Tom Glavine is 4-2, with a 1.94 ERA.  He's sending guys down on strikes at a clip of almost 8 per game, even though his career average is a little more than 5.

Greg Maddux is 5-1 with a 2.35 ERA and a WHIP just over one.

Kenny Rogers?  4-2 with a 2.59 ERA and a WHIP of .98.  I still hate the bastard for ending the Braves series.  (The pitch before was a ball, too...  )

What year is this again?  1995?

Maybe when I retire from venture capital, I'll start pitching in the majors. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Competition
2. Pricing pressure

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

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

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

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

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

From my post:

"LinkedIn should integrate with my calendar, contacts, and tasks, and remind me to talk to particular people, and at the same time provide me with their one-click contact info. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On MySpace, when you need to prove that you are who you say you are, you take a photo of yourself holding a piece of paper with a certain message on it and e-mail it to MySpace.

That effectively proves that you are indeed a real live human being... but that doesn't mean you are, in fact, you.  You could have set up a Charlie O'Donnell profile and put up your own pictures, then e-mailed a picture of yourself saying, "I'm Charlie O'Donnell."

I just checked out ClaimID.  Its basically del.icio.us...  tagging incidences of yourself with a bookmarklet and it will present them on a highly search optimized "about" page.  However, I don't see what stops anyone else from claiming you.  I guess that might be their model... "Claim yourself before someone else does."

My bank seems to do a pretty good job of figuring out who I am...    I guess there's little chance that anyone else would know my mom's maiden name and my social security number.  But I don't think I'd give either of those out to a web service.

What you really need, at minimum, so a technorati type service for claiming stuff.  So, something that crawls my LinkedIn page, then tells me to change something on it within a half hour or something.  That's good proof that I own that page... and then my blog...  and then other services I may be on... and then they might do degrees of seperation.  So, if I own my blog, and someone links to it and says, "Charlie O'Donnell is a cool guy" then they're probably talking about the same me because of the link.

Are there definitive ways of proving who you are in other creative ways?

A first grade teacher in New York explains to her class that she is a Yankees fan.
She asks her students to raise their hands if they, too, are Yankee fans.
Everyone in the class raises their hand except one little girl.
The teacher looks at the girl with surprise and says, "Janie, why didn't
you raise your hand?"

"Because I'm not a Yankee's fan," she replied.

The teacher, still shocked , asked, "Well, if you are not a Yankee's fan, then who are you a fan of?"

"I am a Met's fan , and proud of it," Janie replied.

The teacher could not believe her ears. "Janie, why are you a Mets' fan?"

"Because my mom is a Mets' fan, and my dad is Mets' fan, so I'm a Mets' fan too!"

"Well," said the teacher in a obviously annoyed tone, "That is no reason for you to be a Mets' fan. You don't have to be just like your parents all of the time. What if your mom were a moron and your dad were a moron, what would you be then?"

"Then ," Janie smiled, "We'd be Yankee fans."

Beisel's got a good post on managing personal identity...  or if nothing else just being conscious of it.

This is something that is becoming more and more important for college students, for two reasons. 

The fact that they have so little experience means that the risk they take with a poorly managed digital identity is huge, and at the same time, it represents a tremendous opportunity.

So, if the only thing you get when you Google a student is a quote given to the school paper for an article on the legalization of marijuana, that student's resume is going to get bounced from the pile pretty quickly.

However, what about if what comes up in Google is a well-written blog about being a student studying finance or psychology or whatever the student is into?  How quickly would that resume move up the pile?  It might even make up for the lack of internship experience, particularly if its insightful enough.

Schools need to be teaching students how to manage their online identities, and not just "Don't show your thong on MySpace", but "Here's how to use your MySpace account or a blog or LinkedIn to get a great job."

The problem is, if all your professors are PhDs who have been teaching for 25 years, how many people out there have enough expertise to actually teach something about this?  I don't think the pool of college professors who blog who have actually seen a MySpace page is very large...  let alone those who have interest in showing how this could apply to career advancement.

On that note, tonight is the first "Intro to Business Blogging" class at Fordham's Graduate School of Business.  Its a class I taught last summer. 

So if there are any forward thinking colleges in the NYC who think this is something their undergraduate students could benefit from, I've yet to book myself for a fall teaching position at night and would be more than happy to explore opportunities.  The criteria is that your school has to be flexible and forward thinking enough to realize that a secondary degree does not necessarily make someone qualified to teach digital career advancement and identity management to undergrads.

