Like Mayfield... 

Others don't.  I won't say anything more about this so as not to interfere with the sanctity of Wikipedia.

Secrecy creates more things to steal.

When all information is public, is it made completely harmless?

Line of thought from Esther .... Are  we looking for privacy or attention?

Do we want to solve the identity problem because we want to broadcast ourselves with clarity or to lock our identities up?

I'll be blogging intermittently from the conference. Jon Palfrey hit the nail right on the head right away.

How do you make all this stuff real?

Second life. ID meta systems.

Social network identity.

Avatars.

How do you make digital identity something important, useful, empowering?

Web 2.0 is fueled by data.  Mashups don't mashup technologies, they mash together information.  The more data you have, the more interesting the applications can be.

Unfortunately, we are suffering a data crisis.  To be honest, there really isn't much data out there that is open that is useful to the average person, and I think that's why some Web 2.0 applications are having trouble getting traction in the mainstream.

There are still too many closed pools of data out there, and opening them up would make for some interesting new services. 

Here's my The Top 10 Data Pools That Need to Be Open

1) Medical records - There's really just no excuse for this.  Its my body.  Any information that any doctor gets off of it should be owned by me and accessable online.  I should be able to chart my cholestorol levels, weight, etc, going back to when I was born. 

2) Credit card purchase history - Three months?  This is silly.  Not only should credit cards have my total history available to me online, but there should be APIs on it, too, so that financial data services can help me analyze my spending.  I wouldn't mind if they did item level breakdowns or started pumping in SKUs, too, so I can reorder things, but that's probably just a pipe dream.  Still, I think retailers would benefit a lot from giving the CC companies more data on each purchase.  This also solves the Amazon purchase history problem as well.

3) Elias Sports Bureau - Why is there no consumer version of this?  If I want to look up Frank Tanana's home record on Wednesdays, I should be able to do that in an ad supported site.

4) Public transportation - If I leave now, am I going to catch the R train or just miss it?

5) Friend behavior - First off, who are my friends, really.  I hope whoever succeeds at doing MyWare can help me figure out who I actually talk to the most across the phone, IM, email, MySpace comments, etc.  Then, I'd like to be able to see at least the aggregate of what they're up to.  Are they all swarming around the same local news article?  This is not a database that needs to be opened... its one that needs to be created and then opened, with permissions of course.

6) Local item availability - Does the local hardware store carry sun protectant stuff for vinyl convertible tops?  No?  Who has this item within a 5 block radius?  Searching Best Buy's inventory is cool, but knowing where I can cheap dental floss would be even better.

7) Web traffic - Most of the tools for measuring other people's web traffic are pretty crappy and never work.  Why don't we call just join a collective and share that data amongst ourselves?  Maybe SiteMeter needs to have a site where you can search by website like Alexa to get the traffic and do comparative analytics.

8)

9)

10)

Tuesday night, 50 young entreprenuers and potential entreprenuers gathered at Manatt Phelps and Phillips to hear about what it takes to start a business from people who have either done it before or supported those who had.

We had a great lineup of experienced NYC tech leaders taking part in the roundtable discussion:

Jason McCabe Calacanis, CEO, Weblogs, Inc., An AOL Company

Ian Landsman, Userscape Software

Jay Rand, Partner, Manatt

Jackie Reed, Business Consultant, Administaff

David S. Rose, Angel Investor

Peter Semmelhack, Founder, Antennae Software, BugLabs

Michael Volpatt, Partner, Larkin/Volpatt Communications

Albert Wenger, President of del.icio.us through Yahoo! acquisition

It was really a strong turnout by the up and coming NYC tech crowd and I think we all walked away with a lot of food for thought from the speakers.   Seems like nextNY is turning a momentum corner here as we start to contribute more back to our participants and trying to identify what people feel like they need to be successful.

You'll see us do more of these Community Conversation events in the future and if you're a young member of the NYC tech community, please join us.  Help us run future events or just generate ideas.

