Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Category: Venture Capital/M&A/Angels (Page 53 of 54)

More Content-Sharing Plays from Demo

February 14, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Another presenter in the photo-sharing business that got some buzz at Demo 2006 was Tiny Pictures, though you won’t learn much at their web site. They’ve received Series A venture funding from Mohr Davidow (maybe now they can afford to buy a real .com domain?), but they’re one of the companies for which the date of Demo appears to have fallen a tad bit early: they’re only taking “signups” at their site. The pitch was sure good, though! Their planned service is called “Radar,” and it’s for Java phones, said the company’s CEO and founder, John Poisson. Later, however, he said the service is “for regular people with regular phones.” (Is Java regular?) But then, at the end, he said the service will also come in a version that will work with “any phone and any carrier that supports the mobile browser.” So, you guess, friends. The company bills the service as “a dramatic shift in the way consumers use photography.” How does it work? How do you get your cell phone pix on their site? “One click and it goes directly to your account,” said Poisson. Or will … when it’s available … maybe. You invite people to see your “channel,” and you can look at all your friends’ channels. “A simple and addicting way to stay in touch anywhere and everywhere,” says the company.

A company that led with photo-sharing but really appears to be about much more than that is Sharpcast. They got $3 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, so they can’t be all bad. But again, folks, this is futures: I heard later their product is months out, and the on-stage demo didn’t work from what I could see. Sharpcastlogo So take this all on faith, would ya? They call it a “connected applications platform,” which lets you synchronize your digital content on multiple PCs, mobile devices, and the web. So you can get at all your stuff with whatever device you’re using at the moment. But it’s not just about accessing and sharing — this looks essentially like a backup company, if you ask me, directed at consumers. It’s focusing now on media files like photos (who isn’t?), but it has its eye on a lot more than that, I suspect. Think synchronization. Maybe a Plaxo or GoToMyPC killer. Please wake me when it’s over…I mean available.

All this writing about what might be is making my brain ache, friends. And I was gonna write about GarageBand.com, SmileBox, TagWorld, Zingee, and LocaModa, too — oufits that all have stuff now! Oh well, that’ll have to wait. Watch for my next post, “Yet More Content-Sharing,” I guess. I still have a few more Demo nuggets to share with y’all….

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[Written at breakfast in Bloomington, MN, just a few miles west
of the Mall of America. And it’s freaking cold here, people.]

VC Blogs: Just When You Thought You’d Had Enough

February 2, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Blogging by venture capitalists isn’t anything new. Some would even say it’s getting old because it’s been talked about and blogged about so much. But I thought it’d be interesting to step back and take a bit of a snapshot of the state-of-the-art to date, if you will — especially in light of a recent development (more on that later).

Much of this gang of VC bloggers came onto the scene because so many of them were investing in social networking and other Web 2.0 companies, of course, which we can measure in years now. In other words, they were getting so immersed in the whole subject that they naturally started wanting to do it themselves — and they had incentive to, so as to promote the portfolio companies they were pumping money into. Some have done a fine job, writing about lots of interesting stuff (VC-related and not), and sticking with it regularly…others not so much. (Here in Minnesota, where I spend most of my time, our VCs haven’t really gotten into it yet. But there’s been little Web 2.0 type of investing here. In this state, med-tech investing sucks out way too much of the oxygen — pardon the analogy — and the cash.)

To give you a quick overview, I thought I’d run a filter on the many links out there about VC blogging, including articles, other blog posts on the topic, and sites that have been put forth as favorites by others (and me), etc, etc. First, here’s a single RSS feed that aggregates a whole bunch of VC blogs — the ones that this guy, as a VC-blogger himself, likes to read. He’s Babak Nivi, who’s actually an EIR at Bessemer; he calls his feed “Nivi’s VC Channel.” He’s just been at the firm since October 2005, so this is pretty up-to-date stuff.

Another good link, from a VC blog by Jeff Clavier, is an interesting discussion about Paul Kedrosky’s post on “Why Are There So Many VC Blogs?” A more recent item was this short post by my friend Doc Searls, mentioning three VC blogs he particularly likes. A much older post, though seemingly still worthy, is this one by Ross Mayfield, listing what he thinks are some of the better VC blogs.

The New York Times ran a great piece just last week called “Venture Capital Blogs? They’re About Anything But”. It’s a fascinating look at the genre, including this insight: “a general predisposition toward mystery is colliding headlong with a new interest in self-expression.” In this article, Paul Kedrosky, himself a VC, says: “The reason you see so many venture guys blogging is because they have time to do it. How many C.E.O.’s do you have blogging?” As I said in my last post (shades of Willie Nelson): they got the money, honey, *and* they got the time!

