The Post Money Value

CREEP v2.0

CREEP.

For all you young ones, that was the Committee for the Re-Election of the President. Richard Nixon’s gang of pals, those CREEPs. The one good guy? Hugh Sloan Jr who was immortalized in the words of the late great Senator Sam Ervin when he said that "your testimony has renewed my faith in the old expression -- an honest man is the noblest work of God."  Interesting story, here.

Like everything else in this world, we appear to have CREEP 2.0. 

Only in this case CREEP stands for Cockamamie Random Exercises for Entrepreneurial Punishment.

I got a note from a nice guy working on a startup. Jon asked me if I had ever heard of a guy named “Hugh Sloan III.” Nope, I replied, why?  Well, Jon says, Hugh sent me an offer to help my start up but it seems weird.  Really, forward it to me if  you can. Then, two other start up folks forward me the exact same email/attachment from one each Hugh Sloan III.

It started out with:

 “My angel group are the folks that seeded Google (Andy Bechtolsheim and Ron Conway) Let me know if your team has interest in meeting with some of the funds that I work with (attachments)”

There was an attachment called “what to expect”.  While at MashUp Camp, I started having start up people come by and asking me about Hugh. At one point, while one guy was asking me, another jumped in and said, “yeah he just spammed me too!”

I asked a couple of the other VCs at MashUp and TED. The general view on these seed and agent combos  was “do your homework.” 

Hugh wants to charge $6,500 plus a percentage of the funds raised, if I am reading this right. He lists pretty much every fund in the valley as a >5 year relationship and then does an amazing job of taking a fairly good swipe at a few people in the business. This is just one of the excerpts:

“You should be aware that despite receiving a signed term sheet, Tier 1 funds sometimes dump a deal.  Jotspot was originally bridged at Accel only to be dumped and later picked-up by Redpoint and Mayfield.  There is one instance where a Top Five fund signed a term sheet and left the Founder hanging out to dry on his Series A round.”

This type of ‘paid agent’ at a very very early stage, where you pay, is not a good idea in my opinion.  This is no different then getting somebody to spam your resume all over the place.  Hugh sending email to all these start ups is a questionable strategy and, in general, I would check references on anyone that promises to put you in front of investors out very very carefully since that is, after all, what you would be expecting.  

Call the VCs that the prospective agent mentions and see what they say. 

Here in Canada, I’m a big fan of Mike Middleton’s  Fusion Capital Partners if you believe you do need a good agent. He and his team are great guys and give out lots of good (and free advice). He is a big believer in giving back so, if you are in Toronto, talk with Mike’s team.

As for Hugh, you can read about him and what he does here.  I encourage you to be fair and judge this approach against other opportunities to get into the VC mix. I’m always available for a 30 minute, no harm, no foul meeting and I believe you will find lots of VCs willing to give you a few moments without the need for an agent.

Sorry to Hugh’s fans and Hugh himself, this isn’t personal. I just don’t think this process/approach and the feedback I am hearing from start ups is good for any of us. Okay, I’m pushing it on CREEP shot, it’s a joke, no lawsuits, plz.

The cure for foot in mouth disease

From time to time, everybody, steps in it. What you do while pulling your foot out of your mouth is a good indication of who you are.  Some bloggers say dumb things, get just hammered and take the approach of goody, I’ve been controversial.  This, despite the reputation hit(s). 

Guy Kawasaki had recently done a blog posting on how to suck up to bloggers. Hit the raw nerve of A-list vs. everybody else, etc. It wasn’t re-purposed content from one of his good books rather some original writing which got lots of people in a tizzy and generated more then a few negative comments, links, and Cartoons.

One of the things that got lost in the tizzy, was the first paragraph of his posting.

 “Blogging has flipped traditional PR on its head. It used to be that ink begat buzz. Life was simple then: you sucked up to the Wall Street Journal, one of its reporters wrote about your product, and the buzz began.”

Dead On. 

But, as I said, lots of people did not agree with the use of words sucking up and bloggers in the same sentence.  So, a bit of backlash came down.

