mainstream, b/c I'm an influencer. You acquire me by finding me where I am... and I tend to live more on the edge than I do in the middle.... which means I'm actually easier to find b/c I'm more flexible in my habits, more willing to try new things, and appreciate that you've found me on the edge and you're trying to make my life more efficient.

Acquiring my dad means acquiring my dad and probably nobody else, because he's not an influencer, and that's if you acquire him because he's in the mainstream in his service usage, and not really looking to change.

The problem is that there's many more of my dad then there are of me... and every incremental customer, while easier to lock in b/c of network effects, may naturally be harder to acquire because they're closer to the mainstream and less of an early adopter.

Its like cell phones.  When everyone has them, you'd think it would be that much easier to acquire the next customer, but now you have to wonder... if someone still doesn't have a cellphone, perhaps they're that much more resistant to change than the next person.

Blogging... same way..   I can't imagine not blogging now that I'm jacked into the community now by doing it... but how do you then get anyone who isn't blogging now to start blogging... its certainly a lot harder than it was to get everyone who has been blogging already up and running. You'd think there be more network effects or momentum there, but there's also more friction the more you get towards the mainstream.

What really fascinates me to no end is how much time any web service needs to spend understanding the user.

Case in point...  that little digital me on the sidebar.  Some people didn't like that it auto-played... saying that blog readers are not used to having to deal with any kind of audio whatsoever.

That may be true, unless you're ever checking out MySpace pages, which barrage you with audio and video, sometimes two videos at a time, all as soon as you load a page.  In that community, jarring as some of us may find it, that's the norm. 

Why is it ok to present an audio experience on MySpace but not on my blog?  Is that because you're reading in the office?  Is it just a generational thing where most people under 25 watch TV, listen to the radio, instant message and do work all at the same time?

Of course, there's no right answer, but if you're a web service, it certainly presents a difficult challenge.  Avatars aside, anyone who wants to get penetration throughout the web  has to decide how they make their platform flexible, but not confusing and certainly not so flexible that it fails to establish a uniformity of a brand experience. 

I don't know about you, but I've been getting a lot of messages from foreign bankers wanting to share the misplaced fortunes of dead military generals and millionaires from Africa.

Is the Gmail team too busy integrating GCal to notice the spam uptick?

I'm really getting into DigiCharlie over on my sidebar...     There's a new message...more bald, twice the funny.

If you normally only read my blog through RSS, today I've got something worth you clicking through on....  its on the web.

Just trust me....  click though.  :)

The really great thing about getting all these great people together for nextNY is that I really get to learn a lot.

Here's what I learned:

1. Bars with big comfy chairs and leather couches are not condusive to mingling.
2. The real business model in podcasting is recording everything in your life and then charging people not to podcast it.  I mean, come on, how big is the global blackmail market relative to the potential podcasting advertising market?  (from Greg Galant of Venture Voice)
3. If you are an entrepreneur, Barcelona wants you! 
4. As the organizer, I will never get a chance to play pool.
5. SquareSpace was created and run by just one guy...  and a small army of carpenter ants, but they mostly just do QA.
6. When two or more podcasters show up to a party, and record each other's podcasting each other, its called group podcasterbation.  (from Adam Varga of DailySonic )
7. Student Advantage was a billion dollar market cap company at one point....actually, for one day.
8. Some really cool people come out of ITP...actually even more cool than I thought before.
9. The next trip I go on, I need to go here to find people who travel the way I do.
10. Dewey's has a really good jerk chicken sandwich.

More pictures taken with our cheap throwaway camera here.

Obviously, our SEO skills leave something to be  desired...

When you type in "new york venture capital" in Yahoo! search, Union Square Ventures comes up #3, behind SuperPages and New York Life, two sites with way more traffic than ours.  That's pretty good.  (Good to see venture capital jobs in New York from Indeed come up on that first page, too.)

But in  Google, I can't even find us.  (Can't find Indeed either.)

Pitango comes in ahead of us, because they list themselves as having a New York office, even though "New York" isn't in the title of their site like ours is. 

