Anniversary!, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Path 101 is 1 years old today!

Not surprisingly, I was too busy to notice until this afternoon. :)

That's what CNN said and I agree. So, hats off to the Republican party for coaching her enough to prevent her from throwing up on herself again--verbally or literally.

What was obvious to me, though is that she doesn't even come close to grasping the isses that she spoke to. Her answers were memorized and delivered in a kind of exhausitive unease reminiscent of a second grader at a spelling bee waiting for the bell to ding, and breathing a sigh of relief everytime it didn't.

What's more was that Biden, too, exceeded expectations. He started off really slow, but gathered a ton of steam as things got rolling. His answers on foreign policy were thoughtful, nuanced--exactly what our policy hasn't been the last eight years.

And when it came time to relate to the little guys, Joe actually shined. Palin's doggonnit Alaska hockey mom thing got old quickly. She used it in uncomfortable places, while on the other hand, Biden's own emotions around his family snuck up on him. His getting choked up as a parent was so genuine, and Palin didn't even seem to notice it. She was too busy repeating lines in her head to pay attention.

What was also great was when Biden called bullshit on the whole "Maverick" thing. It's been tired for a while and Joe put it to bed.

Did Biden wipe the floor with her? No. Did he prove himself to be infinately more qualifed and prepared to be VP?

Unquestionably.

Hi folks...    I'm competing in the Donors Choose Blogger Challenge.  Basically, each blogger selects a set of educational projects they'd like to encourage donations to.  These are individual teachers and the projects are usually just a couple hundred bucks--like buying supplies, visual aids, etc. 

Check out the projects I've selected.  If half my blog readers give ten bucks each, we could easily fulfill all of these projects!

But most of all, I want to raise more than TechCrunch does.  Why?  Because by reading this blog, you're just a better person.  :)

Today, Oddcast announced their AvatarSpace product.  The idea for multiple avatars chatting in the same room was Adi's vision for quite a while now and it's cool to see it come to fruition, especially since I worked on some of the initial plans for it.

Check out my early wireframe for a gameshow with multiple avatars chatting in the same room:

I worked on that at the beginning of last summer, not long before I left.  Now, it's a real thing.  Rooms can be anything, I imagine...   places, shows, games, etc.

Check it out...

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

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

 From Mr. Jarvis...

"Instead, I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. Its a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. Its also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. Its an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. Its a discussion that doesnt just blather but that tries to accomplish something (an extension of an article like this one that asks what options there are to bailout a bailout). Its collaborative and distributed and open but organized."

From Healy Jones of Atlas Ventures, who writes "Startable" with an entrepreneur... 

"The bad news is that early stage VCs tend to have pretty non-defined processes - assuming that there ANY process at all. As such, Ive created this helpful diagram so that you can try to guess where your company is in its capital raise: Venture Capital Deal Process Diagram"

Ideas and Thoughts from Winter Street VC and Entrepreneur

The more that I think about $700 billion, the more I think that kind of dependence on debt we can't handle is how we got into this mess in the first place.

Roger says that this bailout is about keeping the credit windows open for small businesses to "support both business and personal economic growth," but at some point don't we ever have to pay the piper?  Shouldn't we at least have to feel a little hurt from all our excesses?

Sure, the markets tumbled 7% today, but you know they'll be up 4% tomorrow, and if not tomorrow then I'll bet you they'll be up for the week.  Either way, that's not my food money in there and for most of us, stock market jitters only effect our long term retirement plans.

Housing is a different issue, and we keep talking about people losing their houses like it's the end of the world.  Let's keep in mind that if someone has to bite the bullet on their house, they don't automatically become homeless--they just move into a smaller house or rent.  Not everyone needs a big McMansion they couldn't afford in the first place.  My brothers shared a bedroom growing up--a room that I thought was really small when it was just me.  Maybe some kids from the entitlement generation will have to bunk up, get a few less cable channels and send a few less texts.  Jeans from Walmart anyone?  I wore hand me downs...  how many kids today do that? 

I just don't feel like paying for everyone who made bad decisions.  I bought a place in Bay Ridge in 2005 because I couldn't afford to buy closer to or in the city--you know, because I didn't want to buy something I couldn't afford.  Silly me.  Had I known the government and other taxpayers would have bent over backwards to

My point is that, maybe in the long run, a bit of hurt isn't so bad and maybe we should just take our medicine now.  I don't want to crash the system, but it reminds me of why I don't like taking pain medications.  If my knees hurt after playing sports, I don't take anything, because I did something to my knee that is causing pain.  I don't want to just mask the pain, because then I might reinjure it worse.  I'd rather suck it up, so that I know when it stops hurting and I can get back on the field again.

Being out doing the venture capital dog and pony show now, there are a lot of things I'd tell you were pretty frustrating, despite the fact that our process is going pretty well.  When we do close our round, I'll post a lot more about it.  However, the one thing I would have to say has been the most bewildering has been the divergance among venture firms definition of what early stage is, and what they're willing to bet on.

Virtually all of the VCs we went to wanted to see that we had built a product, which we have, but then the question came to traction--and it wasn't at all clear what kind of traction was enough and what it proved.

When I was at Union Square Ventures, we used to say that we wouldn't invest in a consumer facing web application without any consumers.  In fact, to quote Fred, "I coined that phrase."  :)  The question, though, was what exactly that proved?

In my mind, it eliminated execution risk--that you wanted to back a team who was able to complete a functional product.  We didn't want to take the technological risk of whether or not the stuff worked--and that having a team who could get product out the door was a good filter.

What it did not prove, to me, and what a lot of firms seem to think, was that early traction somehow proves adoption and sustainable consumer interest.

This thinking falls down for two reasons.  First of all, there are lots of web applications that fail to get beyond the initial "TechCrunch bump", or as Josh Kopelman puts it, the 53,651.  That was the number of TechCrunch RSS subs back in May of '06.  The interesting thing is that number is almost twice the number of users del.icio.us had when we started talking about an investment.  You never know if that initial ferver of the digerati will transfer over to a mainstream crowd.  Even at 100,000 users, that could still flatten out and never get past the geeks, and mainstream adoption is absolutely critical to success. 

Look at Notchup.  Everyone signed up for it back in the beginning of the year, pushing it past 150,000 monthly users.  I mean, who wouldn't want to get paid to interview?  The only problem was that it wasn't sustainable, and traffic has nearly completely disappeared.

You could say that startups should then have at least six months of before being funded, but then you get into the question of who's supposed to be funding that path.  From conception to launch, it probably takes most companies 9-12 months.  Tack on another six months, and now you're talking almost 18 months of life--a lot to squeeze out of an angel round, no?  Perhaps angel rounds now need to be at least 500k to get a company anywhere useful, because just building a product won't be seen as enough.

This emphasis on initial traction also fails to take into consideration iteration and the idea that most companies will not get it right the first time.  Sure, there are a select few companies that get it right from the start, but that's not the case with most.  Take Flock, for example.

Now, I don't know what they consinder success, but certainly they're doing better now, and seemingly sustainably so, than they were when they first released.  Who knows, perhaps another big product release could push their monthly traffic to a half a million uniques.  Either way, they were able to have the flexibility to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to improve their product.  We saw that with the guys from InfoNGen, who nearly went back to square one to iterate on their information product in the financial services space, making it much more lightweight and feedbased.  Without the right funding, they wouldn't have been able to do that.  What helped them was that they had done it before (iterating on a product to make it successful) so that was part of their previous M.O.

Products will, and should, change over time based on the lessons learned from getting users in the door.  How many users do you need to learn those lessons?  At the moment we've had 3500 people take the Path 101 personality test, without really marketing it at all.  Everyday, we learn a lot more about what people expect from the results, and what makes it easier for them to take and complete the test.  We've seen completion rates double just based adjustments made after the first few hundred people took it--and we're running that same process with other features that we're testing to smaller audiences. 

What we know we really need, though, is a good user experience expert and front end developer to help fix things, and that takes financial resources.  That in itself is an interest bet, though.  You could imagine that there are sites, if made easier, would take off with a better experience, but without being able to envision what those experiences look like, it's difficult to really count on that. 

This theory also discounts the value of marketing and business development.  A central focus of our distribution strategy is to syndicate our career tools out to partner sites--like professional socities, alumni groups, etc.  A good marketing and business development person can make that happen--but it's just a matter time and good old fashion pounding the pavement.  However, if you're supposed to have deals done, product complete in partnership quality form, users in the door, can you really even call it early stage anymore?

We didn't even talk about business model.  I had one early stage firm want us to be 12 months away from revenue--and not just revenue driven by putting ads up on the site.  Can you imagine if those same demands were put on Google, Twitter, or LinkedIn?  They never would have gotten anywhere, because they never would have been given enough runway to iterate on the product and get to a critical mass of users to make revenue possible. 

Twelve months from revenue generation hardly seems "early stage" to me for a consumer application--because ultimately, in a consumer app, revenue is going to be driven by someone else.  That means that not only do you have to build your consumer application, but then you need to build the monetization engine, too--almost a completely new application for your paying business users who, for example, might pay for data created by the site, or in our case, to search out the right candidates for employment.

Again, all of this stuff is obviously critical and I'm not meaning to be dismissive about it, but startups our out there trying to figure out how much blood they're supposed to squeeze from the stone of an angel round.  Should they expect to raise multiple angel rounds, or just really large angel rounds?  

The interesting thing is that the advent of the larger (500k+) angel round may be shooting some venture firms in the foot.  Companies raising around 750k might be able to get to the point of building something worth acquiring by then--not for huge money, but certainly for enough to send everyone home happy because of the lack of capital sitting on top of them. 

The exception to all these rules is when a VC firm writes a multimillion dollar check to a repeat entpreneur to go after a particular space without even having a product yet--like when Benchmark funded Zillow.  The founders of Zillow were behind Expedia and so it was basically assumed that team could find success if properly resourced, in a completely different industry.  It certainly seems plausible, but then it makes me think of a friend of mine whose first startup was a blowout success, whose team went on to create a product in a different market.  What she's realizing is that she didn't really learn a lot the first time around--that when they built a product that caused the phones to ring off the hook and revenues to start pouring in, no one really questioned it, and so no one really learned much about why or how they were successful.  Those lessons would have to be learned to enable repeatability.  Her team is struggling now with their second go at this.  I think if I were a VC, I might try my hand at finding good teams who have failed once before--but then we dive into what makes a good team if not good results, and that's a whole other question and a whole other blog post!

Congratulations!  You've just been made the VP of Media Innovatiion at Bigolmedia Corp.  You've been tasked with the job of bringing what had historically been a print magazine business into the current Web 2.+ environment.  You came from a startup that grew out of a thriving local entrepreneurial community.  You're excited about not only bringing new ideas in, but also about being a resource to the local community--you have money, you have people resources, and a ton of legacy traffic from the online versions of all your print media titles.

So what do you do first?

You have several tools at your disposal. 

You can hire new folks, invest, incubate, do biz dev deals, buy things.  What has worked for other companies?  What do innovators want from you?  How do you best take advantage of the opportunity you've been given?

We now have personality test widgets for the Path 101 Personality Test!   You can share and compare with your friends side by side!  Click here to see if we're anything alike.

"charlie, can't believe someone took your bike.   Hopefully they'll crash into a wall."  -- Plugoo message left by my mom.

"If you're a Tigers fan, I'll never stress you out again. If you're not a Tigers fan, you'll never have me as your ace in the hole, convinced I'll blow a lead against your team."

The Bubba Strikes Back Fantasy Baseball League - League Home

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

Starting this Wednesday night, September 24th, I'll be teaching ITAC's FastTrac course, which is a beginner's overview on starting up your own business.  ITAC has served as the Marion Ewing Kauffman Foundation’s certified provider of FastTrac entrepreneurship training in NYC for 9 years.  It's not just limited to tech companies--last spring we had three bakers, a fashion line, an HVAC remanufacturer, and a nanotech company in the mix. 

The class goes for 10 successive Wednesday nights and we bring in speakers to cover various areas of entrepreneurship, like financing, recruiting, marketing, etc.

Please contact Veronica Price (vprice@itac.org) with your name, company, and phone number by noon tomorrow for more details and be prepared to come to tomorrow night's first session if there are open spots.

The class costs $1,000, a small part of which goes to pay my salary, but mostly goes to fund ITAC's associated entrepreneurial support activities.  ITAC is a nonprofit consulting and training organization dedicated to helping NYC manufacturing and technology companies with programs that increase their top and bottom lines.

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

Duh... of course they should.  It's about time!

Alana Taylor, who hopefully will be joining me on a panel at the next SXSW if it gets approved, recently blogged about a class she was taking at NYU with Prof. Mary Quigley as part of a project for the PBS MediaShift blog.  (The comments on that post are interesting...)  Her post wasn't exactly flattering to her professor, which prompted her to ban Alana from blogging or Twittering about the class again--and then backtrack on that, obviously realizing that she taught at NYU, which is supposed to be on the side of protecting, not snuffing out, freedom of speech.

The ironic part of this story was that the class was about Generation Y and new media.  While the professor taught about blogging, it seems she never actually expected the students in the class to go out and blog themselves.  The professor's reaction was remenicent of an old school mainstream media company--attack the consumer first, stand behind the letter of the law, and then back off to a more reasonable position.  This professor told Alana that she had violated privacy rights by blogging about the classroom activities.

Check out the full story here.

Personally, I can't even imagine telling a student they couldn't blog, tweet, or videotape any of my lectures.  Why?  If I feel confident in what I'm teaching, I should be excited about the idea of opening up my content to the world for feedback, idea generation, critique, etc.  I'd certainly be excited that my students would be using new media tools and working on PBS projects.

If I were Prof. Quigley, I'd work with Alana to figure out how to use all these social media tools to really make the most out of the class.  How about reaching out to other students outside of the classroom through blogs and video, or creating a class wiki and blog whereby lots of people could participate with their own knowledge and feedback.  Perhaps Prof. Quigley would get it if she started blogging and Twittering herself.

Thoughts?   Any teachers want to defend the idea of the closed classroom?

I don't often agree with Penelope, but I definitely thought this same when I heard about her family.  Penelope has special needs kids and a similar home life...

"Okay. Look. I wasn't going to tell you what I think of Sarah Palin, but so many people are asking, so fine. Here it is. She is nuts. And the Republicans are nuts for putting her on a ticket. She has a five-month-old kid with Down's Syndrome."

Palin's children should take priority over being Vice President » Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk