Alex and I were talking about our recruiting strategy over the weekend, which obviously will only happen if we raise our next round of financing.  He sent me these two e-mails...

"I'm thinking longer term though, we're going to raise this money, it's not an option or a question, this company is too good to not continue, I will do whatever it fucking takes."

Then...

"heh, got a little worked up there. ahem. I am prepared to assist, sir, to ensure that this company remains viable, by whatever means necessary, as I believe in it strongly  ;) "

This is why I think it's a bit silly when people post on message boards looking for a partner without much information at all.  You gotta get someone totally psyched about what you're up to, and to me, that means a lot of transparency.  Without insight into why what you're doing is so special, how is anyone going to get this crazy psyched about the company?

In Alex's case, he's psyched because not only is the company just as much mine financially as it is his, but so's the product.  I didn't come to him after all the wireframes were done and say, "Here, build this."  He joined when all I knew I wanted to do was help people figure out what they wanted to do--to solve one of the biggest problems people have in life.  We whiteboarded and explored and built the feature set together, collaboratively. 

Don't expect someone else to get really psyched about building your product.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

After Obama's selection of Joe Biden as his running mate, the AP ran with this:

"Analysis: Biden pick shows lack of confidence"

"The picks say something profound about Obama: For all his self-confidence, the 47-year-old Illinois senator worried that he couldn't beat Republican John McCain without help from a seasoned politician willing to attack."

I'm sorry, but that's idiotic, and it really captures what's idiotic about poltics.  People think that if you have 35 years political experience, you're an "insider" and somehow you can't work for the good of the people--that you're so wrapped up in insider politics and that you're also partly the cause of everything that has happened.

Yet, if you don't have this kind of experience, people will say you're not qualified.  Damned if you do, damned if you don't. 

To me, having a relative newcomer to Washington paired up with a veteran is what I call BALANCE.   Picking someone who chairs Senate Foreign Relations Committee is what I call COMPLEMENTARY.

When I came up with the idea for Path 101, the first thing I did was look for a tech partner who had a skills set that I didn't.  How silly would it be, after I found Alex to be the CTO, for people to say, "What's the matter Charlie?  Are you afraid your technology skills aren't up to par?  Shouldn't you understand the technology better if you're going to do a web startup?"

Afraid?  No.  Self aware?  Definitely.  I understand enough about technology to know that pairing up with a technologist to focus on it makes us a strong team.

And of course, McCain will attack.  McCain's definitely been the one to bring the campaign down in the dirt, and it's unfortunate, because elections are an opportunity to have a great dialogue on direction.  Instead, we'll have a dialogue about rhetoric. 

How long before McCain brings out the reels of Biden saying Obama didn't have enough experience?  Hi, that's called campaigning.  Biden was running for president and experience was his trump card.  Of course he's going to say that to get the edge.  At the same time, when McCain loses, is he going to continue to campaign against Obama or is he going to actually work with him as a senator, who, in the past, had always sought comprimise and worked with the other side.

I applaud Obama's choice, because it means he's going to surround himself with people who comlement him who have experience and ability to execute.  I'm glad there's someone on the team who has 35 years of Washington experience.  I just never wanted that to be the guy in charge.  I want a visionary leader who will push those who execute to make the right decisions--and someone whose decisions are informed by experience and wisdom.  Joe Biden is an excellent choice for Vice President.

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I try to make contact and hit the ball the other way. I'm always making the turn at first looking out for even the slightest hesitation or bobble from the outfielder. I run everything out. I take big leads and extra bases. I will tag from third on a shallow fly ball. I slide in shorts, dusting off the blood and dirt.

In the field, I pencil in everyone else first to see what gap I need to fill--outfield, first, third, pitcher, even short if I have to (but I'd rather play short on turf). I won't make extra throws, but when I do rear back, get your glove up, because it will have a little extra on it. I yell "Call it!" as soon as the ball is in the air.

I eat fly balls for breakfast, but could be better at balls on the ground. I'm always positioned right, though.

