Whether you realize it or not, as a jobseeker you are participating in a marketplace.   Even when you're not a jobseeker, you're part of the equation.  Employers are the demand and workers (or resumes) are the supply.  In this economy, demand is low and supply is high.  Employers have more workers in their ranks than they need, so layoffs and cuts continue to pile up.  They also have stacks and stacks of resumes from people wanting work--even willing to work for free.  Right now, most HR departments could probably recruit from their own inboxes without ever spending a dime on job postings or resume databases.

Actually, I'm not kidding.  That's probably closer to reality than many big job boards are willing to admit.  Revenues at Monster, Careerbuilder, and Hotjobs have taken a nosedive recently.  Because these companies have totally inflexible business models, jobseekers who post to those boards are feeling the hit, too, but they might not realize it. 

Many people aren't getting any bites on their resume  and assume that's because companies aren't hiring.  That's partly the case, but it's also because those job boards are charging fees to look at your resume and contact you.  In today's market, this is a bad deal for companies who already have plenty of resumes in their inbox.  The market had decided that the incremental value of *another* resume in their inbox is near zero, if not zero already--so why pay for something you already have?  More and more people are uploading their resumes to Monster and the big job boards when fewer and fewer companies are willing to pay Monster to see them.  That's right--receiving your resume is essentially worthless to an employer right now... and the big job boards are making it even harder for you by trying to charge companies to see them.

It's the same with job postings.  Why pay to post a job when you can just email your network and ask "Does anyone know anyone good who needs a job?"  You know what the answer to that is these days.

In any transaction, one or both parties needs to pick up the tab for the cost of the exchange.  If companies are less and less willing to pick up that cost in a tough economy when it comes to jobs, it's really going to have to fall on the consumer.  Lots of people recognize that cost will mean additional time and effort on their part, but how many people are actually investing real money into their job search?

On the higher end of the market, users of TheLadders are paying to see only the best jobs and many are paying getting their resumes edited as well.  Is that helping them get in front of employers or getting them a better shot at a job?  Jobs on TheLadders aren't necessarily exclusive, but one would imagine that it does indicate some level of seriousness if you're paying in to see a job. 

What else is out there?   There are lots of conferences and career coaches--essentially content, but the thing with content is that you don't really know if it's worth it until you consume it.  Career content can't be advertising backed in this economy, because as we said before, companies aren't paying to reach you and see more of you now. 

If I were job seeking now, I'd be paying for a Google and Facebook AdWords campaign--putting money behind my efforts at getting in front of the right employers.  Apparently, I'm not alone in that.  In a recent survey that we took at Path101.com, 55% of job seekers would pay to promote themselves online.  Even more interesting was that 23% of people would pay to promote themselves even if they weren't job seeking.  

What do we mean by that?  How about making sure you're ranked first in all the places people might go to look for you?  Take WeFollow.com for example--the Twitter user directory.  If you were an athlete trying to generate a bigger fan following, paying up to be the "Featured User" on a list of top Twitter users tagged "sports" would be worth it.  I think this is where MyBlogLog could have gone, too.  How many people would have paid a little extra to be a profile that lingers longer on Fred Wilson's blog, for example, perhaps with a direct link to their blog.  What about Disqus?  Featured comments?  You could argue that would lower the quality of these lists, but on the other hand, wouldn't you make sure you had a quality/relevent listing if you were paying to make sure it ranked high?

I think there's an untapped market here--to bring the power of sponsored search to the job seeker and individuals to help them promote themselves in the right places--similar to what Indeed.com does on the job side.  I wrote about this about a year ago in relation to people putting cash behind their best blog posts to gain exposure.  Enabling people to get more active about their own self promotion is something we're working on now at Path 101.  Uploading your resume to a big job board is like sending it into a black hole--and candidates can't do anything to actively get noticed as part of that process, even though they want to.  

When I first heard of Foursquare, I'll admit that I didn't jump on it right away.  I knew the founders, Dennis and Naveen (see photo below), but I'm not really much of a gamer, nor am I much of a bar hopper, so the idea of turning my nightlife into a competition didn't seem so appealing to me (especially when working on Path 101 sucks up so much of my nightlife).  Plus, I don't have an iPhone, so that seemed like it should be the third strike for me.

However, I discovered my own reason for using it.  I was talking with a friend about how I stumbled into a great restaurant (August) walking around Greenwich Village, but couldn't remember the name of it.  I was saying how I wished there was an app that pulled my credit card data to track where I had been.  I was always forgetting the places I had gone.

"Why don't you use Foursquare?"

Aaaaaah.  That made so much sense.  Forget the game.  Forget the bar hopping.  Foursquare would be a dirt simple way to just record the places I had been--and that's all I wanted to do with it.  I signed up and started using it through the mobile site on my Sprint Mogul.  I'll admit, I quickly got hooked.

I definitely started getting sucked into the game, too.  Getting badges and seeing where my friends were was fun.  The other night, I realized that I was about to go to a place that Mike Galpert had been to about an hour or so before me, so I called him to ask what he had.  Indeed, the spinach gnocci at Supper was excellent.

That's when I realized how valuable Foursquare really is from a business perspective.  Mike made a recommendation to me, but Foursquare was the service that actually knew that I went, because I checked in.  Being able to connect web advertising, recommendations, and social media buzz to an actual person walking into your store has long been the holy grail of the advertising world.  We spent lots of money and effort online to drum up our brand, but does it actually drive food traffic?  Foursquare knows.

Think about it from Yelp's perspective.  Yelp helps you figure out where to eat, and gives you recommendations, but it only knows about the people who write reviews.  That represents only a small percentage of the overall Yelp traffic--so while Yelp tries to make the business case for advertising and using it's retail services, it doesn't really know how much real live foot traffic it drives.  Foursquare is the missing link, enabling you to come full circle from a review or recommendation to an in person visit from a real customer.  Best of all, it has figured out a compelling reason to get you to submit that data--in the form of a fun game you play with your friends. 

Additionally valuable is that the game syncs up with Twitter and Facebook, so Foursquare users are telling the world where they are and the places they've visited at any given moment.

