Yesterday, I had an amazing call with a guy with thirty years experience in the recruiting market.  For years, he had a vision of a service doing exactly the kind of things we plan to do with Path 101--not necessarily on the helping people figure out what they want to do side, but on the data-centric, getting to know candidates better side.  We saw completely eye to eye on how badly this market needs to do more than figure out eighty different ways to smash a resume and a job post together, or mindlessly connect people without adding intelligence to the process.  What he also believed in, which we do strongly, was that it needed to be a service people opt-in to--something that provides value to the user every step of the way, encouraging them to participate more and submit more information about themselves. 

What was amazing was that this guy went the distance in terms of describing the power of the vision--referring to it as "one of those four or five big stories..."--while at the same time, he realized that we needed to take small steps to get there, but that directionally we were in the right place.  At one point, the grokking was so intense, we had to pull back and say, "Hey, we need to pull back and let this sink in... let's talk next week." 

While I absolutely believe Path 101 can be one of those companies, there's never been a purpose to describe it as such to anyone like that, particularly investors.  In fact, going through the fundraising process actually forces you into quite the opposite mode of thinking.  Your grand vision starts slowly dying a death by a thousand cuts.  They start nitpicking on features they dislike, or question how long it will take before you drive revenues, or they want to know how are you going to get people to come to the site.  (Which is the most ridiculous question of all time, because every single company has the same answer--SEO, social media tools, PR, or some kind of partnership...and maybe some traffic purchasing... what other traffic is there?  Doesn't everyone say the same thing?)   

Eventually, you find yourself thinking smaller--that if you can't find anyone to believe your big world-changing vision, you try to convince people of small things--how you just want to get to the next product step, how you can pull down some low hanging fruit revenue, etc.  God forbid you should look out further than your next financing in your plan--well don't bother because who's going to believe you, right?

Meanwhile, I was at a panel discussion with four VC's and some of them were talking about "Web 2.0" deals and how they need to do extra diligence on the mindset of the entrepreneur because they need to make sure they're in it to build a big company and don't want the quick flip.  Well, how many game changing companies out there had a clear path to the world changing vision at the point of their angel round? 

Perhaps the reason why so many Web 2.0 companies are small ideas and quick flips is because we've never had so much transparency into the VC mindset as we have now, and what entrepreneurs are hearing isn't "Think big", but "What can you show me now?"  Well, big takes time, and small can be built on Ruby-on-Rails this weekend... and don't expect small to resist a $30 million sale to a media company.   Thus far, no new potential investor has flat out asked me how Path 101 changes the world, and only one has even come close to turning the conversation into how big this gets. 

del.icio.us, for example, was a company where lots of people scratched their heads and said, "Bookmarking?  I don't get it," while at the same time, others, like those of us at Union Square Ventures, thought that people-powered search and discovery was a potential game changer and maybe even a Google-killer.

The key is finding that one person who believes in that vision like you do--even if you haven't previously been #2 at Paypal or built Skype or whatever.  It's hard to do that as part of this process.  I told this guy yesterday that while I totally believed in this vision, as CEO, I also had to deal with the harsh reality that the well runs dry in January, and so no one's changing any worlds without some more cash.  Walking in the door and saying, "I know we're in Alpha and rolling out our product at the moment, but here's how this changes the world", unfortunately, isn't usually the path to solving that immediate need.

I wonder if your expected value increases if you grab your pick ax and go find that one person who believes in the big vision, versus thinking small and incremental and showing what you can do tomorrow so someone will fund you today.  Companies would certainly behave very differently depending on what kind of feedback they get from their supporters, and so I wonder how much the early exit/flip Web 2.0 small idea mentality is a product not of entrepreneurs but of the investment community itself.

UPDATE:

Of course, I really don't want to just come off like I'm complaining.  If you know me, you know I always look for actionable next steps anytime I see an issue.  For me, what this whole experience has me doing is thinking about ways I can better convey the vision and end goal to the folks who need to see what that first step on the path looks like.   Sometimes, though, its just nice to get unbridled support on the vision rather than just spend 99% of your time defending the product plan.

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

I wish I knew who all these people were.

I wish I knew whether the girl standing in front of me reading Marie Claire with the trail of stars tattooed on her ankle was with anyone when she got it.

What about the tall geeky couple to my right? Are they actually a couple? Where did they meet?

The guy with the Handsome Boy Clothing Co tshirt...is that a bible pamphlet he's holding? Where'd he get it? Does he have one for each day?