Guy followed up with a post that contained a cartoon that made fun of the blog entry and guy himself.  The cartoon was less the caption and Guy had these things to say:

“My buddy, Brad Fitzpatrick, drew this cartoon in response to the “abhorrent” article that I wrote”

and

“Brad took a very,very good shot at me. Is this fun or what? I think it's flattering to know that you're worth skewering!”

He invited people to come suggest captions for the cartoon.

Lesson for you? Humor with a dash of humility.  It avoids posts like this or this.

Bonus:

If you’ve wondered about or questioned Hugh’s approach to Suits and Wine, you may want to look carefully at the cartoon:

Not bad, not bad at all.

Zoom Shops - Missing the obvious

Sometimes going for major cool, major smart, and major disruption, leaves you missing the obvious.

Submitted for your consideration: Zoom Systems. They make a pretty sophisticated  high tech Kiosk called the Zoom Shop.

There is a Kiosk at the hotel where I am staying.  Early in the morning, just prior to my daily 20 ft run, I wandered over to take a look at the Kiosk as it is the gift shop for the hotel. The nice Hilton Garden employee said “Sorry, it’s busted. We’ve called em a couple of times, they’re pretty slow at responding, happens a bunch.” 

Ouch number one. Random employee, of another company, completely out of your control, just trashes your reliability and customer service in a hotel packed with business people.   Yep, but there is more.

As I wandered over anyway,  I was think, uh oh another BOD (Blue Screen of Death) picture in the making. These are those famous photos of Windows crashing on signs, movie marquees, etc, etc.  Ah, no.

Yes, that would be a non-windows crashed machine. 

The point here isn’t one crash for the Penguin, naah, happens to the best of us.

There are two points.

First, a truckload of money was spent on this product. Millions went into this according to the web site.  Clearly, somebody didn’t save a bit of coin for a customer service response team that is totally focussed on making sure random employees of other companies aren’t given material to trash Zoom Systems. 

The second is the engineering  here seems a bit weird. I can think of all the obvious remote management, firmware reboot, etc, etc, things that should be in this system which would prevent this from ever happening.  In my simple brain, having a firmware/embedded fail safe that brings the curtain down gracefully (we are updating, please come back) or anything to prevent the customer from seeing this screen, would be a priority. Dialing home instantly, etc, etc, all seem to be logical things for this box to do.

And it all might be there.

It all might work most of the time, but none of it mattered because for the better part of 9 hours (I asked) the machine was dead and the Hilton Garden employees were pointing out how bad it and the company’s service was.  Guests would come up to the lobby and employees would trash the machine and the company.

Lesson for your start up? Besides the obvious engineering points (build for the failure scenarios), remember, no sear into your brain, the importance of customer service and what happens when others, you can’t fire/train/control, are talking about your products and services. 

Expanding the Walled Garden

20060131234948_bridge in the sky.jpg
Originally uploaded by colourblind.

In an conversation with some folks today, I mentioned that bloggers today are basically all talking to ourselves.

While we laugh at AOL's "walled garden", I sometimes get the sense that bloggers have built a much larger garden but with higher walls. Another metaphor might be we collectively need to get out more.

And with that (while waiting for the late plane), I wandered over to flickr and looked at some interesting photos.

Turns out this amazing shot is of a bridge in Toronto taken by a really great photographer named Payam Rajabi who is from Iran.

You can see more of this great work at

www.colourblind.ca

Before we return to the blogging is dead, Dave Winer is a control phreak, and Robert Scoble is a paid shil stuff, take a momement to find something interesting out there and share with the rest of us.

Well done, Payam, well done.

If/when "they" know more then "you"

I’ve mentioned this before but wanted to give you another example of just weirdness in giving out information.

I’m waiting for a friend who is flying in for a conference. I said I’d do the airport pick up. Got the flight information so I could check on status before I’d head out to the airport. 

About the time the flight is due in, for grins, I test the three places where the information is available for United Airlines flight 397.

