If I had a Cliche of the Week, I think it would have to be "Flickr for Video"...  at least this week anyway.  It seems like in the last few months or so, we've seen a lot of new focus on video, whether its user generated or Apple-repurposed.  YouTube got funding, the CollegeHumor guys refocused on Vimeo, and Alex Vitaki is working hard to build Castpost, to name a few.

People are going to keep their videos somewhere, don't get me wrong, and they're going to want to share, discover, etc.  So, there probably is a Flickr type business model there somewhere, but that's not so interesting to me.

I was speaking with an entrepreneur about this the other day and they told me that they were experimenting with ads inserted in the videos.  Ugh...    I just had a bad reaction to that... the same bad reaction I had when CNN was showing mortgage ad clips everytime I wanted to watch a Hurricane Katrina video.  I'm glad they stopped doing that after a while.

Around the same time, I saw the new Dunkin Donuts commercial where the the CEO gets some cornrows in addition to his new vanilla spice latte, prompting a lackey to say, "That's kind of a new thing for you sir, isn't it?"   Its hilarious.

Then it hit me.   That commercial is so funny, I'd love to run the clip on my blog.  In fact, there are a lot of good commercials that I'd love to run on my blog.  (My favorite all time commercial is the Outpost.com one where they shoot the hamster through the O in outpost... or at least attempt to, and they miss, smacking the poor things against the other letters.)

If I did that, though, why shouldn't I get paid for that? 

In fact, Dunkin Donuts probably would pay me for that if they could.  Advertisors have come up with all sorts of stupid little ways to steal desktop space from me... to get in front of my face in annoying ways with clips, sound, etc.  What if we could just choose commercials to view...   to go to a site, pick the best video clip commercials we can find, and get paid to have our audiences glue their little eyeballs to your 30 second clip.  Some of them are pure entertainment.  I think that would be a great use for some of these video clip services... and a good business model for them.

Even better would be if you let the audience create their own.  What if Dunkin Donuts said, "Ok, we're looking for commercials that have the product in it the whole time, no profanity, nudity, whatever, and are funny as hell."   How many college kids would probably make really fantastic Dunkin Donuts commercials worth watching, displaying on blogs, and e-mailing it to others?  Remember when someone made a Tiger Woods/Nike ad?   Someone else made their own iPod ads.

For companies, it would create cheap advertising, brand awareness, and really capture the attention their looking for.  For bloggers and other publishers, they would be getting paid to display the most entertaining content.  For video creators, they could get a cut, too, and get their name out, and, if nothing else, the pure satisfaction of starring in their own commercials or having the most popular one.

So instead of trying to sneak your way into my attention, why not let the community create something worthy of my attention for the brands they're passionate about, and then pay them for it?

Makes me think of when I was in the fifth grade and Sal Auteri, a tough, bruising little guido if you ever saw one, was doing a class presentation.  It was supposed to be a "TV Newscast" about the state of Missouri or something.  His group couldn't get his act together and all of the sudden, he just turns to the class , rubs his cheek and goes, "Use Dove soap.  It doesn't try your face like other soaps..."   Pure humor.   User generated commercial clips on the web.  I'd click on that and I think advertisers would be to have me watch it.

Just ONCE, I'd like someone to write a story about how students can actually use the internet, blogging and social networks in particular, for good.

The NYT has story today about "outed" anonymous blogging interns....   

I thought we were supposed to be teaching our students how to take advantage of new technologies, not make them afraid.

Companies should be encouraging their interns to blog...  so that they can promote all the great things about their internship programs, the cool things going on at their companies, etc.   They should also be reviewing privacy policies and making clear what's ok to post and what's not.  As long as its done in a responsible way, why would you want to crush your employee's interest in voluntarily associating themselves with their company?  And if one of them is disgruntled... you should work with them to right the wrongs...   not silence their voice.

According to Susan Wojcicki, Google VP of Product Management:

• Focused on a product designed for real users
• Set a strong vision about information access
• Took hiring very seriously; lots of energy into trying to hire the right people. Most of the early hires are now VPs of major areas (of the first 35, 6 are VPs)
• Performed scientific-level analysis of what worked

From Christine Herron.

I think the most important two are product and people.   Get the product right and get the right people behind it.  (Often, getting the product right means having the right people to define and create it.. so its a virtuous circle.)

Being at a VC firm, you get to see a lot of little bits of cool stuff that come together to form a trend or a realization... insight into the big picture.   

Last week, Dice ran an ad in Fred's blog with the words, "Does your tech job suck?"  In the ad itself was a search box and an action button to generate a job query.  They could have created a job search widget and asked Fred to place it on his blog, but instead they just found it easier to figure out what they could monetize a search at, and pay their way into Fred's blog through a functional ad banner.

