So much going on at our portfolio companies this week.
I don’t know how just 2 guys – Danel and Jason – do it, but they are everywhere. Disqus just plain rocks for commenting and conversation across platforms. Just this week they:
1. Added GRAVATAR Support – basically all you yutz’s without a face shot can just grab a Gravatar for your disqus profile. Get on it already.
This week, BTR was a Webware recipient. They are in some pretty cool company. Here are the 100 Winners !
BTR also got a great plug on WNBC. here is the video:
TubeMogul
Web Video shows and clip use continues along an insane growth path. I will have a detailed thought post up on the weekend. In the meantime, Tubemogul is rocking and just this week added HowCast to it’s toolset . The product received lot’s of good press this week as well and their blog is becoming a great source of information on web video trends. They are starting to post very regularly so if you are interested in web video trends and developments, you should subscribe to their blog.
Posted on April 25th, 2008 | Category: VC, Venture Capital | Comments Off
Some of you might have noticed a change in the commenting system for my blog. Its a new company called Disqus that I learned about from over dinner a few months ago Fred.
Basically people reading my blog can now create their own forums through their comments. I hope we can use it on howardlindzon.com to create better discussions around my postings and get some dialogue.
Today Disqus is announcing a new round of financing and a new set of features. Fred and Brad (Union Square Ventures) led the round with Naval Ravikant and ex-Googler Aydin Senkut. Our Knight’s Bridge fund was also an investor.
One feature in the updated beta that I really like are the community pages. Check out mine here. People can now track all of my comments across all blogs and also see who comments the most on my blog.
Another cool thing is the social identity that will follow commenters onto other sites that have disqus installed. So if you create a disqus account (it takes 5 seconds) it will allow you to comment on my site and fred’s with out having to sign in each time. Its really easy to use (which I like) and streamlines the commenting process by making it interactive.
You can also track other commenters (making it more social) so you can follow what they are saying on other websites, which is pretty cool. Think of it like an OpenID, but for commenting.
There are some more updates, but they are more technical so read Daniel Ha’s post on the updates.
Not only is it free, but it works on all the major blogging templates like WordPress (which I use for this blog), Blogger, MovableType and Typepad.
Social leverage is my personal favorite them for venture investing. Om has a good post on Disqus.com . I love social leverage and don’t think you can blow yourself up tapping it. Banks call it the multiplier effect. Problem is you get a credit crisis.
Sign up for an account and keep the comments coming.
Discloser: I am WAY LONG on Disqus and an investor.
My man Andy keeps barelling forward with his vision for ‘CROWD CONTROL’ product from Lotame and now has some more serious financing to roll out his vision. Andy (Lotame) has figured out how to wring money out of the hugely popular, but difficult to sell, social networking sites. The series A round of $10 million is led by Battery Ventures. Peter at Alley Insider has the full scoop .
I am an advisor to Lotame. Andy and I became great friends from his blind trust and video passion investment in Wallstrip, where he sat on the Board. He was a great inspiration to the team with his positive energy and ideas. Andy is the perfect leader fr a start-up and now gets to prove it further.
The money raising process is grueling and I spent some time with Andy during the process. Hopefully he will share some of the lessons on his blog. We did chat Friday about Black Licorice. Andy tells me you either love him or hate him, like Black Licorice. Me… I love black licorice. I love ‘good and plenty’ candy and just straight up black sticks of it.
You can’t/won’t please everybody so you must trudge forward in the stocks and entrepreneurial world. Head up and guns blazing. I expect to carry black licorice to all future important meetings. Good ice breaker.
I am happy to formally announce my partnership with my good friend and mentor Kenny Finkelstein with Knight’s Bridge Capital Partners . It is an $80 million private equity fund. The head office is Toronto, but I will continue to scour for opportunities in Phoenix and New York as well as summers in Toronto of course. If you read this blog you know how I feel about my hometown of Toronto and the opportunities north of the border.
I met Kenny when he founded Ride snowboards and I was an early entrepreneur with The Gripp. They tried to buy our business and we unfortunately turned it down. Kenny was also one of the founders of GSI Commerce (NASD – GSIC).
We have been busy for sure . The fund is more opportunistic in it’s strategy. I anticipate 5-10 percent of the assets to be allocated towards internet angel and VC investments. I have not had the opportunity to talk much about all the activity. I will be pushing Kenny to post to the KBC blog on deal structure and turnarounds and some different topics. He is an operating and investing magician.
To keep things simple, we have also purchased the General Partner interests of my one year old fund Biltmore Ventures . The investments to date are Lifelock.com, MyTrade.com, vSocial.com, AdaptiveBlue.com and CopperKey. The Fund has been renamed as Knight’s Bridge Capital Partners Internet Fund. We will continue to make investments in the internet space with the assets in the fund.
I have been addicted to early stage investing and entrepreneurship since my late teens.
I have kissed many frogs. I have started to get better – mostly in the last 7 years and as my SOCIAL network expands, exponentially in the last few years.
The guys in my Venture Dudes blogroll have taught me much in the last few years and losing money has taught me the rest.
I am not insane, therefore I try not to make the same mistakes over and over. Failure has it’s tiny, itsy, long-term upside if you analyze the reasons for it and focus on doing things better the next time.