What Foursquare does is even more valuable than the Yelp mobile app itself.  It not only records where you've been, but it also encourages others to visit the same place and join you.  If I was a business, and I had the choice of getting all my customers on Yelp or on Foursquare, Foursquare seems much more compelling.  It's not about reviews so much, so I have less downside of a bad rating or review killing my business.  Plus, it encourages others who aren't even on the app to come join their friends and check out my business.  More Foursquare users will check in and promote my store than the number of Yelpers who will rate my store and then publish that rating.  On top of that, Foursquare helps me identify who my best customers are, putting a name to a face.

So if I'm Yelp, Foursquare has valuable data that I need--whether or not my recommendations are actually driving anyone to visit the store--and has a much more compelling social media network effect.  Yelp's current social network isn't well tied to their site.  I can have friends on Yelp, but it's not totally clear how having friends improves my navigation of the site or my ability to get ratings--as opposed to Foursquare which is all about tight networks of friends. 

But Yelp also has stuff that Foursquare really needs--distribution and content.  A deal or some funding from Yelp could put Foursquare on the map as the default "Where am I now?" app and make Yelp's social media offering to a business complete and compelling.  They'd finally be able to figure out exactly how much traffic their site drives in the door.  They'd know which reviewers were the most influential--not just to other reviewers but to actual paying customers.

I think Yelp needs to act fast on this, because if I'm Foursquare, I'd start going straight to retail establishments and striking deals.  I'd get every single Starbucks to start encouraging their customers to use Foursquare and check-in to their favorite Starbucks.  I'd know whether or not that was driving feet in the door from other check-ins and who my best customers were.  Foursquare should built a neat little self serve portal that allows retailers to claim their establishments, and track who's coming in and when. 

Yelp has an "Elite" badge for the best users of Yelp, but how long before Foursquare allows retailers to create their own Elite badges for their best customers--rewarding people who support the store, not just the ratings site.   If I'm Shake Shack, I want to know who the Shake Shack Elite is, not the Yelp Elite--the latter doesn't really directly help me as a business.  The more a site enables me to have a direct relationship with my customers, the more valuable it's going to be for me and overall.  Starbucks, Jamba Juice, NYSC, Dunkin Donuts, etc. should be all over FourSquare right now trying to figure out how to get their customers on it. 

If Yelp doesn't strike up a distribution deal with Foursquare soon, I think they're going to regret it.  The deal is simple.  We'll invest a couple hundred grand in you and promote you to our users.  You give us the data (through a sync to Yelp accounts) of who goes to an establishment based on a Yelp review.  That will help Yelp sell it's service to retailers and restaurants.  Yelp should provide reviews in Foursquare in exchange for promoting Foursquare's "Tips" and "ToDo's" as well. 

Google proved that you needed to be able to tell a retailer exactly how advertising helps their business and help them track ROI.  Foursquare is well positioned to capture that all important retail visit--the hardest piece of data to get short of diving into your credit card statement.  That makes them a serious player in the local ad space--and one that will undoubtedly pass on an early Google exit based on Crowley's past experience. 

Recently, there was a big fluff up over Twitter replies--messages that users direct at each other in public using the @ symbol.  Now, you only see public @ messages if you follow the person being spoken to.

It used to be that you had a choice as to whether or not you saw replies that were directed at you or people you followed. The default had most recently been set to off--meaning that you didn't see many of the public messages that your friends sent. Most users didn't even know this was a setting, so few changed it.

How can we know that most users hadn't known about it versus liking the way it was? We can't know for sure, but the fact that *most* users have trouble catching on to using Twitter in the first place and that *most* users will just leave the default up on any feature in any web service is a good indication that this was not a conscious vote for the setting.

In fact, many were unaware that they weren't seeing all of the Tweets from their friends--I certainly didn't.  These were people they had signed up to follow the conversations of.  It would be an odd assumption to think you weren't seeing all public messages.

The effect?

Discovery of new people to follow has gone way down. One rarely encounters the usernames of new people they don't follow anymore.  It goes both ways as well.  Not only is my own discovery of new people way down, but since the change, the number of relevent, interesting people who have found me has gone way down.   No offense to recent followers, but now I hardly look at who follows me, because it's often people I have no connection to who never chime in on conversations--because they can't see conversations.

Instead of a more organic discovery mechanism based on overheard conversations in your close proximity, most new followers come from recommendation services, PR lists, and WeFollow.  For whatever reason, the quality and relevence of these followers seems to be much lower.

I'd be willing to bet that, across the board, the follow back ratio of new followers of popular people has gone way down.  The lack of discovery is making relevent connection difficult and unlikely.

Fred Wilson argues that hiding public replies increases signal to noise--a big problem for him given the number of people he follows on Twitter. That's true--tweets not directed at Fred or people he knows are less likely to be relevent to him.

So who does this affect?  What is their preference and what are the alternatives?  Also, how does it change Twitter usage?   Also, how does this relate to the overall core value proposition of Twitter?

In Fred's case, not seeing replies increases his signal to noise, but is that really why? What makes something noise? The average Twittter user sends about a quarter of his messages as replies. Chances are, most of those are going to people they know.  While Twitter networks can often have a fair bit of overlap, let's say that 2/3 of my replies are directed at people he doesn't know. That means that 2/3 of 25% of my tweets--or 17% of them--are his issue.

But, even then, is it really true that every tweet I send as a reply outside of Fred's network isn't relevent to Fred? What if I'm writing "@frozen2late I don't think Carlos Delgado is going to come back this season"? Fred's a big Met fan, too. It's hard to believe he wouldn't want to weigh in with a "@ceonyc Josh thinks if we don't get Delgado back, we're screwed."

Here's an example, albeit on Facebook, of how someone else got value from a conversation that wasn't intended for them:

Some of these replies are very relevent to Fred, judged on content alone. There's no reason why anything I write in a reply would be any different from a relevency perspective than any other Tweet.  Sure, I might occasionally tweet out "@zoedisco Funny!" and that's a meaningless tweet to Fred--but is it any more meaningless than when I tweet out that I'm going to bed or that I ate some ice cream--not directed at anyone in particular.