In the same vein, Brad and I were on a call the other day where we were talking to a VC behind a popular social network making an intro to one of our companies for a business development relationship.  However, the company didn't really have a lot of bandwidth to spare for integration, joint development, etc...    so the VC just suggested we try and do something in the ad banner space.

Brad called it "self serve business development."

I think as smaller and smaller pieces of code can generate more and more functionality, and sites open up more of their data to powering advertising, you're going to see a lot more functional and interactive advertising show up on websites to the point where you think they're actually part of the site or doing some kind of joint development.  The lines between what's a service and what is an ad are definitely blurring.

1. Take care of your own business before you start a new one.
2. Project a positive and professional image to generate trust.
3. Pay attention... listen, ask.
4. Dive into your interests and make your life reflective of who you are.
5. Don't wait for someone to tell you to be an entreprenuer... only you can hire yourself.
6. Think long term.
7. Know yourself.
8. Constantly reevaluate.
9. Deligate.  Share both responsibility and credit.
10. Learn from your mistakes and failures.

Its an arms race out there.

I have 17' wheels on my car, but I know there's someone out there with an 18' inch set.

I could buy a gold plated cellphone, but you know someone else probably has diamonds.

So how do you win?  What's the bling that no one else can top?

Me.

Me-bling, actually.  Anyone can get a ringtone just like yours, or steal your MySpace background, but no one else is going to use your own expression of yourself to top you. 

So, no matter how many people get avatars...  no one else will have the bald Charlie avatar who stands in front of the boathouse, goes to Met games or stands in Union Square.  Why would they?

I think if we've learned anything from the whole blog revolution, its that people want to be able to interact with the media and services they consume, and to express themselves in a personal way.  I think the growth of the "virtual goods" markets like in Second Life or MMPORGs, the ringtone market, etc. proves that you can also make a great business out of enabling these things.  What will be interesting is how you do it on the web, where standards are open, HTML is pastable, screens are capturable, and unlike mobile phones, distribution isn't locked down.

Every morning, I get two private equity industry newsletters in my inbox.  One is PE Week Wire from Thomson and the other is VentureWire Alert from Dow Jones.

Today I unsubscribed from Dow Jones.

Why? 

Because they're basically the exact same content, except that, with PE Week Wire, I get the commentary (essentially blogging) of Dan Primack, an actual human being with a personality who I've met before.  When all content is equal and I can access anything, I'll take my content with a pulse, thank you.  Dan runs Final Four tournaments and complains when the "Trusty Pontiac" isn't so trusty.

DJ VentureWire wants me to pay to get anything more than about 8 words and there are no mention of any humans who contribute to the production of their newsletter.

So, here's my choice every morning:

From DJ Newswire:

venture market summary

By VentureWire Staff Reporters

Investors across the Atlantic appear more willing to line up behind companies raising larger rounds, as the median size of venture capital commitments to European start-ups in the first quarter reached a six-year high.

(story continues for a few stale paragraphs...)

Chinese Podcasting Site Toodou.com Raises $8.5M Series B

By VentureWire Staff Reporters

5/15/2006 – Toodou.com, a Shanghai-based podcasting Web site, has raised $8.5 million in Series B funding [ full story ] <-- Subscribers only.

From PE Week Wire:

Random Ramblings

Back in the saddle after my short

Toronto

I’m not going to provide a speech transcript (nor could I, since it was based on just a few lines of written notes), but here’s the gist:

There are three major private equity trends that will likely reshape the market for decades to come. The first is also the most obvious: Globalization. Most talk of private equity globalization revolves around investment opportunities, but the more salient focus should be on helping existing (read: more localized) portfolio companies leverage the global market. This isn’t to say that certain firms won’t make millions on Chinese software companies and Indian drugmakers, but rather that most firms can not reasonably expand their investment bandwidth to global limits. In other words, Sequoia and DFJ are the exceptions rather than the rules.

More of Dan's "blog" here...

And just enough news to actually inform me of something....

Toodou.com, a

Shanghai

Tuesday night, nextNY will be gathering after work at Slainte at 304 Bowery between Houston and Bleeker.   

You should come...  In fact, if you come to any of our events, I'll put it out there that this is the single most important event to be at in the short history of this burgeoning group.

Why?

Because, now, we're over the hump of trying to come into existance.  We exist.  We're 140 on our listserv.  We have a real website.  Now its not about, "Will this work?" as it is about "Now that this works, what do you want to do with it?"