First was the United web site. Behold:

Late, oh well.  Let’s check Flytecomm and see what is really going on. And, like so:

Yep, a few minor issues. First, note the take off times are different by 30 minutes and the flytecomm data is accurate to the minute. Finally, just to try to see what the humans think, I call United, ignoring the automated flight status stuff.  I get a human, apologize that I am on a rotary phone, and ask about flight 397.  About 20 minutes late? Right, thanks very much. What? No, I’m not really on a rotary phone, my doctor says pressing too many buttons on the phone inflames my hemorrhoids. [Okay, I made the last line up.]

Amazing, eh? How is it possible the core systems the humans have, can’t get accurate information.  There has to be some corporate wonk who decided that actual truth is somehow bad for the customers. Dumb.

Lesson for your start up: Just gives us the facts, we’ll figure it out.

Techcrunch5 - Morning Time in the Valley

While on the west coast for a number of meetings and projects, I was invited to the Techcrunch5 party celebrating Shel and Robert’s book launch as well as testing the limits of Michael Arington’s neighbors.  I wasn’t aware you could pack 500 people in a house with only two bathrooms, cool.

This party had enough going on to keep the sand hill slave blogging for a decade.  One party, 1000 blog entries, minimum. 

With apologies to the kind lady and the disclaimer that I am not as good a writer as she is (from her: “…he went home with 2 Danish women. My parting words to him were, "make sure your Danish rolls are fresh before you eat them in the morning". (Gross and immature, I know).)”

Here are some my Valley Observations.

Crashing the party. When it is an “in” place to be here in the valley, the stories at the front door are way better then what you see at some fancy night club.

“I’m on the damn Wiki, young lady!”

“No, you don’t understand, my firm handles most of legal work for these companies, I’m always on the list.”

“I blog about this parties, Missy, I don’t do invites.”

“I’m here to replace a crashed drive in the Kaboodle demo, they just messaged me.”

The best pick up line I heard last night, pocket protector type to clearly A list lady:

“Wow, cleaning this carpet is going to be a bitch tomorrow, don’t you think.”

I am blessed with the fact that nobody knows (or cares) who I am.  It affords me the same level of Sand Hill Slave (SHS) type anonymity without the fear of being outed. I used this blessing by being a quiet observer and then, when engaged, basically make stuff up just to test SHS valley theory.

Consider the recent dust up over John Dvorak’s working theory about Apple shipping Vista on Apple hardware.  While John relaxes with his current intake of mind alternating substances, I tweak a few folks.

me: Mishka! Great to finally meet  you. I’ve gotten the port code up and I must say it; Apple’s implementation of Vista is much more stable, especially with the new Bluetooth version 5 drivers, wow, 1200 feet. When is the NDA coming off all this stuff. Well done.

him: Uh, I don’t work for Apple, but whoa, really? You got a port from Apple of Microsoft code?

me: Oh. Gee, sorry, I mis-read your name tag and you looked just like your email. I really can’t talk about it. But it is cool.

Of course he is standing there with three friends trying to act all cool and hip. Now the four of them have a hot scoop they can share with all the A list bloggers running around the party.  You heard it here first, don’t let ValleyWag tell you otherwise.

Then there is this whole notion of what you do vs. who you are.   Nowhere, I think, but in the valley can you get away with this kinda stuff.

Her: “Do you have a card?”

Him: “Just Google me, babe.”

And speaking of Valleywag, while I do agree with Fred Wilson and others that it is a bit over the top, telling people you are “contributing editor” for Valleywag appears to be handy for getting dates.

Her: “And what do you do?”

Me: “I’m a contributing editor for Valleywag, have you heard of us?”

Her: OMG, I love what you are doing. It’s about time. (Saddles up close). Now, you see that one over there, bet you didn’t know she is sleeping with him in order to get information for the start up she wants to do which will probably get funded because her husband is a VC over at that guy’s firm which, of course, will fund anything.  Grab me a wine spritzer and I’ll let you in on everything really going here.”

And the phrases! They are all here, being used, in one tent, it’s cliche central.

“Let’s continue the dialog” (said to a guy hounding a VC about an idea to bring Solyent Green like products out.)

“I lived with a double dip but the drag -n– tags on top of the weighted average math, well just not gonna happen at this man’s start up.”

Not to be out done, is the name dropping, yowsa.

