22 years from now, I will be 50. There's a scary thought.

Anyway, I'll probably have teenage kids and, aside from that, I have no idea what my world will look like, mostly because I have no specific long term plans.

At least me and our government have that in common.

It seems all our government plans all run along election timelines--except for McCain, of course, who's got visionary plans to occupy Iraq for 100 years.

I think we should be thoughtful about some period in between that. Mike Bloomberg unveiled a plan for this city to cover what it would look like in 2030. It seemed like as good a an arbitrary point in the future as any.  The plan was just about sustainability, but it touched on many areas of life and our economy.

I'd like to see the US unveil a similar plan for our whole country--across all of the facets of our life: the environment, energy, education, business, culture and the arts, infrastructure. Let's kick it off with a big Davos-like conference of the leaders of today and tomorrow, as well as the people who clearly aren't on leadership paths. Mix in some soccer moms and trailer park kids and maybe even an ex convict or two (given the disproportionate number of our population in jail).

Let's set some stretch goals like, "In 2030, we will have the best and most accessible education on the planet."

Why not?

If we can't make that happen after 22 years of focusing on it, then at least we'll be trying. How about 22 years of work towards a zero carbon footprint economy?

Yeah...zero. Why not try?

I am a big believer in the idea that if you work you ass off towards a ridiculously big goal, even if you don't make it, you get a lot further than if you cut your potential short by thinking too small. Of course, that doesn't mean you just get up and swing for the fences every time. You can single an double a team to death and score 12 runs, but you still have to keep your eye on winning big.

However this process runs, it needs to be two things--apolitical and accessible.
If we just have politicians do this and it isn't a plan that administrations to come can't stick with, or if we just have two sides bickering on policy all the time, it will fail. This is no time for infighting.

It also needs to feel like something everyone ca get involved with. We need to organize both in person and online. Let's get back to town halls (Local USA 2030 Meetup Groups?). I liked Jeff Jarvis' idea for using Salesforce Ideas for the government.

No matter what tools we use, it needs to be talked about in barber shops, worked into school curriculums (aren't problem solving and goal setting skills that we should be teaching anyway?).

For once, I just want to feel like we know where we're going and that its a good place. That direction can't just come from Obama...we all need to be involved.

• Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media: Twingly: Innovating The (Blog) Search Interface
  (tags: interface ui blogs ux)

I'm running this fan page to learn more about marketing in Facebook, and of course, to support the Downtown Boathouse. 

Interesting things missing:

• You can't invite your friend to the page, unless you want them to be admins.
• No plugin for donations

I wonder what else people would want from their pages.  I'm a fan of several pages, but they don't seem to want to interact with me much.

Alex and I had the pleasure of chatting with Jason Shellen a couple of months ago on the phone--Smart guy and pretty funny, too.  He slipped us some info on what Plinky was about and I think it's very cool.  I can't wait to see it.

Interesting that Polaris funded the seed round.

With a guy like Jason, there's little risk of execution or that the technology won't work.  Plus, getting adoption is part of an iterative process--the crowd rarely loves you on your first pass--so why not fund this early?  If you like the entrepreneur and their vision, I don't think a couple of months of traction with bootstrapped or angel resources really proves much of anything.

Good luck Jason!  Send an alpha invite our way!

I went to the supermarket late this afternoon.  I thought about relationships...  and cheese.

The single Charlie has three types of cheese in the house: Extra sharp cheddar, pepper jack, and grated peccorino romano. 

I didn't have anyone to suggest any other types of cheese in the supermarket.  No one else was going to eat cheese in my apartment but me.... so I got the types I normally get.

In college, I went with someone I was dating to the Dominican Republic.  The resort we stayed in had an all you can eat place--and one whole table dedicated to cheese.  We started off our meals with whole platefuls of cheese.  It was a special bond. 

I would like someone else around to affect my cheese decisions--to spice things up a bit.  An ex used to bring baby bel paise into the house.  It was so conspicuous in my fridge--obviously not mine but a nice reminder of the presence of someone else around. 

• Swift Kick Central: An Open Letter to Umair Haque, Applying for Revolutionary Status
  (tags: education swiftkick)
• 20 Super Foods You Need to Build Muscle & Lose Fat | StrongLifts.com
  (tags: food diet)
• Logic+Emotion: The One Video All Marketers Should Watch
  (tags: marketing video customers experience)
• Dearth of Deep-Sea Drilling Ships Hinders Offshore Oil Search - NYTimes.com
  Great... so now we have enough oil... just not enough ships and rigs to drill it. Doh!!
  (tags: oil ships energy)

For those of you that don't know, Sermo is a social network for doctors to share information, insights, and advice with each other.  You would think, given such a high quality demographic profile, that driving advertising revenue would be like shooting fish in a barrel.  What pharmaceutical company wouldn't want to get their ads in front of doctors talking to each other about medicine?