As a manager, I play everyone. You show you play. I like high OBP at the top of a lineup before my boppers get up. I like teaching people to play new positions and want everyone to know where the ball is going before it comes to them. Run hard...just run your ass off every play. You don't need talent to just run as fast as you can on every play. You will hear me from the dugout whether or not I'm actually coaching the bases.

"Because he’s on the wrong side of nearly every issue that has caused the majority of the problems we have today."

- from Marco

The other day I signed up for the Web 2.0 Expo Conference Social Network (I'll be speaking at one of the workshops). It was powered by Crowdvine. I found it mildly annoying to have to retype my professional information when that already existed somewhere else on the web--namely LinkedIn. I tweeted that Crowdvine should integrate LinkedIn import, since I'd seen a few places hack it, and then very quickly got this response via Crowdvine's Twitter account:

  "@ceonyc We're just waiting for LinkedIn to release their API. So far they've just released the PR announcements."

It was true. It's been over a year since LinkedIn talked about releasing some kind of a platform and API's and we've seen very little. There were a few throwaway integrations into mainstream web publisher content, but little else.

Their initial move towards the platform and API talk came soon after Facebook grabbed the spotlight with its platform. After the buzz, particularly around the initial applications, died down though, it was obvious that the Facebook platform, in that incarnation, didn't live up to the hype. The quality of applications was really low, and everyday new measures needed to be put in to decrease friend spam. These measures, and the eventual redesign that pushed applications off to another page in your profile, left applications handcuffed and unable to spread as virally as they had in the past.

Initially, that made it seem like LinkedIn's wait and see approach might have paid off. Instead of opening up a platform, they focused on a redesign that made LinkedIn more user friendly.  They also focused on driving revenues, expected to be $100 million.  Facebook, meanwhile, went back to the platform drawing board, stubbing its toe on Beacon, but eventually coming out with Facebook Connect.  Crowdvine uses Facebook connect for me to see which of my Facebook friends are going to the Web 2.0 Expo in New York. 

Facebook Connect allows me to bring my social graph to any application. I can see which of my Facebook friends are already using something and invite more. This gives keeping my "real network" on Facebook a direct benefit. Even Google recognizes that just because someone is in your Gmail contacts doesn't make them your friend, which is why they recently updated their address book functionality.  I think Facebook Connect is just the beginning of a second, potentially much more successful push at powering various applications by Facebook.  Lessons learned from F8 and Beacon will pay off.

In the meantime, LinkedIn remains a pretty closed place where data goes in and rarely comes out. The odd thing about Facebook's charge at being the defacto social graph for all applications is that they don't really monetize data and people--they monetize pageviews. LinkedIn is supposed to be the one that monetizes people, whether they use the site extensively or not. Recruiters pay to access LinkedIn's network of professionals.

You'd think that a site where huge revenues come from directly monetizing the presence (not even the participation) of users would be doing more to get people on it.

Facebook's value proposition to users is pretty clear: All your friends are there. Whatever functionality and applications you want to think about on top of that is gravy. You want, and dare I say at this point, need to be there because everyone else is there.

Don't get me wrong. I use LinkedIn nearly everyday, have nearly 1000 contacts, and I get a lot of value out of it. I'm in the minority, though. Most of the people I know are only on there because they got invited and do little more than accept invitations. That might bode well for the experience of being on there--most people don't get spammed--but at some point, that fails to create additional value. If you're selling people and you don't even have a quarter of the people your competitor does, you better know those people cold--and that has to come from active usage. The more I do on a site and the more that site plugs into other places that I'm active, the more data that site is going to build up on me.

That's why we're bucking the "do one thing" Web 2.0 trend at Path 101. We think that giving users a number of complimentary things to do around discovering their career interests, the better the picture of them as a potential candidate we'll be able to create--and the more people we'll capture through diverse methods.

