Feld Thoughts

The Dark Knight

brad@feld.com — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 23:57:56 -0700

Amy insists I'm the Good Knight so we'll call this a good night for the Dark Knight.

My Dad's Summer Camp Story - 1950

brad@feld.com — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 23:46:57 -0700

I love it when my dad writes about personal history on his blog. He's a great storyteller and is extremely articulate about living and growing up in a generation that seems very very far away from today, as well as very far away from the generation I grew up with.

His post titled Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund Summer Camp 1950 made me smile an enormous smile. I can totally see my scrawny 12 year old dad surrounded by these huge guys from the Red Hook District in Brooklyn, being scared shitless but keeping it all inside, and winning them all over on the ball field.

Love ya dad.

Doubling Down

brad@feld.com — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:45:27 -0700

Fred Wilson - my friend and co-investor in Zynga - titled his post on Zynga's $29 million financing Raising The Stakes so I couldn't resist titling my post Doubling Down. And I'll echo what Fred said - I'm amazed with the hand that Mark Pincus (Zynga's CEO and founder) has and am delighted to be sitting at the table playing it with him.

Zynga just announced that Kleiner Perkins has led a $29 million round that includes new investor Institutional Venture Partners and the old investors (Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group, and Avalon Ventures.) Bing Gordon from KPCB has joined the board - Bing recently joined KPCB and was previously the chief creative officer at Electronic Arts where he had been a key executive since 1982. The TechCrunch article has some good info in it including the news that Zynga has acquired Yoville.

When we made our initial investment in Zynga last November, the idea of "social gaming" was just starting to emerge. Mark and the team at Zynga started with Texas HoldEm Poker (hence the poker theme in the first paragraph) but rapidly expanded into a number of other socially-oriented games on Facebook that you could play with your friends. When I wrote about some of these games in my post Wanna Play Zynga Games With Me? I was just starting to understand the potential power of social gaming. Over the past six months, I've become an incredible believer in the appeal of social gaming as a broad idea and see it as a disrupting force in the overall gaming industry. Oh - and as a user it's also a ton of fun to play these games with people I know all over the world.

While gaming is nothing new (and continues to be a fantastic business), the science of social gaming - figuring out how it works, making the games compelling, and dealing with the broad platform issues that come with massive scale - is really hard. While the popularity of Facebook seeded the social gaming phenomenon, it is now rapidly evolving onto new platforms such as other social networks like MySpace as well as connected devices like the iPhone via the iPhone AppStore.

While I've had a bunch of fantastic experiences as an investor, the tempo, pacing, quality of the people, and success of Zynga has exceeded anything I've ever experienced. I attribute it all to the genius of Mark and the fantastic people that he's surrounded himself with. And it's cool to be doubling down with investors like Bing, IVP, my friends Fred Wilson and Rich Levandov, and the entire team at Zynga that are the real folks making this happen.

Glue and Comments

brad@feld.com — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 01:16:23 -0700

Since last summer I've been talking about comments as the Dark Matter of the Blogosphere. I use Intense Debate* for the comment system on my blog and have learned a lot by experimenting with it.

In the past six months comments have moved to the forefront of the discussion around user generated content. While the various new commenting systems that have emerged have played a part in this, I think the broad activity around systems that enable small bursts of user generated content (Twitter, BrightKite*) and systems that aggregate a wide variety of user generated content (FriendFeed, SocialThing*) are playing a huge role in this and more "comment-like" data is being generated all over the Web.

One of the investment themes I'm most fascinated with right now is the one we call "Glue". We've made a handful of investments in the Glue theme at Foundry Group including Gnip, AdMeld, and Topspin. We've also been working with our good friend Eric Norlin - the creator of the Defrag Conference - on a Glue Conference.

I'm always looking for great, simple examples of Glue and I found one accidentally the other day. I put up a blog post titled Brilliant Op-Ed Crushing McCain On The Economy. I posted it on Sunday morning and then went out for a two hour run. I came back to about 20 comments on it in my inbox. Even though the post was done on my blog, I noticed the comments were from FriendFeed accounts being emailed to me by Intense Debate.

Here's what happened. My blog is one of my FriendFeed services. A vigorous debate broke out on FriendFeed between a couple of people. I wouldn't have noticed it until Monday when I checked my FriendFeed ego feed (I only do this once a day.) However, Intense Debate is "glued" to my FriendFeed account so any comments that show up on a blog post of mine on FriendFeed automatically show up in Intense Debate on my blog. It's a small feature, but a brilliant one, as it brings the overall conversation associated with my blog post back to my blog where I actually want it.

