Archive for December, 2009
Every once in a while something dawns on you that applies equally to your personal life and professional life. I just had one of those this week, and so am making it my New Years Resolution.
VC’s are (rightfully) notorious for falling in love with the “shiny new thing,” the “hot” new sector, business model, deal, whatever. B2C, B2B, Web Services, Search, Web 2.0, Cloud Computing, Realtime Web, Mobile, Social Games, blah blah blah, you name it, we fall in love with it and just gotta have one. Every VC worth his salt can look him/herself in the mirror and identify an investment he/she made which was influenced at least in substantial part by the allure of being in a “hot” deal or sector, and much less so by truly compelling investment fundamentals. Actually, if you’ve only got one you are much more disciplined than most.
So, the professional aspect of my resolution is to maintain the discipline to be focused on the stuff that *really* makes something a compelling investment opportunity — to be excited by compelling entrepreneurs/products/markets even when not in a “hot sector,” and equally unexcited by “hot” entrepreneurs/products/markets that are more sizzle than steak.
My resolution applies equally, I hope, outside of the work context. At times like New Years, and other milestone markers, when I look back on things I am always struck by the ability to separate the things that *really* mattered from things that are much more temporal and fleeting in importance and/or value. Relationships, personal endeavors, material acquisitions, etc. As with venture investing, in life generally it is so much easier in hindsight to look back and recognize things that, from the outset, were and were not likely to create lasting value. Obviously, we would want to invest as much of our personal time as possible in those things that really matter over the long term, and yet we still go through life investing alot of time and energy in things that we ultimately realize didn’t really matter.
So here is to a 2010 spending my personal energies, and my LPs’ capital, in the stuff that really does matter.
For the financing to close for Company A;
A billion dollar acquisition for Company B;
For that dream CEO to reneg on his other offer and join my Company C;
For Company D’s launch to be a huge success;
For Company E to hit it’s monetization milestones;
For Company F to, well, survive;
For Company G, H, I, to figure out a business model;
A kickass busdev exec for Company J.
Is that asking too much, Santa??
My colleague @berecruited (Ryan Spoon) and I made what has become our nearly weekly pilgrimage to Facebook on Tuesday to chat with some of our friends there. In the course of our meeting the Twitter question came up, and we divulged our bipolar personal usage patterns: Ryan is a total Facebook bigot and never uses Twitter, while I am an avid Twitter user, though I have been spending increasingly more time on Facebook.
We spent a bunch of time discussing why this was so. For me the answer is simple: with the exception of a couple dozen folks who I follow because we are friends, for the most part I follow people on Twitter expressly because they have interesting updates and/or link to interesting content. As such, Twitter has entirely replaced my usage of Google Reader.
In contrast, the combination of getting onto Facebook a couple years ago and not really knowing how/why I would use it, together with the bilateral nature of Facebook friending, means that I have tended only to friend people I know pretty well, and for more social than professional reasons. In contrast, many of the people whom I follow on Twitter I do not know, and so am not inclined to friend on Facebook.
I guess it turns out that my friends just aren’t that interesting…
