Archive for March, 2009
Early this morning Facebook announced that Adobe integrated FB Connect into the Flash development environment. That’s cool.
Even cooler is Sprout’s integration of FB Connect into its hosted WYSIWYG Flash development service (disclosure, I am an investor in Sprout).
Congrats to the Sprout team!
“Some of the most successful companies have been “pivots”. PayPal started out as a service to beam money through Palm Pilots, while YouTube was originally a video dating site. The truth is that early stage ventures are all about experimentation and iteration. As soon as it’s written, every business plan is wrong. Good entrepreneurs recognize this, and tend to build agile teams that can quickly respond to early market information in order to identify a real business model and minimize risk.”
I’ve just returned from a busy week in Silicon Valley. Like a kid in a candy store, I found myself wildly overbooked and dashing from meeting to meeting.
No doubt the highlight was Wednesday evening, when Seth “slumlord millionaire” Goldstein hosted the Dog Patch Labsters and all the other Pier 38 startups to a Spring Fling Show n Tell over beer n barbecue. The energy around Pier 38 these days is awesome.
But beyond that, the thing that struck me on my flight home is the amount and quality of entrepreneurial activity I saw this week. While the rest of the world is slogging through the worst recession of our lifetime, the very early stage scene in Silicon Valley is buzzing with activity. Which is great news for all of us.
GigaOm: AOL, Yahoo adding life streams;
VentureBeat: Ecommerce inside games;
Silicon Alley Insider: In 2000 BusinessWeek Wondered “Will Google Ever Make Money?”
Narendra Rocherolle: Graph Showing Twitter Usage on Google
Mashable: ExecTweets: Twitter Business Model?
electronmobile: The iPhone is the Next Desktop Platform
I had the apple tart and photomatt had the sundae.
5. The hotel already has my clothes waiting for me in my room;
4.The flight crew on the early morning monday flight out know to expect me;
3. The flight crew on the friday red-eye home know to expect me;
2. The lady at the starbucks counter in SF asks me how my “week away” was;
1. I’ve added SF to my iGoogle weather widget.
Schilling announced on his blog this morning that he is hanging up the spikes. I couldn’t read it myself as his server was down, but saw it thanks to @seth’s tweet, and then this post over on Bloomberg.
And, funny enough, he is sitting right in front of me on my Virgin American flight to SF!
Since becoming a Twitter addict at the turn of the year, I have been wondering how to balance blogging and Twittering. I think I have an answer.
One of my favorite things about Twitter is that it is a great way to see what other folks are reading. In fact, I have chosen to follow a large number of my followees precisely because I want to see what they are reading. And, when I find a Twitter link to something I find interesting, I almost always “retweet” it. And, for that matter, whenever I come across anything I find interesting on Twitter I retweet it.
Which leads me to how to related blogging to Twittering. Many of my “tweets,” especially ones that are personal/social and not professional, wouldn’t make sense to blog about (they might not make sense to tweet either, but that is a separate topic). But by definition, things I retweet are things I find interesting. And this is stuff I would really like to blog. Although I probably will never take the time to both twitter it and then do a separate blog post.
So, if anyone out there knows of a tool that will let me import my retweets to my WordPress blog, please let me know!
Brad Feld has a great article in Enterpreneur Magazine entitled “A VCs Biggest Flaw: Arrogance.”
Brad makes a number of great points, my favorite of which is recalling his own transition from entrepreneur to investor and his difficulty, at first, of constantly crossing the boundary between investor and entrepreneur.
Having entered the VC business from a totally distant career path in DC, I never faced this struggle since it was pretty clear to me that I didn’t know Jack about being an entrepreneur. But I often work with VCs who recently got into the business from prior operating roles, and it is something I see all the time. To use a well worn analogy, entrepreneurs-turned-VC sometimes forget that while they have a front row seat from the bench, their job is confined to the sidelines and does not entitle them to jump onto the court.
While many entrepreneur-turned-VC like to promote their operational experience as a value-add — and it certainly can be — entrepreneurs should make sure these VCs have checked their need to operate at the boardroom door.
In fact, one of my partners who never had operating experience and was a successful VC for about 20 years before recently founding a company, had a somewhat different take on why founding a company was incredibly valuable to his role as an investor: it made him appreciate how it feels for the entrepreneur to have a know-it-all VC telling him what to do.
Hey folks, Bob Metcafle is now Twittering. Welcome Bob to the Twittersphere by following him here.