“Yes, I was at Guy Kawasaki’s place talking about Paul Kedrosky and my working on his latest thing and had to take a call from Eric Schmidt about lining up a meeting with Bill Gates so we could all get our plan ready for that Congressional Testimony. It’s just crazy, I tell you, crazy.”

At the prize for the most questionable tactic at the party?

A couple of ‘random’ types were sucking up to Robert Scoble’s kid, giving him seriously nice free goodies. The overhead part was “Hopefully, we will get a meet.” Lame, boyz, really lame.

Memo to Mark Evans and Matthew Ingram: Let’s borrow somebody’s house and throw a party like this in Toronto. I’ll pitch in some FF miles and we’ll get Sand Hill Slave to make her first bay street appearance.

Memo to Hugh: Does this go on at the Geek Dinners in London?

Enjoy your weekend and if you are at MashUp Camp, please say hello. I will be the guy in the Valet Parking Jacket. No, really.

McAfee - How to dump customers

I like alerts on my machine from Zone Alarm, and others who warn me of problems.

Except Crap like this:

This little ditty popped up while I was working away.  The only thing missing is the option to switch providers.

No worries, I’ve got that covered.  McAfee, you are the weakest link, buh bye..

Term Sheets on Aisle 6

Sometimes you just have draw the ol line and say that regardless of what ‘everybody’ does, you just aren’t gonna play that game. 

I got a call from a pretty smart guy working on a company that I really like in a space that I think is really growing.  “Joe” wanted me see a term sheet that one of the other VCs in town had given him and that was signed. I got the “Rick, I really want to work with you, so just take this, tweak it a tiny tiny bit, and I’ll ditch these guys.”

I declined and further declined to pursue the investment.  While I understand the game, understand trying to get value for your company, etc, it’s just completely unprofessional to ignore a signed document that uses the word confidential in it.  I don’t want email copies of something that you’ve talked about with another party.

It’s a major red alert to somebody’s character and the tone of what is going to happen moving forward.

On the other side, we’ve just received a term sheet for one of my portfolio companies raising capital and I’ve been crystal clear with the management team on how to handle this: Professionally.

If we decided to negotiate the terms and sign it, we’re good to go. If we want to get other offers, park the term sheet, tell the first party we want to get all the offers on the table and then we will negotiate but shopping term sheets and passing that stuff around in email, is totally off sides.

I know, it’s the game, but sometimes you just have to say, here’s the standard by which will we play and be judged in our profession.  Don’t email other term sheets from other parties if you want me to fund you. Negotiate with me and judge the relative merits of the offers as they best suit your needs.

Oh, and the other point? When you tell me so and so is looking at you, I’m going to call them because, at least here in Canada, we like to work together, cooperate and avoid bidding up value. 

Be careful about the VC name dropping, term sheet shopping, risky business.

 

Dot Net Coder?

One of our portfolio companies is looking for a .net coder that can do some pretty quick app development for an upcoming demo.

The company is in the LA area (arcadia) and this gig would last 4 weeks min or more if it worked out, etc, etc.

You'd have to be here for a few days but could code from home if that was your thing.

Email me (rick) at jlaventures.com

The "conversation"

For whatever reason (full moon?), there has been a bunch of recent punching bag behavior on Doc Searls regarding conversations, what’s old, what’s new, etc.  I’m not going to link to all this stuff because if you are interested, you’ve already read it. I’m not sure why some people have decided now is the time to rag on Clue train and other commentary from Doc.  The whole notion of the “conversation”  is here and, well, not sure the motives of people trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle or poo poo Doc’s theory’s about marketing, conversations, etc.

One thing you might find interesting as you think about traditional vs. whatever we are calling today’s ‘marketing’:

At the South by Southwest Interactive show this year, like most shows, there is a keynote.  But not a keynote speaker nor a keynote address rather a keynote conversation.

This conversation will be started by Heather Armstrong of  dooce.com fame. 

Here’s a quote from Heather’s blog:

“This just needs to be talked about: every bathroom in the world should come equipped with the toilet we have in our hotel room. That thing could flush a four-story brick building if it had to. The force of the water is so intense that one flush most likely sends everything out through the canal all the way to the river and then out to sea. That far. And that is what I look for in a toilet.