I'll also echo our desire to have a more balanced representation in our community...  so all if you NYC geek girls, join us!

Thanks to all who participated!

Reactions to the event:

From Ian...

From Sean...

From Umair...   We should really all chip in and get him this for his neverending crusade on behalf of us edgedwellers.

"Let me make that more concrete: Media is deeply personal, social, cultural, human, creative - "

Ok.. just stop right there and think about that for a second.  Sink in?  Good.

"...and so it's economics aren't those of simple technological scale, because, more often than not, technological scale kills those things (think Clear Channel roboDJs). The real opportunity is in leveraging the new forms at the edges of the firms - markets, networks, communities - to explode just how personal, social, cultural, human and creative media can be...

 ...If there's a single lesson those industries yield today, it's that that entire way of thinking about business is deeply out of touch with the new world of consumption. And ultimately, that's the flaw at the heart of the Googleverse - consumers play almost exactly the same role in it that they did, suprisingly, in the industrial economy.

        NB: No, I'm not saying that "empowered" consumers will begin composing sonatas and producing movies to rival         Kiarostami's . Rather, I'm pointing out that the economics of cultural industries change when consumers connect, and we should see greater (returns to) creativity; not necessarily because consumers make them, but maybe only because consumers are better at helping choose them."

Read the whole thing here...

It really deserves this quote:

"I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone, and I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world without you. I'm going to show them a world without rules or controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you."

This is from Tom Evslin.

When businesses are paying $20K site licenses for mission critical data applications, and something goes wrong, they e-mail, they call...  you hear from them and its not very difficult for your support staff to track bugs in the system.

But what about consumers?

When is the last time you used a consumer app that you weren't "testing" and something was a little bit buggy, so you e-mailed the company with the details of the problem?

Ok, for us tech geeks, maybe that was just this morning, but for most people, they just move on and ignore it.  That presents a difficult problem for designers of consumer facing apps who need to know how their system is working and where its not. 

Consumers don't generally want to e-mail for support, but they might flag things.  The funny thing is, even though they aren't willing to commit much in terms of communicaion, they definitely want communication back.  They want to know that someone is working on something.  Maybe every app should make their trouble ticket list public and searchable, and include how many other people flagged an item.

The folks at nextNY have been talking about building a New York City tech calendar of all the events, from Meetups to Drinkups to Mashups.  We think it would be a great service to the community.

The problem is that there isn't any calendaring software that actually has a calendar and allows for anyone to post to it without an account or password.   

We'd like to avoid mashing up two services...  like posting in Upcoming and subscribing to a feed in Gcal to publish it in calendar form.

It would be really easy for someone like Kiko or 30 Boxes just to allow someone to create a calendar and allow public posting with some sort of approval or notification... sort of like a cross between a wiki and a calendar.

It would be ideal of we could also subscribe to RSS feeds of other tech events.

It sort of strikes me as odd that all of these Web 2.0 calendars would put limitations on the most basic calander element itself--posting. 

If anyone knows someone at a Web 2.0 calendar company and can get them to create something where anyone can just come and post and display a calendar somewhere, let me know!  We'd like to help pull something together that is of great benefit to the local community here.

There are a handful of people making great little businesses out of introducing the best ideas to the cash and advice needed to make them great.

Frankly, I'm not a fan of this model at all.

I don't think you should have to pay to meet a VC if you're an entreprenuer.  You should be able to pour all your money into your idea, making it successful and visable enough to garner interest from the more aware and relevent VCs in your space. 

So if you're an entreprenuer debating whether or not you should "dress up and save up" to present at a big conference or even a local "summit" to meet people who might fund you, well, you can do what you want, but I just don't like the principal of the whole thing.

I think we should be paying to meet you.  I mean, the reality is, while a startup can bootstrap itself and doesn't necessarily need VC money, a VC fund can't bootstrap itself.  Without entreprenuers, VC funds don't exist, but the same is not true in the reverse.  We need you more than you need us, so an entreprenuer paying to meet us seems like it should be an economic anomaly.