In addition to lots of great business plans, we tend to get a lot of emails from people trying to break into the venture capital business or to work for a startup.

The best thing we can really tell anyone, and one thing I learned very quickly when I joined Union Square Ventures last February, is that it’s all about the community.  The technology landscape changes too quickly for one person to keep up with every innovation.  We are dependent upon the people we talk to everyday to keep us informed and to challenge our thinking.  Similarly, it’s important to build a reputation not just as smart investors, but also as the kind of people you would enjoy working with. 

Sometimes that means sharing our music interests through our personal blogs and other times, as we learned this past Monday night, it means having dodgeballs thrown at you in a high school gym.

On Monday, Brad, Fred and I, along with Fred's kids Josh and Jessica, all took part in nextNY's dodgeball tournament.  (Check out our awesome new website!)  nextNY is a social networking group for the up and coming members of the New York City tech community that I helped start.  We played against web designers, entrepreneurs, analysts from other VC firms--all active and visible members of our local tech community.  They're smart, ambitious, and as we saw Monday--a lot of fun.  They are the kind of people we want to work with and also people we like to socialize with. 
When entrepreneurs and technologists invest their whole lives into their passions, its only natural that the lines between professional and social engagement get a bit blurred.  Its important to be willing to engage the technology community around us on both levels.

We had a great time and we even made it to the finals.  So if you're looking to get more involved in New York City's local tech community, we highly encourage you to participate in groups like nextNY, the New York Tech Meetup and Mobile Mondays.  If you know of other groups we should be a part of, please feel free to list them in the comments below

I hate shopping.

I hate the whole process...  being sold to, crowded stores... buying stuff that other people don't need just because its the day they were born.  I wind up spending money, as most guys do, not actually buying gifts.  (As in...   You're a $30 birthday friend...  You're a $50 date vs. a $100 date.) 

Its all very...   manufactured.  John Cusack captured the feeling best:

“I don't wanna sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't wanna sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed, you know, as a career, I don't wanna do that...right now I just wanna be with your daughter, sir.”

But today, I just received a product that I bought last week that made me feel different about it, from Etsy.  Etsy is a marketplace for all things not mass produced... but as I learned, its a marketplace for people, because you don't just get the item, you get a personal story.  It has a community look and feel...  when you go on the site, you feel like you're at a fair.  Its made just for this kind of stuff... not a one size fits all site where you could sell a lamp, your '82 Chevelle, or women's surplus army pants all in the same place. 

First off, it came from Singapore.  And it didn't come from some big factory where hundreds of 11 year old kids are running big machines or doing this all day by hand until they bleed.  It came directly from Chu Ling, a mom with a 16 month old daughter who isn't feeling well at the moment.  She runs a shop on Etsy and comes from a very poor family.  She handwrote the envelope... somewhere in Singapore... last week.  Something about that is just really fantastic for me...   a lot more interesting than just getting a book from someone from Barnes & Noble.  In fact, I think I want to keep the envelope and give it as part of the gift.

I bought a purple glass pendant.  As soon as Chu received my PayPal payment, she wrote me by e-mail to tell me she'd mail it the next day.  When she did, she e-mailed me again to tell me the tracking number, which, to be honest, I didn't even use.  She had like 500+ positive buyer experiences to her credit against 0 negative ones and not even a single neutral ones. 

I'm very happy with my purchase, too.  So no more manbuying for me...  where I'm just a wallet making a monetary judgement of a friendship.  These things are special an now I feel like I can get special stuff for the people I care about most. 

The web is so fuckin' cool.

Brad wrote this morning about an interesting take on tech blogging.

Too many people writing about solutions, but not enough people talking about the problems.

At the same time, two people sent me some info on this Sunday's DC rally for Darfur.

I'm a bit cynical about these types of political rallies because I feel like its all about complaining about the problems, but not too many people have actual solutions.  Where's the ten step plan for fixing the atrocities in Darfur?   I'll get behind a reasonable solution, but I haven't seen any.

Maybe we should get the tech bloggers to bring their 85 calandaring solutions together to come up with one solution for Darfur...

...and then get the political protesters to work on pointing out what the everyday problems in the tech world that the average person needs solving.

I'd love that.   Web based, AJAX world peace...   and protesters outside Amazon with little "No walled garden" signs.

So I'm realizing that my commute is like 11 minutes too long and my neighborhood is one detached $2 million house too residential.

