Babbling VC

Plazes Acquired by Nokia

Although I don't know what the price was, Plazes has been acquired by Nokia. This for me is a good sign. The company was focused on location based social networks and just like when Nokia acquired Gate5, this is a sign of the future. I have been arguing for at least two years now that location aware services are coming and Nokia making this acquisition is an obvious signal that we're close. Once manufacturers start delivering devices with these services pre-installed you'll see location aware services making the jump to mass adoption. For me it's an absolute no-brainer that people want these services. At this point, only geeks truly understand the benefits or entertainment value offered by such services. (Plus you need further adoption of devices with GPS pre-installed). It's still too difficult to load applications on to devices yourself yet once the manufacturer does it for you, a huge hurdle has been removed. I predict 2009 will be the year where we see the most movement to services implementing location awareness. It'll become inevitable that your phone will simply know where you are in the future and you won't even think twice about it using this information to make your life easier or at least more fun. (Just don't forget to shut off your "location" when you don't want people to know where you are!)

Doing a Corporate Event Right

I was asked by someone (a corporate VC) for feedback on an event they are planning. I wrote an email back with my thoughts and immediately after finishing it, thought I should blog this. So, via the magic of cut & paste (the lazy man's greatest digital asset), here's what I wrote back.

Make sure that to truly make the event worthwhile, you keep it small. We ran an event for SAP Ventures (all kudos for the ideas go to my former partner, Jeff Nolan when it came to location and agenda) where we limited total attendance to 100 people including everyone from SAP as well as our customer guests. SAP paid for people’s hotel rooms to make sure everyone we wanted came (it was at the Bacara Resort). If you pay the hotel, anyone you invite will come unless they truly have a conflict. Make sure the agenda has tons of free time and do something fun....we did a sailing regatta with Team New Zealand which used to be sponsored by SAP. No one cares about sitting in presentations. They want to interact and network with one another in a comfortable, fun environment. Don’t invite people somewhere boring. Either do it in a cool destination or find an awesome hotel near you (everything obviously depends on your budget and SAP is probably a bad comparable). Sun and beach always attract the most people but skiing in the winter is also cool. Finally, don’t let your senior executives use it as a platform to advertise their interests. No one gives a shit. Allow them access to your network and vice-verse and do everything possible to facilitate this. Finally, make sure to invite me!

The part about inviting me was a bit individually beneficial! :-)

Are VC's just lucky?

If I was, I sure as hell wouldn't admit it!!! (via Private Equity Hub)

Could Good VCs Be Just Lucky?

Could a great VC get to the top of the Midas list by just being lucky?

The press might pick up the story and track down the successful guesser, call him a clairvoyant, the Oracle of Wrigley Field. There would, no doubt, be discussion of how the guesser had come to his win/loss prediction each day. Did he take into account whether the wind was blowing in or out? Was his prediction a product of some hitherto unknown baseball brilliance? Should the Cubs manager consult him before each game for advice?

The guesser’s strategy might have been as simple as flipping a coin, however. And this might be the most maddening thing of all.

It could, of course, explain how people such as Peter Lynch always seem to come out ahead. An investor’s decision isn’t as simple as win/lose, but when the base of investors is big enough, there’s bound to be someone who wins almost all of the time.

Could such a principal hold true in venture capital? Could a successful VC pick the right companies all the time as the product of sheer dumb luck?

These questions get to the heart of what VCs actually do. Do you have an anecdote about how a VC has been a big help to you?

Giving up privacy to reduce friction

I couldn't agree more with Mike Arrington on his post regarding social networks on mobile devices. Whether he coined the phrase used as my title remains open but when I read it in one of his responses in the comments section to above mentioned post I wanted to link to it. In essence, what social networks on mobiles do is exactly that: remove friction from the social interaction process. I have written multiple times in the past about how I believe social interaction needs to be facilitated by technology. Making social networks easily available on the phone is exactly the key step in this direction. Mike also correctly notes that younger generations are more than happy to sacrifice privacy to make meeting people easier. Dating sites have proven this. 10 years ago, if you were outed as using a dating site, you were labeled a loser. Now I'd bet a large proportion of folks are meeting online. A lot of "friction" has disappeared and people are doing it. I also often have noted how Twitter is making finding people in the real world easier via a simple service.  It's so incredibly simple that there is hardly any barrier to use. Friction again is removed and you can see how successful Twitter has become. One caveat to all this is that a lot of these applications helping to facilitate the removal of friction are still only used by geeks. Further, only dating seems to have gone mainstream. MySpace and Facebook seem to be asleep at the wheel when it comes to truly taking advantage of the opportunity. And the carriers are trying to milk any and every opportunity before driving further innovation so don't bet on them. This means that it may take some time until your average user is standing in a bar, pinging the hot girl he sees both in front of him (physical features) and on his device (details about this person). I think the iPhone can play a role but it has to go beyond the iPhone. Again this will take time but seeing some of the success of Aki Aki and many other start-ups in this space gives me hope.

Your Brain Is Going to Become Jiffy Pop

This video, although highly likely to be a hoax, weirds me out. It would really suck to find out that mobile phones are slowly cooking our brains. I'm not sweating it much but continue to mostly use my phone with a Bluetooth headset! Know what I'm sayin'? (By the way, if it's real, why are the folks so "excited" to that phones in sync could fry your brain!)