What's also important is what is good for Twitter as a service and a community.  There have been stories about Twitter's engagement issues--that most people join and don't Tweet at all, or stop soon after they start.  This isn't any different from any other site.  One thing we do know is that on any site where there are network effects--the benefit to finding more people that you know or feel are worth following is clear. 

It's no different than walking into a party late.  If no one shows you around, you need to be able to insert yourself in other people's conversations otherwise you're just going to feel left out and leave early.

So while someone following 400 people might feel like replies are overwhelming, those following 3 people really need those public replies to discover new people.  People need to remember that there are many more people *not* using your service than users.

So what's the solution?  I think we should default back to public replies and let people like Fred who follow 100's of people opt out of them--because he represents the minority.  Not only that, but I'm sure he has a few people who are the worst offenders and maybe he just needs to unfollow them altogether.

Or, you could perhaps do give people the choice to opt out at the app level--which would also solve Fred's problem because he's reading these tweets on his phone half the time--and that's probably when it's most annoying.

In the meantime, I've circumvented the hiding of my tweet replies by throwing a period in front of them--the .@ convention for public replies. This way, the person sees the reply and so does everyone else.  I'd like to see more of this, because I want to see who my friends are talking to and discover more people that way.  I think it's also important to the growth an engagement of the service overall.

Twitter trending topics had become a good way to play celebrity deadpool--only now every legitimate celebrity death is followed up by a fake one.  After Michael Jackson died, we had fake rumors of Jeff Goldblum, Rick Astley, and Billy Mays. 

(Wait...  Billy Mays is actually dead?  Jeez.  How's anyone supposed to confirm anything these days?  Does Twitter need Verified Death tweets?)

Now, almost every day, I see trends starting from people who are clearly gaming the system or that just aren't interesting at all to most people.

Aircraft Loadmaster anyone?   WTF is this?

If you're going to make Twitter trends relevant again, you need to start focusing on who's creating the tweet (influencer versus some job posting bot vs a bot that just picks out trend names to get in the flow) and what their reputation is.  

Trends have become a mess--inviting spam, gaming, marketing and combinations of the three.  Kill it for now and come back when it's fixed and it's not so easy to glom onto it.

Consider this theoretical exercise...

I met a company the other day with a live social networking product that could be easily whitelabeled for brands and publishers.  They were also looking to raise between 500k and 1m. 

My suggestion to them was to go out and charge some brands to whitelabel their product at 50k a pop--generate revenue instead of raising capital. 

Here's the thinking:

If you're telling me that gathering your audience or doing whatever it is that you do solves someone's problem, than selling it is really the only proof.  What happens when a big company has a problem that costs them 200k a year?  They budget out 50k of either internal or contract resources to fix it if there's no good solution on the market.  In other words, they pay money to a team of people who haven't built product yet to fix their problem. 

On top of that, interactive advertising shops get paid tens of thousands of dollars all the time to build microsites and apps for brands and publishers.

Therefore, the idea that you can't get *somebody* to pay for a future solution to be delivered in a few months seems like a flimsy argument, given the right terms.  Sure, they won't pay a fifty dollar a month subscription for a product that doesn't exist, but they routinely pay 50k for custom built solutions.

Here's the problem with that, and what you need to convince companies out of.  Custom solutions are always a nightmare to maintain.  Domain expertise on what companies build internally is nearly non-existent, so you'll always be overpaying to retain employees to maintain it.  There's no direct incentive and certainly no budget to continually improve and iterate on the product, so it's bound to get stale and become obsolete.  The problem is so bad that you have to imagine that companies might be better off seeding lots of little ISVs to build efficient, flexible software that other companies could use rather than attempt to homegrow anything.

And that's your pitch:  Pay us to do this--we'll be focused on it, iterate on it, incorporate the good feedback from other customers, and in the long run, we'll be cheaper to maintain.  Perhaps with that comes some warrants, options, or even some equity. 

If you scour the market and one out of the top 100 companies isn't willing to pay you for your solution or to attach their brand to you, then I have to wonder one of the following things:

Is this just not enough of a pain point for these customers or their audience? 

Does this other company not see your tool as a compelling enough way to monetize their audience--which is also your audience--one that they know, conceivably just as well if not better than you?  If it was, you'd have to believe that some kind of revenue share or equity agreement would make sense to them.  If you're doing something amazing for the auto market, and Car & Driver doesn't want to be a part of it, you have to wonder how amazing what you're doing is.

In this or any economy, you need champions--and your best champions are your paying customers.  Angels and VCs don't mind being second in line behind someone actually paying to use the product that will ultimately drive your success.

Are there exceptions to this?  Sure.  There are certainly pain in the ass situations where you're doing so much custom development all day for other people that you're no longer actually selling you're product--you're a development shop.  Still, the exercise of talking to customers and seeing what they would pay for is sure to be an informative one.

Has anyone noticed the increased interest that Boston VCs are taking in NYC these days?   It's not just Bijan from Spark anymore--Beantown investors are flocking to NYC in a big way, and being very public about it.

In addition to deals like .406's investment in EnergyHub, Boston firms have recently shown a penchant for participating in NYC community events and support--perhaps even more than NY firms have.

General Catalyst sponsored Alley Insider's Startup 2009.  More recently, a bunch of investors and entrepreneurs have gotten together to great a venture education and mentoring program called First Growth Venture Network right here in NYC, not Boston. 

Check out the Sawx-lovin' VC firms on the executive committee:

Flybridge Capital Partners

Polaris Venture Partners

North Bridge Venture Partners

Charles River Ventures

Battery Ventures

Highland Capital Partners

On top of that, there are a number of firms putting feet on the ground here.  Mo Koyfman of Spark is based out of NYC.  General Catalyst give Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes the nod to hangout in NYC and drum up some deals.  MIT MBA candidate Amanda Peyton is in NYC for the summer on behalf of New Atlantic Ventures--a recent backer of Brooklyn-based Pontiflex to go with their investment in NY's ContextWeb.

