Sawickipedia: Microsoft has no choice put to get behind HTML5 in a big way. It’s the only hedge against the hegemonies of Flash and Apple’s Apps for mobile. Much like the music labels had to finally get over their DRM biases and embrace non-DRM MP3 as a way to enable competition to iTunes, MSFT needs HTML5.
Yes MSFT’s HTML5 support is self-serving, but in this case it’s helping the public at the same time.
What do Admob, CafePress, Aardvark, Polyvore, and Xoopit have in common? If you said that they were all backed by great VC’s like Sequoia, August, Benchmark, and Accel, you would be correct. But did you know that they are also all backed by the same seed stage investor as well?
What these companies all have in common is that they are all portfolio companies of Harrison Metal Capital. With 3 exits in 2009 (Admob, Xoopit, and GeoAPI) Harrison Metal is one of the hottest of an emerging category of investors that some call “Micro VC’s”. Harrison Metal isn’t alone in their success - there is Maples Investments (SolarWinds, ngmoco, Chegg), Founder Collective (Hunch, 20x200, Milo), and probably another dozen or so firms like these that have emerged over the past 5 years.
What these firms all have in common is a fund strategy and size that is both different from and complimentary to traditional VC’s. Their investment strategy and sub $50M funds are well suited for the increased capital efficiency of certain sectors and the fact that larger VC’s have difficulty deploying capital in $1M chunks. It’s also a very attractive option for entrepreneurs in that it preserves option value. Mike Maples puts is best:
“Smaller up-front investments create a greater range of exit strategies where everyone wins. For example, if a business raises a small amount of initial capital, then exceeds its early milestones and decides to swing for the fences, it can then raise a larger sum at a higher price, while preserving ownership. If the business is not ready for rapid growth, it preserves the option for an exit at around $50 million, while still delivering a high return for investors. This dual-track model is less available to companies that raise large amounts of money early.”
It should be noted that most of these fund aren’t shooting for mid-sized wins. But their size allows them to do quite well with mid-sized wins, and it is well suited for consumer internet investments where it’s often very difficult to predict whether a company has the chance to be big enough to produce “venture returns”.
I think these firms are excellent investments (looking from an LP perspective). Their strategies fit the times and inefficiencies in the market. They also do wonders for their local entrepreneurial ecosystems by allowing more companies to get shots on goal and providing the help that sophisticated investors can bring. They are continuing the work that great angel investment pioneers like Ron Conway who helped (and continues to help) great companies emerge.
As an investor at Spark, which currently invests out of a $360M fund, I am very excited about these guys. Even though we also do seed stage investments, it’s great to be able to call on sophisticated seed investors that can partner with us and add serious value to companies on hiring, product marketing, and strategy. These funds also bring a lot of excellent deal flow, and give companies great counsel on how to approach VC’ and how to hit the milestones that matter earlier. This increases the pool of great companies that we have a chance to invest in and gives us greater leverage on the seed investments that we pursue.
“Despite this remarkable success, history will also show that Apple intentionally chose a business model with plenty of room for disruption underneath its pricing structure.”
(thanks to matsm for the reblog that pointed me back to a favorite source)
Steve (is he back from Africa?) B. wrote to point out, as an offended southerner, that the Mason-Dixon line refers very specifically to the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland.
Of course Steve is correct in the exact sense (ref. Wikipedia), but not in the colloquial sense:
From 1820 onward the name Mason-Dixon Line came in general colloquial usage to mean the boundary between the free states and the slave states. It therefore included not only the original Mason-Dixon Line as surveyed by Mason and Dixon but also that part of the Pennsylvania/Ohio border from the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania to where the Ohio river crosses this border, the route of the Ohio River from that point to where it flows into the Mississippi, the eastern, northern and western borders of Missouri, and the 36 degrees 30 minutes parallel westward from the southwestern corner of Missouri
"You can take that road - and it may work for some of you. But at this difficult time, let me suggest..."
“You can take that road - and it may work for some of you. But at this difficult time, let me suggest that such an approach won’t get you where you want to go; that in fact, the elevation of appearance over substance, celebrity over character, short-term gain over lasting achievement is precisely what your generation needs to help end.
[…]
That’s a good motto for all of us - find someone to be successful for.”
If you’re at all interested in the state of online video, this is 18 mins of your time well spent. Money quote: “I think a lot of these guys don’t really understand what it takes to program a Broadcom chip.” (at 16:00)
This weekend, Bonnie and I went to see State of Play (plot summary: cute cub reporter, grizzled old vet, black helicopters) at the Big Picture (once again, what an awesome place to see a movie).
In so many ways, the film is a requiem for a dying newspaper industry. The cub reporter is from the online division, the grumpy veteran’s office is filled with paper. The movie is capped off with sentimental footage of big newspaper printing presses as the final credits roll.
There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke. […] It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
I could have picked 15 other spots to quote as well. The article is fantastic, and if you are at all interested in the death of the newspaper industry, you should read the whole thing.
“Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better.”
I was surprised to note this morning that Google registers no hits for the phrase “flypaper job description” (nor for several variants), which is a phrase I’ve used off and on for a while. So, here’s my minor contribution to the vocabulary of the tech startups world.
A flypaper job description, or flypaper job posting, is a listing designed to attract potential candidates to a company even though there’s no open req for that position - i.e. no formal plan exists to hire for the position advertised. Frequently used as a group, one might list a collection of flypaper job descriptions from entry-level developer to senior architect, so that a range of potential candidates trolling a company website might consider inquiring or sending in a resume.
One purpose behind the flypaper job description is to snare that one in a million candidate who the company would hire no matter what - the person who happens to be the domain expert in the field, or the guy who studied under the guru at Caltech who invented the original widget, or .. you get the idea.
These “fake” job postings may also be used for the secondary purpose of making a company look more successful than it is (“we’re hiring!”), and in rare cases, to sow a little misinformation in a competitive feint. (Job postings frequently betray new projects starting up, or underlying technologies used at a company.) Sometimes you even snare a resume from an employee at a competitor.
A more passive flavor of this practice involves simply being slow about removing job descriptions for positions already filled or no longer needed - under the theory that there’s no harm in collecting more resumes that you might want to use later.
Flypaper job descriptions are quite common among tech startups. I’d venture to guess that if you click through to the ‘Jobs’ or ‘Careers’ pages of the 200-odd tech startups in Seattle, as many as half of the jobs posted have no true open hiring requisition behind them. I suspect this practice is frowned on by HR professionals, and it’s certainly questionable from my reading of employment law - but it’s all over the place.
So, is there another term for this practice that is more common than mine? Let me know in the comments if you know of another.