Note: For those of you who don't know Jiffy Pop, please follow link.

For you Workout Junkies

Having received some compliments for posts on training as well as really good questions, I thought I'd throw some posts in here every now and again for all you workout junkies.

Having now refocused my training on mostly Crossfit style workouts, I needed to step up the cardio work a bit. I hate spending time on cardio. No, I really hate it! Having reduced my whole workout down to about 30-40 minutes, I also didn't want to add any more than 10 to 15 minutes max additional cardio, preferably 5 minutes. This all depends on how hard I go for the first part of my workout. If I do a round of deadlifts interspersed with pullups, box jumps, staggered pushups and so forth, I am simply too spent to add in cardio. On days though when I am working mostly upper body and leaving out legs, I'll do the cardio. (Obviously, if I am out running or cycling, I completely leave out the cardio.......it's a rainy day thing).

Anyway, I used to get on the recumbent bike when it came to cardio. I had done this for years and simply went hard on it to get a good sweat. My body became used to this though. I became completely sick of it. Hence, after seeing a bunch of indoor rowing thrown into Gym Jones workouts, I decided to add this as my cardio. After 3 weeks, I can truly say this is a good switch to throw a loop into your workout. If you get on a rower and go all out for 5 to 10 minutes, you are able to really get your heart rate up. I sweat like a pig as well since my body just isn't used to the motion yet. Finally, you can really hit a lot more of the body as indoor rowers offer a ton of benefits and train a large number of muscles. If you want to do a bit more as part of your workout and get your heart rate up, give the rowing machine a try.

"What Got You Here Won't Get You There"

I have read and recently re-read the book What Got You Here Won't Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith. I actually didn't want to like this book when initially picking it up. I figured it would be another quick read with regurgitated information which I've read about in 20 other such books. Fortunately it turned out to be really good. I would put it up there alongside Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, one of my all time favorite books. The reason Goldsmith's book was so good is because it basically starts where Carnegie's book ends. You can implement everything you learn in Carnegie's book but at some point you need to reflect and re-adjust. After becoming successful, you have to stop and see whether you haven't become a total asshole or an overbearing control freak (or one of 20 other habits you can have as listed by Goldsmith). The psychological threat of success to your personality and performance is huge. The reason I feel that Goldsmith's book is worth reading though is that it's one of those where while reading it, you keep seeing parallels to what you do. It also doesn't matter whether you're a CEO, mid-level manager or a football coach. The ideas are simply straightforward.  Here you can find the 20 habits which can creep up and keep you from getting "there". Take a look and if you find the list interesting, you'll find the book to be even better.

Slow getting back to posting!

As you may have seen, my posting has been light in the past 10 days. After returning from vacation, I've been slow to start posting again. Stay tuned........to-do list is long and is getting priority right now. More here soon!

ZYB Sold (More important...another exit for Lund)

Just recently, ZYB was sold to Vodafone. It's not a spectacular deal in terms of dealsize: €31 million. Yet, it was still a great exit for its investors and founders I am sure. What I find most interesting is that it's another exit for Morton Lund. Without blowing too much sunshine up his ass (and no, I am not a friend of his), he has managed to be involved in some spectacular exits (remember Skype.....google the stories). This guy has backed over 80 companies and he's 34 I believe. I'm more than humbled by the performance Morton has had and the few times I met him, he was pretty cool. He has a bit of that "fuck-off, I'm a rockstar" attitude but I can imagine why. He's probably getting chased by every damn start-up that crosses his path. If nothing else, take a look at his blog. He always has interesting things to say and this is the kind of person who's driving important things in the start-up scene in Europe (and beyond). If nothing else, catch this guy on stage somewhere. I quite enjoyed hearing his comparison of "investing and tits". I thought the American woman sitting next to me was going to implode when hearing his ideas on this. It was great!

What Motivates Online Social Community Activity

I was wondering about this when recently spending time on various sites with extensive user generated content. How absolutely true is the Pareto Principle when looking at such sites. It's quite clear that a small percentage (approx. 20% I would guess) generates over 80% of the content. The sites which spring to mind are Qype/Yelp (local reviews),  TripAdvisor (travel and hotel reviews) and  even Emporis (a building data related site in my portfolio). There are individuals (god bless em!) who provide so much content to these sites that it practically looks like they've made it their full time jobs. On Qype, where you get points for reviews as well as for the quality of your reviews, there are individuals who have hundreds of entries in comparison to the typical user who has a couple. Same goes for Tripadvisor. When looking at the community surrounding Emporis, you have individuals who in their spare time and on their own dime travel the world gathering information. This is absolutely necessary for the site and these top ranked providers of UGC are what makes these sites possible. At the same time, you often hear what these people's motivations for doing this are. There are the typical motivations such as ego, where you simply get to see your name at the top of a list or you have the most friends (this is more a Facebook or LinkedIn phenomenon). There may also be the boredom factor. I am sure many people simply make it a hobby to feed a site with content to pass time. There's also financial motivation as you can earn money by being the largest contributor on some sites. Yet I still wonder. Is there some other motivation which has these users spending disproportionate amounts of time entering content? If you know of any interesting studies regarding this please do let me know. I would find it interesting to delve into this a bit further especially in regards to sites focused more on business related social communities.

Update: Ayelet does a good job of partially answering my question and taking care of some of my homework.