When I was doing my graduate business degrees, I could never attend classes that were textbook only or led by textbook professors. I wanted classes led by Rodney Dangerfield type ‘Back to School’ professors that would tell me about ‘Paying Off the Teamsters’ and real life drama.
It is interesting though that the term ‘WIDGETS’ used in every textbook as THE PRODUCT when using case study examples, has become the buzzword ‘burgeoning ?’ industry on the web. I guess that’s why ‘WIDGETS’ as a venture backed theme is ultimately doomed – but I digress.
Venture Investing for Dummies does not exist, but the blogosphere definitely can get you going in the right direction…fast.
Here are three great posts from Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures on some do’s and don’ts from all sides of the equation:
All great stuff for beginners and veterans to review.
In the end, you need to know yourself and be honest with yourself with respect to your abilities.
You need to be great at backing the right leaders because good ones can save crap models and bad ones can wreck good models and ALWAYS be worried about valuation (something I never care about in stock trend following). Always.
Too much free shit on the web and too many ‘Business Development’ people. If you call someone business development, you are giving them free reign to social network all day and take meetings. That’s just wrong at this point.
If you are starting a web business today, how about a ‘Chief Revenue Officer’ and ‘Chief of Burn Rate Control’ – that reports to the founder and investors
Too many biz plans with ‘free’ as the basis for building a business around eyeballs that will some day lead to ads that nobody clicks on.
I am not saying that ‘Freemium ‘, as Fred calls it, is dead. BUT, if you don’t have MAJOR VC backing or lightning strikes your genius application, than really, why bother.
I don’t have the energy anymore to start or back a business that relies on building eyeballs first and no click throughs later.
If Wordpress had a ‘Chief Revenue Officer’, someone could at least be ‘FIRED ‘ for not calling me to ask me to pay SOMETHING, ANYTHING (I will pay $240 if someone from Wordpress just picks up the phone and calls me to ask for it) for all the wonderfullnessessisness that this software has brought to me. If they are just expecting to me to pick up the phone and donate, I won’t.
Waaaaay to much revenue being left on the table by Web 2.0 companies and way too many Web 2.0 companies being started and funded without revenue number one on their mind. It is really time to start caring if you are a founder and a VC.
Paul Graham’s essay – The Future of Web Startups – has become pretty viral in the VC and Nerd Community. Rightly so…it’s awesome. Not so much for the thoughts, but for the organization of them and the structure.
I have spent the last few years thinking and trying to prove that it does not matter where you call home to a web start-up. I still believe that the management and investor group make the difference, but Paul has a different point of view and a great one:
The question of whether to be in a startup hub is like the question of whether to take outside investment. The question is not whether you need it, but whether it brings any advantage at all. Because anything that brings an advantage will give your competitors an advantage over you if they do it and you don’t. So if you hear someone saying “we don’t need to be in Silicon Valley,” that use of the word “need” is a sign they’re not even thinking about the question right.
I have long thought that college for my kids will not be very important. We have lost the education race to China and India. Sorry…over! It’s just not important to our leadership. We try and encourage creativity in our house. We believe strongly in EQ not just IQ in our home.
If the best hackers all start their own companies after college instead of getting jobs, that will change what happens in college. Most of these changes will be for the better. I think the experience of college is warped in a bad way by the expectation that afterward you’ll be judged by potential employers.
One of the most obvious changes will be in the meaning of “after college,” which will change from when one graduates from college to when one leaves it. If you’re starting your own company, why do you need a degree? We don’t encourage people to start startups during college, among other things because it gives them a socially acceptable excuse for quitting, but the best founders are certainly capable of it. Some of the most successful companies we’ve funded were started by undergrads.
I grew up in a time where college degrees seemed really important, so I’m alarmed to be saying things like this, but there’s nothing magical about a degree. There’s nothing that magically changes after you take that last exam. The importance of degrees is due solely to the administrative needs of large organizations. These can certainly affect your life—it’s hard to get into grad school, or to get a work visa in the US, without an undergraduate degree—but tests like this will matter less and less.
As well as mattering less whether students get degrees, it will also start to matter less where they go to college. In a startup you’re judged by users, and they don’t care where you went to college. So in a world of startups, elite universities will play less of a role as gatekeepers. In the US it’s a national scandal how easily children of rich parents game college admissions. But the way this problem ultimately gets solved may not be by reforming the universities but by going around them. We in the technology world are used to that sort of solution: you don’t beat the incumbents; you redefine the problem to make them irrelevant.
The greatest value of universities is not the brand name or perhaps even the classes so much as the other students you meet there. If it becomes common to start a startup after college, people may start consciously trying to maximize this. Instead of focusing on getting internships with companies they want to work for, students may start to focus on working with other students they want as cofounders.
What students do in their classes will change too. Instead of trying to get good grades to impress future employers, students will try to learn things. We’re talking about some pretty dramatic changes here.
The whole section brings back memories of one of my fave Rodney Dangerfield movies.. ‘Back to school’ where in his keynote to graduating schools his advice is to “GO BACK”.
. The next reader of the blog to integrate disqus onto their blog and let me know can have a cool t-shirt from the guys. 
