All you can eat sushi, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Don't worry, tummy, there's more on the way.

Bay Ridge Sunset, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

This is down the block from me...the hill sort of makes it look like SF.

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

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

This is just too funny. 

Here's a test...

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

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

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

...for a company making next generation semiconductors.

Mike Moritz is a terrible partner... 

...for an early stage biopharma deal.

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

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

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

Link: Genuine VC: How Yummy are Cookies?.

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

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

Robert Redford will show up again on this list, and both Dan Ackroyd and Mary McDonnell have already appeared.  Same, too, with Ben Kingsley.  Perhaps I should just have made this a Top 25 Actors list.

Sneakers is about a quirky cast of characters that gets paid to break into things so that no one else can break into them.   Then, when one of them gets discovered to have a not so clean record, they need to break into a place to break their friend out of trouble. 

There are a lot of characters in here...  maybe too many, but its a bit like Ocean's Eleven, where none of the characters really get developed to deeply, but you just kind of have fun watching them play the game with each other.  In addition to the aforementioned repeaters, those making their first and perhaps only (although that's subject to change) appearance on my list are Sidney Portier and the late River Phoenix, who both do a great job as well.

In any case, in addition to being a fun, quirky, and geeky movie, it sounds fantastic.  James Horner's soundtrack is worth a purchase, and listening to Branford Marsalis play the sax is worth the price of admission.  The soundtrack seamlessly sets off the movie and you probably only realize how good it was if you listen to it separately afterwards.

Grey Monday, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Beautiful weekend, but cruddy Monday.  (Live from the N train over the Manhattan Bridge.)

We did a kayak race of about 40 boats...  This is me hamming it up for the camera, explaining what we're doing.

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Photo 356, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

I have a vision...   warm grey tone with lots of framed colorful art.  Black leather couch and loveseat.  Green plants.  Thoughts?  Any ideas on what to do about the border?  I don't think I like it white... same goes for the window.

Waiting at the DMV, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

This is the worst part about getting your wallet stolen.  Bastards!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cool...  Lara was one of the friendliest faces on campus and is going to make a great contribution to the team. 

Link: Ram News.

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

Link: The Business Experiment - Home.

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

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

If you're an entrepreneur, one of the best ways to get me using something is to give me a service I can run on my blog.  :)    Now I'm obsessed with Castpost.

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If you live in New York City, you probably get asked for money on the street at least once a day, if not more.  Sometimes, its from the homeless, which is an unfortunate situation.  Other times, its from organized bands of young people all wearing the same t-shirt.

Well, I've been feeling very chatty the last few days and, when I went out to lunch, I decided I'd stop and let one of them give their pitch.  This young lady told me about all of the great things that CARE is doing.  She was so excited that I let her talk, she could hardly contain herself.  I didn't know anything about CARE, but apparently its a pretty big organization, with over a half billion dollars worth of donations received a year--92% of which go to their programs.  That seems pretty high, and they have a good list of companies and boardmembers behind them according to their site.

The young lady on the street was pitching the monthly donation plan, which I wasn't interested in, but I will give them $25 because she did such a good job.  More importantly, I told her I'd blog about it.  Coincidently, I was also looking for a charity to include in my sidebar to test out Word of Blog.

This is going to be big:   Doing due diligence, helping people, and having fun all at the same time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't think this is going to make it to Fred's MP3 of the week list.  And yes, this is what it sounds like when I bike.

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I'm using Castpost (which is in Alpha) to blog this video. I have most of my other videos at Vimeo, but they have a limit on uploads, and no blogging tool yet. I'm sure they'll get there on it, but for now, I'll try this.

So last Saturday, I did kayaking swim support for the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim--a 28.5 mile swim around the city. I was helping out the "Mo Ladies of the Sea." They were a great group and its too bad the weather cut them short.

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

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

I have SO MANY things I want to blog about, take pictures of, etc. but I have no internet at home yet, and on top of that, my Treo is busted.  I get a new Treo on Friday and internet on Saturday, so you should see a lot of posts this weekend.  In the meantime, I'll be just letting all this stuff build up.  If I seem distracted or I'm sitting uncomfortably (depending on the quality of the blog post I'm thinking about), now you know why. 

Its amazing how disconnected I feel without e-mail on my phone and broadband in the apartment.  I might as well be living in Saskachawan.