The New Old Media

And so it begins. Google starts acting like a traditional TV network with it's (sort of) attack on Sicko. from The Inquirer:

Here's the recap. Michael Moore's new film, Sicko, goes on general release this week and has been widely applauded by critics, pundits and bloggers - across party lines, interestingly enough - as a well-made and powerful document of the flaws in the American health care system and the providers of that care.

Consequently, the health care industry is taking something of a beating in the popular press, and many would argue deservedly so. Not, however, Lauren Turner of the Google Advertising team - she suggested in a recent blog post to the Google Health Advertising Blog (yes, such a thing exists) that the movie was deeply flawed, and failed to show the health industry in its best light. The answer, she suggested, was for healthcare monopolies to buy ads on Google against the keywords "Michael Moore" and "Sicko", thus promoting the healthcare industry to those searching for information on Moore's film.

Where have we seen this before?

Let's give away a service, say, entertainment... and instead of charging each user for access, let's shift the payment for that service to people wanting to sell their products by pitching them during use of that service.

That's television.

Google (and Yahoo, and any other internet based service that gives away a service in exchange for the selling of advertising) are heading down the same road. And, human nature being what it is, they'll very likely look and act just like Television Networks (and radio and other advertising supported media) more and more as time goes by.

This Sicko flap happened because Google isn't very sophisticated about this (yet). You can bet they'll get sophisticated quickly enough though. In a few years you'll likely be seeing behavior's very similar to what you've seen the TV folks doing for decades. Google (and all the others) may be technology companies in how they operate, but their business is media and advertising. And that's what'll drive their day to day decisions.

It'll seem a bit slimy and evil (like this Sicko thing), but it's really just a young innocent set of companies getting older, more mature and, in the process, losing some of that naive child-like glow. And yea, it's still a little slimy and evil. It'll happen anyway.

Welcome to the new old media!

Pick your iPartner iWisely (or: How AT&T is wrecking the Apple iPhone Experience)

Yet another report of a lousy 'getting it going' experience from Brad Feld with the iPhone.

I've read about 2o of these in the last half an hour. It seems AT&T just didn't think it through very well. Apple's just as guilty. (what is it they say about being able to judge a man best by looking at how he marries?).

Goes to show how you can spend years, 10's of millions of dollars and use up lots of braincells to create an amazing product and STILL, easily, have the users first experience with that product (arguably the most important experience) destroyed by choosing an incapable, immoral or just inept (AT&T, it seems, fit's all of this and more) partner.

just say no to that subpoena

"Bush's attorney told Congress the White House would not turn over subpoenaed documents from former presidential counsel Harriet Miers and former political director Sara Taylor. Congressional panels want the documents for their investigations of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' stewardship of the Justice Department, including complaints of undue political influence."

"Increasingly, the president and vice president feel they are above the law," said Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. He portrayed the president's actions as "Nixonian stonewalling."

His House counterpart, Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., said Bush's assertion of executive privilege was "unprecedented in its breadth and scope" and displayed "an appalling disregard for the right of the people to know what is going on in their government."

Gee. Does this mean if I get a subpoena, I can just ignore it? You know.. this could be get really interesting.

Over 30 Age Meme.. this one's getting old

Dave Winer's at it again. He's baiting Fred Wilson into continuing the 'over 30 means you can't do a startup' meme.

Fred should know that Dave's a master at this (especially the baiting part) and has been doing it very successfully for years. For Dave, I suspect, it's fun. A sort of sport really.

The age meme discussion is getting too much play though. I'm gonna sum it up and pack it away:

-Yes, if you're over 30 (or 40 or 50) it's harder to do a startup than if you're under 30.
-Yes, you're harder to 'deal with' for VC's and angels because you've had time to learn up from down. They'll deal.
-Yes, it's likely you'll work less if you're still married with kids. Or married w/o kids. Or divorced with kids.
-Yes, it's only likely you'll work like a 22 year old if you're single or divorced w/o kids.
-Yes, over 30's know more and can avoid potholes under 20's cheerfully bee-line into.
-Yes, if you're willing to find us (single/divorced/healthy/withoutkidsathome) we are gems.

Any money guy who bases a decision on funding primarily on your birthday isn't a funding guy you should be dealing with anyway (even if you're under 30).

Fred knows this. Every top notch VC or angel knows this. And Dave knows it too.

