robwebb2k » venture capital

b-side

Rob Webb — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 04:32:35 +0000

I’ve learned a bit about a very interesting company called b-side over the past few weeks. They’re focusing on, as their tag line describes, “the other side of film”. B-side brings their technology to film festivals around the globe to help poll audiences and create valuable hard data about films. They also are an independent distributor of films – their technology allows them to identify the best films in festivals which they sign to distribution deals. Their site is slick – users can watch previews and purchase full length films, as well as create user accounts and get recommendations. The 43 films currently available through the site are presumably the films that b-side has signed. I just watched “Before the Music Dies” and highly recommend it. They also have the cult hit “Four Eyed Monsters” and lesser known titles like “Phone Sex Grandma“.

B-side may be a hit for their investors through site sales alone, but the data that they can pull from festivals could be extremely valuable if they are able to identify and purchase the rights to the next Napoleon Dynamite, or sell information to those who are interested in doing so. B-side is a great example of a company that has identified an information inefficiency that can be exploited to the benefit of everyday folks (via movie downloads on the site that they wouldn’t otherwise get) and big money players (interested in sniping the next low cost blockbuster). Definitely check them out.

My picks: The best content on the web

Rob Webb — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 13:24:00 +0000

My buddy Will recently asked me what feeds I subscribe too, so I thought I would post what I pulled together for him here in case anyone else is looking for the good stuff. I subscribe to tons more feeds, but these are the ones I find myself consistently reading. I’ve found myself helping people set up NetVibes accounts recently, and this is generally what I put together, with each header being a separate tab within the same account. I’ve linked to the sites when possible and included the feed addresses below them. If you want to subscribe to one, copy the feed address and paste it into your aggregator (“Add content” >> “Add feed” in NetVibes). I’ve included feeds from my sites because I read that stuff too.

Tech/VC News
Venture Beat

http://venturebeat.com/?feed=rss2

Barron’s Tech Trader Daily
http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/feed/
TechCrunch

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch

ValleyWag

http://www.valleywag.com/index.xml

The Alarm Clock

http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/atom.xml

Digg.com: Technology

http://www.digg.com/rss/containertechnology.xml

Analyst’s Edge: Venture Capital News

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnalystsEdge-VentureCapitalFirmNews

Entrepreneurs
Marc Andressen: Ning

http://blog.pmarca.com/atom.xml

Roger Ehrenberg: Monitor110

http://www.informationarbitrage.com/atom.xml

Keith Schacht: JobCoin/Freshwaterventure

http://www.chicagobeta.com/feed/

Noah Kagan: Mint.com

http://feeds.feedburner.com/okdork/tZRC

Steve Newcomb: Powerset

http://feeds.feedburner.com/SteveNewcombBlog

VC Blogs
Jeremy Liew: Lightspeed Venture Partners

http://feeds.feedburner.com/lightspeedblog

Ask the VC (Brad Feld & Jason Mendelson: Mobius Venture Capital/Foundry Group)

http://feeds.feedburner.com/askthevc

Venture Hacks

http://feeds.venturehacks.com/venturehacks

Econ
The Big Picture: Barry Rithholtz

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/index.rdf

Freakonomics Blog: Levitt & Dubner

http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/feed/

Private Equity/M&A
NYTimes: Dealbook

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/?feed=rss2

Seeking Alpha: M&A

http://usmarket.seekingalpha.com/by/type/mergers-acquisitions/feed

Analyst’s Edge: Private Equity News

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnalystsEdge-PrivateEquityFirmNews

Hedge Funds/Public Equities
Infectious Greed: Paul Kedrosky

http://paul.kedrosky.com/index.rdf

Wall Street Folly

http://wallstfolly.typepad.com/wallstfolly/atom.xml

Controlled Greed: John Bethel

http://www.controlledgreed.com/atom.xml

Analyst’s Edge: Hedge Fund News

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnalystsEdge-HedgeFundNews

Traditional News
WSJ

http://feeds.wsjonline.com/wsj/xml/rss/3_7011.xml

Economist
http://www.economist.com/rss/printedition/economist_printedition.xml
NYTimes
http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml

Legal
WSJ: Law Blog

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/feed/

Above The Law

http://www.abovethelaw.com/index.xml

Sports
Townie News

http://feeds.feedburner.com/fitzy

Boston.com Red Sox (no direct link because of their stupid registration crap)

http://syndication.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox/red_sox_rss/?mode=rss_10

Boston.com Patriots (no direct link because of their stupid registration crap)

http://syndication.boston.com/sports/football/patriots/patriots_rss?mode=rss_10

ESPN

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/rss/news

Enjoy! Also, let me know if you think I missed anything…

LinkedIn IPO?

Rob Webb — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 15:55:00 +0000

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).

Colby in on YouTube via Sequoia Capital XI

Rob Webb — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 14:45:00 +0000

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 Netflix Prize & Aggregate Knowledge

Rob Webb — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 19:38:00 +0000

I have been learning a bit about the interesting statistical & programming challenges involved in the creation of recommendations, like those produced by Amazon regarding what sort of books, CDs and other products a user may be interested in based on what that user has purchased in the past as well as what other users who have purchased similar items has liked, etc. Apparently these are some of the priciest and most difficult algorithms to write and they are extremely valuable when they work.

Like Amazon, Netflix offers recommendations to users. They have their own algorithm called Cinematch, which, according to Wikipedia, produces recommendations that are a 9.6% improvement over a straight average of user ratings. The Netflix Prize is contest the company has organized that will give $1,000,000 to the creators of an algorithm that offers a 10% improvement over the 9.6% improvement that Cinematch can already attain. The current standings can be seen here. The current leaders have reached a 7.1% improvement. Apparently Cinematch itself was improved on in 6 days.

Aggregate Knowledge is a Kleiner backed start-up trying to commercialize algorithms like these. Pretty interesting stuff.

The benefits of due diligence

Rob Webb — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:09:00 +0000

Last night I helped out with the Chicagoland Entrepreneurship Center’s Fast Pitch Competition. The event was co-sponsored by The GSB, Kellogg, and De Paul and a bunch of my GSB classmates entered with hopes of winning the $5,000 prize. Each entrant in the contest had 3 minutes to pitch to a panel of 4 judges. I was the timekeeper in for the Web-Based Technologies group where one of the judges was Matt McCall of DFJ Portage Ventures and author of VC Confidential, a blog that I subscribe to. It was cool to meet him. It was also great to see GSB entry ParkWhiz win the Web-Based group and go on to win the whole competition. ParkWhiz wants to create a marketplace for buyers and sellers of parking spaces in urban areas where parking spaces can be hard to find.

I think the idea behind ParkWhiz has potential. However, ParkWhiz’ victory illuminates the flaws in these quick pitch types of contest, as well as the benefits of due diligence. This idea is not a new one – there is company out of MIT called SpotScout that is trying to tackle the same problem and has a mobile application that has substantial momentum. There is also a group called Spark Parking out of Northwestern that is taking a high tech approach to the same problem. There is likely room for multiple players in this marketplace, especially considering intensely regional nature of their products and services, however if the judges had not known about the other players (and they likely didn’t), the idea behind ParkWhiz probably seemed much more novel than it actually was. This reminded me of the coverage I saw of the CRV Entrepreneur Idol fast pitch contest held at Stanford GSB earlier this year where the winner pitched battery-less LED flashlights, a product that is already mass produced.

I’m not saying that these ideas wouldn’t have won if there was a diligence period, but as the New Venture Challenge is on the horizon here at The GSB, I am starting to realize the macro flaws inherent in business plan competitions, and lack of time for judges to research ideas is definitely one of them.