When Josh Kopelman and I first spoke about me joining First Round Capital, we talked a lot about alignment of interests—what First Round Capital was interested in with regards to investing in New York City, and also what my interests were with respect to my own career.  Given that our discussions had only started about a week and a half before my last fulltime day at my startup, I hadn’t really had a lot of time to think about what my next move was going to be.  It didn’t really make sense for either of us to commit to a big four year engagement when I couldn’t say for sure what my goals were.  Josh suggested that I help First Round firm up their footprint in NYC over the next year while I figure it out. 

So, that being said, what am I actually doing with my time?  The Entrepreneur-in-Residence title is a bit of a misnomer.  Traditionally, EIRs are out looking for the next thing to build, and are only peripherally out looking to help on dealflow.  I’ve been quite the opposite.  It took me 7 years to decide I wanted to build something in the career guidance space—I highly doubt I’ll gain enough passion for a new idea anytime soon, so I wouldn’t look for me to start a new company. 

I’m spending about a third of my time looking at deals, another third meeting with folks that see a number of startups to boost our NYC dealflow, like angels, lawyers, etc., and then a third of my time on what I’m calling “community support”—helping to make NYC a better place to build a startup.  A rising tide lifts all ships, so that not only helps the community, but helps First Round, other NYC investors, other local startups, people looking to build tech and digital media careers here—the whole ecosystem. 

Here’s a little more detail on each of those endeavors:

Deals

One thing I realized is that many people in NYC don’t actually realize what First Round does and how it differs from a typical venture capital fund.  Actually, you can think of us more like an angel investor more than anything—one that has the ability to follow on.  We’re one of the few places in NYC, other than from an individual angel, where you can get a check of $100k.  We’re more than happy to lead a $500k angel round by being half of it, and we don’t need to get 20% of the company upfront.  One way I measure my own dealflow is on how many people have a finished Powerpoint deck.  If they do, I’m seeing them much later than I want to.  I want to meet people when they just started hacking or they’re vetting the idea—not when they’re shopping it around to every investor.  I think I can be pretty helpful, having just gone through raising angel capital for my own startup, in helping people think about their financing plans, product viability, business models, etc. 

So if you’re raising an angel round in New York City, thinking about it, or you’re in an angel round, please do make sure you come talk to me.  (charlie@firstround.com) The best thing we can do for you is to be a really value added investor around the table, and the worst thing we can do is just give you a quick no—or tell you what’s missing. 

My role at First Round from a deal perspective is to uncover as many interesting startups as possible, but also as early as possible, and help vet them for the team.  We have a very team focused approach to deals and all of the partners, with the support of the rest of the team, get involved in decision making. I remarked to another VC the other day that the idea of “Partner X’s deal” seemed so foreign to the way things get done at First Round.  (It’s actually quite the well oiled decision making machine, actually…  you should see our meetings.  I was impressed when I first saw it.)

I think a lot of local entrepreneurs feel like they’re too early to talk to us until they’re ready to raise a million bucks.  Please do come see us much earlier than that—even without a deck.  I know one entrepreneur in particular that I’m helping write her deck so she’d be better at pitching us. 

Other Players in the Ecosystem

You’re a lawyer, a school running an incubator program, a designer who has worked with startups—let’s talk.  First off, I have companies that might be able to use your services.  Second, let’s chat about the NYC market in general and what we can mutually do to help make NYC a better place to build a company.  Third, undoubtedly you’re seeing a lot of companies that might be thinking about financing.  Send them my way.  Don’t worry about screening them.  That’s my job.  Screening is what I get paid to do. 

Community Support

Like I said before, the better that New York City is at supporting startups, the better it will be for First Round and for everyone else in the community.  I’m very dedicated to making that happen, and the team at First Round is also committed to participating in that effort.  I want to run a lot more events for nextNY and for First Round in New York City that are relevant, educational, and productive.  Sure, I’ll probably get roped into running another Shake Shack event, but what I really want to do is more events like we did last night at TechSales—where 100 professionals, like sales people, developers, product managers, etc.,  get together in a room on a focused topic and have a great discussion. 

That’s the kind of thing that has brought the community together over the last five years.  Give me a room for 75 people and I’ll push the community forward—or rather set the stage for the community to push itself forward like it’s been doing.  That’s the kind of thing that I think is hard for folks in government, for example, to understand.  When they do surveys and hearings about what the community needs, I tell them the community needs easy access to free event space for 75-100 people and a single person to just run around connecting everyone.  Seems too small, but that’s what innovation is.  It’s a house to house ground war, with conversations taking place just a handful of people at a time.

So if you’re a company with space to host 50, 75, 100+ people, trust me, I’ll fill it with innovative folks from the NY tech community and their ideas, arguments, and accumulated wisdom. 

Does it need to be explicitly branded First Round?  Not really.  We have a great network in New York and I’ll be making sure that network not only mixes with itself, but gets out in front of the community.  So, expect to see a lot of experienced pros from the First Round portfolio on various panels and out at events more often, but don’t expect a lot of in your face banners and schwag. 

This is syndicated from an e-mail list I’ve been sending this out to over the past four weeks to hundreds of people.  If you’d like to receive this on Monday mornings, please sign up here:  http://eepurl.com/e3On

Welcome to Holiday Party Season!