Of course, what doctor really wants to join a social network full of pharmaceutical ads--not to mention how likely are they to click a banner ad about drugs?  (Although they might be able to sell a list of the doctors with the highest clickthroughs to patients, so I know who NOT to go to in an emergency.)

Unfortunately, given current ad formats, monetization through advertising directly flies in the face of the quality of interaction in the community.  It degrades the user experience, creating a problem for startups.

Instead, Sermo is making the user experience a priority, ridding their site of ads, and instead, allowing financial investors, government agencies, and yes, the pharma companies, an opportunity to observe the interactions and pull useful insights out of the community.  Instead of taking their customers out of their natural environment to do surveys and research, they're making the whole community into a huge research panel.

The value to the institutions that live and die with drug approvals, potential recalls, new patent uses, etc. is unquestionable.  In fact, Sermo should become profitable this year, after securing almost $40 million in investment.

Does it really take that much money to build a social network?  No, but these types of information creating communities are requiring a second phase of build--tools to secure and to harvest the data, as well as a more robust infrastructure to scale the community and insure it's continued growth.

This is an interesting potential path for communities like Twitter, Get Satisfaction, and Tumblr.  On their face, it might not be obvious to folks how they'll ever drive revenue, especially since these aren't necessarily places people want to be sold to. 

The information coming out of Twitter is a gold mine--whether it's about brands, stocks, events, music, etc.  I'm a bit surprised that Twitter hasn't done more along the lines of search and trend tracking, but I suppose their amazing growth has given them more immediate fish to fry.  Anyone who's ever tracked a consumer brand on Twitter knows that a marketer or brand manager would pay through the nose for this kind of insight into customers in the wild.

Get Satisfaction--the community powered customer feedback portal--is creating a place where people can tap into their userbase and understand issues, problems, opportunities, etc.  Since the Kryptonite lock incident, companies have realized that social media engagement isn't a choice--it's a business necessity, and yet great tools for engagement and participation haven't really been built until GetSatisfaction.

I love the fact that customers can create pages for the companies they love or hate even before the company joins the network.  Not surprisingly, many companies will be the last ones to the party, but what this model also does is to give the company a great pipeline for who to sell to next.

Tumblr may wind up with a similar model, especially if it continues to be a place where cool people share cool things on the web.  I don't know of they can continue to maintain this atmosphere and scale at the same time, but if they can, there's surely a lot of interesting trend data that can bubble up from Tumblr. 

In a lot of ways, this model is just like the way Google monetized search.  You built a place where people could get something done or solve a problem for free--try not to interrupt their experience, and then try to harvest the data their participation created. 

There are, of course, several challenges with this model.  First is that the visionary community person who created the community may not be the same person tasked with building the application that packages the data and the participation tools for the entity that ultimately pays for the service.  Of course, it's integral for the visionary community folks to be a part of this process to protect the interests of the consumers, but ultimately, you need an industry person to really understand and service the needs of the pharma companies, Comcast, or the brand marketer, whoever it may be. 

Second, investors may have to make a kind of leap of faith about the value of the data and the ability for the team to build a product that gleans valuable insights from it.  Whereas now they don't have to make much of a leap of faith as to whether or not there's user value in these free applications, the chasm has shifted to betting on whether or not the business information seekers will buy in.

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

Albert Wenger and I will be moderating a three hour startup workshop at NYC Web 2.0 Expo in September. There is a lot we could talk about from getting started to hiring to fundraising. But rather than just pick the topics ourselves based on what we think might be interesting, we figured we should find out ahead of time what folks really want to hear about. So please use the comments to suggest questions, topics and even guest speakers (three hours is a long time and we will vary the format including break out sessions).

Growing a startup isn't easy, but at least once you're up and running, you're more likely to get outside feedback and suggestions. When all you have is an idea, it's often hard to figure out where to begin. Here are five things I tell napkin stage entrepreneurs all the time:

1) Have great relationships with the people who know you already.  If the people who have either worked for you or that you've worked for won't vouch for you, who will?  Investors, employees, and partners are all going to look for this.  So, before you spend the next 6 months trying to pound the pavement trying to drum up new relationships, how about spending half that time with the successful people who know you already?

2) Join the conversations already going on in your space--read blogs, start a blog, join groups, listservs, attend meetups. There are a bunch of reasons for this. First off, unless you're actively engaging with thoughtful people in your industry on a daily basis, it's going to be extremely difficult to be as current as possible on the trends that affect your idea. Plus, engagement in conversation, both online and offline, will attract likeminded thinkers, which you're going to need when you get your idea off the ground.