The Davis venture fund comes in ahead of us, too... albeit on the 2nd page, because "Davis New York Venture Fund’s investment objective is long term growth of capital."  So, the words aren't together, but capital is in that sentence somewhere.

Our Feedburner feed is at the bottom of page #8, but I went all the way to page #20 and can't find our actual site at all.  Wacky, no?  I mean, the words "New York Venture Capital" are right in the title of our website, in that order.

Anybody have any ideas?

Technorati Tags: google, seo, yahoo, search

I find myself in the middle of a lot of groups.  Here are all the groups I belong to in various capacities:

nextNY, Fordham Alumni Young Alumni Committee, Fordham Jubilee Committee (5 year reunion), Fordham Softball, ZogSports Football, Dodgeball, & Softball, Warthogs Softball (all guys Brooklyn fastpitch team), Downtown Boathouse, Hoboken Cove Boathouse, NYSSA's SEMI Program, and of course, Union Square Ventures.

Check this out...   Google Maps!

You can get directions, and find local businesses as well.  The maps load and scroll much faster than Mapquest.  Hmm...   Perhaps I should check out what my available lunch options are for next week...

Interestingly enough, the maps are powered by TeleAtlas, a recent aquis

Popular misconception is that companies like Google, AOL, Microsoft, IAC, Yahoo! just have sales organizations in New York City and little else.

We know that's not true, but...   

...what is going on at some of these firms?

Well, the ambitious members of nextNY would like to know!  Open your doors, Google!  AOL, show us how open you are now!   Kimonos wide open!

We're looking for a large tech firm in NYC to host our 3rd event in April to give us an overview of what they've got going on here in the city and to tell us how we can be a part of it.  Ideally it would be an interactive session--some Q&A with the key people in the Big Apple.

Please contact me at charlie@unionsquareventures.com if you can help us make this happen.

Thanks to Joshua for pointing this out to me.   I like using FeedBurner for my RSS feeds because I get to see how many subscribers I have and what posts they like to click on.  FeedBurner provides me with those stats, while the two feeds that come off of Typepad do not.  Now, I have over 100 people using my FeedBurner feed, but I have no idea how many people are using the default Typepad feeds.  If you're subscribing via FeedDemon or Yahoo... something where you just dropped my URL in a box and let it figure out what my feed was, you could be using any of these.  However, you can change your HTML to point to only Feedburner as your default feed.

Just go down to your template until you see this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom" href="<$MTBlogURL$>atom.xml" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="<$MTBlogURL$>index.rdf" />

And replace it with this:

="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeed" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeed" />

This way, people who drop your URL in a box will get your FeedBurner feed.

If you're subscribing via RSS and you're not sure which feed you're using, if you could go into the properties of the feed and check, I'd greatly appreciate it.  It would be great to have accurate statistics on exactly how many people are reading this blog.

Link: A VC: eBay and Skype?.

Fred asks why eBay would want to own Skype, because he doesn't see the synergy.

That's because there isn't any.

But that didn't stop eBay from buying PayPal.  When eBay bought PayPal, the payments system was already public, with 750 employees.  The business is still run pretty seperately, too.  At the time, probably 30-40% of eBay transactions were being done by PayPal.  Great.  Probably about 30-40% of all Nike sneaker wearers wear Champion socks... does that mean it makes sense for Nike to buy the Champion sock business?  I'm not saying it would be a bad deal...   it might be a better ROI than the company's current sneaker projects, but that doesn't make it true synergy.  So, eBay has grown PayPal and its a great earnings stream for them, but I really doubt that having PayPal in house, versus people just using it when it was seperate makes someone that much more likely to transact on eBay.

That being said, while Skype may in fact be a great way for you to ping a buyer on eBay to ask a question, I seriously doubt that Skype is going to make transactions that much easier.  Its not true synergy.  I doubt most people even want to get on the phone with someone anyway...  I think voice makes a transaction harder, not easier.  People could start pestering you by calling you about your bike, lamp, car, whatever...  Skype rings are intrusive if they're coming from people you don't know. 

