January 2009
“Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to bjy more and more of...”
– Some Friday fun - the old ones are the best ones | The Equity Kicker
“Forestland “will be in the hands of the Boy Scouts for a long time, and...”
– Lots of land, few new camps for scouts
Rafer sez: The Boy Scouts are hypocritical and deceitful at the regional level?!? Shocking.
“Looked at that way, our apparent focus on early stage, consumer facing, web...”
– Arguing From First Principles | Union Square Ventures: A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing
Rafer sez: Bookmark this for the next time a VC tells you not to worry about deal pricing. It won’t happen until 2010 or 2011, but it’ll happen.
“Tech Industry CEOs Back Obama’s Rescue Package”
– Image via Wikipedia
Tech Industry CEOs Back Obama’s Rescue Package - WSJ.com
Rafer sez: I’m calling bulls—-. Here’s the group they call “tech.” These are large, commoditized electronics,
Image via Wikipedia
IT services, and chemical companies. They are capital...
“It’s a shame really. Yahoo, for all it’s management failings, is one of the...”
– Yahoo Quietly Shutters Yahoo Pets [grin] » Dogster Inc. Company Blog
Rafer sez: We’re finding our voice at Lookery, but wow does Dogster have a head start on us.
“Great Entrepreneurs are passionate about customers and Products, not about being...”
– Image via CrunchBase
Master of 500 Hats: Great Entrepreneurs are PASSIONATE about Customers & Products, NOT about being Great Entrepreneurs.
Rafer sez: Great point by the hatsman. I edited it way down for this tumbl, or went a little laconic on his ass as @tedr might say. My only addition...
“Three days after receiving $25 billion in federal bailout funds, Bank of America...”
– Bailout Recipients Hosted Call To Defeat Key Labor Bill
Rafer sez: Companies receiving FAILout money should be barred from lobbying for a year or two.
StockTwits and Spam
stocktwitsblog:
As StockTwits continues to grow followers quickly, we are finding that our stream is getting hit with what we view as spam. We realize that thousands of people are watching our feed daily and that the benefit to organizations hitting us with links to their sites is increasing so we are confronting unsolicited promotion head on. Here is a brief synopsis on our policy towards...
“Anybody who fails should be allowed to fail. Capitalism without bankruptcy is...”
– Great quote on Capitalism & free markets from Soros associate - busterbuster’s posterous
“The Pope has lifted the excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church of four...”
– Image via Wikipedia
BBC NEWS | Europe | Pope move ignites Holocaust row
Rafer sez: No one ever expects [the new Pope to be the Christ-like soul whose last job who ran the] Spanish Inquisition.
US EQUITIES: FIRST IN, FIRST OUT
Image via Wikipedia
Earnings growth, of course, will continue to struggle in 2009. S&P 500 reported earnings have already fallen by around 50% since mid-2007. Importantly, equities have historically bottomed even while earnings are still contracting. More specifically, in the post-war period, the stock market has reached bottom despite a further fall in earnings of around 20%, on average.
...
“If you buy sea salt, you’re paying a premium for the luxury of being a...”
– Buying Sea Salt? You Might Be a Sucker. - Ted Dziuba
Sawickipedia: I love rants
(via sawickipedia)
Rafer sez: I’d like to know what brand of TP, soda, et al, this guy consumes. And yes, i’m implying he eats TP if his tastebuds and ability to discern texture are this extinct. I’m...
“I had in mind serving the same kind of customers but with a different...”
– From Consumer Strategy to Whitelabel - Proceed with Caution - Fred Wilson Dot VC
Suggest a webbug
ghostery:
Are there webbugs that Ghostery isn’t finding that you’d like added? If so you can use our new Suggest a webbug form to let us know.
David
1 tag
Awesome Scheduling. Creating my Version Now.
Other Startup CEO: We've got a conflict now on this Thursday. Do you have time for a call on the 29th?
Rafer: Sure but do you only talk on Thursdays? ;) This Friday or earlier next week is fine too.
Other Startup CEO: Actually yes. Thursdays are data partner discussion days.
“I continue to marvel at the huge amount of coverage that Twitter gets from...”
– Twitter’s risk of ubiquity | Negative Approach - CNET News
Rafer sez: “Negative Approach” is right. Leave marketing analysis to marketing people. No one who isn’t making their living from Web2 cares how Twitter makes money. Attempting to impose the industry insider mindset...
“Since 2008, a majority of Friendster’s employees are now located in the...”
– Friendster Expands Its Team, Offices and Partners in Asia
Rafer sez: Do not expect to be able to control your own destiny.
Oh man, Cancel and I are all over it.
Must admit—I kinda expected that it was a rhetorical “boring.” I think it’s going to be an interesting couple of years: tools like bit.ly, and the first stirrings of a corresponding shift in mindset away from analytics as a discrete, monolithic undertaking, should get a lot of new people looking at data. It’s going to be pretty messy and ugly at first, but this is a...
