Archive for June, 2007|Monthly archive page
LinkedIn IPO?
Looks like LinkedIn is lining up an IPO exec team…hoping to hit $100m in revs this year. LinkedIn replaced CEO Reid Hoffman earlier this year as well. Very interesting.
This concept of an IPO team reminds me of Steven Kaplan‘s research on the importance of the horse (technology, idea, etc.) or the jockey (management) in VC investment context. The slides linked here are pretty thick, but in short Kaplan cites CEO turnover at start-ups that IPO as an indicator that human capital is less important than non-human capital. What he fails to address is the fact that in many cases a very, very good start-up CEO who grows a company from $0 to $Ms (Reid Hoffman) is a completely different animal than an IPO/publicly traded company CEO who grows a company from $Ms to $MMMs (Dan Nye).
crispyideas
I have been looking around for a Digg clone and came across a cool company called crispyideas that lets subscribers create customizable user generated/submitted content sites with voting features. You can see crispyideas in action on the Salesforce.com customer feedback page and news sites like PutVote and OSViews. Rates are a bit steep though. It looks like crispyideas started as crispynews, which allowed anyone to host a user generated news site like one can host a blog with Blogger, etc. but they recently switched focus to enterprise customers. I’m guessing the hosting costs got to them. I’m still looking for an open source customizable framework to use for something like this if anyone knows of one…
Edit: Found it.
38 Pitches…noticeably silent
38 Pitches, Curt Schilling‘s blog, has been silent since June 13th. Schilling, a $13m starter for the Boston Red Sox, posted on his loss to Colorado on the 13th, but hasn’t written about his blowout loss to Atlanta on June 18th (after which he was placed on the DL) or his subsequent MRI and additional testing.
I love Curt as much as the next Red Sox fan, and have ever since the bloody sock of ’04. I’m also a fan of blogging. However, I can’t say that right now I’m a fan of Curt Schilling blogging. I don’t think I’m alone in that when I hear about Schilling’s 40 year old fatigued shoulder, the first thing that comes to mind is that maybe he shouldn’t be blogging so much, shouldn’t be starting a nebulous gaming company, and shouldn’t be signing up for speaking engagements alongside Walt Mossberg. He should be doing what he’s getting paid $13m a year to do and save the other stuff for retirement.
LinkedIn getting aggressive…feeling the heat?
I posted a few days ago about Yelp getting aggressive/deceptive with the tactic of getting users’ email login and passwords to scrape contacts. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman was kind enough to respond to my post and clarify that Yelp keeps scraped info private and offers the feature only for user benefit. LinkedIn has recently started intensifying similar efforts. Nearly every time I add someone as a contact I’m prompted with a screen asking for my email account info so they can get in there and take my contact information. I’m sure LinkedIn would state that they too are only using this information for legitimate purposes, but it’s still something I’m not about to give to anyone. LinkedIn has got to be feeling the heat with all the recent Facebook hype.
News feed access somewhere above Iowa
I’ve posted a bit in the past about Netvibes, the RSS aggregator that I use to catch and organize all of the web content I consume. My Netvibes page currently catches feeds from ~125 different sites and organizes them into 11 different tabbed categories which, when I’m online, constantly refresh themselves. This allows me to monitor the content of all of these sites from one web location and vastly increases the amount of information that I can consume. This is a good thing and a bad thing. Good because I can stay up to speed on things I’m interested in very easily. Bad because I’m interested in a lot of things. The sites that I subscribe to regularly produce new content – probably an average of 4 items per day. Across 125 sites, that’s ~500 new things to read a day. If I read all of that everyday, I would get very little accomplished. Accordingly I’ve gotten pretty good at scanning my Netvibes pages throughout the day and catching the gems, although I definitely need to get better at limiting the number of times I scan my feeds though, as it is tough to avoid getting sidetracked.