I first found the NYT article in this post from Threadwatch.org, which took a rather skeptical look at the practice. And a comment posted there pointed to a piece written by Paul Graham, which is so good I can’t not include it here: “A Unified Theory of VC Suckage”.

In other media coverage, the Venture Capital Journal ran a cover story last year called “My Life as a Blogger”. One of several VCs who blog that were cited in this piece was Steve Jurvetson. Steve’s one of the most thoughtful and intelligent VCs out there, in my book — and a very popular conference speaker. Too bad he doesn’t have time to post more regularly on his blog. But you just know it’s because he’s working on some big, big things! He and partner Tim Draper are two of the VCs I most admire, and I’ve had the opportunity to meet and chat with both of them at conferences I’ve reported on in the past.

Another guy who’s taken the time to write a lot of really good, helpful stuff on his blog is Bill Burnham — a VC who was mentioned in the NY Times article above, and one I list in my blog roll at the right. You may have seen a post I did last month, in which I linked to Bill’s really funny recap of his blog’s stats and financial results.

Which brings me to the latest development in this very active category of blogs: Guy Kawasaki. Here’s an industry player — Mac evangelist, Apple Fellow, book author, wildly popular conference speaker, cum VC — who decided to wait out all the blog hype, think about it, and make sure he had it right before he launched his own blog. As an admitted “late adopter,” he didn’t come forth with his until January 1 of this year. Well, guess what? In 30 days, I’d say we have a new VC blogging star — because, if you believe the traffic stats that Guy just reported yesterday — on only his one-month anniversary — I’d say we could have a clear winner here as far as pure numbers of reader eyeballs.

It will be interesting now to see how many other VCs put up their traffic numbers to his, or shut their sites down in shame. I wouldn’t be the first to suggest that, in this private little, closed club of a world, much of the game is about “mine’s bigger than yours.” Hey, maybe they’ll lose interest and life will just go back to normal — with VCs spending all their time listening to pitches, doing “due dili,” writing term sheets, and investing all that dough that’s supposed to be piling up underneath them.

What am I thinking? Nah! They’ll keep blogging…
[Watch for more on this topic from Demo next week, where lots of VCs will be mingling about.]

Technology’s A-List

January 31, 2006 / / 0 Comments

That’s who the producers of the Demo ’06 conference say you’ll be mingling with if you attend their event next week in Phoenix. The way it works is this: they filter through some 300 new upstarts that apply to present, reducing the number down to about 70 — the ones they think are the most promising. Demobannercrop3 Those then each get to do the famed six-minute pitch. How do they choose the companies? Who knows — behind some secure curtain, I’m sure. Do VCs lobby hard for their favorites? Ya think so? There sure are a ton of VCs that attend this thing, big names included, based on a partial attendee list I saw a few days ago.

This pitching at Demo is a big deal — hard to get a chance, then even harder to do it well. You talk about pressure. Check it out: watch some Demo presentation videos here — just look on the right side and click on the link “2005 DEMOfall,” for example, then pick a company. There’s a real art to presenting at Demo, according to Guy Kawasaki, a master presenter himself. Guy, of course, is also a VC these days. Wonder how many VCs will be blogging from Demo? I’m told 20-30 more bloggers besides me are part of the press contingent, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see some VCs hammering away on their laptops, too.

Which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to do a post on the practice of VCs blogging. There are several of ’em doing it. Hey, they got the money, honey — *and* they got the time! Watch for that soon.

You Want Intrigue? I’ll Give Ya Intrigue!

January 17, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Just met with a Minneapolis stealth startup that’s meeting with In-Q-Tel and the NSA next week. (Where do you meet with the NSA? As this guy was told, “Oh, we’ll tell you that when the time comes.”) Man, this harks me back to my days working with the first CEO of Secure Computing, Kermit Beseke, way back in late ’80s. He knew the NSA guys on a first-name basis. And the rest became history (starting in ’95, with one of the top-5 hottest IPOs for several years running). Wow, when you think of how many major technologies we take for granted actually started with the government, it’s amazing. How about a little thing called, oh, *email* for one? And the very Internet itself. I remember the guys at Secure Computing telling me about email, and then Mosaic and the Web, waay before they were much known outside of government circles. This world of stealth startups is so much fun I can hardly stand it! Oh, and by the way, for all you folks now scratching your head and wondering “Minnesota?” — this has nothing to do with government stuff, but, remember, that early search technology Gopher started right here, too…at a great school called the U of MN!

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