No doubt your inbox is full of places to imbibe with friends, clients, and investors under the guise of holiday merriment.  Just try not to overdue it and stay off your hipster scooter if you've had a few too many.  Here now, we present a list of things to do that won't necessarily lead to yuletide blackouts.

Monday, December 7th

7PM: Boxee Beta Unveiling - If you haven't figured out by now that this is the**EVENT OF THE WEEK** then you need to hangout with cooler friends.  At the event they'll demo the new Beta, launch new applications from partners and start a 4-weeks early-access for users to test the Beta before we release it to the public at CES on Jan 7th.  You know what they say--750 people in Brooklyn can't be wrong.

Music Hall of Williamsburg

66 N 6th St

Brooklyn, NY 11211

RSVP: http://boxeebeta.eventbrite.com

Tuesday, December 8th

6:30PM - 9PM: MatchupCamp II is the reprise of a past successful nextNY event. It is all about startup networking, creating a place for ideas and talent to meet.  MatchupCamp has the sole objective of bringing together people looking to start, expand, or join a startup in New York (and the tri-state area).  If you want to get your hands dirty and build something new, this is the place.

For Your Imagination Studio

22 West 27th ST

RSVP: http://matchupcamp.eventbrite.com/

6pm – 9pm: Launch Party for Hive at 55 – Downtown New York’s newest coworking space.  The Hive at 55 is a workspace for freelancers and small business owners. 

55 Broad Street, 13th FLoor

More Info: http://www.downtownny.com/news?nid=222

RSVP: hiveat55@downtownny.com

Mediaite Launch Party

6:30PM - 8:30PM

Plaza Hotel

RSVP: I wish I knew, because Rachel Sklar is pretty cool, but I didn't get an invite.  Oh well.

Wednesday December 9th

Digital Dumbo: Purple Sangria Digital Festivus

Bringing together the Digital Minds of NYC, Digital Dumbo facilities idea sharing and networking all while drinking purple sangria. This months event is sponsored by Purple Rock Scissors.

Galapagos Art Space

16 Main Street

RSVP: http://digitaldumbo.eventbrite.com/

6PM -8PM: Insider Tips from the Big Apple's Best Tech and Digital Media Sales Professionals - Sales Pros Only!

We've assembled some of the Big Apple's best tech and digital media sales talent for a very interactive discussion that every new and accomplished sales professional in tech should attend.

Deutsch Inc

111 8th Ave

RSVP: http://www.nextNY.org/TechSales

Thursday, December 10th

5PM- 7PM The DEMO New York City Meet-up is one stop on the DEMO Innovation tour where Matt and the DEMO team will travel around the country to connect with the DEMO community in search of  the best innovation to showcase at DEMOspring 2010.

3 Ten Lounge

310 Bowery

RSVP: http://demoinnovationnyc.eventbrite.com/

7PM URDB (http://urdb.org/) Presents: World Record Appreciation Society #10

Following a brief NYC hiatus and two sold-out events on the West Coast, the World Record Appreciation Society is coming back strong with holiday-themed world record blowout extravaganza.

Odd addition to our list?  Perhaps, but I'm showing up purely to see Andrea Rosen set the record for "Fastest Time To Open An Advent Calendar And Eat All The Chocolates In Order".  How awesome is that?

Pianos

158 Ludlow St

RSVP: http://guestlistapp.com/events/6627

Real Time Twitter Booze NYC

If you're building a business around the real time web or just tinkering with a few product ideas, you'll want to get drunk here.  The founders of Stocktwits, fourSquare, Bit.ly, Hootsuite, and Winetwits will be in attendence. 

Swift

34 E 4th Street

RSVP: http://realtimeboozenyc.eventbrite.com/

Friday, December 11th and Saturday, December 12th

Open NY Summit & Codeathon

The Open NY Summit will be the first of many events produced by open government practitioners and volunteers.  Two day conference includes Open NY Co-working, discussions, and a hackathon.  Revolution!

The Open Planning Project

148 Lafayette St

Penthouse (PH)

RSVP: http://opennyforum.org/2009/11/open-ny-summit-09/

Sunday, December 13th

12:45PM: NY Tech Gives Back - Ice Skating is a day for the NY tech community to come together for a good cause through volunteerism and giving. For our inaugural event, we are partnering with CampInteractive, a not-for-profit organization that empowers inner-city youth through the inspiration of the outdoors and the creative power of technology. When asked what event the kids would most like, they chose ice skating. We're making it happen. Your ticket will pay for you + 1 CampInteractive child to go ice skating (+pizza).

RSVP: http://techiesgiveback.eventbrite.com

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told startups to forget about raising money and instead to just go out and sell something.  To me, if there’s any one area that New York City has a serious advantage in, it’s experienced salespeople.  You can never have enough.  They are the rainmakers—the ones who bring in the lifeblood of your company—cash. 

But selling technology and digital media is a different animal.  These aren’t dental supplies—this industry changes every single day.  Given all the experience we have here locally, I thought it would be useful to put together a bunch of knowledgeable sales professionals to share what they know in a take aimed at full time sales professionals. 