“Is it me, or aren’t the entrepreneurs the ones who are supposed to be innovating...”
– Charlie O’Donnell (via betaworks)
Rafer sez: That’s all true, but it’s useless nihilism.
There is a historical point beyond which traditional VC fund structures are so, so poorly aligned with the entrepreneurs’ incentives and decreasing capital requirements that the funds need to...
“WebInkNow: CENTURY 21 is pulling national television advertising in 2009 and...”
– Web Ink Now: CENTURY 21 moves TV ad spend to online: Bev Thorne, CMO, tell us why
Twitter / howardlindzon: Jan can cuss and chart... →
Pop quiz: What’s wrong with this tweet?
“Meanwhile, about Mr. Obama: while it’s probably in his short-term political...”
– Op-Ed Columnist - Forgive and Forget? - NYTimes.com
“Everyone is “hesistant to make capital calls” as a result, says one Valley VC...”
– peHUB » VCs Feeling the Pain of Newly Poor LPs
Rafer sez: Profitability is the only safeguard.
“Ideas are so cheap and plentiful these days that “I thought of it first” has no...”
– Rafer sez: Ideas are cheap, execution is dear.
kottke.org
I only quote it because I feel so good being on the right side of that fact.
(via nickdouglas)
1 tag
Networks Not Sites
This morning, I attended the Gotham Media Ventures Future of News session. The discussion was admirably casual and forthright. They also did a good job of bringing the audience into it — especially for a non-blogging event. I am pleased I went, but a couple of things struck me that are worth sharing. First, calling it the “Future” of anything is problematic. Scanning the room, I markedly...
“The current model, a cosmology widely accepted by our people, is one that...”
– Penny Arcade (via colestryker) (via nickdouglas)
“Twitter presents their audience with a challenge - if you don’t like what we’ve...”
– Greg Battle.
More Greg: “Twitter chose wisely in that they have used the platform to export all interface innovation (the most mutable and therefore, costly part of every web application).”
Had not thought about this angle, but really insightful. In a way, I would say MySpace has done the same. ...
“you never hear 20-year-olds talking about information overload because they...”
– Clay Shirky (via Scott Heiferman) (via betaworks)
Rafer sez: Don’t worry. You aren’t overwhelmed; you are just obsolete.
Transformer Generation - SlideShare →
A great generational analysis with implications far beyond the commericial.
"Place cookies on the phone without using the...
my prediction for 2009 is that someone will figure out how to place cookies on the phone without using the network. ;) Originally posted as a comment by markslater on A VC using Disqus.
Rafer sez:
I’m so clueless. This is brilliant and relatively achievable, if the design goal is “better than the carriers.”
“Small cities in 25 states — almost 100 communities in all — have lost commercial...”
– Lacking Airlines, Small Cities’ Economies Suffer - NYTimes.com
Rafer sez: Either we rejuvenate train service in the US or these cities will shrivel and die. We’ll all end up living in one of a six to ten mega-cities. That migration and urban sprawl would be much, much worse.
(via rafer)
...
“Small cities in 25 states — almost 100 communities in all — have lost commercial...”
– Lacking Airlines, Small Cities’ Economies Suffer - NYTimes.com
Rafer sez: Either we rejuvenate train service in the US or these cities will shrivel and die. We’ll all end up living in one of a six to ten mega-cities. That migration and urban sprawl would be much, much worse.
(via rafer)
...
“Small cities in 25 states — almost 100 communities in all — have lost commercial...”
– Lacking Airlines, Small Cities’ Economies Suffer - NYTimes.com
Rafer sez: Either we rejuvenate train service in the US or these cities will shrivel and die. We’ll all end up living in one of a six to ten mega-cities. That migration and urban sprawl would be much, much worse.
1 tag
“Harry Truman: “I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they...”
– Scripting News: 1/9/2009
Rafer sez: Perfectly said by “the dumbest guy in the room and the boss.”
Obama's Homage to Mark Penn - Strumpette →
On the heels of today’s earlier Mark Penn jab, Tedr points us indirectly at another one.
“Representative Rick Boucher (D-VA) will be taking the chair of the House...”
– Slashdot | Rick Boucher To Chair House Internet Committee
Rafer sez: Congress and Obama diverging.
“A good example of how information can transform a marketplace is the series of...”
– New Info Shoppers - WSJ.com
Rafer sez: Cheap, transparent innovation = marketing.
Read this article but note that the study’s sample size is laughably small, so this is interesting anecdotal data rather than anything resembling information. This appears to be the same Mark Penn whose...
“For Yahoo, naming Decker as CEO could potentially bode well for its efforts to...”
– Sources: Yahoo’s Decker a strong contender for CEO | Digital Media - CNET News Rafer sez: Good heavens, people, Y!’s core product strengths are web content and related applications. None of these people knows the first thing about about how to resurrect this company. All any of these...