This is not something we were expecting because we both had experiences with less than stellar toilet systems in England where you had to stand there and flush like eight times just to get one square of toilet paper through the pipe. Amsterdam! You have welcomed me with your toilet!

This trip: declared a success.”

So, here’s a small homework assignment. Head to Heather’s site and read up. Wander the SXSW Festival website and study who is going, what it is all about, etc.  Now combine the two and see if you ‘get’ why Heather is pretty much perfect for this event.

Jason Fried of 37 Signals is doing the “opening remarks” as part of the festival.  Both choices tell you something about what’s happening out there.

And I’m honestly not being snarky here. You have to look around the corner a bit to see all of this and why it’s important. Important to you, important to what you build, how you offer it, and how you interact with those around you from users to partners, to the suits (moi).

Major World Class Music/Film festival.  Blogger and Web App Guru leading the charge. Keep the faith, Doc, we’re getting there.

Adventures in Craig's land

I’m currently in Los Angeles (Monrovia, actually) working at one of our portfolio companies.  On this sunny morning, I’m wandering Craigslist looking for some additional people.

I thought I would just search through the resumes to see if there some talent that we might be able to get.

Like the newsgroups of days gone by, craigslist has a fairly large number of spammy types who seem to think posting your CV 100 times in two months (sometimes multiple times a day) make sense.

Memo to Scott Leonard, it’s not working, guy. Posting the same resume, over and over on the same day, every month,  naah, I don’t think so.

Then there are the traditional recruiters who put up a candidates resume and invite you to contact them. They should conform to some kind of template so I can skip over those but, free country, no big deal.

Here’s a combination you might like. Harvard and Microsoft. That’s not bad, eh?

The first line of this craigslist resume?

“Here's my info. Please inform me of compensation on initial email”

Hmm. Bold and to the point.

“Positions I am looking for CTO, CIO, COO, IT Manager, Consulting, Chief Officers for medium sized businesses, Project Manager, Hostile Takeovers, Due Diligence contracting, Monthly contract for analysis business development, Director of *, also available for private consultations for high profile people in regards to web development, advice, etc.

I have a great sense of humor and levity to my management style that most people appreciate greatly.”

On the sense of humor part, I totally agree.

Anyway, if you are on the east coast of North America, I hope you are safe and keeping warm. My trek through craigslist continues.

Coordinator Dummies, For Dummies

There are a whole bunch of people out there who still don't get the world we live in today. You have to see the letter that Jason Calacanis got from the Wiley people, owner of the Dummies books.  They are complaining about using the For Dummies words in blog titles.  

Jeff Jarvis, makes an interesting point:

“Well, if we don’t all have the courage to stand up in solidarity with the Danish publishers of the Mohammed cartoons, we can at least stand in solidarity with Jason.

How many of us can write posts headlined “For Dummies”? When you do, please tag it, as I have, above.”

Given that a zillion dollars has been made on this tittles, they’ve gotten “For Dummies” into the conversations of the world, and this is such a non (aka Fair Use) issue, I’m just wondering if the RIAA has set up a secret cloning lab that turns out these types of  “let’s piss people off” mindless drones.

With a Law Prof type mom who is probably going to lecture me about trademarks and the rights/responsibilities all around, let me just say that, yup I do understand but there is a time and place for this stuff and picking one’s fights carefully should enter the mix.

Start up lesson for you?

Pray to the gods of Calacanis so that she shines upon you for the Jeff “Dell Hell” Jarvis, we must overcome, blog posting supporting you. Can I get an amen.

Dummies….

National Arrogance Day

I’m here in California and while flying through the night, I must have missed the start of national arrogance day.

First, there was my previous post on telling customers to get lost and now comes this from one of our portfolio companies.

It seems they were looking for a developer. They put the job up on Craigslist for a C# developer.

They got a whole bunch of responses, including my personal favorite:

(I removed the last name and email address)

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: michael  <xxxxxxx>
Date: Feb 8, 2006 10:43 PM
Subject: Senior C# .NET architect/developer - Exciting Startup Opportunity
To: job-130395032

i'm interested. more details about you gets more details about me...