The woman conked out with her mouth open... Does she fall asleep everyday? Did she go out late last night? Maybe yesterday was her birthday.

Lots of tats around... All are little stories.

How about nametags with links to our web profiles?

I'm sorry, but even besides obvious reasons I just find women so much more interesting to look at. I find guys to be pretty boring.

Ruoska sings Narua in my ear, in Finnish. No silver bullet for mortgages, UK warned says the peach flavored Financial Times. I can see my feet. The FT has spit out an insert. A guy in a Decepticons tshirt swoops in quickly to pick it up. His hipster bag says Black Paw.

Everything just came up Charlie today.

I had a great call with a smart investor who turns out to know one of my angels through the BYU alumni network.

I used by super amazing powers of interweb stalking to track down a Fordham grad who is an investor at a private equity firm--through his son who turns out to have had my old job at GM.  Only put two and two together because of autocomplete on Thunderbird--it matched the last names.

I got the most amazing e-mail from a new old friend--someone I'd gone years without seeing and have recently reconnected with.

My Fordham softball team won and made the playoffs in a do or pretty much die situation in the last game of the season.  I drove in three and had an outfield assist as we won 9-7.

I spoke at Ignite and apparently did pretty well...  

Funny, because when I was speaking, I noticed that the crowd actually seemed to be listening.  I thought maybe everyone had left, but the attention was confirmed by Eric and Adam.

And then I biked home and it was a beautiful night.   Everything's coming up Charlie!

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

I've been playing on a few softball teams with ZogSports over the past three years, but this fall I barely got on a team.  Because only a few NYC softball fields have lights, and the three on 52nd/11th are going to be under construction, the Zog fall league had to be extremely small.  Spots for teams sold out in just an hour or two, and I didn't get my Fordham team in under the wire.  Luckily, I managed to squeeze in another team, but still, lots of people got shut out.

Field space is at a premium in NYC... frankly, every kind of space is at a premium, but places to play are few and far between, so when there is a spot, making sure there's as much access as possible should be a priority.  That should include making all fields--soccer, softball, etc, available at night, including the ones in Central Park--particularly the Heckscher fields, which are right by the Columbus Circle entrance.

It shouldn't be a cost issue.  Most of these leagues are corporate sponsored, and so you've got an audience of people who are more than willing to pay for access--especially if it meant not having to hike up to 138th/Riverside or 145th and Lennox to play a night game.

More games also adds to the local economy--it keeps people staying in the city longer, and certainly makes them more likely to go with their team out to a local bar... and for those that don't overindulge at bars, getting out to a sports game for a couple more months into the fall (and earlier in the spring) keeps them healthy and more active. 

What will it take to get more fields lit up at night? 

Let them play!  Let them play!

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

When there's an 800 pound gorilla in your space, trying to steal bananas isn't exactly the smartest approach.  You figure out what he's not eating, and you start nibbling.  Before you know it, you're eating just as much as he is and wouldn't you know it, one bad banana crop and he's toast. 

So when I hear that someone wants to build a better search engine than Google, while I don't think it's impossible, I question along what lines they're trying to do it.  Can you really do it by indexing more pages than Google?  I find that hard to believe, because an infrastructure arms race with Google seems like a bad idea--no matter how efficiently you think you can manage your crawling costs.

Smarter algorithms?  Maybe, but isn't algorithm quality a function of sheer brain power of your search team?  Again, this isn't where I want to take Google on head to head.

No, where I think you can beat Google, or at least make some headway on them, is with people.

At the end of the day, computer interpretation of human behavior and desires is what drives Google.  You could attempt building a bigger or faster computer, but no one computer is really going to be able to interpret people better than, well, people.

That's why del.icio.us had so much potential.  Google could never figure out what was funny or interesting, but del.icio.us could. 

To me, it's also the reason why Firefox gained so much ground against Internet Explorer.  It wasn't that smarter people work on Firefox--it's that more people worked on only the things they cared about, solving problems for themselves.  The best ideas floated to the top and became part of the codebase.  Things got addressed that weren't a priority for the IE team, but that more engaged users had keen insight into the value of.  The more you directly involve people--at scale, which isn't easy--into the process, the better your product is, because your product is made for people.

So, right now, Cuil and a number of other startups have teams of a handful of people who are supposed to know better than all the Google people what users want out of their search and how to search better.  Why not, instead, open up the process to something more open source--more Firefox-like?