So, if you’re a sales rep, director, or VP selling digital media or technology in NYC, this event is for you, and boy have we assembled a murderers row of sales experience here.

The event will take place next Wednesday night, December 9th at 6PM at 111 8th Avenue at Deutsche Inc. 

You must RSVP here.

They’ll be talking about what they did to get to the next level... ie. was there a turning point in their sales career and  when did things came easier... when did they "get it" and when did they really break through.  They’ll also cover what kind of training and methods worked for them, what didn’t and the things that maybe go against commonly accepted sales wisdom. 

Here’s the lineup:

John Roswech, President, Jingle Networks

Prior to joining Jingle Networks, John Roswech served as vice president of sales for Atlas Solutions (Aquantive), where he managed sales and account management teams for third party ad serving, search, rich media and landing page optimization, with revenue growing $100mm plus under his sales leadership. Before Aquantive, Roswech was senior director of sales with Matchlogic (Excite@Home), where he was part of the management team at Narrative Communications and responsible for rich media and lead generation products.

Jed Savage, Chief Revenue Officer, ScanScout

A twelve+ year Digital Media Sales veteran, Jed was the Director of Business Development for eBay’s Strategic Partnerships unit before joining ScanScout.  He served for 4 years with Microsoft’s MSN division, holding positions including Eastern Sales Director, National Sales Manager and General Manager of MSN Sales. Jed increased revenue 10-fold in his first two years at MSN, and helped make the MSN sales division one of the leading revenue organizations in the industry.  Before working with MSN, Jed created the National Sales Team for CBS Sportsline. As the company’s Vice President of Sales his team drove over $30 million in total revenue during his first 2years at the helm.

Jeff Stewart

Jeff is the founder of Urgent Career, a pioneer in the use of linguistic technology to match sales professionals with compatible employment opportunities.  Jeff has founded over a half-dozen companies, which combined employ over 600 people. Immediately prior to founding Urgent Career, Jeff founded a technology-based financial intelligence firm that provides real-time analysis of semi structured text information for Hedge Funds and other Institutional Investors. The seeds of Urgent Career grew out of the observation that semantic analysis of massive amounts of textual data yields valuable insights.

Emily Twomey, SVP Sales, Oddcast

Emily has over ten years of experience in online media sales & interactive product sales. Prior to her position at Oddcast she held the positions of Director of Sales at Razorfish Networks and Senior Sales Manger at The New York Post.  She started her sales career at the downtown style bible PAPER Magazine.

Mark LaRosa

Mark LaRosa is the CEO of QuotaCrush, a sales consulting company focused on helping start-ups with sales strategy and outsourced sales management.  In its first year, QuotaCrush has brought two start-ups from zero sales to break-even – in a horrible economic climate.   Prior to QuotaCrush, Mark was also the founder of Dynamic Mobile Data, a wireless enterprise software company focused on vehicle location and dispatch software.  Mark sold over $20 million in enterprise software in this startup to companies including Pepsi, SHL, UPS, Purolator Courier and Kraft/Nabisco.

 
Vivek Sharma, Former Area Mgr., North America - Engine Yard 

Vivek is currently working on a stealth startup, but he most recent ran the sales team at Engine Yard that covered the eastern part of North America and EMEA.  He was the second salesperson in the company and best performing regional manager in 2008 and was on track for similar success in 2009.  In 2008, he brought on nearly 40% of Engine Yard's net new revenue and closed the largest deal ever in the company's history. )

In our completely tiny world of the Web 2.0 echochamber, Plancast is blowing up after some good Techcrunch coverage.  (BTW… is it me or does MG Siegler class that place up like tenfold?) 

So what is it?

Plancast is a place where you can share what you plan on doing in the future.  Tonight, I’m planning on going to the NY Tech Meetup, and so using Plancast, I was able to let anyone who cares know about it—and tweet it out as well.

Plancast has a non-bidirectional follow, just like Twitter—which means you can find out about my events but I don’t need to hear where you’re going to be.  That’s very powerful because it opens up the number of possible connections in the system.

What’s really interesting to me is that I’ve been talking about the scheduling and event issue with a number of people who are working on it.  Why everyone is suddenly working on scheduling, I have no idea, but there are a number of different takes on it.  There’s BuddyBlip and tym.ly as well, and I’m sure a number of other people are working on it. 

At first, when I saw Plancast, I thought of Dopplr.  Tons of people signed up for it, and people kept posting to it to varying degrees, but it never quite crossed the chasm.  It’s a perfect example of a startup that showed solid initial traction, but sputtered when it tried to get past the tech community.  One reason is that it kept all your future plans locked away.  There was no broadcasting to other networks, and so there was very little virality and discovery by outsiders.  Even so, Dopplr didn’t really change my behavior much.  I sort of felt like, “Great, so you’re going to be in Denver…”  If I wasn’t going to be in Denver at that time, it wasn’t useful to me.  In fact, because it was all about big trips, most of the info, by definition, was never going to be that useful for me. 

Plancast solves that problem by making it about the small stuff—the stuff I could actually tag along for and participate in.  That makes it infinitely more useful to me—but let’s keep in mind that I’m not every user.  To cross the chasm, you have to get past the people with almost 5,000 Twitter followers (should I get a cake?), and those folks, like my mom, don’t attend nearly as many events, nor do they want to broadcast it to the world.