Claire Cain Miller asked whether or not Boston was dying as a VC hotbed, but positioned that it was being abandoned in favor of the valley after Greylock went out west.  It seems more logical to me that any Boston exodus would naturally lead down I-95 first before it jumped across the country.

Unfortunately, and typically, the continuing buzz (which is what... three years old now?) around NYC's surging startup economy seems to have escaped the WSJ's Scott Denne, who covered the First Growth story by leading with the following: 

"...start-up founders in New York City are a relatively solitary lot. With fewer firms and no particular geographic nexus, entrepreneurs rarely have the kinds of chance encounters that can jump-start a start-up."

Dear anyone who can't find the NYC tech scene or still doesn't know it exists...   You are cordially invited to join nextNY, the NY Tech Meetup, show up at a Digital Dumbo, the Entrepreneurs Roundtable, or follow @shakeshack.

You've spent lots of time and effort cultivating a fanbase of thousands--on Twitter, Facebook, even on your own applications.  Yet, when you need new employees, how much of your efforts are directed towards people across the web that don't know you or who aren't nearly as passionate as your existing employees are.  You might even need to pay a recruiter to help make your salespitch.

Meanwhile, among your biggest fans and most passionate users are developers, marketers, accountants, public relations professionals--people from every industry imaginable who would probably jump at the chance to come work for you.  The only thing is, you don't know who these people are, short of their tiny little Twitter profiles which you can't search at scale anyway. 

You could try tweeting all youropenings, but not all of them are going to be relevent to your whole audience, which will degrad the quality of your livestream.

Christa Foley from Zappos agrees, “It wouldn’t fit within our culture to be salesy/pushy... we’re not blasting on Twitter every job opening... To me, that feels like spamming, which I think goes against what Twitter was meant to be used for.”

Just publishing your openings in social networks is a very 1.0 broadcast way of approaching a very 2.0 environment.  The problem is that all of the recruiting tools and social spaces are silos.  You can't search the resumes of your Twitter followers, and you can't search LinkedIn and filter by who follows who on Twitter. 

Having people put links to their resume in their Twitter account might be a start, but that wouldn't be easily searchable by structured search--plus it might look a little odd to their bosses. 

Coming at it from the other way, from Reid Hoffman's keynote at the Social Recruiting Summit, it seems pretty certain that LinkedIn is more worried about keeping the "noise" from other networks out than the free flow of data.  He didn't seem too pleased about Plaxo's attempts at syncing and he's always referred to behavior on Facebook with some disdain--associating it with zombie bites and electronic hamburgers.  This misses the opportunity to capture a lot of useful data on candidates, like their interests, affinities, and what companies they follow.

Path 101 is working on this problem now, and in about a month or so, will give you the tap for the keg of human capital that use your social media fanbase.

If you're interested in recruiting your followers, comment below or reach me at charlie@path101.com.

I got a note this morning (complete with its own press release attached) from Stephanie Agresta telling me that she had moved to a fulltime gig at Porter Novelli.

She writes, "My move to Porter Novelli is symbolic of the fact that the agency gets it: PR has changed forever."

It reminds me of Tara Hunt's announcement that she was moving to Intuit.  She was super excited about getting "a little schoolin’ on corporate America".

PR has changed?  Corporate America exciting?  What kind of social media bizarro world did we enter?

I think if you read between the lines, you'll realize that when two such prominent personalities in the social media world jump to the corporate side, it's a market signal: 

There just isn't enough money in social media to be a fulltime consultant. 

This is also what I heard recently from a very prominent social media expert who told me that actual dollars paid to her for her expertise were tough to come by.  Sure, there are going to be a few exceptions, but when some of the top folks are moving to big firms, if you don't believe this is a market top, then I've got a bridge to sell you.

And hey, I don't blame them.  They landed great jobs!  It's a tough economy and seeking shelter in the stability of a big firm is a smart move--just don't expect me to believe how psyched you are to leave independence for the joys and challenges of the Cube World.  

More people should get out while they can, because, in this economy, if you're not showing companies how all this stuff can directly contribute to the bottom line in real dollars, you're seriously screwed. 

Advertising and PR is becoming much more integrated.  Messaging is going cross medium.  You can't really survive at the strategy level if you don't understand all of the aspects of both traditional and interactive advertising--direct marketing, SEO/SEM, sponsorships, event marketing, etc.  That raises the bar for what it takes to be an advertising expert of any kind--let alone just in social media.  And thank God for that... seriously.  There are too many people going around with social media on their business cards where you say, "I don't get what that person does for a living--what do they actually do again?" 

So if you're smart and you see people like Tara and Steph--successful consultants who had real clients and a track record of success--going corporate, maybe it's time to hangup your "Social Media Expert" hat.

I've clearly been blogging less these days...but when I do, the overall quality (or at least effonrt) is up at a pretty high level.  I'm a writer--I still love writing essay length posts and always will. 

But since I started using Twitter and more recently since I started using Tumblr for real, not only has my publishing splintered across mediums, but I realize engagement with my community of readers is up.   Before Twitter, I would write the occasional micropost, but I'd feel like it went into a void.  It would be a quick passing thought and it would take too long for my daily RSS reading blog audience to receive it for the kind of quick response it might garner.

At the same time, I'd occasionally post ridiculous things--things few people found as funny as I did.  It seemed a little out of place to blog a College Humor video after a serious piece about entrepreneurship.  I didn't really want to use Tumblr, though.  Mainly, I was actually being  somewhat hypocritical because I was focused on having my blog as the central place to find and consume the published me on the web but I constantly criticize Friendfeed for killing the context and nouance that comes with each individual platform.  Additionally, I firmly believed that different people wanted different slices of me--and to force them to all consume the same sausagelike feed was borderline abusive.   That's why I don't usually friend my professional contacts.  I may find your professional presence in my life worthwhile, but please don't make me look at your kids photos.

I started using Tumblr for real a few weeks ago.  I say for real because I used to just publish a feed from my blog to it.  It got very few clickthroughs and hardly any followers--no reblogs.  Certainly no one was going to pass along around my content if it wasn't tailored towards the audience.  Like a dying marriage, it's as if that audience knew I wasn't putting in the effort so why should they? 