Facebook may not have figured out how to monetize me yet, but they know me better than any other site--the data's either all there or well within reach. Perhaps Lotame, with its interesting ad platform built specifically to be powered by social network data, will be the answer.  The East Coast company, which just raised $13 million, uses user data to "target the most influential members of social networks and measure a campaign’s success as indicated by user generated content related to the brand."

I think at the end of the day, if you have a platform made of people, you've got to open up so that you can gather a much deeper understanding of who you have.  Just allowing people to connect and throwing a rather remidial free text search on top of superficial profiles has worked mostly because the alternatives--the noisey firehose of Monster and Jobs 1.0--was so bad, and the need to hire great people is so high.  Side note: What other market besides recruiting is the pain point and business criticalness of a task so high and the solution sets so bad?  To get to the next level, I believe LinkedIn will need to fully commit to a very comprehensive and even risky platform strategy--and iterate on it like Facebook has. 

Unfortunately, they might already be making too much money to bother, leaving most of it's potential on the table.

Fred posted about age today.  For a guy who's pretty cool about most things, he does have this bizarre  obsession with age--and he's worried that 47 is too close to the age where VC's start to fade.  Frankly, I think that VC's fade more because of money than because of age.  Why put in the same effort when you've got 20 million in the bank?

But Fred put this trend to bed years ago, because he made a ton of cash in the late 90's at a very early age.  By all accounts, he could have retired seven years ago--instead he's working harder than ever.  If you're not convinced, try getting on his calendar.

There are a lot of examples in my life where people don't act their age:

• My grandmother is 90.  She learned to drive in her 50's and still takes the car out all over Staten Island to go shopping and take car of errands.  She lives on her own, reads the paper everyday, and regularly cooks up a storm.
• My friend Darren has started something like 8 companies and is now the Head of Digital Media for Media Kitchen.  He's married, lives in Westchester and is now expecting his first child.  Did I mention he's only 26? 
• When I started the Fordham young alumni softball team, we had a guy sign up who listed his grad school graduation year as 1980.  I figured it was a typo, but the person who works in the alumni office handling signups said the guy was so enthusiastic that she felt too bad not to let him on.  Since then, this 52 year old guy shows up and plays harder than just about all of the 20-somethings on the field, diving for balls and steamrolling around the bases.  He calls me on the phone the day of every game to excitedly check on who's coming, what the standings are, etc.
• I originally got invited to teach about blogging at Fordham by a management professor who is nearly 70 as far as I can tell from her resume.  She had an engineering degree and worked for Lockheed as an engineer from 1960-1966.  Not only did she not fit gender stereotypes back than, but by reaching out to me to teach about social media's impact in business back in '04, she stood out from her peers on the cutting edge.

How old you are is a function of your willingness to learn new things, your ability not to let your experience close you off to new thinking, and your passion for what you do...    which pretty much makes Fred one of the youngest people I know.

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

Over the weekend, 300 people showed up in Union Square for a "Pandamonium".  With some dressed as Pandas, there wasn't much point to the gathering "other than to wreak havoc," according to one of the participants.

After moving to Williamsburg, the group started getting rowdy.

"The participants were chanting, “Whose street? Our street!” and some began overturning newspaper boxes." - AMNY

Not surprisingly, my buddy "No Neck" Noel was in the middle of the action...

“Hundreds of people were out on the sidewalk, dancing, yelling, having a good time,” said Noel Hidalgo, a community activist who goes by the name No Neck and who witnessed the event. “Police were trying to control people and clear the streets and that’s when it got out of control.”

Noel, I hate to break it to you, but when 300 people go roaming the streets yelling and overturning newspaper boxes, that's about when I want the police to step in and "control people". 

What a lot of the people involved in these mass gatherings fail to realize is that they do infringe upon the rights of others.  You can't have hundreds of people randomly gathering in a single group like that without police presence...  because the chances of a riot are too great--unless you simply think all that mob mentality research is bunk.  This group didn't get out of control because of the cops--turning over newspaper boxes or anything that isn't yours, is out of control.  Chances are a wayward newsbox dented someone's car, or a sideview mirror or two got knocked off, too.  Stuff like that happens when 300 people roam the streets. 