Being the Tipping Point

Solving this, however, is where Plancast could be potentially awesome, if this is the way they want to go… and here’s how.  If I’m Plancast, I’d strike deals with Facebook, Meetup, Eventbrite, Evite, Pingg, Upcoming, etc…   and I’d focus on becoming the event “Tipping Point.”  A browser plugin or link would effectively work the same way.  Basically, you’d want a button or checkbox that recognizes that there’s an event on the page, and broadcasts a message to my friends that I’m interested in going. 

By allowing me to curate which events I blast to my social network, you’re creating a stronger signal than just hitting maybe, ignoring it, or sometimes even hitting yes.  You’re telling the world that you’re going and that you’d like people to come with you.  There’s a huge problem, particularly in Facebook and Meetup events where no one ever wants to be the first one in the pool.  For whatever reason, in Facebook they hit yes but never show up, and in Meetup they just tend to ignore the invite.  A lot of these people would actually go if they knew their friends were going, so Plancast could seriously up the response rates and actual followthrough on attendance for events.  By encouraging others to go, and informing me when other friends sign up, it pushes the event over the tipping point, which is potentially very powerful. 

This would work well not just for the Web 2.0 crowd, but for the soccer moms in closed little groups of close friends publishing their intention to to go the next Wiggles concert to each other.

Not only that, it begins to aggregate the information on what I go to across event platforms, learning a lot about my interests and being in a position to offer new events to me—so there’s your business model, kiddies.

Of course, maybe this isn’t where Plancast wants to go—and maybe they’ll just wind up being another Dopplr—a sad reminder of what could have been.  I have a feeling that won’t happen though.  They seem to have a lot more user centric DNA to them, and I love their publish everywhere, open strategy. 

One thing they definitely need to do, though, is make it so I don’t have to manually input all my future events—like I said either with a browser plugin, or by allowing me to sign in and sync with all of my various event accounts.  Heck, they could even publish this stuff to my Gcal automatically—but that might be a bit of feature creep.  They’d have to let me have the choice as to which events I want to publish to the outside world, though.

I’m looking forward to see where this one goes… it’s really interesting.

Just the other day, an entrepreneur I know asked me what I thought of a recent hire going from one startup to another—and the “aggressive” fashion in which that person was recruited.

This is a touchy subject—way more than it ever is within the big corporate community.  There, it’s much more about competition.  When you’re talking about folks you may have started with when your team was just a handful of people, it can easy get personal—both between the exiting employee and their company, and among entrepreneurs. 

I basically follow two rules of thumb when it comes to these situations:

“No one takes your employees from you, you lose them.”

and

“Don’t hire anyone with baggage.”

If someone is able to hire away one of your employees, that means you haven’t created an interesting enough environment for them to work in, or one that looked promising enough for them to stick around in.  If it wasn’t that company they left for, they probably would have left for someone else soon enough.  It’s easy to demonize the person who hired them away, in the same way that people who get cheated on tend to hate “the other woman/guy”, but the reality is that the blame starts in the mirror.  At my own company, we had an employee whose background was extremely highly sought after, and I know she got several offers.  I even know which startups made those offers and I can’t blame them.  She was pretty awesome.  However, she stuck with us nearly until the end of our fulltime status at the company, which is more than I ever could have asked for—and I think that’s a testament to the kind of relationship we built over time.  It was a relationship based on a clear shared vision, fairness, and open communication.

At the same time, each employee really needs to do what is best for them—so it’s really not about one company “stealing” from another company so much as it is employees optimizing for whatever priorities they have in their life.  We don’t have guaranteed employment from employers, so employees don’t realistically owe any “extra” loyalty to the people they work for.  This is still business, despite all the blood, sweat, and tears that teams put into their startups.  However, that doesn’t mean a free for all is good either.  We all need to play nicely in the sandbox, because you never know when you’re going to need someone else’s help.

When I say not to hire anyone with baggage, I think you really want to make sure that anyone you bring on has been as forthright as possible in dealing with their current employer.  You should always ask about that if you’re about to hire someone—and insist on openness from the person you’re trying to recruit.  If they’re unhappy, it should come to no one’s surprise.  If they have other goals, they need to be communicated to the employer.  Sure, no one likes to see a good employee leave, but there’s no reason why you can’t know that it’s coming ahead of time and make the appropriate plans around it.  If you know that your top dev is looking for more of a challenge—one you can’t provide—then not only should they be able to tell you, but also you should be supportive of their search.  Not only is the open and honest feedback about their situation helpful and informative to you as an employer, but you want to make sure your company has a supportive, not vindictive, reputation in the market.   People switch jobs.  It happens.  The worse you treat your former employees, the harder it will be to recruit new ones. 

So, when I hear the word “poach”, I cringe a little, because I think it misses the point.  That employee was gone way before the offer was made, but unfortunately, internal communication is often very poor *on both sides*, which often leads to bad blood and negative buzz in the market around your company.

Abandoned shopping carts getting you down on Black Friday?  Pay per click ad campaigns not converting to more purchases?  Perhaps that’s because you spent all sorts of time customizing your AdWords text, your direct marketing newsletter, and adjusting the wording on your display ads, but yet you’re driving all of your customers to the same site with the same messaging and offers.