Now, I pass the music I listen to through Tumblr as well as the occasional drunk Kung Fu Panda.  I clip the quotes from my blog I think will appeal to that audience.  Now, I not only get more followers, but I get more engagement as well. 

Media outlets need to realize that.  If you're CNN, you can't just blast a link to the CNN homepage everywhere.  You need to maintain a unique, curated presence everywhere your audience is and engage them in a unique way. 

When I worked in private equity, I learned about the buyout of Gaylan's sports.  The concept there was to build a big box retail space for sports, but to make sure that each individual section of the store was as good or better than the speciality store equivilent.  Therefore, the golf section of Gaylan's had to be as good as your local golf shop.    This was very different from places like Modell's, which are decent options if you want to buy a generic set of golf balls, but you're not going to find any premium items or anyone who knows anyone at golf.

If you're a big media outlet and you're going to be publishing into social spaces, then your Twitter account needs to be as engaging as the alternative individual that I would subscribe to.  There's no sense being @ComedyCentral if you're not going to be as funny as @dickc.  If you're going to have a CNN Tumblr, then you need to be as good at curating content as Soup.  Esquire, if you're going to be on Tumblr, you need to be as smart, sexy, and funny as Meaghano. 

Don't throw this "social media stuff" off to your youngest social media intern.  Go to these communities.  Go meet with Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, MySpace, all of 'em and ask, "Who gets it?  Bring us to them so we can learn."

How many people did the following search for Obama's speech this morning?

Ariana got all the traffic and the rest of the big boys had nothing to show me.

Amanda hits this one right on the head:

"THE NOT-SO-GOOD - Where are the Developers?

There are few events that involve actually learning how to code and/or build stuff (exceptions here and here). From what I can tell, the best way to lock down job security if you work in print media/traditional advertising is to beef up your knowledge of the digital side. If you’re a content ninja, wouldn’t having a working knowledge of rails, php, python or even wordpress provide a huge advantage?"

It seems like the powers that be are making a bet... that the future of innovation around the web in NYC will be powered by advertising supported content--an economy run on digital pennies.  So much for NYC building the next Google.

There are exactly three entrepreneurs on the 45 person Internet Week Executive Council with companies whose current or future business models are not depending on ad supported content: Caterina Fake from Hunch (I imagine that's going to be a data biz of some kind, Scott from Meetup (subscription), and myself (Path 101 is working on candidate search and self promotion tools.)  In fact, the whole thing is co-sponsored by the Mayor's Office of "Film, Theatre and Broadcasting".  

Is this really where innovation is going to happen--by moving all the broadcast content to the web?   I agree with Amanda--we need more people building, and less people broadcasting.

I had a fascinating conversation with an early/seed stage investor yesterday who basically described the market as follows...

He said that, over the course of all of their deals (over 50), they've done a very good job figuring out what a team will need to do to raise venture capital.  Their investments are basically meant to supply a team with about 9 months of capital to go out and build something and "jump 9 feet", because that's the milestone they see for VC--whatever 9 feet is for that particular comapny.

That had been going pretty well up until deals that were done in the first half of last year--right around the time that Path101.com got it's first angel financing.  Now their companies are coming back into the market, as planned, for financing.  They're reporting that instead of the 9 feet they were training for, they're now being asked to jump 15 feet by the VCs.  Somehow, companies are supposed to get straight from product to revenue--without iteration or even traction in between.

If you're an investor and you can get a Series B company--one with revenue traction--for Series A prices, why would you ever do a Series A?  It's not unfair--it's just good business.

Welcome to raising capital in 2009.  Go straight to Series B or do not pass go.

This investor was basically doubling the size of the rounds he was doing--splitting them with a partner fund--in order to give companies longer runways to actually make it to sustainability.  He described your angel/seed funding like a rocket ship.  You need to decide how big of a fuel tank you need to take you into orbit, because, these days, if you run out before you get there, there's no refueling mid-flight. 

We'll be talking to our board tomorrow and the theme of the conversation is more or less "If financing happens, great, but we're not going to wait around for it."  We're still in conversations with investors, but our product plan has prioritized immediately monetizable features.  We're shooting for 45 days, give or take a few bug fixes here and there, to launch both recruiter and candidate services we can sell.  We've cut our burn pretty low and we're working on some in person job search seminars to help extend the runway.  We're not going to disappear tomorrow, that's for sure--but we want to still be here six months from now and beyond.  That takes a solid plan and some rolled up sleeves.

What am I telling startups now?  Forget raising 250-500k.  If you can raise a million, do it--because the chances of you creating a break-even business on 250k-500k is pretty low.  If you can't raise a million, then only focus on building something that a customer is willing to pay for TODAY.  (That should focus your product roadmap just a bit.)  Anything in between will be a bridge to nowhere. 

UPDATE: Fred wrote this post yesterday about becoming the default behavior for your market--ahead of figuring out how to monetize it.  I think the problem with that thinking is that it basically only gives you one shot.  You're playing startup Russion Roulette when your goal is to become the default activity and you have no Plan B.  At least of you monetize in some way, if it takes you two or three tries to become the default, you have the runway to iterate.  We're all aiming to become the default activity for our consumer base and the service we provide--but it's not always clear how to do that.  Lots of people wanted to be the Google of events--it never happened, but not for lack of trying.  In new markets, it's not always clear what model wins out, and often times the last one standing wins.  It's hard to be the last one standing if you're not making money.  The key is to make money in a way that doesn't hinder your growth. 

In hindsight, I wonder if perhaps we at Union Square Ventures did the world a disservice back in 2005 when we started blogging as a fund--opening the kimono on the world of venture capital and making it seem like it was within arms reach.  Maybe the world was better off when businessplans@venturefund.com was the black hole where your ideas went.

We have a new black hole where all the ideas go today--but this time we call it the economy.