So some of us will be meeting at 6PM on the dot to go over some ideas we have for public discussions, like a Startup 101 with some of the most successful area entrepreneurs.  But really, everybody there should be talking about "what next" because the larger this group gets, the less its about nextNY and the more its about the up and coming members of the NYC digitial community.   What do we want to be as a whole? What's the message we want to broadcast? 

In my mind, its that NYC is the best place for ambitious and creative people to build their best ideas into reality.  But that doesn't happen if we're all onesies and twosies drowned out by the noise of the finance crowd of Wall St., the advertising people of Madison Ave., the actors on Broadway, and all the other industries are huge in NYC.  I'd love for this group to have a show of force in numbers tomorrow... over 100...  and not just attending... but going home to post Flickr photos, to blog, to invite others to join, to really turn the volume up on the buzz...     because our future content needs to be reflective of what the larger community is interested.  Because if we're to get the large tech firms like Google and AOL to engage us at all... they've got to hear the buzz loud and clear. 

I hope you all can make it tomorrow, and please don't hesitate to bring friends.

Thanks for all of your time and effort to make this great.

Andrew at Phanfare was answering a completely seperate question when he noted what I think is a really interesting consideration.

"What Skype sells, mostly, is the ability to call in and out of the traditional phone network (SkypeIn and SkypeOut). That makes strategic sense. The free users don’t cannibalize the sale of the SkypeIn and SkypeOut (well maybe to a very small degree since the more Skype users there are, the fewer people outside of Skype there are to call), and in fact increase the pool of people who might buy the upsell."

So, when we all have free Wifi or WiMax or WiWhatever and we're all using Skype to call each other...

...  How does Skype make money?

I mean, the whole business of Skype is based on the concept that there are people not on Skype, because you only pay to receive or make calls from outside the Skype network to regular phonelines.

Can you think of another example of a business where converting every last human being on the face of the earth to customers would drive revenues to zero?

I really like your little Spam Catcher thing on my desktop.  Catching all the IMs from people not on my buddy list is smart and a much needed product.

Unfortunately, you made it a client side tool rather than a server side tool.  Therefore, it doesn't work when I forward IMs to my phone when I'm idle, because the forwarding happens before the spam catching. 

Also, screenames caught in my Spam Catcher should never show up in my Recent Buddies list.  I do not need to know when spammers have signed in. 

Thank you.

Recently, an entreprenuer e-mailed us with an pretty good beta version of his site on a development server.  I asked him why he didn't just release it and see what people did with it.

He was waiting to hear back from TechCrunch to get it reviewed and then launch it.

Here's what I wrote back:

"TechCrunch is the hottest girl in the class in junior high.  You felt compelled to ask her out because it was widely accepted that she was the most desireable date.  That says nothing about whether or not the two of you would make a good match.  Find the right girl not the hot girl.  I'd say to hit up [Meetup groups of people into the kind of activity relevent to your site]...if you can't gain traction with them first then no amount of techcrunch buzz will help.  (might even be distracting noise)..."

Josh Kopelman seems to be echoing these sentiments.  Too many people are focused on building things for a really small audience, and in this case, perhaps not even the most relevent audience.

I would imagine that Mike Arrington would probably agree... that you don't build for TechCrunch or wait for TechCrunch...  you go out and try to build the best service that could gain wide adoption with a large audience... and he'll provide some smart insight and feedback, and spotlight when people are doing something really right or really wrong.

And that goes for DEMO, the Wall Street Journal, or any other site.  Its cool to have a big press "launch", but don't actually wait to release something just to time it with a big PR splash.  Just get it out there!

So when it comes down to it, I really had no business trying to ask Dawn out on the 5th grade, but I understood why I did it.  Prettiest girl in the class... you feel compelled to take a shot because you think that's going to make life wonderful...  and that might get you 10,000 users if you get 20% penetration (with Techcrunch, not with the date... get your mind out of the gutter), but then what? 

Niki Scevak posted a comment on Fred's blog that included the fact that Monster has more than doubled in share price in the last year.  In fact, the stock is up about 6X from March '03.

How's that even possible?

It blows my mind that, somehow, paying $300 to post a job on a job board is still a valuable proposition to someone.  You could get absolutely no resumes, not even any views and still have to fork over the money.

Job postings are really just

There are a lot of great things I can say about the two jobs I've held so far.  I've worked with really smart people.  I've been compensated fairly.  They've been flexible about my need to leave a little early once a week for the occasional early softball game.

But the most rewarding aspect of my job has been that my employers have been sincerely interested in my own growth and personal development.  We've been able to maintain an open dialogue about what I was interested in doing, the skills they thought I needed to develop, and the balance between those things and the job at hand.  They've also treated my ideas with respect and allowed me to maintain a relatively public presence. 