What Monetate does is to allow any site to easy and dynamically create a post click marketing solution with a single javascript tag.  You can add new content to pages, overlay content on other elements (like sale tags) and render dynamic text in creative.  Sites have shown substantial ability to boost conversion, increase revenue, and decrease abandonment.

So this way, when I find your site because I clicked on the “Hats for bald dudes” PPC link on Google, you can dynamically change all the ads to show bald dudes in hats with attractive women checking them out.

Of course, I wouldn’t be searching for that, because chics seem to dig the shorn dome, but you know, some guys out there are still doing the hat thing and haven’t fully embraced the shine.  That kind of display would certainly increase conversion of that particular customer.

I love the tagline on their site: “You work hard to drive traffic to your site. Don’t waste it.”

Services like Monetate that improve the overall shopping experience are particularly interesting to me.  I think retailers are realizing that the web allows them to analyze, personalize, and compliment their existing offerings in ways they never had before—and that if they don’t take advantage of this now, they’re going to get steamrolled.  This is the kind of technology that Amazon has been perfecting for years—and now any online seller or marketplace can take advantage of as a service. 

Obviously, I’m biased because this is a First Round investment, but if I’m selling anything, I can’t see a reason why I wouldn’t give this technology a shot.  That is, unless, you’re absolutely satisfied where your conversions and revenues are and wouldn’t want to see them increase.  If you’re curious, check out their “Lift Without Loss” whitepaper.

Almost overnight, the Ace Hotel lobby has become something of a phenomenon.  On any given day, you’ll run into an actor, a fashion designer, a model and—randomly enough--an tech entrepreneur. 

Just this week, as I was taking meetings in my relatively new role on the First Round Capital investment team, I got to meet Charlie Rose, spotted Tobey Maguire, and most notably, Boxee’s Avner Ronen and Jetsetter’s Drew Patterson.

With a long study hall style table, comfortable couches, and wifi whose codes are the worst kept secret since USV’s Foursquare funding, the Ace had attracted a growing following from the New York City startup world.  The Stumptown Coffee right off the lobby doesn’t hurt the geek pull either—everyone knows high quality caffeine is the fuel that makes code go.

I discovered the Ace Hotel thanks to a coffee invite from Nick Bilton.  As it turns out, Phin Barnes, my colleague at First Round had known about it for a while, and on any given day you’re likely to run into one of us taking meetings with entrepreneurs here. 

The question is whether the Ace Hotel will embrace its newfound friends in the Big Apple’s creative class.  While the waitresses aren’t pushy with getting people to order—yet—little cards have started showing up reminding folks that these seats are “guest only”.  I’ve yet to find a guest among the Ace’s laptop nation yet, but I’m currently sitting within spitting distance of Malcolm Gladwell as I write this.  I’m pretty sure he’s not staying at the hotel either.

There’s certainly an argument that attracting the local tech scene’s “cool kid” crowd, like Zach Klein, who I ran into the other day and passed on an office space tip to, is good for business.  Being community friendly will help the Ace become the go to place for innovators from the creative class.  I mean, wouldn’t you like to be the place where the next Google or Facebook was hatched?  That’s especially the case since many of the young innovators are also the trendsetters in music, food, clothing, etc.  I doubt anyone wants someone to build a router at the study hall table at Ace, but they should certainly extend an open invite for Anthony from Hype Machine to come hack here with his tech team. 

To look at a similar story, you can go back to when the local NYC tech community adopted the Shake Shack in Madison Square Park as its unofficial social hub.  That’s a good example of a business totally embracing the community.  Mentions of the Shake Shack on Fred Wilson’s blog date back to the summer of 2004, when foodie entrepreneur Joshua Schachter and del.icio.us had a little office at 915 Broadway.  Since then, the venue has hosted two of the best tech events in NYC and an epic snowball fight that featured Shake Shack employees participating and free hot chocolate.

The Shake Shack further fostered their relationship with the local tech community by letting a couple of hackers claim and build off of the @shackshack Twitter account.  By powering it with a retweet bot, they created a way for local “insiders” to skirt the line by seeing who they knew was already there.  Now, much of that functionality can be found on Foursquare, but still, the fact that the folks from Danny Meyer’s burger paradise in the park didn’t attempt to block the account speaks well to the kind of relationship they want to have with the community.

So the question is, will the employees from the Ace Hotel be ready for the West 29th Street snowball fight with local entrepreneurs or will we soon get booted for being wifi and table moochers. 

Video from last year’s Shake Shack snowball fight.

UPDATE:  I got this message via the little Plugoo chat window on my blog: 

“ACE NEW YORK LOBBY SIGNS > "Thanks for pointing this out. We want to balance the needs of our guests & the community - both are very important to us. NY lobby signs are down & we hope this flows naturally & organically. – Ace”

That’s really the best response I could have gotten.  It makes me want to go there more and to make sure I’m spending a little money and recommending them, too.

If you haven't been getting this in your e-mail, go here and sign up.

LET THESE NYC STARTUPS MAKE YOUR HOLIDAY WEEK!