Over the weekend, I installed a ceiling fan in my bedroom.

Now, you might not think this is such a big deal, but keep in mind that I've had absolutely no experience dealing with anything electrical whatsoever.  I think it runs in the genes, though, because my grandfather could do almost anything with electricity.  He used to have this little bulb with two wires on the end of it that he would use to test to see of the sockets he installed were working.

Of course, it would have been easier and probably safer to have an experienced professional do this for me, but I just had to take a crack at it myself.  My "flashlight helper" was betting that I'd "smash and break" something...most likely me.

Once I think I have some understanding of how a system works, I can generally take a very methodical approach to dissecting it and problem solving.  This one included turning on all the lights and appliances to map my circuit breakers and figure out which switch controlled which outlet.  I went to Home Depot to get the fans and also pick up some rubber handled pliers and a wire stripper. 

What I realized yesterday and what I've been thinking about since my last review here at USV is that this is the kind of challenge I'm really meant for...  taking something new to me apart, figuring out how it works, and taking a crack at building it up. 

When I first joined here, it was pitched to me as a two year position, but to be honest, I largely ignored that.  I sort of figured that I'll just make myself so totally indespensible that there's no way anyone would want to get rid of me.  Then, after a while, seeing the tech landscape evolving, meeting smart entreprenuers who tackle tough problems, and seeing the business world get changed by the power of the consumer, I've had this growing urge to want to join the fray. 

But really, who doesn't?  (And who isn't?)  I guess what I'm saying is that I'm slowing realizing that this isn't a new thing for me... that this need to be in the middle of the building process goes back to when I used to sit on my bedroom floor and build sprawling LEGO towns.   

So what does that mean for me next?  Well, first off, I'm a big believer in the idea that you don't go anywhere unless you get the job at hand done first.  So, I'll still be nose to the grindstone here at USV working on all the great deals we're looking at now.  (We're closing on two this week... news to come...)  But as I look at these deals, I'll also be looking to try and understand where it is that I think, should the opportunity arise, where I could have the most positive impact by working more closely with a company. 

So, as I write here, don't be surprised if I start doing a lot of self assessement, thinking about my future, etc.   I certainly welcome any conversation from people in a similar boat and I've been talking to a lot of very experienced mentors and peers lately about the subject. 

When Brian Oberkirch showed up at our last nextNY gathering, we talked about how, if this were the Valley, we would have had 50 pictures of us uploaded to Flickr before the night was through.  Instead, we had to find somebody with a camera...  one of like 5 people out of our group of 150 with a Flickr account. 

And we have a whopping 11 bloggers among us...  (Actually, 12... that I know of.  Someone didn't even bother adding their name to the wiki.)

Are they disinterested?  Not at all!!  In fact, we're running an "Community Conversation" about all the nuts and bolts stuff it takes to take your idea from napkin to real company, called "Startup 101".

In just a couple of days, we're basically all filled up...  45 attendees... pretty much all young entreprenuers building startups, outlining ideas, consulting others.  So, they saw something informative and jumped all over it.

But, I'll bet you I'll be the only one there with a camera.

New Yorkers seem to have a different view on the value of buzz and splash... at least in the tech community.  Maybe its the fact that, despite being the 3rd largest area for startups in the country, tech is never going to be the #1 thing going on in this city, so people don't even try to be "rockstars".  Tech buzz is slow in this town, contracted with actual tech action which has heated up and is boiling over at the moment.  There are a ton of new startups popping up everyday and lots of great events to go to.

It just doesn't seem like it sometimes if you check out all the usual Web 2.0 channels. 

Perhaps its a PR issue.   