Before all the transparancy, those who really wanted to pursue their ideas, out of necessity, went and got paying customers for their business day one.  If you built a great business, the VCs would find you, but short of that, you didn't have all of these conferences, bootcamps, etc. making you feel like you're just an investor away from the next big thing.

People would tell me, "Oh, you're lucky that you used to work for a venture fund, because you understand what they want."  In hindsight, I don't know about that.  I might have been better off not knowing that venture capital existed, aiming for profits from the beginning--and then just being nicely surprised if some dude shows up at my door with a few million in cash asking to buy a minority stake in my business.

Venture capital is like winning the lottery.  Somebody wins, but statistically, it's not you.  Don't wait for an investor to go build the business.  We're not--not anymore, anyway.

"Facebook has almost finished raising $150 million in capital, in an extraordinary move by the company to buy out shares of hundreds of regular employees. Hundreds of the Palo Alto, Calif.s employees have now toiled at the company for more than two years, and many have worked three to five years. Increasingly, some have become restless, and would like to cash in on the huge value they've created."

Facebook raises $150 million more to cash out employees » VentureBeat

For more than TWO YEARS?!  TWO YEARS?!  TOILED? 

Restless?

Cry me a fucking river!  

Tell that to some family who ran their local Chevy dealer for the last 20 years who just got news this week that they're getting the ax. 

They're the ones who deserve to be a little restless.

I'm sorry, but this is exactly what's wrong with this country and why we got here in this economic mess--people looking for a handout before actually creating any real value.  Facebook has not made a single penny of actual profit.  It has no exit in sight.  They've capitalized themselves and grown to the point where no one is going to acquire them, and they can't go public without some actual cashflow. 

And yet, after just a few years, their employees need to cash out?  Really?

Did they not notice that not only is no one else hiring, but equity payouts are few and far between?  Sure, a few companies got picked up along the way in the Web 2.0 M&A window, but it's not like everyone else in the Valley got fat payouts and they're the only ones without a Porsche in the drive. 

And PS... Most startups don't even have an exit.  Equity is UPSIDE.  It's a risk you take, because you don't know if, when, and how much--and if you wanna see the payout, you stick around and see the company through to an exit.

This is like tips--where instead of tipping for good service, now you're just expected to lop 20% on top of your bill all the time and it's expected. 

It's not like these people have been working for peanuts this whole time either.  I'm sure Facebook is paying their people market rates, so the idea that they need to see their upside already--in this economy, and after just a few years--is astounding. 

Right now, I'm working hard to make sure our company, Path 101, survives past the summer.  My expectation is that it takes at least five if not seven or eight years to build a company.  If anything good happens before that, it's gravy, but I'm in this for the long haul.  If I can work at something I love doing for the next five or six years, I'd consider myself very lucky. 

Trust me, I won't be looking for a cashout after two, especially if we're not making any profit yet. 

And what does that investment memo look like?   I'd like to hear that partnership discussion at the VC firm...

"We're going to need $150 million more in Facebook?"

"For what?  To grow internationally?  To scale?  For bandwidth costs?"

"No... to keep these twentysomethings working for *two years straight* from whining."

And who are these Asian investors and where do I send my Powerpoint?

Recently, Alex and I had one of the best conversations about Path 101 that we've had with an investor so far.  We talked about what we've learned, the space, our approach, etc.  They were extremely thoughtful in terms of where the market is going and how to best take advantage of the opportunity.  We riffed for nearly two hours.

A day or two later, I was talking with a successful startup guy who was going to make a key introduction for us.  I had been nearly tripping over myself in terms of all the potential for value creation we had and the opportunities missed by others.  (I get pretty passionate about this stuff.)  I then asked him about how "pitchy" I should be when talking to this potential new investor.

"The last ten minutes of our conversation--that's what you need to have with him," he said.

That's when I realized how inauthentic and contrived the whole pitch process was.  You'd never find your soulmate, make a friend, or hire someone based on a Powerpoint--so why find someone to invest in your company that way?  Either show your product or just talk to the person--with the latter probably being much more effective in presenting a vision and as a way to get to know you as a person. 

The other thing about a "pitch" is that the tone of the conversation is negative.  Investors are looking for holes--reasons not to invest, because the default is a no.  Conversations don't have a default answer that you have to hurdle over, they're just an exchange.

I don't think enough entrepreneurs get out from behind their desks to talk to the market--to business development partners, to investors, to prospective employees...  to anyone who could give useful product feedback.  I can't tell you how many times I've talked to startups and said, "Oh, you know so and so, right?"  They rarely do... even when it's a no-brainer that they should be talking to a completely obvious partner or investor. 

"I dont want to be part of some game to become more popular. Im on here to share my views and opinions and discoveries and learn about other peoples fascinating finds. Some of my favorite tumblrs probably have a very low score because they dont kowtow to the lowest common denominator, but instead are frank, intelligent, funny and incredibly unique. They are niche blogs, providing me with insight that I cant find anywhere else on the web, which is THE ONLY REASON IM ON HERE. That, and for my friends and family around the world to keep updated on my life. If you post valuable insight about interesting topics that not EVERYONE cares about, your blog is more valuable to me than the shit people throw up on dashboards hoping something sticks."

The Upsider - Tumblarity goes against the whole reason I started blogging.

Ask the average venture investor how excited they are about the recruiting space--you'd get more enthusiasm in the waiting room of a dentist's office.  I don't blame them.  There are a million "Me, too!" companies and the space is nearly devoid of innovation. 

How many ways can you smuch a resume against a job post?  Turns out... tons... or really just one, dressed up as tons.  On top of that, there is a severe lack of focus on behalf of the job seeker--and if you're not helping people with their career, just what are you doing? 

Early in 2008, my partner Alex Lines and I finished raising a small angel round and got to work on building a company called Path101.com.  We're a small team working on an innovate approach to career guidance--and we're getting closer and closer to meeting our potential each day, but we're still not there yet. 

The career space still haven't solved really basic problems of helping people find jobs and careers--and each year the potential of the technology pushes forward, the industry falls further and further behind.  The future is coming much faster than the current players are preparing for it. 

It's clear that five to ten years from now--everyone is findable on the web.  Every job is nearly already findable through aggregators like Indeed.com and Simply Hired.  Just like the market specialists on Wall Street who disappeared when electronic trading came into maturity, many of the players adding friction in the middle of this marketplace will go away.  We're seeing this happen on college campuses, where employers are connecting directly with students and visits to career centers are way down.  Sure, there may be some people still finding niches to connect people--but surely a lot less in a hyperconnected, seemless world. 

What we're heading to, like it or not, is a form of electronic trading markets for people--where exactly who you are and what you can do can get instantly mapped to exactly the company and role that makes the most sense for you and your interests.  Unfortunately for most of the existing players--a resume and a job post not the kinds of data infrastructure that will get us there.  A resume doesn't tell you nearly enough about who I am and what I can do, and job post doesn't tell me anything about the path that post leads to or what my experience is likely to be in that position.  That's why all these "eHarmony for jobs" companies are failing to get the job done.  Trying to get everyone in the right place seemlessly with such poor data building blocks would be like trying to run a stock market ticker with refrigerator magnets.

There are all sorts of incentive issues and missteps in the job space.  Here are just a few, as I see them, from both sides.

First, here are five ways job sites fail the job seeker:

1) The job boards like Monster, Careerbuilder, and Hotjobs fail to give job seekers the data they need to make adjustments and navigate opportunities.  How many people already applied to this job?  How does my resume compare to the other applicants?  What were people search for when they found my resume?  How many views did my resume get?  Did anyone even look at it after I sent it in?

2) LinkedIn is masterful at making you think you should be on there, giving you the impression that you'll be networking, and then having you scratch your head as to what the point is.  The problem is that Linkedin has the incentive to get you on, but not have you actually do anything.  Don't take my for it... these people were pretty easy to find on Twitter:

I personally use it a ton, but if everyone used it the way I do, it would be a noisy mess.  Since they broker access to your profile information, the fact that everyone's on it, without really using it, means maximum profits for the company.  Sure, they have a section about using it somewhere on the site, but if they really wanted you to get the most out of it, they'd take you right into, "Ok, so let's start contacting some people."  Instead, they leave you off right after, "Ok, so let's start adding some people."

3)  Got your resume on VisualCV or Emurse?  These resume on the web sites are supposed to help you stand out and get noticed.  Sure, they come up high when you Google your own name--but if someone's searching for your name (most likely you), then they already know you and most likely have your resume.  What about using these sites you actually get found and contacted?

Meet Carol Anderson.  She has her resume on VisualCV--it won an award as one of the best ones out there.  She's a Heathcare Consultant in Fredericksburg, VA.  It says so right on her VisualCV.  Try Googling for "Heathcare Consultant  Fredericksburg, VA".  She doesn't come anywhere.  In fact, you can't even find her until Page 3 of Google search results for Carol Anderson!  Sure, it's a pretty common name, but isn't the point of using one of these profile sites to rise above the rest?  You're certainly not going to rise above the rest on Google--VisualCV only has 9,000 pages on it's site exposed to the search engine.  Either only 9,000 people have created VisualCVs, or the site is keeping all of the people who joined under wraps--certainly not what people who wanted to "STAND OUT!" and get noticed probably want.

Emurse is a bit better, exposing nearly 200,000 profiles to Google.  However, they're not optimized to get you found for much more than searches for your name.  Brian Robertson sure wants you to hire him as a freelance web developer, but good luck finding his Emurse resume in Google searches for "freelance web developer st. charles, missouri" on the first page.  How many could there be? 

4) TheLadders has a great business model...for TheLadders.  You pay monthly to see jobs paying over $100,000.  It doesn't take a genius to figure out what their incentive is--to keep you on the site as long as possible.  If you get hired, you leave and TheLadders loses out on it's revenue.  That's not really the kind of model that makes me feel like a site is trying really hard to get me a job.

5) Jobfox tries to be a lot smarter about matching you to the right opening, but unfortunately they suffer from a classic chicken & egg problem.  The only jobs you can be matched for with Jobfox's highly scientific approach are openings on Jobfox.  In the current economy, those are some pretty slim pickins.  It would be better if candidates could see what positions they would be best for even if there weren't positions open in those areas right away.  At least they'd have a clue where to look--on other sites.  

...and here are five ways job sites fail the recruiter:

1) No site actually understands the full picture of the candidate that the web has to offer versus just aggregating it.  Zoominfo just aggregates everything it thinks it found about you (and some stuff it finds about other people) all in one place.  LinkedIn doesn't understand that even when you don't write "Python" on your profile, someone with a link to their "py.hack" blog and who tags things python in del.icio.us should come up in a search for Python developers. 

2) Search is horrific...everywhere.  Try to find the resume of someone with two years of sales experience with a Chemistry major who worked for a large company in a certain geographic area who can speak Spanish.  This should be a lot easier--and it's why you tend to get spam from recruiters on job boards.  It's not that they want to spam you--they just can't target *and* scale at the same time.

3) No reptuations:  A spammy, underhanded recruiter looks the same as a recruiter who takes the time to get to know candidates and send them relevent stuff.  In nearly every other kind of marketplace, both buyers and sellers have reputations.  Why not in recruiting?  (And no, a few "thumbs up" notes in LinkedIn doesn't count--I'm talking something that says 78% of candidates feel that this recruiters offers are relevent).   

4) We all know that someone updating their LinkedIn profile and adding people is an extremely strong signal that they're packing up to leave their job.  Why not expose this data and let recruiters search on it--maybe even pay a little extra to get out in front of the pack with exclusive access?  Recruiting is falling behind in "real time search" and the "now web".  The whole thing is based not on the blog post that a social media marketer posted just a few minutes ago, but what someone listed on their resume as their job six years ago--and that needs to change.

5) No "soft" data: We search resumes as if candidates like everything they did in the past and want to do it again---even though we know that isn't even close to being accurate, maybe not even half the time.  Doing something simple like asking people if they liked their job would be a huge leap in helping recruiters find people enthusiastic for their offering--not to mention collecting more descreet data about the types of situations they find more satisfying.  Now start laying on things like work values, personality, etc., and for a lot of jobs, you might not even care to see a resume.

