An old post from AO but I found it interesting: For VCs, Success Is Staying Awake. Some revelations about Sequoia Capital's secrets to pick up the cherries from the high tech toppings. No surprises here but why all the successful guys tell that it is the details? Maybe they are trying to tell us something. Do you homework - do them well. And most of all - be awake!
Well, Schmidt notes that it's easier to grow and figure out something exciting when things are already moving. Therefore one should scan around those second derivative markets that are already speeding up nicely. In another words - right timing.
Web-analysis are getting better. The other day I found this service where already some 12m people's bios are put together from public sources. The scary part was that those old press releases and quotes in online news papers often reveal your career history - even the ones that you would like to forget about... I run the search with a few of my friends and it seemed to work quite nicely. Try it out yourself: Eliyon.
Rojo is another new company in beta mode. Rojo (i.e. Mojo companied with reputation) claims to combine social networking with rich content of internet feeds (RSS, weblogs etc.). If you are not that excited about it yet make sure you read who is behind the venture. Some names should ring a bell.. Here's their weblog.
Mark Leslie posted a good one about The Sales Learning Curve. The concept is the same as with a manufacturing learning curve. It takes time to get your organisation up to speed and learn the clients buying habits and requirements. This is not dependent so much on the number of sales people but more on the time to adapt. The implications are that one could start with a small crew and add the force later and this way still achieve the results but with lower cost structure.
I just finished Andy Kessler's Running money and Wall Street Meat. Andy's storytelling is very conversational but I did not like it as much as Micheal Lewis' style. However I must say that I enjoyed a lot reading both of the books.
Running money illustrated the tech investing era and Andy was right in the middle of the action. He talks from an investor point of view and especially from one who has his feet on the ground despite the hot market. Kessler is very low-key and direct with his writing. In addition to describing how to run a hedge fun and what does it really mean he explains as well very nicely the semiconductor business model. As macro-level he tries to put together how the US IP economy is working. I'm not buying his theory of profit margin surplus but definitely his quest for the driving force and new underlying growth factor of innovation sector puts one considering where the new opportunities could be identified.
Wall Street Meat overlaps with Running Money and this is very disturbing at least for me since I read the Running Money first. There are some 10 pages or so same stories and some of them even 100% 1:1 with the other book. Sounds like a rush to get things published... Anyhow, if you want to know what happened behind the scenes and how actually the investment banking business was run in the 80's and 90's Andy's book is a must. He spreads wide open the business model and way the Street banking was conducted. Liar's Poker was great but Andy walks the reader through the crazy days of the 90's and tells the story from an insider's point of view. Mary Meeker, Jack Grubman, Frank Quattrone and others are nicely illustrated and positioned from a co-worker's point of view. I was very pleased to find some analysing of the dot bomb boom from the liquidity angle. Kessler brings into limelight the institutional funds (momos etc.) that played a crucial role in making the bubble to happen.
If you like the financial world and are looking for some answers why some companies got funded and made huge IPOs. Those days it was really not about how solid your business was put how right your timing was (and who you knew).
VentureBlog captured an interesting article about internet success stories in Wired and wrote a post worth reading.
A VC tells which technologies disrupt the existing ones.
I visited Manhattan the other day and was surprised to see so many people using the push-to-talk feature. One could here the beep in almost every block and see people talking to their phones in a walkie-talky manner. I'm still waiting for Samsung i530 to become available...