So I was thinking...   what if, instead of spending all their PR resources on promotion of their own companies, what if a big group of VC firms, tech companies, etc. got together and all chipped in a little bit to put a blogger on the street.  Arm them with a camera and a digital audio recorder.  Let them blog every event, do podcast interviews at the NY Tech Meetup, and Flickr the nextNY events to death.  And seriously, there are a ton of events.  We've got conferences and user groups... dodgeball tournaments, too!   Maybe the WSJ or the NYT should do it...  but seriously there needs to be someone whose primary focus is making sure everything going on in NYC is properly reflected in the Web 2.0 glob of buzz.

Buzz goes a long way... it goes a long way when you've got college grads from Carnegie Mellon and Urbana Champlain deciding whether to code their way east or west...  when you've got companies trying to figure out where to set up shop... or even when people here are deciding whether or not to manage IT systems for Goldman Sachs or be the CTO of their best friend's startup.  We all need to be doing a much better job of representing our NYC community here on the web, but I think supporting someone doing it fulltime might be a good addition to the conversation.

Good article from a local entreprenuer on whether people working on startups should also be doing contract work.

Coming from the Limited Partner side, I've had the opportunity to see investing in private equity from high level portfolio allocation perspective...  leveraged buyouts, venture, distressed investments, etc.

It always struck me when people talked about making an "allocation" to venture capital, as if it was somewhere that you could just stick a lot of money and get something close to historical returns.  Not only is that not true, but I think that what most institutional investors even call "venture capital" is a terrible catch-all for a pretty diverse set of investment strategies across a number of uncorrellated industries.

I mean, should a $50 million investment in a profitable and growing healthcare services company from a group like Summit Partners fall into the same "asset class" as a small angel/seed round in a company like del.icio.us that started out with one guy and one server?   Do those investments have any correlation whatsover?

Granted, when the public markets are doing well, rising tides tend to float all ships and that's when you get outsized "VC" returns.  But, keep in mind that one of the best venture investments ever, Google, was made during one of the worst possible periods of venture investment... ever.  Google's first VC round game in June of 1999.  How many other companies that got their first round of investment in June of 1999 are even still around?  Selecting from that vintage would be an exercise in catching... well... forget falling knives...  try falling hand grenades... oh, and one golden egg, of course.

The reality of venture capital is that its a relationship business where reputations and industry expertise count.  You're betting on people... people who are betting on other people.  The idea that you could group all of these people in one bucket and make assumptions and predictions that all of these people are going to move in step always seemed a bit silly to me.  Just because you can aggregate data doesn't mean you should.

In fact, if you're not betting on the right people, its really not even worth being in this "asset class" to begin with.  Take this chart.  This chart plots "vintage year" returns across time of the top quartile, median, and bottom quartile of VC funds.  So, for example, this chart says that the green spike is the aggregate IRR of the top quartile funds that began in 1997.  So, that money was largely put to work in '97, '98, and '99, and those companies exited in the '99 and '00 timeframes... a great time to exit, but not a great time to start putting your money to work as you can see from the really low returns garnered by even the best managers who raised their funds in '99.

I plotted these returns against the next 3 years returns from the S&P.  Its not exact, but it gives you a sense of what your money would have been doing in the public market over the next few years if you had put your money in public stocks as an alternative. 

What is says is that venture really only makes sense if you are with the right firms.  Even the median venture manager doesn't outperform the S&P 500, particularly when you take risk into consideration. 

So when people say, "I'm bearish on venture" are they talking about median managers or top folks, because I'll always be bearish on median managers, but I'd be happy to invest with the best of the best, no matter what the market looks like for public exits, IT spend, etc.   In fact, it is great innovation by the best of entreprenuers that often drives these markets and spending.  I'm sure any CTO would find the money for the next big idea that solves all of his or her problems no matter what their budget looked like.

The bottleneck here is access.  Not everyone can get into the best managers.  In fact, if you're a new investor, you might even have trouble getting into even the second tier.  But everyone who invests on the LP side thinks their managers are the best, right?  And obviously, not everyone can be the top quartile, as the saying goes.  How many people are top tier?  Who are they?  Well, that's a whole debate in and of itself, but I'm just more concerned with the idea that investors look at venture capital as a homogeneous set of investments that can be slotted into an efficient frontier, because its quite the opposite.  Investors need to consider their own opportunity set, due diligence their managers thoroughly, and make bets on people the same way VCs do.  How much money could you actually put to work with managers you think you have the right relationships and industry knowledge to succeed? 

