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The Archives
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07.12.08Word Play: "Tooth to Tail Ratio"In the midst of conversation with an investor/entrepreneur out of Dallas, I mentally stumbled over his musing, "Good tooth to tail ratio." This one was new to me, though the startup world is full of bizarre analogies. I'm used to baseball metaphors (e.g., single, double, triple, home-run returns), horse racing (entrepreneur as "jockey"), food ("this one's all sizzle and no steak" meaning hype without the substance), fights ("saber rattling," often to indicate noise-making with no intent to actually battle), even fire ("he's trying to boil the ocean with a Bic lighter" meaning thin resources applied towards a ...
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07.02.08Market Sizing Benchmarks and SurprisesMarket makes for a healthy obsession. Marc Andreesen calls it "the most important factor in a startup's success or failure." And there are plenty of market intricacies to ponder but size is a big one (forgive the pun <grin>). So I'm prone to comparing, and putting into context. Benchmarks are key here. Domestic healthcare spend was $2.3 trillion in 2007. The media/comm market is about $1 trillion (40% of healthcare). A subset, the domestic advertising market, is approximately $300 billion. So is Wal*Mart's annual revenue. (Actually, Wal*Mart did about $350 billion in 2007.) Global consumer electronics sales ...
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06.19.08Accepting of the "New New Thing"? Not Just Yet.Controversy walks hand-in-hand with innovation. It seems, after all, that conversation focused on what's to be raises hairs. Never mind that we can’t agree on the forecasting. It’s that even when we agree, the outlook may be distasteful. Consider for a moment John Tierney’s recent piece correlating business lunch deal success with serotonin boosts. Here’s the summary slice: In an experiment reported in Science, researchers at the University of Cambridge and U.C.L.A. manipulated the diet of subjects and found that people with low levels of serotonin become less likely to make a deal when playing the ...
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06.15.08Spawning BusinessThere’s something appealing about viewing entrepreneurship through the lens of evolutionary biology. Any fruitful niche finds occupants, symbiosis can offer a leg up, and “survival of the fittest” ultimately reigns. I’m reminded of this November 2006 video from Brad Feld encouraging entrepreneurs to “munch on the bones” of competition (Grendel worthy, by the way): So extinction is part of the process. And a rejuvenating element. Ambling through the halls of the natural history museum in Paris, Olivia Judson weaves the story of death and rebirth in her stellar "Wild Side" NYTimes blog. She writes: …each ...
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03.25.08Between Warring Ad Trends, Targeting PrevailsI've been thinking about two competing online ad trends: 1) Advertisers/publishers are getting better and better at targeting ads. 2) Consumers are getting better and better at ignoring ads. Targeting improvements have come on multiple fronts. Advertisers have an increasing understanding of who is consuming content, in what context, and what exactly is being consumed. The behavioral ad engines (Tacoda, Aggregate Knowledge, Wunderloop, amongst others) are amassing massive datasets on user behavior to figure out consumer preferences. Meanwhile, Facebook and other social networks literally hold such information under their nose, embedded in the profile of each of their members. Content ...
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03.23.08Two Types of Entrepreneur: "Alpha" and "Beta"A friend introduced me to a noteworthy line of thinking recently. It went something like this: "There are two types of entrepreneurs in this world: alpha entrepreneurs and beta entrepreneurs. Alpha entrepreneurs are the guys that are naturally risk tolerant, even irrational dreamers; they're charismatic and marshal folks around them to develop a company that's viable. Alphas take the first step. Beta entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are very execution focused, basically rational when it comes to risk, and bring to bear a learned skill set. They take problems and set about methodically solving them. Betas make entrepreneurship work." ...
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03.15.08Imprinting a LegacyThis whole Spitzer hullabaloo has me thinking about legacy. The New York Times put up an interactive timeline, "Milestones in an Ambitious Career," that curtly sums the New York Governor's key career moments into a few pictures and captions. Here's the headlining snippet: "Eliot Spitzer's journey from Harvard Law School to the highest office in New York state was marked by drive, ambition and [sic] string of successful prosecutions as the state's attorney general. But as governor, he stumbled repeatedly and faced humiliation after being linked to a prostitution ring." Full stop. I sure hope Governor Spitzer gets ...