------------------------------------------------------------------

Okay, all together now, De-cafe, DeeeCafe…

 

Ning - A customer focused company

Well, maybe.

Over on a mailing list I participate in, the following was mentioned:

“Ning co-founder Marc Andreessen recently said...

Ideally we’ll never meet any of our customers. We actually had to take the sign down from our front door because one of our customers actually stopped in, uninvited, and said, "Hi, I love your service." And we’re like, "why are you here?" And so down came the sign.

Drop-bys like that should only happen in sitcoms as far as I’m concerned… The consumer internet businesses in a sense are ideal businesses from the standpoint of never meeting your customers.”

So, Adam is organizing a drop in by a mass group of customers. This all being done with the help of an inside Ning ‘spy.’

Under the assumption that is was actually said, I’m sure there is another meaning or some additional context that should be wrapped around this. Wonder-kid or not, I’m pretty sure Marc is not implying he doesn’t want to meet his customers, listen face to face what they have to say (good and bad) about the company, etc. 

Or maybe when you make big bags of cash, you get to say stuff like this which, I guess, points to other issues that, I’m sure are obvious to all of you.

The lesson for your “customer internet business” is really simple:

If somebody drops by, unannounced, to tell you they love your service, have a T-shirt, free coffee, and serious gratitude served up immediately. If they come by to complain, add extra gratitude.

 [UPDATE: He said it. Watch it here. CNET busted him on it as well.]

 

Congrats to IOTUM - DEMO God 2006

Way to go Alec and Howard. Long road, well done. Now the hard work starts.

Iotum  Demo God 2006

An interesting glimpse at the advertising evolution

AOL has an interesting page with respect to the superbowl ads. Now, before you think I’m just a head case with respect to superbowl commercials, take a look at how this was done with respect to a couple of things.

First, the Sopranos introduction with the promo on the new (finally) season. Next, note how there are commercials inside the commercials apart from this whole voting thing which are great data points of feedback to the advertisers.

Watch the Leonard Nimoy ad, then watch a bunch more.  Then go surf, put the kids to bed, remember what your spouse/significant other looks like, etc. Okay, done all that? What product was he hawking?  It will be interesting to see how many people remember the product vs. just remember it was him doing some commercial.

Anyway, there is some interesting dynamics going on here especially as the traditional stuff starts to take serious advantage of the Internet, mobile devices, etc.

Fascinating..

FlimLoop = FlimGoop

You’ve probably seen/heard about Filmloop. It’s an interesting little app, free, cute, etc.  I’m always checking out software so after seeing Guy Kawasaki’s latest mention about the superbowl commercials, I figured I’d give this puppy a shot.

1. Download. Simple and nothing to it. Check.

2. Fill out page with bogus information to stay anonymous. Oops.

3. Microsoft’s spyware catches this little app’s attempt to put itself into my start up sequence. Oops.

One out of Three.

Reminders for you.

If you are going to attempt to capture information, call it optional if it really is optional because I’m going to get annoyed and give you ka ka for data when you imply it is required. Will most people? Dunno, but I believe there are about a zillion nobody@nobody.com email addresses in reg bases around the world. 

Figure out a way to entice me. Talk nice, ask permission, something besides fill it in.  Mr. Not Telling, the 65+ year old, at 98053? That’s me.  I have given out information, email addresses, etc to others; so it is in the approach.

Do not futz with my settings without first asking permission.  This behavior by Filmloop is a major bad thing and the Filmloop folks, free app or not, should be roundly slapped.  Takes five seconds (or less) to pop a dialog box and ask me. Heck, make the box default to yes, but ask first, modify on permission.

[Note: I checked and there is a setting in options, filmloop, settings, to turn it off. The default should be off unless I give you permission to add yourself to my start up.  Lots of big time apps, aka Microsoft stuff, do this by default and it is just bad behavior. Don’t do it.]

And bonus Turd: Stop the app? Naah… Even after you kill it, it stays on the tool bar(app tray), again, without my permission. If I kill the app and you want to stay in the tray, ask.

2006, the year of asking permission. Start a trend, code it that way.

Oh, the application is interesting if this sort of sharing is your thing. Simple and nicely done.