While this will be one of the quieter weeks in the NYC tech scene, no doubt that it's going to be one of the most hectic weeks at home. You're probably hosting, cooking, and shopping (and drinking), so why shouldn't the internet make your life a little bit easier and more entertaining this week. I've picked out a few local companies that might make this the best Thanksgiving week ever.

I did find free jazz on the (covered) rooftop of the Empire Hotel tomorrow night, which looks like a pretty cool thing to do.

First off, you can't host a great party without inviting anyone, so Pingg should be your first stop for party invites. They wrote up a piece for all the T-day hosts out there that you should check out.

Before all the festivities, you should definitely make the traditional trek to the Upper West Side to see the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade floats get blown up. Who else is going to be there, though? How will you find them and share the experience? Hotpotato, a First Round portfolio company, just got back from launching at Crunchup and should be up and live in the app store by the time the first bit of helium makes its way into Snoopy. Share photos, notes, etc., with others in real time all around this annual event.

Meals are going to be pretty standard--turkey, stuffing, etc.--but make sure your wine selection isn't. Check out Snooth.com for the best recommendations from the most comprehensive wine database in the world.

What on earth are you going to wear? Try out a bunch of outfits and ask your friends to vote on the most appropriate ensemble with Fashism. If you're like me, you can barely dress yourself, so this kind of thing is best left to crowdsourcing.

Men, you will undoubtedly spill wine, gravy, and cranberry sauce on your white shirts, so come this Friday, it's going to be time to go shopping for a new one. Don't just buy one off the rack. Customize and personalize your own unique dress shirt with Propercloth, another cool NYC startup.

You've made way too much food and will undoubtedly be eating turkey between now and 2015. Looking for the best recipe to mashup the leftovers? Look no further than this week's Food52 Turkey Leftovers contest. I feel like that one is going to be a win-win all the way around.

Enjoy your holiday!

Startup Weekend NYC FTW!, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Lotsa work going on right up to the finish.

People who actually know me recognize the image to the left as my avatar.  They might not know what it is, but they know they see it across many of my various profiles and instant messenger accounts.  It’s actually the screenshot of a Voki character that I created—a little bald dude with headphones in front of a baseball, surrounded by a fireball.  It’s meaningful to me because I was the Director of Consumer Products at Oddcast when Voki was launched.

Fred told a similar story this week about his avatar:

“I began to use it a bit here and there around the web as I set up new profiles. But by no means was it the only profile picture I used. For corporate oriented services like LinkedIn, I'd use my Union Square Ventures headshot. For social nets like Facebook, I'd use a regular headshot. I used a photo of me taking a photo on Flickr for a long time.

But then I started to realize that the Wallstrip avatar was becoming my online identity. People would comment about it all the time. Around the time we sold Wallstrip, Howard asked Jenny to do a real painting of it which I now have in my office at Union Square Ventures. It's a real conversation starter.

Sometime in early 2008, I just decided to go with it everywhere. It's at the top of this blog and everywhere else I have an online identity. It's my online brand now.”

One of his commenters agreed: “thats how i recognize the Fred Wilson brand online.”

The key here is that, by making our online interactions personal, Fred and I are creating a brand for ourselves that has real business ROI.  Followers of my blog and my Twitter account know that I bike, play softball, and kayak.  They’ll joke with me about my taste for heavy industrial music, and they don’t mind so much the occasional snark I use in my writing, because when you deal with me professionally, you get Charlie O’Donnell the person, not just the resume.

It shouldn’t be any surprise, then, that I think of my online presence as my most important business asset—and that I conduct a lot of important business through these casual and personal channels. 

That’s also why, more and more, LinkedIn is becoming less of a place of business for me, and more like a static rolodex.  At the end of the day, LinkedIn just isn’t a place where I want to spend much time.  I don’t engage in nearly the kind of interesting back and forth that I do on Twitter or on Disqus comments either on my both or that of others.  It’s just a well connected rolodex of over 1300 of my best contacts…   but in the grand scheme of things, I’d rank it a distant fourth in terms of my most important online profiles behind my blog, Twitter, and Facebook.

So when I got notified that not only had LinkedIn removed my avatar, but had revoked my photo privileges, I was pretty stunned.  They told me that “as a professional networking site” they give users the opportunity to upload a photo to assist other members in recognizing me. 

Actually, I don’t need photos to help others remember who I am—because I only connect to people that already know me… and tend to know me pretty well.  If you just saw my bald head at a conference and that’s all you have to go on, I’d rather you didn’t try to connect. 

On top of that, LinkedIn’s language of photo “privileges” and giving me an “opportunity” is a rather interesting choice of words for a site that depends on its users’ content and active use of the site to upload their contacts to produce revenue.  If anything, LinkedIn should be thanking me for the privilege I gave it to monetize my network, instead of reprimanding me for improper use of the “opportunity” it gave me like I was a child.  Furthermore, who are they to tell me what acceptable professionalism is online?  Clearly, over 1300 people find me acceptably professional.  If they didn’t, they wouldn’t connect to me.  How about removing all of the privileges of random people who don’t know me and try to connect. 