As I’m writing this, I’m sitting in the back row of an airplane somewhere over Iowa reading through my feeds. I’m not connected to the internet (I’m going to post this later today), but I let my Netvibes pages refresh this morning before I went to the airport and kept the browser window open afterwards. My pages collected all the content from my sites and now I can read through the new stuff from my feeds. Netvibes collects the full content of an item for the first three items in a feed. For stories #4 and on, the only thing you can read without a web connection is the headline and the first few sentences. So this means right now I have access to the full content for the first three items of each feed in my account…roughly 375 articles. Pretty cool stuff considering I’m 34,000 feet above Iowa. I’ve included some screenshots below to illustrate.
Page view of my Entrepreneur Blog Netvibes tabbed page – the first three stories in each feed are readable off line.
Full story from Marc Andreessen’s blog captured by Netvibes – readable off line.
Ecosystems and Platforms
I’ve been kicking some ideas around in my head for a few weeks about a post on developer ecosystems and platforms, looking back to the battle for the desktop between Apple and Microsoft and their divergent developer kit strategies and then fast forwarding up to Salesforce.com’s AppExchange and most recently the Facebook Platform. I thought through some stuff and even started writing a few times…then I read this post on Marc Andreessen’s blog and realized I shouldn’t even bother. Definitely give it a read if you are trying to figure out what all the hype is about. Also realize that Andreessen himself is deep in the business side of social networking with his own company Ning which released a Facebook application today. Ning allows users to create their own social networks, but their Facebook application…get this…lets users develop branded Facebook applications, which will be hosted by Ning. All things to keep in mind when reading Andreessen’s post.
The moral of the story: hosting a platform on which others operate and run businesses is a good place to be…it’s tough as hell to get there though.
Corporate Branding 2.0
Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo is taking quirky, cheerful, do-gooder corporate branding pioneered by Google with their “Don’t be evil” moto and bright logo to the next level. The Mahalo name means “thank you” in Hawaiian. The corporate moto appears to either be “We’re here to help” or “Let’s do some good”. The colors of the whole site are pastel and covered with flowers. Calacanis is from Brooklyn and has been a pioneer of “fat blogging“. He certainly is not Hawaiian. He is, however, a PR wizard. You can be 100% sure that every aspect of the Mahalo corporate branding package has been carefully crafted. As I’ve posted before, I’m not optimistic about Mahalo, but Calacanis is about as good as it gets when in comes to getting press. He did an interview with freaking Al-Jazeera last week. It’ll be tough to tell if Mahalo’s branding plays a role in its success or failure, but it seems a bit forced to me. Surfing does sell though….
Chicago Beta
The best source for day to day entrepreneurial activity is Chicago Beta, a blog written by Keith Schacht of Jobcoin. Keith also writes Freshwater Venture, which I have posted a bit about in the past. Keep it up Keith!
Colby in on YouTube via Sequoia Capital XI
I was just reading through the S-3 filling Google released back in February for their YouTube acquisition and was happy to see that my undergraduate alma mater, Colby College, was an investor in Sequoia Capital XI, the Sequoia fund which invested $11.5m in 05/06 and received 941,027 shares of GOOG as a result of the acquisition, which have a value today of $474m. Colby received 7,608 shares, with a present value of $3.8m, although it looks like they sold 3,608 right after the acquisition when the share price was a bit lower. Footnote 48 indicates that Hugh M. Evans III is Colby’s portfolio manager at T. Rowe Price that got them in. Good work Hugh!
Other schools in on the fund were Amherst, BU, Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Davidson, Duke, Grinnell, MIT, Northwestern, Princeton, University of Minnesota, Rensselaer Polytech, Notre Dame, Oxford, Rochester, USC, Vanderbilt, Wellesley, Williams, and Yale. Bowdoin and Bates are noticeably absent.