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01.23.08Put Your Blinders On When It Comes to Peer ReviewSomehow the concept of transparency made its way into both my lunch and dinner conversations yesterday. It's a worn topic, really, usually focused on privacy concerns and reputation (for the individual) or business opportunity, competitive pressure, or again, reputation (for the enterprise). At dinner, though, with a good friend, we briefly touched on what's a rarely discussed downside to the transparency march: peer success comparison. Research indicates that happiness hinges to some extent on one's evaluation of status relative to one's friend group. Career guru Penelope Trunk moved from New York City to Madison, Wisconsin at least in part ...
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01.19.08Word Play: "Longevity Escape Velocity"I've heard famed inventor Ray Kurzweil give his "Acceleration of Innovation" talk twice now and each time he tickled the audience with a rather fantastic notion: live another 20 years or so, and you'll live forever. Recently, the concept has received some business press: first in Portfolio's "Never Say Die" (December 2007), then again in The Economist's "How to Live Forever" (January 3, 2008). According to Kurzweil, "Our lives will extend exponentially," assisted largely, perhaps, by advances in artificial intelligence. Essentially, he argues that the work of life extension scales. In the context of an individual life, each additional ...
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01.06.08Index Card Startup HumorIn the vein of napkin-drawn business plans, enjoy this index card argument for exercising your inner child, courtesy of Jessica Hagy: An analysis: Heaps of imagination at a startup yields heaps of money. Or is it heaps of imagination and heaps of money yield a startup? Presumably the latter, under the assumption that a dearth of imagination in the hands of a bore rarely equates to heaps of money. A tongue-in-cheek answer: It depends on investor sentiment. Or even bolder: It depends on your fund's vintage year (the bubble's fanciful imagination and heaps of money sometimes yielded a ...
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Welcome to Punctuative! Here you'll find occasionally insightful comments on entrepreneurship, venture capital, technology, and the future, as well as a nifty tool (coming soon) meant to help open doors in the financing world. Go ahead and explore.
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July 6, 2008“An article today in Sunday Business about missed opportunities to reduce America’s dependence on imported oil refers to a 1990 effort by Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, to block higher mileage requirements for vehicles and notes that Mr. Helms did not return calls seeking comment. The section went to press on Thursday, before Mr. Helms’s death Friday morning.” [from today’s NYTimes]
More and more, this kind of thing just feels like a mistake. How can text published on a Sunday be “sealed” on a Thursday? Consumption expectations have changed.
bluetooth baby monitor? oi. [via NYTimes]
June 17, 2008
bluetooth baby monitor? oi. [via NYTimes]"Stento believes the industry will yield better returns in the long run than buyout investments,..."
June 14, 2008“Stento believes the industry will yield better returns in the long run than buyout investments, despite the huge growth of the latter in recent years. “Relative to buyouts, I think of it as the tortoise and the hare. I think the [venture] returns from the 2001-2005 funds will beat buyout returns, but we may not know that for three to four years.””
- Greg Stento, HarbourVest Partners. VentureWire. Friday, June 13, 2008"A household with income under $13,000 spends, on average, $645 a year on lottery tickets, about 9..."
June 10, 2008“A household with income under $13,000 spends, on average, $645 a year on lottery tickets, about 9 percent of all income.”
- http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/opinion/10brooks.html"…the success of a Broadway show depends increasingly on the presence of bankable Hollywood..."
May 15, 2008“…the success of a Broadway show depends increasingly on the presence of bankable Hollywood names on the marquee, even for a nonprofit company like the Roundabout. “The reality is that stars sell single tickets,” Mr. Haimes said. “A third of our budget” — about $14 million a year — “comes from single ticket sales, and probably the most important aspect to single ticket sales is the name of the show and who’s in it. There is pressure, no doubt about it.””
- The British Actor Ben Daniels Seduces American Theatergoers as Valmont in ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ - New York TimesThe ride reminds me of the Italian art futurism movement (early...
May 11, 2008
The ride reminds me of the Italian art futurism movement (early part of the 20th century) and the rider, a 50s hipster. Cool asics. [via]
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