Here's what a more collaborative approach to building a better search engine might look like:

Backend:

Outsource just the basic crawl to Amazon, because they've probably got the best shot at competing cost effectively, but enable outsiders a chance to add elements to the crawl.  So, if you have a way of categorizing pages, like Cuil says they do, add that ability to the Amazon powered crawl, and your special taxonomy and tags will be available for anyone to access, work on and improve. 

Let others use your infrastructure to target specific pages with a different type of crawl and contribute to the results.  In other words, let Indeed and others run their crawlers on your infrastructure, so that the barrier to create new attempts at search isn't set artificially high.  This will make a lot more sense when we talk about Plugins.

Plugins

There are lots of different types of search that Google just doesn't do well, like jobs and events.  This has given rise to some opportunities in the vertical search market   Let's take that Indeed example.  Right now, Indeed searches jobs much better than Google does, so why not enable Indeed, Simply Hired or anyone else crawling jobs to outline what represent job keywords and searches, and automatically provide results for them.  You could even randomly rotate which job search engine plugin powers your job search and let them duke it out for highest clickthrough rates, or allow the user to set a default. 

Basically, a "plugin" would be a hosted version of the third party crawler that gets sent queries based on their structure, keywords, etc., and gets to send back all the results they can, as well as gets the opportunity to advertise against them.   So, in our "open source" search engine, when I type in "marketing jobs, new york, NY", instead of getting a page of links to search engines for their marketing jobs queries--i.e. an "extra click"--I'd actually get jobs as my results, and Indeed powered job ads.

The same could go for movies.  How many times do you type a movie name into Google, knowing full well that IMDB is going to be the first result?  Why not allow IMDB to be the movie plugin?  They could directly provide structured results for all the actor and movie queries and be allowed to advertise against them.  This way, you eliminate the Google middle man when all you were really trying to do was reach IMDB in the first place.  All you'd need are some standardized display templates for results, which could also allow some interface flexibility for different types of queries, like videos or location searches on local maps.

People could build other types of plugins, like one that would automatically display RSS results when blogs came up high in your ranking.  I get Google results for "Charlie O'Donnell's blog"...  let Newsgator build that plugin and power it with all of the clickthrough data on what my interesting most recent posts were.

The system of sending queries to the right search tool would be a kind of AdWords platform, but a level up the chain.  Instead of a marketplace for advertising next to one kind of search result, you'd have a marketplace of search results, each coming with their own ads in tow (or using a default ad platform that anyone could use.)  You could attempt to "buy" certain keywords to put your search results next to them, but you'd have to get good clickthrough performance to keep appearing.

Personalization

You'd definitely allow users to add their own scripts and plugins, as well as have them contribute other types of data.  Let me pump in my blog, my del.icio.us tags, twitter feed, etc. in an effort to teach the search engine all about what I like.  Let me remove results, follow my clicks... learn about me (and my friends) as I go along.

The company that should really get into this is Yahoo!  They couldn't out-Google Google on search or monetization, so they should just crack open the whole thing and let the community and other companies have a shot at it.  They could be the default ad network for searches that weren't powered by plugins...   and they could strike deals with plugin providers to take a smaller cut than Google would have had on ad clickthoughs. 

If not, I still think it would make for a pretty viable community project.  Hell, maybe Mozilla should be the one to work on it, or are they getting paid too much by Google for Firefox default search to rock the boat there?

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

"So we are thrilled to be an investor in a company that has been organized since its inception around the key insight that we believe will drive the next several years of innovation on the web – the need to solve real problems in the real world for real people."   - Brad Burnham on USV's Investment in Meetup

If only there were other companies solving real problems for real people.

Have you ever written something you really thought had a chance to go viral.  Maybe it wasn't even linkbait--it was just something you thought was really original and thoughtprovoking, and if only the right handful of people, or a critical mass of your friends caught onto it, it would take off.

So what do you do?

You bite the bullet and you start asking for people to Digg it.  Ugh.  There's nothing worse than being a social media panhandler.  It makes you feel stripped of your authenticity.  You might as well be pushing Rolexes.

So, what if, instead of blowing so much social capital on Diggbegging, you could easly throw a few bucks towards it to get it in front of the right bloggers.

Feedburner had something a little bit like that--where you could figure out what the CPMs were on your blog and advertise your feed in the feeds of other people in order to try to get more users. 

For businesses, easy tools like Clickable are really lowering the overhead it takes to have your own SEM strategy.  What individual contributors need is a kind of mini-Clickable right at the point of creation.  How great would it be if, right next to the publish button, there was another button that said, "Do you want to invest $10 in driving relevant traffic to this post?"  The money could be used to not only do search placement, but sponsored placement as "Suggested sponsored links" in front of bloggers talking about the same things.  They wouldn't get paid to reblog, so it wouldn't be like PayPerPost--you'd just be paying to get in front of people who are likely to reblog the idea.  