Have we solved all of those problems at Path101.com?  Not yet--but we have key data infrastructure in place.  The very philosophy on which we are building out our product and laying out our roadmap is fundamentally about this data-driven, candidate centric future marketplace.

That's one thing that we believe strongly--that unless every single line of code, every business decision, every design choice is made with the jobseeker and their data in mind, you're going to get left far behind.  Imagine creating a "green" car company from scratch versus thinking you can make GM green tomorrow.  It's probably already too late for the existing players, but this market represents a huge business opportunity for anyone that understands that the candidate comes first and depth of data is your business--and the only way you get there is by getting the candidate to want to give it to you because they're getting something useful back.  

What's the last time you got something useful back after submitting your data to Monster.com? 

Exactly. 

How long do you think that lasts?

When Tumblr first came out, it was promoted as "instant, no-overhead".   The post on the Union Square Ventures blog about their first investment in the company is all about personal expression, aggregation, curation.  When I first talked to David about it, he stressed the simplicity.

You know what no one seemed to be talking about?  The community. 

A while back, I recommended Tumblr as a dead-simple blogging platform to a friend.  Now, if you're just writing full blog posts and not taking part in the Tumblr community, you'd be a bit of an odd duck.  It would be the 2009 version of someone who decided to write an economics blog on LiveJournal. 

Hmm... LiveJournal.  Is Tumblr the new LiveJournal... or LiveJournal for adults? 

In both cases, there's clearly something *more* going on than just publishing.  In Tumblr, there's a community with it's own social currency--reblogging.  Nearly three quarters of my dashboard is reblogs of others.  Do my friends only express themselves in relation to others--unable to convey original thought?  Or is it a function of how easy this is to do?  Was this community behavior evolution or intelligent design?

The other aspect of services like Tumblr, Vimeo, or Foursquare, for example, that is tough to replicate is the nature of the initial users.  Doostang has this attribute as well--although instead of hipster geeks, it started out with private equity geeks.  That has not only dictated the makeup of the Doostang community, but has ultimately impacted the business model there as well--the site is now a pay for placement recruiting service. 

So, what is Tumblr?  Is it the application?  The people?  An emergent behavior?  Can it be replicated?

Sometimes, it takes you longer to realize things about your own business--especially somewhat obvious (in hindsight) business analogies.

I was thinking about Mint.com, the personal finance site, and I never realized how similar our goals are at Path 101.

Mint is building a suite of free tools to help manage a mainstream problem that effects everyone--in their case, managing your budget.  Their target audiance?  What about... everyone who makes money?  Spends money?  Wants more money?  It's a pretty huge potential audience and we feel the same way about our career guidance site.  Path 101 is targeted at anyone who works and wants to figure out what's next.

Now, the argument could be made that not a lot of people who make money actually manage their money well, which is what I thought initially about Mint.  However, Mint is making their tools so easy that they're not just converting the beancounters, they're helping people who have never ever kept a budget before--introducing people to the concept of budging and personal financial management.  We want to do the same for careers.  Thinking about your career can be an intimidating thing and we want to shed some light on the process and make it easier. 

Mint.com makes it easy for you to upload your financial data to the system, but moreover they give you a compelling reason to--to get recommendations and gain insight into your budget, the same way we want someone to get value from uploading their resume and other information.

This enables Mint to gain a tremendous information advantage from a business standpoint.  By working hand in hand with their users in managing their finances, they are the best positioned to broker offers from people who want to access those users.  That's ultimately where we want to be with Path 101.  By getting to know our users better, because we helped them manage their career, we'll ultimately be the best place to broker recruiter and employer access--particularly given that we'll know so much more about each user.

They're also using the network effects of having all that user data to improve the product.  The more Mint users there are, the more insight they get into trends and norms, which can, in turn, be presented back to the user in a useful, comparitive way.

It's a business and product model that no doubt works in other areas, too, but I feel like Mint is a particularly relevent comparison given the size of the potential market, the importance of this aspect of someone's lifestyle, and the focus on data.

I found this neat little viral app, When did you join Twitter?

Apparently, I joined on February 12, 2007... and then about a month later, I totally got it.

This is a note I wrote to Fred Wilson... note the date:

From: Charlie O'Donnell
To: Fred Wilson
Sent: Fri Mar 09 10:44:03 2007
Subject: Do you twitter?

You should check it out... I didn't get it at first, but now that there's a group going to sxsw, I get it. Its like an OS for sms. I'd never text all the people I'm texting now...but its a really seemless way to text groups and inidividuals at the same time.

It needs to be packaged for the MySpace gen better, and also marketed to groups and conferences. I'm connected to the sxsw group and they randomly connected me to two other twitter people in a 3 person group. It can solve the prob of walking into a conf and not knowing who the heck to meet or talk to first.

What's even better...    check this out:

So basically, what we can take from this is that it takes Fred three days to act on e-mails and four months to invest. 

1) Great hiring is partly function of how many people you put into the top of the funnel.  You won't put extra pressure on yourself to hire anyone you don't feel great about, because you know you'll see more, and it will help you get a good sense of what you're looking for.

2) Take feature suggestions out of the hands of executives.  Instead, make problem/opportunity identification their job and let the process figure out the solutions through testing and data.

3) Slankets are awesome.  Path 101 got Gary Clegg at The Slanket to hook up every single SocialFoo attendee with a Slanket.  We thought it would be appropriate because it gets cold at night in Sebastopol, plus, as you can see, Slankets are an important part of the social graph:

4) At the end of the day, the most successful people are those that are dedicated to building really great stuff, not the people who worry too much about beating the competition--collaboration FTW!

5) Building a few deep connections with people is better than trying to network at scale.  This is the same reason I love SXSW.  When you can hangout with people in your industry in a relaxed social setting, you get to know them a lot better.  They become people versus just business cards or Twitter icons.  I greatly enjoyed getting to know the folks I met at SocialFoo and look forward to hopefully running into them again soon.