There are now 46 comments on this particular blog post (unexpected - I don't write that much about politics and it was a Sunday post.) Most of them are from the FriendFeed discussion, but some are from my blog readers. They are intermixed where I want them - on my blog. Even though they are coming from multiple sources, they persist permanently on my blog due to a tiny feature in Intense Debate.

Now - this is all much too complex still, but it's why the Glue is so interesting to us. We are continually looking for unnecessary complexity in the metaverse and ways to build really large companies that (a) take advantage of the complexity, (b) simplify the complexity, or (c) both. If you make glue, email me!

* Yes - I'm aware that each of Intense Debate, BrightKite, and SocialThing are TechStars companies from 2007 - and I'm immensely proud of the progress each has made and the fact they are in the midst of what I consider to be a very interesting and vigorous segment of our little tech universe

I'm Speculating About The Speculation About Oil

brad@feld.com — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:34:05 -0700

Having just finished reading George Soros's latest book The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crash of 2008 and What It Means my brain is now full of his theories around reflexivity. I have always instinctively agreed with Soros's philosophy even though I find it incredibly difficult and chewy to work my way through (but that's true of all philosophy for me.)

I'm a great fan of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which, according to my friend Wikipedia, "is the statement that locating a particle in a small region of space makes the velocity of the particle uncertain; and conversely, that measuring the velocity of a particle precisely makes the position uncertain." Wikipedia suggests that this is often conflated with the Observer Effect (when you observe a phenomenon, you change it), but I think the intersection of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Soros's Theory of Reflexivity reduce nicely in my brain to the Observer Effect.

That leads me to the real point of this post, which is the great short article in the New Yorker by James Surowiecki titled Oily Speculations (thanks Amy.) In the last month a new class of villain has emerged in the rapidly escalating price of oil - the "speculator." Surowiecki calls bullshit on this (not on the involvement of the speculator, but why this is both irrelevant and why the speculator is not the villain.)

The key sentence in the article is "Speculation has been a favorite target of politicians looking to mollify anxious voters since the time of ancient Greece, when the orator Lysias protested that wheat traders had reduced Athens to a state of siege.”

The conclusion, which Surowiecki bashes us (appropriately) over the head with is "The difficulty for Congress, of course, is that none of the problems that have driven up the price of oil lend themselves to a quick fix, and most, like the boom in global demand and the inaccessibility of certain oil fields, aren’t under our control at all. That’s what makes speculators a perfect target: by going after them, Congress can demonstrate to voters that it understands their pain, and at the same time avoid doing anything that might require real sacrifice from Americans. Our dependence on foreign oil, together with the fiscal fecklessness that has helped reduce the value of the dollar, means that there is no easy way out of where we are. But in an election year that’s hardly a message that anyone in Washington is going to deliver."

If you net it all out, it's the Observer Effect writ large.

Running and Conferences

brad@feld.com — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:56:13 -0700

I've got some fun things for you to do this Monday morning (or at least to put on your schedule to do.)

Want to learn how to run? How to Go From Sedentary to Running in Five Steps.

If you are already running, join the Gyminee Running Challenge or Gyminee Weight Loss Challenge. Or - join me on Gyminee in my Lifehacker inspired six week program to do One Hundred Pushups.

Developing software for your iPhone? Check out iPhoneDevCamp Colorado on 8/1 - 8/3.

Like 37 Signals? Jason Fried is talking at the Oriental Theater in Denver on July 31st.

Defrag is starting to heat up. Eric has a post up in response to the "tech has gotten boring" meme that is making the rounds. That that he says "bah" and talks more about his thoughts in Anything but ho-hum.

Reporting on w3w3 from Homer, Alaska

brad@feld.com — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:03:12 -0700

My friend Larry Nelson who with his wife Pat runs w3w3.com interviews me periodically. I'm always happy to talk to Larry - he's a tireless reporter on the Colorado entrepreneurial scene. His most recent interview with me happens while I am reclining on my red coach downstairs in my house in Homer, Alaska.

Note the blue sky in the background. It's gone now, but it was here for a few days.

Brilliant Op-Ed Crushing McCain On The Economy

brad@feld.com — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 11:19:28 -0700

My Sunday morning online scan of the New York Times turned up an awesome Op-Ed by Frank Rich titled It's the Economic Stupidity, Stupid. It's a scathing (er - "fucking brutal") criticism of McCain and his total lack of understanding of "the economy", how it actually works, and what he would do about it were he to be president.

While Rich takes a few cheap shots (hey - it wouldn't be a political Op-Ed without some gratuitous things) I think it's right on the money.