And now... I'm done commenting on this one.

Blogging: Average Persons Way To Immortality?

I know that's an odd title, but I think it's true.

The Chinese have a great saying that puts everything into perspective:

"Every 100 years- All new people".

Think about that. It's effectively true. For the vast majority of people on Earth, their time here is nothing more than a blink of the eye and then they're gone. Poof. Dust. Forgotten.

Unless they write a blog.

I suspect that, 1000 years from now, your blogged words, thoughts, ideas, rants and tirades will, somehow, somewhere, still be stored in the Googleplex, or on the Internet (or it's equivalent) and accessible. Effectively the only thing left of you long after you're dead and gone.

I doubt anything else you do with your life will have that kind of personal staying power. Maybe if you write a book or record a song, but that's not something the average person does. The only other thing that might be really equal in representing you, and what is uniquely you is the DNA you pass on to your children.

Even then, your thoughts via blog are more personal, public and representative of you when you were alive and spewing energy into the void.

I've always known whatever I wrote here was available to anyone, anywhere. What I didn't think about before was that also means anytime. Now, or 1000 years from now.

This stuff isn't going away anymore. The internet saves everything somewhere.

I'm sure you've all thought of this already and you're doing the 'so what'. Still, the TIME aspect and what that means to a human with a deterministically short (<100 years) existence never really sunk in until recently.

Time to go read a book. :)

Hatchery's vs. Angel Investing

I've been watching what Brad and David are doing over at TechStars and I think they're really onto the right model. I've heard David say that it's the evolution of angel investing, and I think he's right. Especially in the high tech/internet/media sector.

I look at what I've done with ClickCaster, which was a traditional angel model. First the founder invests his own money/time/resources to get an idea to a certain point (a team that delivers, a market identified, a beta product in production) and then he goes for either angel money or VC money depending on how big his/her plans are. In high tech/internet, with the costs to get to the next level so low, it's usually angel money. Certainly less than $1m, and usually half that; call it $500K average.

So I'm an angel investor, and I've got, say, $50 or $100K into an angel round of an early stage startup. I've put a pretty fair amount of betting money into this one deal. Is that good? Is it the most efficient way to invest money on high risk ventures? Until recently, I'd have said yes. Now, I'm not so sure.

David Cohen's TechStars is bringing in 10 groups at $10-15K investment each. Invested amount of around $150K total. Another $50K for things like creating a space for 3 months for them to work out of, maybe some datacenter setup with servers and bandwidth everyone can use to prototype on and some computers in the space they'll work in.

$200K. 10 companies. 20-30 hungry and foolish entrepreneurs with big dreams. Out of that you're likely to get 1 or 2, maybe 3 real companies that get their claws dug into a real market. For the money put in, you get 5-6% of the company. But they've been seriously vetted to get there. Maybe 200 applicants for 10 slots of which 2 companies will emerge. That's a hell of an efficient tunnel that happens in very short order (2 months to screen the 200, 3 months to screen the 10). Get your other legal, data center, entrepreneur and angel friends to help out and, man, you've got a wisdom of crowds market that, I suspect, kicks ass on the traditional angel investing or even early stage VC model.

Old news to many of you I'm sure, but here's what's new news (at least to me).

I put in about $200K of my own money for ClickCaster and a couple of years of my life (so far). I'm over 40, I've got some money to bet, I'm reasonably smart. I've been involved in starting things for a couple of decades, I'm well versed in the high tech/internet space and I want to get involved in the startup world.

Would doing a hatchery have been a better approach than focusing on a single company? Should a guy like me do this as opposed to a single focused startup with that $200K?

I don't know the answer, but I would bet big that several thousand guys like me, and angel investors who already have networks of friends, VC's and resources needed to do startups, are having this exact thought right about now.

They're watching TechStars and Ycombinator and the other hatchery's and looking to see if this way of filtering ideas, people and markets is the best approach for this particular investment sector.

If I were an entrepreneurs or angel investor (or a wanna be) who was looking for what's next, I'd want to talk with David and gang, get the initial formula/playbook (and blessings), move to Austin, Santa Fe, Iowa City, Portland or any of a couple of dozen smaller cities with high quality of life, a university, get plugged into the local scene and fire it up.