3) Use every single even mildly related service you possibly can--and not just once. You need to have a really thorough knowledge of what else is out there--not to defend your idea and explain why it's different, but to learn from (copy, improve upon) the best ideas the market already has, and understand what isn't working about the ones that fail. I can't tell you how many times I mention a related company to a startup and they've never even heard of it. I shouldn't know more about the startups and existing services in your space than you do.

4) Identify the 30 most knowledgeable people in your space--analysts, investors, executives, even competitors--and try to meet with them about your idea. Look, all you have is an idea. Chances are, all of these people have thought about or heard of your idea before, and they have existing day jobs, so they're not likely to just jump in and steal what you're doing. When anyone can copy your idea in a matter of weeks, it's a matter of execution anyway--and that requires all the best thinking you can muster. Plus, chances are that some of these people will put you in touch with people who could help build your idea, through collaboration, investment, or even literally code it up.

5) Be a leader of startups in your space. All startups need some basic help with the nuts and bolts of running a business. Gathering a critical mass of other startups doing similar things allows you all to learn from each other and focus on the parts of your business that creates value, not stumble on the basics. Also, putting together events for new companies in your space can attract potential clients, who may want to checkout a bunch of startups all at once. A good example of a group of new startups in a single industry coming together to help each other and learn is the new Fashion 2.0 Meetup group here in NYC. They're sure to attract more industry speakers, investors, etc. as a group than any one of them would have been able to individually. Competition? Sure, some of them may be competitive with each other, but better to know and have a dialogue with the enemy than not.

Oh...  I mean... Chatter.

In my old apartment, I had a huge desk up against a wall that, I admit, I never really moved.  When I finally went back there to sweep, I found some fuzz and bones that, at one time, was a mouse who chewed right into an extension cord and zapped himself.  Had I never swept up back there, I never would have noticed him.

In the same way, I'd never notice Donna Bogatin's blog, "Startup Chatter" either, except that she constantly links to TechMeme stories, making her one really angry pilot fish who never generates her own insights.  That's the only way I know that she's still blogging, and still, for some bizzare reason, hating on Fred Wilson and every Union Square Ventures portfolio company.

Her latest target is Daniel Ha and Disqus, which just launched at the end of last October.  She rips on both the company and Fred, who backed it, because of a "spoon-fed puff piece" that appeared about the company on Louis Gray's blog.  She attacks Fred for being "consistently, disingenuously mum regarding meaningful insights about achieving what really matters to the investors in all of his portfolio companies: A BIG PROFIT ON THEIR INVESTMENTS".

This is what bothers me.  The Brooklyn boy in me gets pretty pissed of when she calls Fred Wilson "disingenuous."  Fred's been a mentor, friend, teacher, and supportive angel investor, and it just irks me to see her talk trash about a really great guy--and a great investor.  After taking her to lunch a while back to try to open up a dialogue, and then promptly getting ripped on again the next day, Fred doesn't bother with her, but I can't let this go. 

Why?   

Because Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures (along with David Hornick's VentureBlog) opened up the world of venture capital investing to entrepreneurs in a way that no one had ever done before--not with PR speak, but with an honest and sincere day to day account of the behind the scenes thinking that goes into running a venture fund.  Plus, he's consistantly one of the most insightful bloggers out there and, unlike Donna, full of original and useful ideas. 

Donna's big gripe about Union Square Ventures is that she thinks they're not focused enough on building real companies with real revenues.   Has she even looked at their portfolio?  Of the 19 investments that they've made, at least 6 of them (FeedBurner, Etsy, Indeed, Oddcast, Tacoda, and Instant Information) were generating multiple millions of dollars in annual revenues.   Of the other 13, del.icio.us was sold 9 months after USV invested, which was the choice of the founder and majority owner, but could have been built up into a people powered search engine (which, last I checked, is a real revenue model), 4 are recent investments, and the rest are in various stages of building up scale--a necessary requirement for significant revenue generation for some of the plans of these companies.  (Google had to get to signficant scale before they had enough search traffic to monetize against.)

And the silliest thing about her comments is how she speaks on behalf of the USV investors about what really matters to them.  Nearly all of the USV investors reupped in the firm's next fund.  With exits in Tacoda, Feedburner, del.icio.us, and nearly guaranteed (b/c of significant revenue traction) big exits in Indeed and Etsy, not to mention the potential of their other portfolio companise, USV's doing just fine in terms of creating revenue generating businesses and ones with successful exits.

So, basically, she has no idea what she's talking about. 

Actually, that's not the silliest thing about her comments.  The silliest thing about her comments is that she's now trying to make a business helping NYC startups as an advisor.  How wise do you think it is for someone advising startups and offering to make introductions to VCs here in NYC to constantly rip on the #1 VC firm in the city?  If that's the kind of advising she gives herself, I'd hate to hear what she has to tell startup companies. 