Russell Shaw thinks its a good idea, calling it a way for buyers and sellers on eBay to talk to each other, or even just to Instant Message.  Yeah, or they could...  um... just Skype each other or Instant Message.  Most e-Bay users already have AIM, but that doesn't mean eBay should try and wrestle the AIM business from AOL. Most eBay users have a browser, too.   Should they buy Flock? When does this get silly? When does the market take this as a sign that the core eBay business is dying and the company is looking elsewhere for growth?

Yet, its probably going to be a good purchase for them.  I agree with Fred that Skype still has even greater potential as a business, and we may look back at Skype and think that $3 billion was a bargain. Perhaps one day Silver Lake will come along with its $50 billion Fund VII and buy eBay fifteen years from now to break out its undervalued Skype and PayPal assets the way it did with Seagate.

Link: Silicon Valley Himalayan Expedition: LinkedIn Needs to Disintermediate Itself.

LinkedIn needs to act less like the mother at the school dance and more like the limo driver waiting to take you to the next party.

To get more funny NBC videos, "go to the source".  (Page source, that is.)

Adrianna tells me that I can't understand the plight of the underprivilaged and that its not so easy to just pick oneself up from one's bootstraps and create success in your life.

That may be true.  Its not as if I have a lot of avenues of understanding in that area. 

I don't have any friends without some kind of support structure.  I mean...   even poor actors that I know still have families to go home to and even college degrees that would allow them access to other careers.

I couldn't believe Andrew Rasiej came in FOURTH in the NYC Public Advocate's race with 5.17% of the vote.  I didn't necessarily support him, but I felt like he was EVERYWHERE and EVERYONE was talking about him.

Turns out, only the bloggers and tech people were talking about him, and the numbers seem to prove out that those were the only people he was talking to as well...   now I'm surprised we number as high as we do...  5%...    woooooo.   A victory for geeks.  A failure for diverse communication.

We're talking to ourselves... highlighting ourselves... making ourselves smarter.  The problem is, "ourselves" is a really small community... smaller than we think.

Everyday, I take more and more advantage of the little platform I've created here.  I've sourced a few deals, connected to smart people, but more importantly, I use blogging in general to gather information and feedback.  I look at all of the people who aren't publicizing themselves by blogging, and who aren't listening to blogs and I see the information gap growing and growing.  I connected to people via LinkedIn.  I lookup information on Wikipedia.  I see the most popular things going on up to the minute on the del.icio.us popular list.  But that's only the beginning.  I see who links to me... I connect with them.  Others write lists of the technologies I should be looking at.  I know several standard dev's more than the avg Joe about my world  and what's going on around me.

But its not just about my job.  Its deeper than that.  When you have this much information and personal connection to people in your own industry, you "see the path."  You see clearly that, if you make the right, and sometimes tough, choices, you can be very successful on your own terms.  I can clearly see that when I don't drink, I can wake up early the next day, work out, logon, connect, etc. all by 9:30 and be fresh, thoughtful, and hopefully impressive to anyone I might meet.

So, where does that leave the average inner city high school kid?  It used to be about just getting him to finish high school.  Then, the bar for the same level of achievement probably became a college degree.  Now, the underrepresented, underreached and undereducated seem to be getting left further and further behind as our neat little peer production community bootstraps itself to the next level.  Everytime I learn some new way to leverage technology to move ahead, recently I can't help but think who I'm moving ahead or just further away from.

How do we fix this?

Ok, so I've been thinking about conferences.  We have conferences for everything... for RSS, for blogs, for Web 2.0, for blogs about business, for blogs about blogs, for women bloggers, for women bloggers who go to conferences about RSS and then podcast about them...   you get the point.  And, to some extent, its a lot of the same people that sits on a lot of these panels. 

What if we did a conference for (and perhaps by) the segment of the population that's getting left the furthest behind and we featured all of us talking heads that usually talks to ourselves?