At the end, Rich makes a good argument for Michael Bloomberg as the VP Candidate. He also dismantles Carly Fiorina as a potential VP and suggests Romney would be a slightly less bad idea. I can't imagine either Fiorina or Romney as VP's - my mind just boggles. Bloomberg - now that's someone I could get excited about - for EITHER party. I hope the dude is at least answering his phone when it rings.

But the real message of the Op-Ed is how out to lunch McCain is on the economy. Taken at face value, it's terrifying. Of course, it's an Op-Ed so you can't take it at face value, but it's politics so that's what you get.

Time to go for a run and think about birds, the ocean, and happy thoughts. I'll drink some Pixie Maté first to fuel me while giving thanks to my latest 50 by 50 Marathon sponsor.

Excellent Story on the Failure of Monitor110

brad@feld.com — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 00:35:00 -0700

It's unusual for a founder to write a long thoughtful post on the failure of his company. Roger Ehrenberg - the co-founder of Monitor110 - which shut down earlier this week, did just that on his outstanding post titled Monitor110: A Post Mortem. The post is oriented around Roger's "seven deadly sins":

The lack of a single, "the buck stops here" leader until too late in the game
No separation between the technology organization and the product organization
Too much PR, too early
Too much money
Not close enough to the customer
Slow to adapt to market reality
Disagreement on strategy both within the Company and with the Board

Every person in every company that I'm involved with should read this post carefully. Every entrepreneur should also. Failure is part of the entrepreneur experience - Roger has done us all a great service by being willing to be deeply introspective and share his thoughts on what went wrong at Monitor110 in such a direct way.

Will You Marry Me On Scramble?

brad@feld.com — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:32:44 -0700

Who said the magic of Facebook is wearing thin? Nah. Cynics.

One of our investments - Zynga - helped a nice young couple (Tyler Richardson and his (now) fiancee Christine) get engaged via Scramble, one of my favorite Zynga games. Thanks to Inside Social Games for showing us the way with their post Suitor Pops the Question in Game of Facebook Scramble.

Gnip Starts Getting Twitter Data

brad@feld.com — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:17:21 -0700

One of the questions I've been asked numerous times since Gnip launched a few weeks ago is "when is Gnip going to start working with Twitter?" The answer is: today. Gnip's current partners now include Twitter.

Thanks Twitter guys! This happens to coincide with the end of my experiment of "a week without Twitter" (yes - I missed it) so to commemorate this I turned my Twitter client (Twhirl) back on and started tweeting again.

The Gnip data producer and data consumer universe is getting larger quickly; drop me an email if you want to come play and I'll get you gnipped-up.

The New Wallstrip

brad@feld.com — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:30:32 -0700

Wallstrip 2.0 is out. Fortunately, channeling the voice of the founder Howard Lindzon, they announce it very sarcastically on the homepage.

Welcome to Wallstrip 2.0, where everything is happy and bubbly so you don’t have to think about how much money you’re losing on the market. Sure, the site is blue, but don’t let that fool you: we laugh in the face of market woes.

Today's episode is on a public online dating company - Spark Networks - owner of JDate, CatholicMingle, LDSMingle, and a whole bunch of other niche dating sites. I just got my final Wallstrip escrow payment from CBS from the acquisition. CBS (and - more importantly - Wallstrip and Howard) - I LOV you.

The Who, Inflation, Blogging, and Global Warming

brad@feld.com — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:12:34 -0700

It's time for another quick list of interesting things I found this morning on the web along with my occasionally witty commentary.

Harmonix Party: Rock Band owns LA with Who concert. I love everything about Harmonix and Rock Band. Er, um, The Who just played at a Harmonix / MTV party at the Orpheum Theater in LA. The Who. The Who! One of my best friends - Warren Katz - who was also an angel investor in Harmonix had the following to say about the party:

"My jaw is on the floor and I am speechless. Not because I semi-randomly got hooked up with a game that's turning out to be one of the greatest hits of all time. Not because that game is actually fundamentally changing how a great hunk of the world interacts with music. Not because this game hosted a party featuring my favorite rock band of all time, The Who (and I would have hurt myself to get on a plane for this party). I am stunned mute because, in my opinion, one of the three best songs in Rock and Roll history, "Won't Get Fooled Again" (the other two being "Paradise By the DashBoard Lights" and "Bohemian Rhapsody"), was referred to throughout this article as "the theme from CSI". We cannot possibly be that old, and the youth of today cannot possibly be that out of touch. It actually took me a minute to realize what song they were talking about."

Alex, Eran, and all the rest of the people at Harmonix. You are the coolest nerds ever. Ian - you have real competition here in the cool nerd category!