One side note on Hatchery's vs. Incubators:

David likes to point out this is not the old bubble days incubator approach. An incubator owned a larger percentage of the companies, was more deeply involved in the day to day business and didn't have a well defined near future endpoint when the money stopped, dead, and you were kicked out of the nest to live or die.

A hatchery is fast, ruthless in it's selection process and, after everyone involved votes (by what I can tell, with angel or even VC money) shuts down the 7-8 companies that didn't make the cut and does everything it can to help the 2-3 survivors.

Darwin, I think, would be proud.

The "bad news for graybeards as entrepreneurs" meme rears it's head again- or - In defense of the over 40 entrepreneur

Well shit.

Here we go again. Now Valleywag says you can only do a really big win startup if you're in your 20's and then Fred Wilson back peddles (sort of) on his back peddle about funding in their 20's vs. over 40 entrepreneurs .



Valleywag:

Bad news for the graybeards: a quick check on the great tech companies of the last three decades shows a pretty brutal rule. The most spectacular successes are launched by founders still in their twenties. The peak age: 26. Within a year of that age were Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Apple's Steve Wozniak, Yahoo's Jerry Yang, Skype's Janus Friis, Chad Hurley from Youtube, and Tom Anderson from Myspace. Full post here

Fred:

So I don't know if youth is an advantage in the tech/startup world, but it certainly isn't a disadvantage. And I see our job as being able to work with young entrepreneurs in a way that allows them to be their best while helping them where they need it. It's something we are working very hard on perfecting. Full post here.

At least Fred tempers his with 'it's a state of mind' more than anything else. He's right. It IS a state of mind. I refer, again, to my post last year "Are early stage start ups and normal lives incompatible?"

Of course a 23 year old with no family, no mortgage, no kids, no college funds, no IRA or 401K to fund in perfect health (and no medical or health insurance bills), a paid for 1990 volvo and 3 roommates (who are also your co-founders), no cube life/big company work experience with the requisite cynicism/dilbert disease and with no fear and a 140 IQ unimpaired by 20 years of (pick one): Drinking, drugs, bad relationships, lousy kids, all of the above bills, etc. has an advantage.

Doh.

Life can wear you down. And it does most people. Doing a startup requires dedication, focus, naive belief in the impossible, more dedication, long hours and sacrificing 'life balance'; at least for awhile. That's why alot of entrepreneurs kill themselves and succeed (or fail) take off a few months (or in some cases a few years if the battle was particularly gruesome) and do it again.

I would put forth that it takes a particular (some would say peculiar, others would say slightly warped) personality type that's similar in some ways to the addictive personality to do a startup company. In our case, the addiction is the process of creating something useful and valuable from nothing and marshaling it through all the creativity, elation, pain, fear and fun that doing it entails.

Age isn't the defining factor. However, it does change the equation. I would bet fewer over 40's have it in them to do it than the same personality type does in their 20's, for instance.

Our society tries it's best to beat individuality and creativity out of you as soon as you hit 'the workforce'.

Even the good companies do it. Near the end of my tenure at Apple, my boss had an executive consultant (who worked with executives and CEO's to make them them better at their jobs) work with his reports. She set up as series of meetings with me for a 6 week period. In our first meeting, we talked for 4 hours. At the end of it, she said "Scott, I'm cancelling the rest of our meetings'. Thinking I'd done something wrong I asked why. She said "your one of those guys that drive corporations crazy. You have the qualities all of them are trying to bring out in themselves, but they can't control you. They want to find a way to tame it, and still have it. If I put you through this, it's like taming a wild stallion (no shit, that's exactly the phrase she used) and this company needs people like you". My boss was a little pissed, but, interestingly, he also gave me alot more funding and leeway after that.

Most people in their 40's have had it beaten out of them. Even big company senior execs and CEO's (there's a whole consulting industry built around it). Them, maybe, more than most.

But some of us survive the process. Not many, but some. And those of us that do are the over 40's that are capable of doing startups.

And we bring experience, contacts and resources no 23 year old has.

So...if we over 40's successfully run the product, market and funding gauntlet alongside the 20 somethings, even with a graybeard, we shouldn't be written off or filtered out just because of a birthday.

Granted, I'm biased, but if you ask me, smart investors should seek out that hard to find seasoned just right over 40 entrepreneur. There's likely 1 of us for every hundred 20 somethings of like mind, but if you can find us, we're worth it.