The demographics of music
I live across the street from Park West, a popular Chicago concert venue. It’s just big enough to get big local events and smaller traveling shows, but it’s not big enough to get current big name performers. The capacity is probably around 1,500. I recognize maybe 1 in 6 of the performers that play there, and the venue averages around 4 shows a week. Mandy Moore was there last night, The Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus is performing this Saturday night (an example of a group I’m not familiar with)…followed by Steven Stills of CSNY next week…with Jazz for Youth, Jimmy Eats World, and The Cowboy Junkies coming the week after. There are also several Grateful Dead tribute bands that play there frequently. It’s eclectic, to say the least.
I’ve lived across the street from Park West for nearly a year and I walk by it multiple times every day. The really interesting thing to me is how homogeneous the ages and ethnicities are of the people within each audience and how completely heterogeneous the audiences are from concert to concert. One day I’ll walk out of my building and there will be 75 Asian high-schoolers in front of the place, and the next night there will be lots of white middle-aged couples, and the next night there will be tons of 20-something African Americans. What makes it really striking is that there is generally zero variance within each group. There are no Asian high schoolers in with the baby-boomers, and there are no 20-something African Americans in the group of Asian teens, etc.
I’m guessing part of the reason the groups are so distinct is because the performers are popular enough to go on tour but small enough that they have a core fan base grown largely from word of mouth, not generated from radio play, and some music is ethnic (the Chicago Salsa Festival is next month) or age (Baby Loves Disco is there monthly) specific in nature, etc. At least this explains the bands that are small and “on the way up”. The bands that have been around for a while and are “on the way down” are probably pulling the core fan base that was there for them while they were on the way up. Whatever the case may be, it’s interesting to think about.
Tiffany v. eBay…dragging on
Tiffany & Co. is now arguing that the 10 additional trademarks it’s trying to include in its never ending trademark litigation with eBay were not sprung on the eve of the trial and the eBay knew about them throughout the three year discovery period. The obvious counter argument seems to be that if the trademarks were included in the litigation all along, why did Tiffany & Co. feel the need to amend their complaint to include them after the discovery period. Tiffany & Co. is using Weil Gotshal, eBay is using Arnold & Porter. This has been a cash cow for the last three years for these guys…they just don’t want it to end.
The next Sports Guy: Fitzy
All of you true Boston sports fans out there have fond memories of Bill Simmons’ (aka “The Sports Guy”) rise to prominence in tandem with Tom Brady during the Patriot’s miracle season of 2001/02…and you’ve probably all grown tired of his really, really long articles, now featured not only on the front page of ESPN.com, but also the first article in every ESPN magazine. Well, there is a new Masshole on the block. Fitzy at Townie News delivers profanity laden Boston sports weekly recap videos every Friday, and his new partner in crime Slade is producing Monday blog posts that are very reminiscent of The Sports Guy in his glory days. I’m sure that is exactly what they’re going for, but whatever. It works for me.
US state/GDP comparison map
This map, referred to me by my big brother Al, has been kicked around the web a bit. It definitely puts international GDPs in context…and illustrates the power and size of the US economy (click it for a larger view).
School’s out…time to crank!
After four years and ~5o exams, this past weekend I received my degrees from the University of Chicago Law School and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. It feels great to finally have the diplomas in hand, and I’m extremely excited to now be able to focus 100% of my time in directions that I choose. I highly recommend both schools to anyone seeking a rigorous graduate school experience. The value that these institutions place on ideas, debate and intellectual curiosity is truly unmatched.
Islamic Finance
Very interesting Reuters article on Islamic-friendly hedge funds I found through the Albourne Village weekly newsletter. In short, Islamic law bans gambling and generating interest on loans. This prevents short selling and debt. The article glosses over the issues investors face in trying to cater to this market, but in general it sounds like a very tough row to hoe.
Reuters reports that demand for hedge funds and for Islamic finance is booming, which makes a hedge fund that complies with Islamic law the holy grail for fund managers who want to tap huge liquidity in the Gulf. But most Islamic finance industry players say the two sides are incompatible and that common hedge fund strategies break Islamic law.