Salary and benefits are always nice, but not feeling like your company is trying to hide you and keep you chained in the basement like some bastard stepchild...well that's pretty irreplaceable.  I can't tell you how many stories I've heard of my friends who do all the work for the client, but don't get to go to the client dinners, because that's a "partner thing".  Another great example is the PR person who writes his company's blog under his CEO's name, but isn't  allowed to post on his own and create a name for himself, or respond to any comments.

That kind of treatment creates a bad relationship with your employee.  It signals a lack of confidence.  Its the kind of thing that causes people to leave without warning, because you've built up this underlying resentment growing within your firm.

So put yourself in every last employees shoes if you run a company and ask yourself if you would feel like your company was passionate about you.  If not, is that because you don't believe in them or is it because you've been asking for passion from them for your company but not returning it.

Passion is definitely a two way street...otherwise is just kind of an unhealthy obsession.

Sachi from Centerpoint wrote a while back about conversation in the blogosphere:

• "There are way too many monologues, and not enough dialogues, in the blogosphere.
• Likewise, there is too much talking and not enough listening.
• Comments and trackbacks are not good metrics of which blogs are being read."

Part of the problem?   Comments suck.

And I'm not the only one that thinks so.

There's lots going on in New York City over the next week.

Tonight is the ITP Spring Show.  For those of you who don't know, ITP is NYU's graduate program that combines design and technology and is one of the epicenters of creation in the NYC digitial scene.  Some very talented young minds have come out of ITP and I'm excited to meet the current group of students.  I'll be there from 5-6:30ish.

Then at 7, I'll be heading to the NY Tech Meetup.  Its going to be a packed house, so if you didn't already RSVP, I wouldn't expect to make it.

Then next Tuesday, we've got our May social gathering for nextNY.   So if you're an up and coming member of the NYC tech scene, or just in for Syndicate, stop by and say hello.  Its going to be our biggest group yet!

Back in August, I wrote about being successful in Web 2.0...      but lately, I've been a little frustrated by it.  There's a lot of noise, hype, and not as much traction and utility as one would like. 

Promise? Potential?

Yeah, its still there, but here are some of the things that are dragging it down...  The Top 10 Reasons Why Web 2.0 Sucks:

10. 

For all of about 10 seconds the other day, we threw around the idea here of a completely public deal log--being completely open about every deal that comes into the shop.

Now, I think the reality of the situation is that our LPs would think we had lost our minds, and probably a lot of entrepreneurs might think that, too, so its kind of a non-starter.  Still, the though exercise of what would actually happen doeshed some interesting light on the notion of proprietary deal flow and market pricing.

Brad Twohig from Insight, a later stage firm here in NYC, debated this over IM yesterday and so he'll be posting a response to this post.  Nothing like a little friendly VC analyst blogger debate.

I think the first thing that people would assume would happen is that you would get all your deals swiped out from under you.  I think that assumes that there is such a thing as truly proprietary deal flow.  Is there?

I actually think there is, but not because you're the only VC an entrepreneur talks to.  There is the case where you're the only VC that an entrepreneur wants to talk to, most of the time because of a previous relationship.  If you've backed someone's previous two startups with great success, its unlikely the entrepreneur is going to go searching for another partner...at least not until you get a look at it.  In this case, you could probably be as public as you want and it wouldn't matter.

The notion of partnership is key, especially in the early stage.  Entrepreneurs are looking for someone who is going to help them build their business, not just a check. 

You probably won't have the case, though, where you never worked wth the company before and somehow, by being faster or turning over more rocks, you're the only one who gets a look at a deal.  Entrepreneurs are incentivized to test the market, not jut to get an indication of pricing, but of terms and even more than that, to hear several different people give feedback on where they should take their business.  Larry Rusoff from PEQM (which used to be the GM pension fund) had a great line when it came to claims of people getting low priced deals because they were proprietary.  He said, "I get my living room rug cleaned and I get two quotes..."  Back then, we were talking about proprietary deal flow of secondary partnership interests--interests that could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.  Obviously they were going to test the market, and I'm pretty sure the same still aplies in early stage deals.  Entrepreneurs can be counted on to get a good sense of what current market pricing for their deal is, even is they aren't seriously considering a lot of those bids.