Its kind of funny, actually, because the first five months that I was living here, I was dating someone in Park Slope, which artificially split my commute in half.  It was rare that I was making the full trip at one time.  Now, admittedly, its kind of annoying.

Plus, I've had a lot of friends start to move into Fort Greene.  That got topped off when we went to see a company right in that neighborhood last week that had an awesome walkup space. 

I really dread the thought of moving again.

Well, first I need to figure out what I'm doing next year so I can size up my bite size.... so I'm probably not going anywhere in 2006.   

But it doesn't seem like this Bay Ridge thing is going to last.

MiniCharlie has the details on how you can see Fred, Brad, Fred's kids Josh and Jessica, and my friend Jen take on lots of nextNYers in dodgeball tonight!  Come out to watch the action!

I have this bizzare little habit everytime I fly on a plane.

I e-mail myself a simple last will and testament.

Then I e-mail my friend Brian the password to my e-mail, in case the plane goes down.

I'm not even afraid of flying or anything...   but while the plane is boarding, I tend to get board and my mind starts wandering.  I figure for the minute that it takes, I might as well have my stuff in order.

There is one thing that I've been putting in it, though, that I can make public here, though.  Don't worry, I'm not going anywhere, but while I have your attention, I think I'd like to make one request public.

I don't want a wake and I want to be cremated.  I really hate the idea of "embalming" and the being put up for display for a couple of days, then being dropped in a box in the ground left to decay.  I mean, come on, does that sound appealing to you?   Nope...  as soon as I go, harvest me for whatever organs people need, and then toast me.  Spread the ashes places I cared about, like the Boathouse or Fordham or something like that. 

Sorry if that was morbid, but that's life.  Now you all know what to do with me should I overdose on Jamba Juice.

Live from the N train over the Manhattan Bridge, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

....its a cement truck full of Wonder Bread!



Haha



You might not find this funny, but I as highly amused.

Sweet... Front row and lots of leg room, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

But where's my tray table??

Off to Tampa, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Niece's first communion...

So NewsCorp invested in SimplyHired...  and the talk is that MySpace will now get jobs content.

Obviously, since USV is invested in Indeed, it was important news.

At first, I thought it was a big win for them, but as I think about it, it may very well be the moment that MySpace jumped the shark.

MySpace is comprised of two things...    user generated content and entertainment.  That's it.  That's been the secret to its success.

But jobs?  How are MySpacers going to react when jobs start showing up?  I mean, I have a feeling that they'll probably just ignore it, because for most people, MySpace is self expression and a way to meet new people or discover new music.  It will be fascinating to see how job content gets integrated here.

I think MySpace could be a huge moneymaker for NewsCorp... the habits of this audience should be valuable enough to mine by "facilitation" alone, without "addition."  In other words, give the crowd enough ways to express themselves and that becomes a lot of valuable metadata.

Frankly, I think the Facebook would have made so much more sense.  College students use the Facebook as their personal PIM... the online connection to their college life that colleges themselves could never create.  Job content, particularly internships, would fit very seemlessly here and probably get a lot more traffic than the average career planning office's website.  (A vertical job search would probably be a lot more useful, too.)  The web offerings of most career planning office's websites are so poor and so behind the times, that by adding a vertical job search to the Facebook, particularly one neatly tied in with cool social features (tagging jobs for friends, broadcasting them to the Finance club, etc...), they'd be doing a huge service to the students.

Plus, regardless of which site gets more traffic, the Facebook is a better target audience for job seekers, because MySpace has a lot of high school students.

The other interesting thing about the Facebook is how it eventually deals with alumni.  At some point, Facebookees are going to leave school and the Facebook is going to be their connection to other alumni.  That means that, if I were InCircle, I'd be looking over my shoulder.  It wouldn't take much, if anything, for Facebook to be the first stop for alumni in terms of social networking, and that's InCircle's business model.  Jobs makes a lot of sense for alumni...  and integrating social features means Facebook moves close to LinkedIn's model as well.  Imagine going on the Facebook to checkout a job, then being able to see how many of your school's alumni work at that company and how you're connect to them.  I think that would be useful for students as well, once a critical mass of alumni are on board.  Sure, it doesn't seem like "fun" content...   but there are thinks really useful to students that aren't always fun. 

Besides... getting paid to work at a great job is fun...trust me.

But back to MySpace, either way, its a facinating deal and it will be an even more interesting integration.