I mean, can you imagine if we decided here at USV to make a 25% allocation to "online advertising" and put our money out that way, regardless of what kind of entreprenuers walk out the door?  Certain not a good style of investing and not the way I'd pick VCs either.

So I was just clicking around my blog looking for something, and I noticed something weird about my last 50 Favorite Movies post.  It had an Amazon ad on it...  not the link to the DVD that I usually have, but an actual ad--an annoying flashing/blinking one at that, too.   I figured I pasted the wrong link or something, but then I went back and realized that about half of my movie links had turned into ads. 

So, I pasted a link to a DVD that I'd like to sell as an Amazon Associate, and Amazon's been switching my links out for house ads.

That's pure bullshit.

I don't care if it says that they can in small type somewhere, that's just wrong.  I set up those links so people could find the movies I'm pitching...   not so that Amazon can have ad inventory just to promote its big sale.

That's totally obnoxious and as soon as I get a chance, I'm going to go back and rip down my Amazon links.

Amazon Associate?  No thanks.  I'd rather not "associate" with them on my blog if they're going to pull that.

I'd rather give IMDB the traffic.

Here's the picture of what they put up on my site:

An end to Y.A.F.P.?

Link: SiliconBeat: AlwaysOn's Tony Perkins to launch GoingOn.

Link: Allen's Blog.

Allen Morgan from Mayfield is a VC blogger who seems to have been blogging under the radar compared to guys like Fred, Ed and Brad.  He is currently posting his 10 Commandments for Entrepreneurs...   really great stuff and a must read for anyone looking to get VC funding.  While I'm sure this post will help a lot of startups, I'm sure it will help Allen as well...  making meetings with entreprenuers as effective as possible, which would be important given the lines out the door that must form at a VC firm with a reputation like Mayfield. 

I'm not going to post about last night without explaining why there were 30 of my friends at Bar 515 celebrating.  While I can't say yet where I'm going (not until Monday anyway), the big news is that Friday, February 11, 2005 will be my last day at General Motors Asset Management.  After a little over eight years, I will be moving on for a really fantastic opportunity.  It has been a great experience, which I will write lots about when I make my official announcement on Monday.  For now, I'll just be concentrating on the party last night. 

I think Tim really captured the significance of the occasion when he asked, "What else have you done in your life for eight years so far?  Nothing."  He was totally right.  GM had been the longest continuous association/presense I've ever had.  Talk about an era.  Anyway...  more on Monday.  On to the party.

First of all, the turnout was amazing.  I really didn't expect so many people to show.  One of Dorean's friends said to me, "Wow, you have a lot of friends."   I guess I do.  I just don't like losing touch with people, especially when I've met quality people.  My life, in spite of the fact that it hasn't taken me too far geographically, has taken me through a lot of different groups of people and so I've met a lot of people that I would like to keep around.  Last night, people from so many different parts of my life were represented.  It was a little overwhelming to see them all there at once, and to feel like you're responsible for them having a good time.  I suppose that's what the alcohol is there for... its like a babysitter.  "Mr. Beer, could you watch Brian for a little while while I go greet some guests?"  Anyway, there were people from home, from Genesis, Regis/Marymount days, Fordham, GM, kayaking, baseball.  I thought it would be interesting to plot the entrance of selected people into my life on a timeline. 

No, I'm serious, I actually did it:

It will be interesting to see how that plays out over time.  Maybe I'll do another one for my grad school going away party.  :)

Anyway, I know you're all dying to see the pictures.  To be honest, I didn't get as many people as I would have liked to.  I was pretty busy hanging out with everyone, but I did get a few.  Perhaps I should have deputized some people at the bar with the Powershot.  That always seems to get the volume up and the quality down.