Here's the idea:

In conjunction with public schools, non-profits, etc. we get a bunch of inner city kids to attend a conference loosely about the future... their future.... and additionally, our future, because they are a big part of the youth of America.  Think Larry and Sergey in a discussion group with some kids from Mott Haven in the Bronx.  Let's get them understanding what Google is as a business, but also have them understand who built it, why, how and what it took as people to get it off the ground.  At the same time, Larry and Sergey should learn about what the lives of these kids are like... hear the stories of friends lost to drugs or violence.  Let's get these kids blogging the conference... and boost some of them up the Feedster 500.  We'll put the smartest people we know together with the students who know the most about that world... because they live it everyday.  How about some collaborative panels?   Maybe Bill Gates could create a presentation together with a 15 year old single mom about...  I don't know...  maybe just parenting.  We could have workshops aimed at answers, roadmaps, how to's, etc.  Let's talk about how to get the underprivilaged youth of America back on track, but not just back on track, but winning the race.  What will it take for some kid to grow up coding in the projects and creating something that not only lifts him up, but lifts his peers as well.

And everyone donates their time and effort.  The venue donates the space.  The speakers donate their knowledge and time, etc.  Perhaps we do it with multiple industries over time.  We could do 6 conferences...  one on tech, one on media, one on education.....  who knows.

Here are some of my questions:

Does the idea hold water?   Is it too extreme and will their be too much culture clash to get anything done or any understanding?  Who best to speak?  Does it make sense to narrow it by industry? 

I write this post not because I think I have all the answers, but because I'm interested in the ideas of other people who take an interest in social software.

I've written a lot about LinkedIn, because I see a lot of potential in that service-or at least its potential to power and improve a lot of the other services I use.  At the same time, I've grown pretty frustrated with the service because I don't see it moving towards fulfilling that potential. 

The biggest problem with the closed social networks is that other than the actual exercise of connecting to people, there isn't  a lot to do on them.  There are two solutions around that.  First, you could build the entire suite of services that you thing people would like to do.  That's what I think MySpace is doing.  On MySpace, you don't just connect, you communicate, you consume media, you have the flexibility to express yourself...those three things right there are about 90% of what their demographic wants to do... And that's what makes it so popular.

The other alternative is to plugin and power everyone else's services.  That now seems to be the Plaxo model.  Every now and the Plaxo tells me someone I know has a new phone number...and that's useful to me.  Other than that, I have no idea what its doing.  Its just kind of sitting there somewhere, lurking in the background, making sure I have people's updated information.   Maybe I should be concerned.  I don't know what the business model there is either, but if you're not going to enable your community to consume your services, then I think that's your only option.  (BASF..we don't make any of this stuff...we make it better...)

LinkedIn seems to be caught in between.  They really haven't successfully built out a suite of services that people want to use on a regular basis, but they don't seem too interested in powering anyone else's either.  Hence the stagnation in their site traffic:

I don't even think they need to remake the whole service to significantly improve the usage.  Here are five lightweight features LinkedIn could implement to get themselves more usefully integrated into my life and maybe a decent percentage of their network:

1. Mimic the Plaxo update functionality with contacts.  Contact info on Linkedin is an "excuse me" feature.  You can input all your info, but they never remind you to, so, at best, most of the Vcards you can download only have a name and an e-mail.  On that note, it shouldn't even be a Vcard.  Automatic plugin.  If we connect on LinkedIn, your phone number should be in my Outlook. 
2. Recognize that people aren't just static contacts in the world of professional networking--they're continual reminders.  LinkedIn should integrate with my calendar, contacts, and tasks, and remind me to talk to particular people, and at the same time provide me with their one-click contact info.  Even if you're not trying to sell anything to anyone, the task of keeping your network fresh is still very task oriented.  You make phonecalls, you send emails, you do lunch.  One major problem I seem to have with a lot of the people I meet is that I get their contact info, but then I have no way to manage my desire to see them once a month, drop them a biweekly e-mail, or whatever. 
3. Allow me to write my own notes on people.  Do you know how many times random people IM me and I have no idea who they are.  It would be even cooler if they had a little popup that was reading my e-mail, IMs, etc, and would just do me the favor of telling me who people were with my own notes and an abridged version of their Linkedin profile.  I think this would be a killer applet, because, as of right now, I don't keep this stuff anywhere.  I know some people who make notes on their Palm Desktop.  That's archaic There's got to be a better way, no?  I keep people on Linkedin and if I interact with them, Linkedin should also allow me to track and annotate those interactions.  If anyone knows of any good people management solutions, I'd be interested in hearing them.
4. Let users customize their LinkedIn profiles enough to become landing pages--destinations.  I don't like the idea that I do all the work of inviting, connecting, writing my bio, etc., but the page only helps publicize me within the walled garden.  I should be able to put my company logo, plugin del.icio.us links, whitepapers, whatever.  Its funny, because I call Linkedin the Friendster for professional people, and that's what it is.  Unfortunately, Friendster is dying because their profiles are so rigid and dead.  LinkedIn should aspire to be MySpace for professional people... a vibrant social network of thoughtful communication and "professional expression"... not just connecting. 
5. Reed's Law tells us that a network is more valuable when each and every node on the network can become its own network.  In otherwords, a group of groups is more valuable than just one big group.  Therefore, any social network would have to be crazy to do anything to hinder any kind of group creation.  In fact, they should foster it as much as possible.  Yet, the "groups" feature on LinkedIn is very limited in scope.  In fact, its kind of an exclusive club for "established, real-world organizations (e.g. legally recognized entity, membership costs money, budget, members meet face-to-face)."  It is not designed for "cybercommunities (people who read a blog, members of a mailing list, etc."   Well, why the heck not?  To be honest, I'd be much more interested in connecting up to the 500+ people who read my blog then the hundreds of people who attended the WeMedia conference.  I mean, that was an interesting conference, but I don't really share anything in common with all those people... yet my blog audience I actually talk to all the time and we're probably a more lucrative connection than two people who just went to the same conference.  If I form a group of "people who like the same stuff as me" and people agree to be in it, why wouldn't LinkedIn desire to be the place where those people connect?  Seems a bit ironic that an online professional network isn't interested in connecting up other professionals networking with each other online.  If you really want to manage my professional network, you're going to have to let me group it... and not with an application form, an approval, etc., but in minutes like Meetup.

So, how about you guys?  Anyone out there with any ideas for what LinkedIn or some of these other social networks could do for you to get more integrated into your life?

The other day, I noticed the following footer on someone's e-mail:

This email is: [ ] bloggable [ x ] ask first [ ] private

This is a smart move, especially since most bloggers seem to default to "everything is bloggable."  Will it stop someone who is absolutely determined to reblog an e-mail I send to them?  No. 

However, if it makes just one person think twice about feeding my butt to the Evil Meme God of Flame, its totally worth it.  Its on all my outgoing e-mail now.

I couldn't think of a good title for this post, so I just wrote what I was thinking.

Last night, we probably peaked at about 60 or 70 people... (I counted 45 off the top of my head that I actually match a name to a face, and that's pretty good for me).  The bar was packed, people were mixing it up, and a bunch of people came back to me and said they're going to be following up and maybe collaborating with some of the people they met.  Faaantastic!

Darren beat me to the first post and I'm glad he had a good time.  He echoed something that I've been feeling, too... that there is a definite digital buzz in New York City.  I can't wait to see everyone again, and I'm sorry I didn't get to spend as much time with each person as I would have liked.  I felt like all I kept doing last night was walking away from people to meet more people. 

One thing that is different from some of the other digital parties I've seen.  Seems that New Yorkers are more interested in actually talking to each other than taking pictures of each other.  That's probably a good thing. 

I did manage to get a few pictures, though.  I don't know if anyone else did, but I'll be tagging mine nextNY, obviously.  Oh, and as per usual, if you want to chat with people about this blog post, you can click the "live chat" next to the screaming man icon at the end of this post.

Here's my fav:

If you're bald, and you work in tech or new media in NYC, nextNY is obviously the party for you.