Teddy Goes to Facebook

My old pal Teddy Ullyot, who I know from college and then some shared experiences in DC, was just named General Counsel at Facebook.

Congrats both to Teddy and Facebook.

Mullenweg in BusinessWeek

Another congrats to Matt on being named one of the 25 most influential people on the web.

The New Playing Field for 3d Party Comment Systems

Fred Wilson has a typically thoughtful post today on 3d Party Comment Systems going mainstream.  No doubt prompted in part by some speculating that Automattic’s acquisition of Intense Debate spelled doom for his portfolio company Disqus, Fred makes a couple broader points that I think are worth highlighting here.

The first is that social 3d Party Comment Systems will go mainstream.  With the caveat that “mainstream” need be taken in proper context (as in, perhaps, mainstream for regular users of social media; I still don’t expect the average guy at the Red Sox game to use 3d Party Comment Systems), Fred is right.  And, moreover, hats off to him for being *way* ahead of the curve in seeing this coming — Fred started playing with Disqus as its very first launch partner, and, in all candor, it was Fred’s early posts about commenting that raised it onto my radar as a social service to keep my eye on.  Now, about a year later, after the early success of Disqus and Intense Deabate, and the arrival on the scene of Twitter and FriendFeed, it is pretty clear that the comment streams that follow an initial post are at least as valuable as the original post.  So kudos to Fred for being a super early adopter and market prognosticator; and Kudos to Automattic for taking a strong step to make sure WordPress bloggers have access to a great comment service.

Fred’s second point is that Automattic’s acquisition is not a death knell for Disqus. He is right.  While I have to imagine that Intense Debate’s service will have a huge advantage for WordPress bloggers, and my very biased bet is that WordPress will continue to gain share in the blog software market, even in my wildest dreams of world domination by WordPress, there will continue to be lots of market niches where other blogging services have a very strong presence. And for users of those services, Intense Debate will no doubt see Intense Competition from Disqus and others.  I think they’ll have the advantage of having lots of infrastructure stuff handled by Automattic, but Fred has a great point in emphasizing that small companies that don’t have the safety net of a larger company behind them typically remain more intense competitors and innovators.  So, my challenge to the guys at Automattic and Intense Debate is if they can keep raising the bar on themselves and be the scrappy innovators they were before the combination.

The Power of PR

A conversation I hear frequently is whether a startup really should care at all about PR.

There are lots of good reasons why they shouldn’t.

However, there is at least one very good reason why they SHOULD, and that is hiring. Without fail, some good revs of the buzz engine fills the candidate pipeline better than the highest paid recruiter.

A couple very recent cases in point. I have a portfolio company, Hangout.net, which up until recently was in stealth.  We’ve been looking to fill senior engineering, marketing and busdev roles. The candidate pipeline was OK, but not great.  The searches were taking a long time. Two weeks ago Hangout had a terrific launch at TechCrunch 50, was named a finalist, was on the CBS Evening News, and got lots of props in the blogosphere. Since then the inbound candidate flow has been gushing.

Meanwhile I have another very young portfolio company, LOLApps, which we just backed and is still in stealth mode.  Without getting into details, I’ll quote their website:

“Trying to recruit while you’re in “stealth mode” is like punching yourself in the balls”

‘Nuff said. Though if you are a rockstar busdev guy in the Bay Area and know a thing or two about the social networks, give us a call!

How the Current Market Mess Affects VC and Startups

Good post by VentureBeat assembling thoughts from a variety of well placed folks. Worth a read.

My two cents worth: all the turmoil incites a flight to quality, both for VCs and entrepreneurs. Not sure I make the bar, but hopefully my portfolio entrepreneurs do!

Automattic Acquires Intense Debate

Back in June I posted that “something is in the air with comments.” Indeed, over the past 6 months, a number of smart users/observers of the social media space have echoed the refrain that oftentimes the comments to a blog post, and/or a twitter thread, provide the most valuable content.

The smart guys at Automattic, although generally cautious not to jump on every social media fad that comes around the corner, have also been watching the emergence of comments as an important piece of the blogging equation, and have been studying the space, and the players, over the course of the summer.

Today, Automattic announced that it is acquiring the comment service Intense Debate, a portfolio company of the TechStars startup program out of Boulder, Colorado. I’m excited to see the service rolled out across the WordPress platform, and, hopefully, for comments to play a more central role not just amongst the earliest of early adopters, but across the blogosphere as a whole. As a blogger, I can tell you that there is little more rewarding than to receive comments to a post, and I am willing to be that a service like Intense Debate will improve the experience of commenting and blogging as a whole.

I’m also excited to see Automattic extending their product offering with the addition of small teams that have made important innovations in the space.

The Online Video Value Gap

Heavy founder Dave Carson, one of the best minds I’ve encountered around online video advertising, has a great post laying out what he calls the “value gap” for online video.  The gap is the result of the fact that marketers continue to cling to TV advertising formats, which are pretty antithetical to the usage patter of the web — which, among other things, is the notion that users see what they want when they want. Force-fed 30 second spots don’t work so well in this context.

Congrats Matt

Matt Mullenweg was just named one of Inc.’s top 30 entrepreneurs under 30. Congrats!

Listening to Your Users

It’s hard to overstate the value for a consumer Internet company of being closely attuned to your users.

This has been somewhat of a religious issue for the guys at Automattic.  Today I read a nice blog post from a WordPress user who gave feedback on a feature this morning and by later today got an email back informing him not just that they had received his feedback, but that the proposed improvement had already been implemented and was live across the WordPress.com platform.

Nice.

Beware the Big Deal

I wanted to share a great point a fellow board member made a couple days ago.

One of our portfolio companies is in the very early days of launching their service, and has an opportunity to do a deal with some major brands that are closely connected with the demographic.

I was initially pretty excited about the opportunity. But, my fellow board member pointed out, how often have we all been party to similar “big deals” that pan out to alot of distraction but precious little actual results?

We opted to hold off on pursuing the deal at this stage of the company and to keep our very limited resources focused on building a great product that our users love.