The Superbowl in 20 minutes

The part that matters, anyway: The commercials. Google Video has them all on one page, with one click to watch in a twenty minute stream.  So, if you didn’t get to see them, say you got stuck with two beavers from Bell Canada, you can go enjoy.   You will note one interesting fact. There is/was a commercial from Glaxo Smith Kline.  via IP locator, Google will not play the ad, shows an error that it isn’t authorized in my country.  The stream breaks at that point but all the good bud commercials come first.

The attempts to block people from watching stuff they want never ends and the people going around it, hacking it, etc, never end. Amazing.

The link is here.

The VC Community's own MiniMicrosoft

I want to work with this women.

Selected tidbits.

“But there is another breed that I have encountered as well. The ass hat who drops the hint cooly that he's a "venture capitalist" in order for him to present to you...”

and

“The scenario: A guy sidles up and tries to make conversation with me. Kudos for your effort. I will engage kindly unless:

I see a Blackberry in hand
Budweiser in the other
I hear the words "So what do you do for a living" within 30 seconds of meeting me.

This question usually receives a response along the lines of: "I manually masterbate and extract sperm from comatose patients for cryopreservation." (this varies from tool to tool)”

thus

“I actually enjoy the way men bring it up...you idiots TRY sooooo hard....and Slave Girl knows EXACTLY how to coax your ego down from the noctilucent clouds...

Example:

Tool in Question (hereon out referred to as TQ): Man I've had a bad day at work.
Slave Girl: Yeah we get those on occassion. It's not like you are going to get fired so drink up, dude.
TQ: Well I will be if we don't close this deal.
SG: I'm sure you are great at your job. Look at it this way, the weekends coming up and you can totally chill.
TQ: I have no weekends, I have to go into work. Such is the life of VCs.
SG: (Big Chesire Cat smile) Uh.. FECES? Did you just say FECES?
TQ: NO. I said VC.. Venture Capitalist?
SG: OH ok. Same difference.”

All from one post.   A blog worth reading for entertainment alone. Don’t yell at me about the spelling,  I didn’t correct it and I’m not going to bring it up!

The VC Toliet

The S.H.I.T.S

I read this in a blog entry from Brad Feld so he gets credit for bringing this up first.  SHITS. (Signal High Interest Then Stall.)  Hmm.

Here’s what I’ve told the CEOs running companies in our portfolio about this tactic.

First, it sucks, it is rude, and it is a shining example of why the VC world gets some of the bad rap we do. 

Whenever a call from another VC firm comes into one of the companies that I manage, I’ve suggested they pass the call over to me.  If somebody is on a fishing expedition, it stops really fast. They typically will stammer on the phone, ask some fairly lame questions and then head for the hills.  If it isn’t a fishing expedition, a professional conversation happens and we figure out if there is something the company can do with respect to addressing a particular request. If the company is not fund raising, we say that and tell the truth which gets us a truthful response. If the VC firm in question has an idea for a merger or some other play, they tell us and we discuss it.  But I try very hard to keep the fishing nonsense off the CEOs plate.

There are arguments to be made that a fair percentage of the CEOs time in a start up/growth company is working on fund raising for some next round and this is just part of the overhead.  I don’t have an issue with the CEO working with ‘interested parties’ rather I have an issue with the SHITS process that many firms like to use so they can keep their office up to date on a particular market segment on my start up’s nickel.  Homey don’t play that.

I believe a well performing company, growing, hitting milestones will get noticed and funding opportunities will be there.  Companies that already have VCs in and sitting on the board, should be using those people to filter this stuff and help with getting others to the party.

Maybe this is an outgrowth of all the come to the mountain (aka Sand Hill Road) kind of stuff that goes on in the valley, I’m not sure. I can only tell you that on the east coast of the U.S., there some some professionals that engage in this weird practice of honesty and being straight up.

Two notable examples are Updata Partners (Coner Mullet/Richard Erickson) and JMI (Joe Deal). Both of these firms (and these individuals) are class acts.  In looking at a couple of our portfolio companies, they had specific interest in the space and were very honest about the process they were going through, keeping expectations set correctly and being respectful of the CEO’s time.  Both firms clearly impressed our respective portfolio CEOs and our firm as well.  East coast? Call these guys, they are very professional. West coast? Make the trek on JetBlue or some such and talk to these guys, they are very professional.