I’ve been an active user of LinkedIn for years—advocating its usage and teaching about it up at Fordham.  There are lots of things I wish it did—like helping me actively monitor relevant changes in my network or having better group tools.  One problem I did not have, nor did anyone else, was too many people putting up avators or corporate logos as their image.  It’s not a complaint you hear about Twitter—that the site is unprofessional because people don’t use their real pictures.  LinkedIn may not care about how people conduct business now online—it’s making too much money selling access to my profile to recruiters.  However, things have changed.  More and more people are gathering in more friendly, social places online around common interests outside of their career and getting more business done like that than on a buttoned up resume site.  Policing photos and reprimanding users that other users want to connect to shouldn’t be a priority for LinkedIn if it really wants to be the kind of place that up and coming professionals want to spend any time in.

Congratulations to the future Mr. & Mrs. Cuthbert, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

My best friend since 1st grade just got hitched in Central Park.

Yesterday, I bought an Xbox off of BigDeal.com, one of our First Round Capital portfolio companies. I spent nearly an hour and a half bidding against some guy to try and buy at increments from about $18 all the way to $168.  I tried every strategy I knew…  holding out to the last second to try and lull him into a sense of security and then jump in…  then brute forcing it by counterbidding every second all throughout the $30 and $60 range to try to wear him out.  It was an addictive bidding frenzy—and my downside was just buying it at the Amazon price, so I couldn’t really lose.  (I didn’t win, but I’ll be back!)

TechCrunch did a good job of covering the company yesterday, so I’ll just pull the highlights:

“BigDeal lets users purchase virtual bids $0.75 each which can then be used to bid on goods ranging from video games to high-end televisions. Whenever you bid on an item, its price increases by $0.15 and an extra 30 seconds are tacked on to the duration of the auction. With this model, items end up selling substantially below their market value. But one of the main criticisms of Swoopo was the risk of losing your money spent on bids (regardless of whether you win or not) when the auction concludes. BigDeal takes a couple of steps to mitigate this risk.

With BigDeal’s model, any users who get outbid get a full credit of the money uses for bids to buy the item via a “Buy Item Now” option (which Swoopo also has, called “Swoop-it-now”). So if you spent $10 on bids, your Buy It Now price will be dropped by $10. Of course, the Buy It Now price will frequently be higher than the price of item sold for in the auction but at least users aren’t necessarily losing money all together. And the Buy It Now price is set at the same price that Amazon lists for the same product.

That’s not all. BigDeal provides an added incentive for bids by letting all users trade in the money they spent on bids for gift cards. All users get $1 gift card discount for every $1 spent on bids. So if you buy $25 in bids, BigDeal will give you a $100 gift card for $75…

…It seems that Big Deal has taken the best elements of Swoopo’s model and added several features which make it more of a win-win for consumers. Plus, it adds information, like bidding history, to the process to make the auction more fair.”

I’ll be interested to see how the company works towards providing more and more auction transparency.  Admittedly, when I bought my Xbox, I didn’t realize that I wasn’t getting my bid points back when I took the “buy it now” price.  I thought everyone was seeing the same price, like a loaded gun on the table, and that everyone’s bid lowered it.  I figured everyone else’s lost bids were subsidizing my price, but as it turns out, I didn’t really get “refunded” my points back—they just came off the MSRP.  So, I effectively just paid the MSRP price…  not what I wanted, but not a terrible outcome, since it’s been years since I had a game system and I was kind of itching to get back into it.  Perhaps I’ll bring it to the new First Round offices in Union Square (coming this January) and we’ll have entrepreneur Madden tourneys!

I've been thinking a lot about where entrepreneurs and startup talent come out of in NYC. A lot of folks believe that you can train people coming out of the financial services base to do something entrepreneurial, but honestly, I'm not so sure about that. What I do think, however, is that it takes more than just a visionary leader or a ninja-level hacker to start a business. There are tons of startup companies in New York City, many already making money or well funded, that are looking for top supporting talent--engineers, designers, salespeople, business development pros, product managers, etc. This is where we, as the startup community, can do a better job--mining the installed base of talent in big companies. I'm actively looking for ideas on how to tell the masses of talented, experiences folks slaving away in Cubeworld that there's a thriving innovation community in New York City with lots of great companies looking for talent. How do we pick apart the CondeNasts, JP Morgans, and Time Inc's? Please talk to me about it. If you're a recovering Fortune 500 employee, tell me how you got out. (charlie@firstround.com) One way the nextNY community is trying to help is with Matchup Camp.

MatchupCamp is for skilled professionals to find new opportunities—for developers to find inspiring projects, for salespeople to find interesting products to sell, etc.  It’s not a bunch of unemployed people handing out resumes.  It’s for people looking to explore where they might best fit.  When we did this two years ago, technical talent probably made up 40% of the crowd and we’re working hard to make sure it’s not just people with ideas, but people who can make them happen.

When: December 8th at 6:30

Where: FYI Studio 22 West 27th, 6th Floor

RSVP here

Wow… what a long way we’ve come.  In February 2006, I started nextNY because the only community-wide event in town was the NY Tech Meetup and, at the time, it didn’t have much community about it.  I think I was member #71 and now it’s got over 10,000.  At the same time, the NY tech community has exploded with events, both educational and social.  One look at GarysGuide and you can get quickly overwhelmed.