Others say that Islamic finance, in order to prosper, needs to develop tools to enable investors to hedge against risk, but that does not necessarily mean hedge funds. Standard Chartered does not offer Islamic hedge funds but is one of a number of lenders offering Islamic hedging products in a bid to meet growing demand from the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims for financial services that comply with their beliefs. Many common hedging practices are seen as speculative bets on currency and stock movements. Hedge fund strategies such as short selling are considered haram, or forbidden, by Islamic law. Lending on interest, the trading of debt and gambling are all haram. Practices deemed acceptable by Islamic law, known as sharia, are halal.
Yelp: very helpful, somewhat sneaky?
Filed under: LinkedIn, social networking, spoke, viral marketing, yelp |
Comments (4) I have recently been using Yelp to find a dentist in my area and had great results and got really solid information from the user reviews. I have also been trying to help the ladies operate a small hair salon next to my building get online and get local ads running to get some more business. They are a perfect fit for local advertising on Google, etc. and I’ve been prodding them to get a basic website up so they can start running some ads to it and generating some business. They haven’t been able to get someone to put together a simple HTML site for them, so I figured that I’d go ahead and create a Yelp page for their business (here) and then start running Google local ads to the Yelp page. If you’re in Chicago you can see the ads if you search for “Lincoln Park Hair Salon” or “Lincoln Park Salon”. They should get great results from both the Yelp page and the Google ads. I also lobbed in a query to Yelp to see how much their sponsored results are. If they are using a standard CPC model, that could be a great investment for them too.
The one thing I didn’t like about the process with Yelp was the fact that the second step in the profile creation process asks users for their email address and login info so they can scrape contacts from their email account. It is unclear whether Yelp retains all the email addresses for marketing purposes or they simply look at the addresses in your inbox and then tell you who you know is also on Yelp. I clicked the very, very small link in the upper left hand corner that allowed me to skip this step. Even if they are using the addresses just for me, I sure don’t want Yelp or anyone else in my email account.
Yelp has a great reputation. If they want to keep it, they should access email accounts in a less subversive manner, or not at all. The mother of all inbox scrapers, Spoke.com, has a pretty bad reputation for doing this sort of thing. If anything, they should go the LinkedIn route and allow users to opt into the process after their account has been created.
Edit: Very informative comment from Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman below. Thanks Jeremy, if you are indeed Jeremy…
Albourne Village
Filed under: albourne village, hedge funds, information, social networking |
Leave a Comment Albourne Village, a site run by hedge fund advisor Albourne Partners, is a pseudo social network for hedge and private equity fund managers. They say the site has 47,544 users and has been around for ~7 years. From the looks of the site, they haven’t changed it since it was first built. It’s truly bizarre. Based on a “village” layout, different virtual buildings have different functions:
Like most villages, Albourne has a helpful map for visitors to use to navigate the winding streets and alleyways. With the aid of this map visitors can virtually walk along Albourne’s picturesque streets and explore the different style quarters. For those in a hurry or who haven’t found their bearings yet, the map provides direct routes to the principal locations of the Village. Many visitors tend to make a bee-line for the “old market square”, notable for its historic Town Hall and its impressive Library, before popping into the Bridge Inn for a quick pint and a friendly gossip with the local residents.
Users earn “apples” for submitting stories and posting on the message board – every user gets 500 when they sign up. There are currently 25,417,426 Apples in circulation. It is so difficult to navigate around the site that it is almost not worth investigating, but the service does product a very high quality weekly email newsletter aggregating news stories submitted by users. The message board also seems to get a lot of traffic, but it is almost impossible to read. The value of nearly 50,000 investment professional membership is huge, and the fact that the site gets any traffic at all with the current interface shows that users are getting real value from the system. The thought of hedge fund managers earning virtual apples they can cash in at the village pub is hilarious though. Albourne: if you want a site makeover, let me know. I know a guy.