Another aspect of this is a better way to actually get your friends to reblog, Digg, tweet, etc. on your behalf.  What if I could sent one link around that gives people a menu with the minimum number of clicks necessary to spread it.  They could have their blog id/password, twitter password, digg, etc. already saved, so all it would take are some checkmarks and some additional optional descriptive copy in a few places and press "spread".  There are lots of times I would reblog something relevant that my friends send me, but I just don't have a lot of time to crack open the blog editor, do the appropriate cutting and pasting, etc.  This would come in especially handy when people send me jobs to repost.  I'd repost most of the jobs that people send my way, but it's kind of a pain in the ass.  If I could create a trusted list of friends that are allowed to repost their job ads to my blog, and maybe even aggregate them, I'd pre-approve people to do it.

Because who really wants to be a social media panhandler?

more cat pictures
more cat pictures

I seem to be the only human being in the world, but I was kind of disappointed by the Dark Knight. It was still a good movie, but definitely wasn't as good as Batman Begins. I don't know if it tried to do too much, but midway through the movie, I kept thinking that there was just too much plot going on here. I thought that truck flip scene was going to be the "final standoff" but there was still like an hour left in the movie.

It wasn't so much that there weren't good parts, but there were too many things that bothered me for this to get anything more than a 7, whereas the first one was close to a 10.

Here's what I didn't like:

1) Who is the Joker? In the original movie, we get the Joker backstory. The Joker was Jack Napier--an ambitious thug who falls into a vat of chemicals and gets a backalley hack to try to fix his face--only to leave that ridiculous smile on him. This time, we get nothing but the Joker keeps asking people "Wanna know how I got this scar?" and keeps coming up with new versions of the story. That's completely annoying because these new movie versions are all about the backstory. I wanted to know.

2) The whole Rachel Dawes character is a failure. What exactly did she do to warrant the love of two great men?  Why does Bruce Wayne love her?  Because they played together as little kids?  She's kind of vapid in this one--barely even caring that Harvey Dent nearly gets blown away in the courtroom. (The gun just happened to misfire right? Am I the only one that thought everyone should have reacted a little more to that?) I didn't care at all when she died. Not only is she no MJ from Spiderman, who I think we all fell in love with, but Maggie Gyllenhaal looks distractingly like Kirsten Dunst.

3) I really hate the Batman voice. Why is Christian Bale doing his worst Al Pacino impression under the cowl? It didn't bother me so much in the first one, because Batman doesn't really have a ton of dialogue, but in this one, it just gets silly.

4) The Batcycle is Bat Feature Creep. I was waiting for the back wheel to get blown off so it could get converted to the Bat Segway.

5) Too much obvious foreshadowing. How many "face" references to Dent were there? Face of Gotham? Hmm... I wonder if he becomes Two Face at the end? Lucky for him that Two Face was already his nickname!

6) Phone sonar: We've seen that effect before--in DareDevil, when it rains.

7) The Bat copycats expose us to the silliness of the idea of a guy running around dressed as a bat. What I thought was amazing in the first one was how believable the origin story of a guy in a bat costume was... Like I could actually see it happening and not being silly. When the copycat asks Batman what the difference between him and Batman was "I'm not wearing goalie pads" can't be the answer, otherwise Batman really is just a guy with a boatload of cash and military equipment.

8) Since when do all of the killings in a superhero movie have to be accounted for?  I hate the idea that Batman has to take the blame for Dent's murders.  Did he really kill 5 or 6 people?  I wasn't counting?  Are they counting Morone's limo driver, too?  Who cares who killed a mob limo driver?  Can't they sweep that under the rug?  Leave it as a cold case?   

9) His death was tragedy--no doubt. But, just in terms of his performance, I honestly thought it was kind of understated. When I think psychopath in clown makeup, I'm thinking REALLT creepy. Robin Williams was once mentioned as a potential Riddler before Jim Carrey got it, and his performances in 24 Hour Photo and Insomnia were beyond creepy--they were downright disturbing. I just didn't feel like the Joker was really that unpredictably nuts in this one. I did get my hopes up in the beginning, though. Between the "What busdriver?" line and the amazing disappearing pen, I thought we were in for a real sicko... in a funny kind of sick way. Didn't get him again until he walks out of the hospital in the nurse outfit...not much in between.