That brings me to the notion that the presence of more bids will necessarily drive the price up.  I'm not sure why that would be the case because its not like we're making the bid/ask pubic.  Its a blind auction and so even with 20 term sheets, one would imagine they'll all gravitate around a fair number anyway.  If there is an extreme outlier, I'd like to believe that the presense of more bids makes that price seem silly.  I mean, who really wants to accept a term sheet from a VC just tossing around grossly above market term sheets.  I think entrepreneurs are savvy enough to know that their best chance of success is when the term sheet is fair and works for everyone involved.

The other thing that I believe strongly about is the idea that there's a "right" VC, or at least a limited number of them, for every deal, and that chances are they're all seeing all the same deals anyway.  Most good entrepreneurs do their homework to figure out who are the three or four VCs with a track record of success in their space and a deep domain expertise.  And, I think the reality is that the number is really that low.  The venture market is so broad, from tech to retail to heathcare.  The number of VCs with successful track records going back more than a few years pretty small.  I doubt you're going to find more than a handful of people who are good fits for a deal who have also has some success in that area before.  So if you're doing chips, you're pretty likely to walk through the doors of USVP, Interwest, or Sevin Rosen and at the same time, I think someone without their experience would be hardpressed to out-chip them.

We've learned from our blogs that public dialogue, if it is positive, insightful, sincere, etc. is just as much "protection" from competition as keeping what we're looking at secret.  I mean, in all honesty, has it really been that difficult to figure out what we're working on here and who we're talking to?  Anyone who reads our blogs could probably make some pretty good guesses at what our deal log looks like... at least who we're really engaged in discussion with.  And by our combined public and private discussion, we're hoping that entreprenuers see us as the right kind of financial partners for their projects--people who understand what they're trying to build and feel the same way about the opportunity.

Plus, being public about your deal log would prevent venture fratricide and help us to fish out other people playing in the same space that might have better offerings, or just market confirmation that we were working with the right folks.

Now, of course there might be places where it didn't work...  like late stage where you're doing more financing and less company building, but I'm pretty sure our business wouldn't implode if we just opened up our deal log to the world.

Of course, that doesn't mean we're going to try it anytime soon either.  :)

First off, since we blog so much about companies we like, and use a lot of their services, often times, its not hard to figure out what we're looking at.

But, be that as it may, I went through the thought exercise today of what would happen if we made our deal log publicly available.  Its not something we're likely to do, but its interesting to think about what the repercussions would be.

So, let's say that everytime we see a new deal, it goes up on a publicly available list.

Here's what I think most people would consider the issues to be and why I'm not sure they're that big of a deal:

1. Competition
2. Pricing pressure

Engadget points out a trend on professors banning computers in the classroom... and I think its a great idea.

When I taught my blogging class last year, I did it in a computer lab.  All I heard while I was teaching was the clicking of keys...   and I guarantee you they were not taking notes.  (I know that because the two classes I took in computer labs were definately exercises in continuous partial attention.)   

So this year, I'm in a room with just desks and I've got the computer and projector up at the podium.  All eyeballs on me.  I'm all for banning the cellphones, too.

Back in November, I wrote about some ideas for improving the usefulness of LinkedIn.

And the other day, after downloading the new version of their toolbar software, I'm happy to see that at least one of these ideas found their way into the product.  Now, I take no credit for this, because I this was a fairly obvious idea that I'm sure was in the pipeline long before I brought it up.

From my post:

"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. "

Done.... sort of.  LinkedIn now reminds me if there are people who I contacted that I haven't contacted in 60 days.  That's good to know, but I think I'd like to change that setting for each of my contact.

Also a neat feature that I didn't blog about but I've been thinking about is a notifier that tells me who someone is when they e-mail me.  So, now, in Outlook, when a person e-mails me, I can mouse over a little box and it will bring up a really lightweight floating box with their key LinkedIn profile details.  This is great for someone who gets a lot of random mail like me.

In general, though, it makes me think about how companies engage with their users. 

All along, I've been complaining about how LinkedIn is the company I hate to love or maybe the other way around, because, with their size, its got so much potential but never seems as useful to me as it could be.  Now, if I knew these things were in the pipeline, I would have been more anxious and excited than frustrated. 

A blog would have helped there.  LinkedIn is a perfect example of a company with a active and chatty community, many of which are "power users" and a platform that has the potential to go in a lot of different directions.   This is the perfect opportunity to be blogging, but, so far, LinkedIn doesn't seem to be too blog friendly.  I mean, if nothing else, can we have a little pastable blog widget that shows, when you're signed in, how you might be connected to me via LinkedIn, and a click to connect?

Engaging their community in a public conversation would not only go a lot way for helping their product development, but I think it would also promote a lot of positive thinking about the direction of the product.

So, this way, instead of complaining on our own blogs, we could complain in the comment section of theirs, feed off the comments of other users, etc...