Police presences cost money.  As a NYC taxpayer, I paid for this Panda caper.  Clogged streets cost money and they're dangerous, too.  What happens when ambulances get held up because of mass gatherings like this that clog streets with traffic?  I'd hate to have a heart attack on the Friday of the mass bike ride here in the city.

Do these folks think that EVERYONE in the surrounding neighborhoods thought the yelling Panda's were a good idea?  I'm sure a bunch of people didn't think it was so hot.  What about their rights?

How about a mass feeding of the homeless?  Or a mass graffiti cleanup?  For once, I'd like to see people do something more constructive with their energy than just prove they can "stand up" to authority.  Authority serves a purpose... it keeps your panda asses off my street and away from my car.  

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Equity Private is the most amazing woman that I don't know...      She's incredibly savvy, and a total finance junkie.  She's also got a helluva sense of humor. 

She's been dubbing that "Der Untergang" Hitler mini-series (you know the one... it's been done on the Super Bowl, the Cowboys, Twitter failing, etc) with a financial crisis epic. 

Three of the episodes are up, and she tells me she's got seven more in the complete set.

Here's the first one:

If you're into finance, Equity Private is a must-read....  and now, a must-watch!

Last night, I stopped to see my friend Amy on my way home, because she broke her ankle.  She's been pretty shut in over the last few months.

This is the x-ray of her ankle.  You can actually see the faint lines of where she broke it, in two places.  One break is right where the leftmost screw starts the grooves, just to the left of it... and the other is midway between the bottom two screws on the right.

Anyway, I locked my bike up in front of her apartment, but not right in front of the doorman, because there's construction and no place to put it in plain sight.  I was maybe there for about an hour and when I came back, the bike was gone and all that was left was my broken lock and chain. 

I wasn't that bothered by it actually.  I never spend more than $250 on a bike, because I assume it will get stolen every two years or so.  This one I got three years out of.  Tack on the $200 of various accessories and maintenance I did and I averaged about a $12.50 a month cost.  That's pretty good, considering all the train fare I saved--definitely came out ahead.

So now I'm in the market for a new bike.  I definitely want something lighter and taller than I had, and mildly considering a single speed bike, but the ones I've seen are a bit hard on the suspension or seem not to have any at all.  

So, if you know anyone selling a used bike that would fit a 34" inseam for $250 or less, please let me know.

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Default avatar on faceyourmanga.com I didn't even get to click anything, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Creepy... how did they know??

Back when I was at GM, working on investing in private equity funds, there were two funds I really liked that the team eventually turned down:

Union Square Ventures, which saw exits in Tacoda, Feedburner, and del.icio.us, and is nearly guaranteed (because of significant revenue traction) $200mil+ exits in Etsy and Indeed.  That's not counting the potential value of Twitter, either. 

The other one was a consumer focused buyout fund called Catterton Partners, which PEHub just announced had a 7x return on Wellness Pet Food.

"Wellness represents the second big exit for Catterton in four months. In April it earned more than 4x its money when it sold luxury hair product company Frederick Fekkai & Co. for more than $400 million..."

I'm not going to say I told you so, but...

Back in February of 2006, when nextNY started, there weren't a lot of social events going on in the NY Tech scene.  Now, it seems like there's a party going on every other day--and not parties for specific user groups or industries, where the chances of you making a connection to someone relevant are pretty good--just these big generalized "tech community" parties with sponsors no one really cares about. 

It's fun if most of your friends are tech and digital media folks, but mine aren't.  I grew up here in NYC and was a finance guy long before I was a tech guy--not that all my friends are finance people either.  My best friends work in publishing, law, and television production.

That's not to say I haven't made really good friends in the tech community.  I have, but I don't only see them at "industry" events.  I try to see the people in the tech community that I'm actually friends with in smaller settings like at the Shake Shack or for 1:1 lunches.  I play on sports teams with them and invite them to go out with me and my non-tech friends. 

So when I bounce from these bigger, generalized, noisy parties early, it's often because there's someone I know for years, maybe since junior high, waiting somewhere for coffee--or I just have a ton of work to do and can't go out every night if I ever expect to see my parents and other family. 

I think because I don't necessarily take part in the "scene" as much as others, I get a little bit of a reputation of being standoffish, or not sociable.  In actuality, I'm very social--just not necessarily with 300 random strangers who also have websites. 

Sometimes, I think that people think this is what is meant by "participation" when entrepreneurs out looking for money or deals for their startups attend these parties.  I don't know about you, but I never quite feel like these big things are my community and I always wind up hanging out with the same people anyway.

I think entrepreneurs are better off spending as much 1:1 time with people who's opinions they respect and admire, who actually know their space a bit, and also creating communities around them.  No matter what the industry or interest, there's a smaller community of people that you should be gathering together to leverage and exchange ideas.

Hey, if you wanna drink on someone else's tab, these big parties are great... but don't mistake them for or let them replace the more authentic, true relationship (and dare I say friendship) building that needs to be part of your networking.

Last Thursday, I attended Jeff Veen and Bryan Mason's Start Conference.  First off, I want to thank them for all their hard work--it was a refreshing event with a sincere approach.  Right off the bat, priced at $200, you knew that these guys were more out to actually lend entrepreneurs a hand than make a quick buck off them, so I appreciated that.

As I sat through the morning interviews they had set up, I realized that successful people have trouble attributing success to specific actions taken.  There were a few spots in the conversations where key points were glossed over with things like, "And soon after we launched, the product took off..."

Whoa!  Back up the truck!

How?  Why?  What caused success and did you plan for it?

I mean, you know, besides the fact that you created a great product and all, because I definitely took that note down.  "Create great product... check."

Failures are often easier to figure out.  Usually, when shit hits the fan, you know exactly what you did wrong, whether or not you're willing to admit it, but success--crossing that chasm is often something that people can debate for years.

I think someone ought to create a conference just about failure--that all the speakers can do is talk about stuff that went wrong.  We'll call it FailureCon or something.  That's one of my favorite things about having so many entrepreneurs as angels--if I could just manage to avoid half the mistakes they tell me they made, Path 101 will turn out ok. 

Still, attempting to get a list of likely success causes and best practices would be a good start.  I would have liked to see more structured conversations.  George Oates did a fantastic job up on the stage monitoring the audience feedback--perhaps another person could have an expanded role in recording specific takeaways and lessons.

That's another cool thing about the conference--George's presence was an indication of their willingness to experiment to create the best outcome possible for all those involved. 

How about a "what worked/what didn't work" ledger, with each speaker needing to add at least one or two things to both?

Or some kind of lesson voting system for the crowd... where the conference recorder person could add lessons learned to a publicly displayed voting site, the audience could add their own, and at the end of the conference, you'd have 10 solid takeaways. 

One other thing I'd like to hear more discussion of is product.  Making a great product always seems to be what being successful is all about, and everyone usually feels like they have one, but obviously that's not the case.  I'd love to see more product folks go in detail on what makes a great product, how to reposition things when they're not going well, and now to go back to the drawing board.  I'm happy to toss my "7 Product features you should add right now" talk from BarCampNYC.

One other idea...   It seemed like Jeff and Bryan, not surprisingly, attracted a great crowd.  The only problem was, I had no idea who was there and what they were up to, so I really didn't know who to meet.  Perhaps a Ning or Crowdvine site setup beforehand would have done the trick?

All in all, though, I'm glad I went.  Getting to pitch in front of the conference was awesome and I got great feedback (more focused deck coming soon!).  One thing I was a bit surprised at was that other than David Hornik and Rob Hayes, who were both involved with the conference, I didn't spot very many VCs.  You'd think this is the kind of thing investors would show up to.  I guess there's not enough mindless hype about Start yet.  Perhaps that's why I'm inclined to show up again.  :)