Running With Foxes

So unless you spent the weekend under a rock, you’ve probably heard about the Sarah Lacey interview blowup, where the crowd turned on Lacey for running a non-interview. There have been many accounts accessing the damage after the fact, but although I wasn’t there, all the attendees I talked to had a palpable sense of the interview’s awkwardness. That awkwardness eventually bubbled up into outright mutiny.

In part, I think the blowup was fed by an endless stream of Twitters between attendees letting each other know just how bad it was. Instead of feeling like they were alone in how they felt, Twitter gave attendees a way to build a consensus and eventually turn on Lacey. Talk about smart (mouth) mobs.

Here are some highlights from the feed:

Nick O’Neill biznickman This interview has been a horrible bomb 03:38 PM March 09, 2008 from web Icon_star_empty reply to biznickman
Dave McClure davemc500hats wow, i’m actually starting to feel sorry for sarah right about now. this is like watching Roger Clemens testimony. physically painful FAIL 12:37 PM March 09, 2008 from web Icon_star_empty reply to davemc500hats

Let me know.

update: email me at nick@socialmedia.com with why you think you’d be a good candidate, then we can get in touch by phone if I don’t already know you.

The firm is looking for a Spring Intern (8-12 weeks, part-time) to work on Internet Technology investments.

Tasks will include Internet research, speaking with new investment opportunities through telephone outreach, and some analysis of new investment opportunities.

Candidates should have a B.A. or B.S. degree, strong verbal and written communication skills, and a good understanding of the Internet Technology space.

Note: Back from graphing social patterns, which was a great conference, but more on that later.

Let’s face it, getting a job is a piece of cake compared to “building a career”. There’s a big difference between the two. A job pays you today, while a career pays you tomorrow through better positions and opportunities. It’s like investing in yourself.

However, it can be devilishly hard to plan out what the right moves are for getting where you want to go, or even where you want to go to begin with. But alas, like most things, the internet provides a great resource.

LinkedIn is not only a good place to network, but also to learn about the journey’s some of the valley’s best and brightest took to get where they are today. Lets look at some different career goals and see the paths people took to get there: Venture Capitalist, CEO, and Marketing Guru.

VC

Salil Deshpande - currently partner at Bay Partners, Masters in EE from Stanford, Hardware Engineer - Hewlett Packard, Software engineer - Sun, Project Lead - Enterprise Integration Partners, CEO - CustomWare, Director Professional Services - Borland, CEO - New CustomWare company, (skipping some more), EIR at Bay Partners, Principle at Bay, Partner at Bay.

Katherine Barr - currently partner at MDV, Stanford Masters, Senior Product Manager - HSA, Negotiator/Senior Consultant - Vantage Partners (Boston based firm), Partner - MDV.

CEO

Gina Bianchini - CEO - Ning, Stanford MBA, Financial Analyst - Goldman Sachs, Director of Biz dev - CKS group, Co-Founder and CMO - Harmonic Group, Co-Founder CEO - Ning

Heather Harde - CEO - TechCrunch, Harvard MBA, Financial Analyst - Brown Brothers, SVP M&A - Fox Interactive, CEO - TechCrunch

Marketing Guru

Dave McClure - BS - John’s Hopkins, Consulting - Various large companies, Founder/CEO - Aslan Computing, Startup Consultant - 500 hats, Director of Marketing - PayPal, Director of Marketing - Simply Hired, VP Evangelism - SimplyHired, adviser to dozens of other companies

Jeremiah Owyang - Business and marketing - SFSU, Intranet designer - Exodus Communications, UI Designer - Extranet, Intranet Architect - World Savings, Manager Global Web Marketing - Hitachi, Dir Corp Media Strat - Podtech, Senior Analyst - Forrester.

So What Can We Learn?

After looking at a lot of profiles I’ve noticed a couple of things. These people didn’t spend that long at a single job (2 years usually). That means don’t waste time at a job you don’t like. Jeremiah jumped through a bunch of positions before he found his calling.

They also went to some pretty good schools. Howard Hartenbaum of Draper Richards told me that pretty much every VC at the firm went to Stanford for their MBA (he was the exception and got involved with the firm because of his European expertise, and natural talent too, I’m sure).