A number of people asked me at recent nextNY events how they can find out about what’s going on.  Pointing a busy entrepreneur or executive to the nextNY listserv, which buzzes all day with discussion of memory caches, CMS’s, and finding a bookkeeper clearly isn’t the answer. 

Therefore, I’ve decided to take the attendee lists from the last two Shakeshack events and some recent nextNY talks and start a once a week e-mail newsletter as a curated version of what’s going on around town and in the online communities as well.  In the future, I’ll also be highlighting some open job positions, maybe some companies, and maybe just some recommendations on people that you should follow.  If you’d like to sign up for the list, just go here.  It’s going to look pretty texty and unformatted for a bit, but I’ll dress it up soon.

Event of the Week:

The Net Neutrality TechDebate, an Oxford style competitive back and forth on what is probably the most important topic in technology today that few of us have a clue about. 

The debate will be held on Tuesday, November 17th at the IAC Building, 555 W 18th St btw 10th & 11th ave.  Doors open at 7:00 PM.   **RSVP here**

The Debaters

Against

James Assey - Executive Vice President, National Cable and Telecommunications Association
Robert Quinn -  Senior Vice President-Federal Regulatory, AT&T
Christopher Yoo - Professor of Law and Communication; Director, Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition, UPenn Law

For

Tim Wu - Coined the term "Network Neutrality"; Professor of Law, Columbia Law
Brad Burnham - VC, Union Square Ventures
Nicholas Economides - Professor of Economics, Stern School of
Business, New York University.

Can't make it?

The debate will be streamed live at: http://www.livestream.com/techdebate
A podcast will be available after the event at: http://tech-debate.com

Would rather drink? 

Check out the NYVC Happy Hour instead.

=========================================

This week is O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo at the Javits Center.  By registering for an Expo Pass, you can get in free to see all the keynotes, the sponsored sessions, Web2Open, Launch Pad, and the Birds of a Feather sessions.  

Here’s what you won’t want to miss:

Monday

Ignite NYC – 5 minutes, 20 slides.  Geeks + Slideshows = Awesomeness

7PM at New World Stages: 340 West 50th Street

Tuesday

2PM: A Conversation with Caterina Fake Jennifer Pahlka (Code for America), Caterina Fake (Hunch)

2:25PM: Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media danah boyd (Microsoft Research)

Wednesday

2:20pm A Conversation about the Realtime Web Brady Forrest (O'Reilly Media, Inc.), John Borthwick (betaworks)

Thursday

9:15am A Conversation with Beth Noveck Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media, Inc.), Beth Noveck (Executive Office of the President/OSTP)  <—Yes, *the* President

=========================================

It’s also Entrepreneur Week and there are a couple of noteworthy panels.  Unfortunately the event is sold out, but there will be a livestream available on their site soon.

I think the pick of the conference is this panel at 2:15PM on Thursday:

The Revenue Inflection Point: The New Reality of Scaling a Business to $100MM in Revenue

MODERATOR: Bob Tedeschi, New York Times Technology Columnist

PANELISTS:

Stephen Messer, Co-Founder of Linkshare

Omar Amanat, Entrepreneur in Residence, Wharton School of Business

Marc Cenedella, Founder & CEO of TheLadders.com

Nancy Pedot, Former CEO of Gymboree & Party City

Chris McCann, President of 1-800 Flowers.com

Also right up there is this Friday panel at 10:30AM:

A Roadmap for the Entrepreneur Pt. 2: Top Venture Capitalists Reflect

MODERATOR: Murat Aktihanoglu, Founder of Centrl & Entrepreneurs Roundtable

PANELISTS:

Albert Wenger, Partner at Union Square Ventures

Jim Robinson, Co-Founder & Managing Partner of RRE Ventures

Anthony Marino, Managing Partner at Virgin Investments

Howard Morgan, Partner at First Round Capital

=========================================

This weekend is Startup Weekend.  Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated group of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects. 

David Kidder will be speaking Friday night while Nate Westheimer, Sam Lessin, and I will be on the Sunday night panel.

Last week, First Round Capital had its annual meeting, where we got to walk through our portfolio with our investors.  Honestly, I didn’t realize how many cool companies we had invested in, so I’m going to take the time each Friday to highlight another company.

Since I got a “One of Josh Kopelman’s friends likes your photo” note from Thread yesterday, that’s going to be today’s spotlight.

Thread is a pretty simple concept: Meet people through your friends on Facebook.  Now, conceptually, meeting people through social networks is a good idea—but we all know how unappealing setups can be.  Thread enables you to get proactive about searching your friends’ networks while minimizing the effort and risk they put in as a middleman. 

What I really like is the anonymizing features of the site—where someone can reach out to you, but they’re shown to you in a group.  You only get matched when there’s mutual interest.  That keeps down the awkwardness of a turndown should you ever meet in person.  For all they know, you just don’t check the site.  This works a little like those “One of your friends likes you” viral sites from the late 90’s, but now you’ve got the assurance that there’s a real human behind the interest. 

The site could do a little better job learning about my preferences and keeping me searching for more people, but overall, it’s a pretty solid concept and execution.  So, if you feel like you’ve got a pretty good network of single friends, but don’t really want to get too involved with matching people up, let the interwebz do all the heavy lifting and sign up for Thread.  You can just sit back and reap all the social capital.