Latest shocker: June prices go up, up, up: "Consumer prices rose 1.1 percent in June from the month before, far faster than the expected rate of 0.7 percent and almost double the reading from May, the Labor Department said Wednesday." Hmmm - an annualized rate of 13.2% - that would be "inflation."

SAP, Oracle Boost Software Prices: "Unlike price increase for food, fuel and many other commodities, the changes in software don't stem from a shortage of supply or a rise in demand. They are attempts by software makers to increase their bottom lines, said Brendan Barnicle, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities Inc." Well - yes - but it's also called an "oligopoly." SAP annual maintenance, which has been at 17% for a while, will now be at 22%. Oracle simply implemented a 15% - 20% across the board price increase for US customers.

Blogging's Dead, Long Live Blogging: While this particular meme goes round and round and round, especially among the A-list bloggers talking about blogging (or not blogging), Fred nails why he - and I - blog in this post. Whenever someone asks me "why do I blog" I now have a new link to send them to.

Chill out - it's just a normal cool summer: My part time meteorologist Josh Larson emailed me this link. Apparently it's just been a normal summer in Alaska with endless clouds, cool weather, and for the last 24 hours non-stop rain. ""We were in a warm phase of the Pacific decadal oscillation in the '80s and '90s. (Some forecasters) believe we may have entered into the cold phase." Where is that damn global warming when you really want it?

Social Search

brad@feld.com — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:29:21 -0700

Last week, Me.dium released its Alpha version of Me.dium Social Search. This coincided with Yahoo!'s launch of BOSS - Me.dium was one of the initial launch partners. This was picked up by Techmeme and prominently talked about throughout the blogosphere, tech media, and even the mainstream media.

I've been involved with Me.dium since its first financing and the launch of Me.dium Social Search is a key pivot point as it starts to capitalize on the initial vision of the company. If you are familiar with Me.dium, you may know of it as a company that has a browser sidebar that enables real time browsing with friends. This concept started out as a "recommendation service" where the algorithms suggested alternative web sites and people based on how your browsing patterns matched the browsing patterns of your friends and the overall community.

This was - and is - a pretty neat idea, but it's really hard to do effectively in a browser sidebar. Me.dium built out a lot of backend infrastructure to process a large amount of information in real time, which is necessary to make the algorithms useful across a large user base. In the process of doing this, it occurred to the team that the sidebar might not be the best way to surface the information and that search might be a better way to deliver its value to the user since Me.dium's collaborative filtering algorithms are an entirely different search algorithm than the PageRank type ones we've gotten used to.

A group of folks at Me.dium went heads down and starting working on using the stream of data they were getting to turn out a real time social search engine. Along the way, Yahoo! decided to open up their search engine infrastructure through Yahoo! BOSS and a natural collaboration was born.

Rather than hold on tight, create a "closed beta", and limit the use and exploration of Me.dium Social Search, they did what I wish more companies would do and went "straight to Alpha". Even though it's alpha and still evolving rapidly, Me.dium Social Search produces some really interesting search results that correspond to the web pages that people are looking at right now about specific topics.

The notion of the Me.dium Sidebar has morphed into a Social Toolbar which, in addition to providing a bevy of social features, also starts including your clickstream in the corpus of data that Me.dium is using for their social search algorithms. Me.dium is fanatical about your privacy and includes a simple one click way in your toolbar to turn Me.dium tracking on and off and never tracks information on secure (via HTTPS) sites.

Yahoo! has stirred the search pot in an interesting way with BOSS. Me.dium's going after one particular vector - that of social search - by building on a lot of work they've been doing over the past eighteen months. I expect you'll hear a lot about The Future of Search in the coming year - I think Me.dium will be one of the companies regularly mentioned in the mix of folks trying new approaches.

Give Me.dium Social Search a try (simply type your search term into the little box and hit the "I Feel Social" button) and tell us what you think. And - if you want to go deeper on the ideas, take a look at Robert Reich's (one of Me.dium's co-founders) blog titled Why to hear him riff on search.

Warranty Repair and Online Retail Don't Mix

brad@feld.com — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 01:54:46 -0700

My partner Ryan McIntyre has an excruciating story up titled Sharp's Dull Service / My eCommerce Nightmare about his experience buying a snazzy new 52" Sharp Aquos LC-52D92U via Amazon only to have to go through over four months of warranty repair hell before his (now old) new TV worked. He's being politically correct with his title - I would have titled the post "How To Get Rat Fucked When Buying A High Ticket Consumer Electronics Item From An Amazon Affiliate." But then again, Ryan is nicer than me. And he's apparently more patient than me - I simply give my broken things to Ross and order a new improved thing.