So, instead of the S.H.I.T.S., it is quite possible to be N.I.C.E (Never Invite Crazy Expectations). Many of my brethren should learn to be NICE.

Get Naked in Toronto

Well, close.

Robert Scoble’s co-author of the book, Naked Conversations, Shel Israel, will be in Toronto on March 6th. Alec Saunders is organizing a bloggers dinner. You can read about that here.

It’s a good book, easy read, and you will enjoy the various interviews, case studies, etc. Shel is a super smart guy, been around a very long time and I’m sure you will enjoy spending some time with Alec and crew.  I will be waiting on tables, raising some capital for my new fund, so stop by, tip good, tip a lot.

 

VC 2.0 Part 3 or "You guys are so OVER"

Lots of email, discussion, and all kinds of fun things happening with my open ended question regarding doing a little shaking up in the VC community.

Jeff Jarvis (hope you are feeling better, Jeff) had an interesting comment added to his entry on Craig’s list and playing the Walmart card. You can link to what he pulled out of the comments here but before you go read it, here is a filter I’d like you to add to the mix. 

View this as being about old guard vs. new guard thinking in general. Ronnie, the guy who wrote the blurb, said among other things:

“I used Craig’s list and Google to find apartments in BR, Lafayette, Seattle (for my son), St. Louis (another son), and Houston (yet another). Exactly how would the fabled print media have helped with that. By the time any print ad could be processed the places were gone….

So wake up, pull the head out of that dark place, and join the 21st century. Just because other people are now making the money you used to make does not mean society is jeopardized. Believe me, someone will go to the freaking zoning meeting. To quote my youngest, “You guys are just so OVER.”

Thanks Wal Mart, and Craig, and Bill Gates, and AOL, and Steve jobs, and all of the other folks who were innovating for a better future while the old guard was sitting on their hands and collecting self generated awards for stories of the past. I cannot imagine what it would have been like without you. I would have had to read a newspaper; in a shelter.

I’ll take the net, Craigs list, and the blogs. You take FEMA, the local daily, and the hard wired phone. Best of luck.”

Again, to be clear: I’m not saying the whole VC world is coming apart or dying rather there are major shifts happening all around us and my profession has both opportunities available as well as changes to be made. When I read this stuff, I’d like to make sure I’m not part of the “old guard.”  Or, as Jeff puts it: “That’s the future calling.”

Lots of ideas coming in. I’ll be posting some of these things shortly.

 

The list game

I know people typically aren’t fond of the list game. This where, in the VC blog world, list things that you should or shouldn’t do, should or shouldn’t say, and should or shouldn’t write.  Lots of people have written/commented here and elsewhere, it’s boring, old, etc.

Okay, I hear the message. Maybe, doing things up by example would be a better approach.

I’m in Seattle for some meetings. One of meetings is to hook up with some folks building a new type of VOIP software which does some interesting things on the back end. Former Intel guy, couple of frustrated cisco types, etc.

We pile in the the mtg room and begin. First 3 minutes is the “Microsoft is dead, clueless, over” story. Okay, I’m not an employee anymore, no biggie to me, that’s Scobble’s department.

The next 5 minutes are “We know these Microsoft guys better then anybody on the planet” story. Then they proceed to name drop everybody from Bill right on down to the nice lady in bldg 16 who handles the latte machine.

Hmmm.

I say, so would you like a little background on my firm. Sure, they say.  I used to work for Microsoft, I say, listing out the various things I did, people I worked for, yadda yadda…

Silence. Blank Stares. Actual beads of sweat can be seen from three miles away.

Please, guys, carry on.

The rest of the meeting was so painful, I can’t even begin to describe it. Painful for them as I just wanted to keep the meeting going.  Every 2 minutes, I’d interrupt and say, does so and so know you guys, I used to work with her in DRG and wait for the response.

So, this is not a VC list of things to do and I’m not putting on the list to read the partner’s bio before you have the meeting.