Finally, studying these profiles is a way of familiarizing yourself with who you should approach for mentorship. I got lucky and had the opportunity to work under Michael Arrington. When looking for someone to get career advice from, know their career, know what questions you’re going to ask when you approach them, find people on their way up (people who have made it are sometimes just too busy), and engage them where they engage others (twitter, FBook, LinkedIn, Blogs). I’m sure you’ll find most people in the valley more than happy to give some guidance. Just ask.

Video by Dave McClure of Kara Swisher for a change. Great insights.

The panopticon of valley society, Twitter, has graced us with some stats about their user base. From Biz himself:

Recently, we’ve been digging around a bit and discovering some interesting statistics about Twitter usage. Some stats are fun–like the number of mentions per US presidential candidate, or the annotated spikes during the Super Bowl. Other stats are more
relative to usage. For example, people who have 10 followers and are following about 10 people represent 50% of all Twitter-ers. If
you have more than 80 followers and you’re following more than 70 people, then you are in the Twitter minority at about 10%.

What part do you fit in?

More juicy stats here.

Following / followers seems to be a good measure for telling the degree to which a twitterer is broadcasting opinions en masse vs. just communicating with friends.

Hmmm, lazy programmers take note of the floating menu to the left visible on my 30″ Dell at work (Mac Firefox and Safari). Readers with lesser monitors are saved this artifact. Oh, and Buzz this.

Back when I first joined TechCrunch, the term “Evite Killer” was bandied about by entrepreneurs looking to unseat the staid and clunky invitation giant. As is common with tech startups, a cohort of startups launched around the same time, drawing a lot of press and even some venture financing ($9 million to Renkoo). However, it looks like the project to re-invent the invite has played itself out and hasn’t really taken off. While Alexa isn’t the holy grail of traffic stats, seeing no upward motion isn’t a good sign.

The reasons become even more apparent when you look at Evite’s own traffic stats.

These startups aren’t killing Evite. Social networking is.

I was having lunch with the two great developers behind Crunchbase, Mark and Henry, and we got to talking about the future of the site. We got to talking about the site’s pretty amazing charts and graphs and I found out that they were not from some GNU licensed php library, but rather Google’s own charting API.

Google’s charting API works through a REST API where you place the parameters of your chart or graph into a URL string for Google to process into a pretty image like the one below.

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=400×225&chd=s:helloWorld&cht=lc&chxt=x,y&chxl=0:|Mar|Apr|May|June|July|1:||50+Kb

equals

This was interesting to me not just because Google’s able to generate these nice looking charts fast and easily, but because anyone using the API is sending their data right to Google in a highly descriptive format. Lets say the Bureau of Labor statistics decides to use the API for their upcoming web report. Now every time they publish a graph not only their readers know about the latest data, but so does Google. All the data can also be easily sourced by the referring URL of the request.

I don’t know if Google is planning on doing something like this, but it certainly seems possible for them to build a search engine around the data being pushed to their servers similar to the destination site Swivel built around graphing. Only Google’s data will be dynamic, whereas Swivel’s data depends on uploaded datasets from users.

Think of this as a distributed to destination model as opposed to destination to distribution model that many content sites like YouTube have (you make content, then distribute it). Google has provided tools users can use to generate charts across the web (distributed), which could be coalesced into a destination site for all sorts of datasets.

Good to see Natali’s new show, Loaded, taking off. I’d embed a sample here, but Cnet doesn’t allow it. Big loss on their part. Linking is the webs currency that could build up search ranking for archival content.

I don’t mean to say something as naive as the title suggests. Rather I had an experience that really helped me understand the all the video how-to startups.

Over the weekend I wanted to find out “how to prepare sushi”. I typed the search “how prepare sushi” in the usual “googlese” and experienced the rather obvious way these guys are going to get traffic and make money. One of the top results was a link from VideoJugg (the one below).

How To Prepare Sashimi - Salmon, Tuna & Yellowtail

It’s interesting to note that a search for “how make sushi” results in a Mahalo link at top and “how prepare sushi” shows some YouTube videos.

Video sites will be killer content for how-to searches because they’re show, not tell. The question is how these sites will duke it out in the SERPs. I don’t see a single video owning a group of keywords (e.g. the making sushi/sashimi example). The winner in this category is going to have to stand out by drawing an audience to their site. SERPs are a great way to draw traffic, but any of these startups have to contend with the YouTube Google relationship. There are already quite a few YouTube videos showing up Google searches and YouTube already draws a wide audience directly to the site to search for video content. It can’t be that hard to just turn on a YouTube How-to section.