That's part of the reason why I feel the need to respond to her comments as well.  Ever since I started nextNY, I feel very protective of the NYC startup community and I've been really wary of self-proclaimed experts looking to profit off of newbie startups--especially when you can get these services for free.

If you're a NYC startup and you want feedback on your pitch, biz plan... anything...  You can join the nextNY list and just ask for a small group of folks to meet up with you about it.  What you'll get is an experienced group of current entrepreneurs, investors, developers, etc. who are part of the over 1700 folks involved in nextNY.  They'll be happy to sit around a table with you and give you excellent feedback on your idea--better feedback than I'm sure you'll get from the crazy cat lady of the NYC tech blogging community. 

I can't wait until she rips on Path 101--that will surely generate tons of unintentional humor. 

Right now, I have 2653 RSS subscribers and 890 Twitter followers.

Assuming not every one of my Twitter followers follow my blog via RSS, I'm going to say that puts Twitter penetration in my blog audience at about 25%. 

If you're not on it, check it out, particularly if you just don't get it.

What's the point of it?  It's a short form conversation that's going on between blog posts.  Think if it this way:  It's the "hallway track" at a conference--when the best conversations are the ones had spontaneously over on the side, away from the main exhibit room.

So before you think about whether you want to publish when you brush your teeth to the world, think about it from the listening perspective.  You spend the time to read my blog, where the posts are often entirely too long--why not find out about what I'm thinking and who I'm talking to when I'm not blogging?

It's time to listen in on the hallway track.  I'm here on Twitter:  http://www.twitter.com/ceonyc

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

Shack Shack Meetup, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

All of the people in this pic are either in startups or have funded them.

Give me your torrid, your pure, your totally smokin' foreign babes.

Feast your eyes on the latest immigration push by Rep. Anthony Weiner, a likely 2009 mayoral contender who has introduced a bill in Congress to make it easier for foreign fashion models to get visas to work in the U.S.

From the Daily News...

• Bootstrapping a Niche Social Network - Bokardo
  (tags: socialnetworking)
• LearnHub & The Mullet Strategy » Married Inc.
  This is a good answer to a question I've been thinking about for a while.
  (tags: mullets frontpage editorial community web2.0)

Back in October, Alex and I were two guys and a Powerpoint. 

We raised $350k partially based on that Powerpoint, but *I think* it was more based on the strength of our relationships and the fact that we were working in a big, lucrative space begging for disruption.  The investment was meant to recruit additional developers, carry us to a product, and give us some running room after to iterate.

We're on the verge of accomplishing the first half of that goal.  We hired two great developers and we're literally a couple of days from rolling out some of our product in an early Alpha version.  (No, no, it's not a "launch".  It will probably suck and break on day one, but you've got to start somewhere, right?)

Some entrepreneur friends were surprised and maybe even thought it was unfair that we were able to raise before having at least a demo or something up.  Certainly this is the kind of thing that VCs look for, but angels can be a different story. 

Thinking about risk and value creation in relation to fundraising is interesting to me, because its on the forefront of my mind right now. Since we're about to roll some product out, we have a very clear idea of what the product will look like and where it's going.  Of course, it needs to iterate based on user response/uptake, but that goes without saying.  What's very clear to me, though, is that the iteration and eventual inflection point for the service really depends on additional resources--a kick-ass user experience person and an operational/biz dev person.  These would clearly be our first hires after any kind of a financing, because the product not only depends on seamlessly integrating several complimentary career applications, but also on syndicating our services out to other communities and groups.

So the big question is, why wait?  (Especially if we've identified prospects for these roles, which we have.)

Right now, there's two scenarios:   

1) Launch, iterate with existing team, catch lots of falling knives and try and power our way forward to some arbitrary milestone that brings the term sheets pouring in, not that we or the VC's are even 100% sure what that is.  Then, spend time trying to fill out team.

2) Try and raise a couple million sooner rather than later, since we can very definitely say "This is the product and the near future of the product you are investing in."  We make our hires and hit the ground running, and make a much bigger impact in shorter order.

Option #1 plus a nice hockey stick might bring a higher valuation... but is that really what we should be optimizing for?  Outside of raising ridiculous amounts of money at ridiculous valuations, have you ever heard an entrepreneur attribute their ultimate success to a million or so here and there on interim valuations?  On the VC side, have you ever heard a VC say, "The success of our fund has really depended on waiting another month or so to see more traction on deals and teams we liked"? 

The worst thing that could happen is that we come out, inspire potential partners and employees, and we're unable to take advantage of them because we don't have the resources.  Raising money takes time, focus...   Raising at the moment your product gets really good and people finally get it is probably the worst thing you can do, because then you won't have your ducks in a row for when opportunities knock.  The trick is finding support from folks who see where you are going with something and believe that you have the passion and ability to get it there, even before its a sure thing. 

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm: