Sometimes life moves faster than you can possibly imagine--like when a relationship suddenly sours. One day things seem fine and the next, every exchange is toxic and things are snowballiing out of control.

Things slow to a crawl at the worst moments sometimes. People in hospitals seem to experience time with unprecidented drag. My one hospital experience--sitting in a Bronx emergency room with 104.4 fever and Lyme Disease, seemed to take forever--even though it lasted only 36 hours so I could get my fever down. What went in the blink of an eye was the softball game I pitched directly after I got home. I'm not sure I remember any of that.

When I was little, little league at bats were so quick. II walked up and in the blink of an eye I turned around and walked back. I couldn't tell you anything about the short sequence of pitches I had just faced.

One day, I made contact finally, and everything started to slow down. I felt like you couldn't put one by me and I had enough control to place the ball into right field. I could see what used to be a blur.

Ever just lay around with someone special late on a Saturday afternoon? You move slow, but time moves fast. Doing absolutely nothing passes four hours in the blink of an eye. All of the sudden, you're amazed at what the clock is telling you. You and your significant other seem to have slipped through cracks in the space-time continuum.

If only all the rifts could be so stragtegically placed.

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

I was talking to my entreprenuership class the other day and made an important discovery--a lot of them lacked for inspiration from the people around them.  A lot of us have great friends--mostly people that life just put in our laps by geography or by shared interest--and they wind up being people you share a lot of history with.

However, those aren't always the people that get your brain stirring the most.  You know what I'm talking about--when you can actually feel, even hear, that little hamster spinning away on the wheel.  Your mind races faster than you can speak, and you trip over your words as you try and get them out into a verbal blueprint of some big mental breakthrough.

Marc Andreessen once quoted Dr. James Austin on the topic of luck, and how just getting your mind going increases the chances that you stumble upon something big:

"A certain [basic] level of action "stirs up the pot", brings in random ideas that will collide and stick together in fresh combinations, lets chance operate.

Motion yields a network of new experiences which, like a sieve, filter best when in constant up-and-down, side-to-side movement..."

I have a friend that is always coming up with big and sometimes ridiculous new ideas.  Once, he was going to get an aquarium for his apartment and populate it with agressive fish--"fish that eat other fish".  He was so psyched about it.  I couldn't help but be equally excited, but also somewhat suspect about the feasability of this endeavor.  Either way, it got my mind going.

Nate has a similar effect on me, too.  He has an idea a minute.  Perhaps one day he'll settle on something, but for the moment, he remains the Wile E. Coyote of Silicon Alley--always working up blueprints for something big.  You can't help but get the wheels turning when you talk to Nate, even if you totally disagree with him, because you're going to wind up exploring the idea and learn something along the way--or take something away from it that could help you with something completely different. 

These are the kinds of people I go out of my way to spend time with.  I probably take about three meetings a week with people who have inspiring ideas completely unrelated to what I'm up to, because it's a mental workout for me.  It helps me think better and gain perspective about my own ideas--a rigorous cerebral exercise.  What I was trying to explain to my students is that, if you're going to make a living off of your creativity and innovation, you need to set your life up in such a way that you spend more time with people who inspire you to think, as opposed to just spending your time with whoever lives on your floor, or the people next to you in class.

Along the way, we've all met pretty interesting people in passing, but we don't always stop them and demand more of their time.  That's active management--making a point to be more deliberate in our scheduling, and its something we all should do more of.  When's the last time you had a really inspiring conversation with someone?  Who was it?  What did they make you think about?  How likely is it that you'll talk to them again soon?   Perhaps you should ensure that happens sooner rather than later by asking them to grab coffee or something.  My life is filled with what I call "onesies"--people not really connected to the rest of my world but that I've pulled in because my interaction with them really lights a fire for me.

Who does it for you?  Why don't you drop them a line...

Yesterday, CNN's citizen journalism site called iReport featured a story that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had a heart attack.  Within minutes, Apple's stock had plunged, wiping out millions of dollars in shareholder value.

While people are pointing fingers at the problems with citizen journalism, I think what this really indicates is a problem with corporate PR.  As soon as the story broke, someone should have called Steve up and said, "Steve, everyone thinks you had a heart attack, go post on the blog."  Within about 30 seconds, he could have had a video posted on the Apple corporate blog saying, "Hey everyone...   I'm ok, working hard as usual."   I don't care where he was--you know he's never far from a Mac with a built-in webcam.  Instead, the constant veil of secrecy around the guy makes it possible for a news forum where users have no ratings or ways to substaniate their claims can erase millions in market cap in minutes.

Yesterday, CNN's citizen journalism site called iReport featured a story that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had a heart attack.  Within minutes, Apple's stock had plunged, wiping out millions of dollars in shareholder value.

While people are pointing fingers at the problems with citizen journalism, I think what this really indicates is a problem with corporate PR.  As soon as the story broke, someone should have called Steve up and said, "Steve, everyone thinks you had a heart attack, go post on the blog."  Within about 30 seconds, he could have had a video posted on the Apple corporate blog saying, "Hey everyone...   I'm ok, working hard as usual."   I don't care where he was--you know he's never far from a Mac with a built-in webcam.  Instead, the constant veil of secrecy around the guy makes it possible for a news forum where users have no ratings or ways to substaniate their claims can erase millions in market cap in minutes.

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?