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11.13.07

Touch Typing on the Cell Phone Science and Tech | Comments
Cell phone touch typists have arrived and I'm happy for it. The observational moment was an odd one to begin with. Crammed into the last row of a propeller plane which operates school bus-style with a full aisle-eliminating back seat load (i.e. 5 seats and nothing behind us), I was already viewing the young lady to my right, sitting where the aisle should have been, with a degree of bemusement. She was reading The Scarlet Letter, mirroring the attention her seat and vantage point in the cabin afforded. Out comes the cell phone. Some thought has hit and she's ...
11.09.07

Creative Destruction in the Automotive Industry, Part II Entrepreneurship, Science and Tech | Comments
Quick follow up to an earlier post on the electric car movement: it turns out that the battery lease model has a second (intended) entrant. As reminder of the first: "Interestingly, ...upstart Think, out of Norway, aims to manufacture electric cars with a sales model geared to sell the car itself, but lease the battery, and sell services (such as WiFi) that utilize the car as platform. A definitively new model." On October 29, the Wall Street Journal covered former SAP executive Shai Agassi's unnamed startup for which he's raised $200 million to tackle electric car manufacturing. Like ...
11.08.07

Liquidity Via Fundraising Entrepreneurship, VC | Comments
Today's VentureWire includes an important piece by Russell Garland summarizing insights from the Dow Jones Venture Capital Deal Terms Report, a survey of startup financing terms from the July 2006 through June 2007 year. Interestingly, I noted in a September post that a certain number of bootstrapping entrepreneurs receive liquidity via fundraising. The Dow Jones report indicates that this happened in 16% of first round deals during the survey period: "The report also found that founders and prior investors usually did not sell shares to investors in the latest round, despite a longer wait for liquidity. But with ...
11.07.07

Private Equity Personalities and Algorithm Generated Judgement Entrepreneurship, VC | Comments
New media investor Alan Patricof on the late-stage component of private equity: It's a different kind of business now...These are spreadsheet people. [source] I'm drawn to the notion that late stage private equity personality types and modes of operation have shifted significantly in recent years. Are there implications for the early-stage side of the business? A primary change agent for late stage has been tremendous growth in the sector. Consider that a single prominent private equity firm, Blackstone, recently raised a $21.7 billion fund, fully 85% of last year's entire venture capital industry investment ($25.5 billion). The following charts non-venture private equity ...
11.02.07

"Flex Artsy" Word Play | Comments
Sometimes a turn of phrase knocks one over. Some clever piece of lingual reportage, it seeps in and starts making its way into one's conversations, spreading itself. I'm a frequent carrier. And on a recent trip through the link labyrinth, heading from pithy aphorisms at Prettier Than Napoleon to superficial indulgence at Things I've Bought That I Love, I was infected. Shoppers can really write. Go figure. Here's the delivery mechanism: About a year ago, Carolinehope, Jen and I were drinking coffee and discussing "Sherrybaby" at Buzz Coffee. We were super depressed. That is a depressing-ass movie. (Alas, it had been my ...
10.31.07

What’s Your Facebook Profile Value? Entrepreneurship, Media | Comments
In case you haven't heard, Microsoft recently invested $240 million into social networking all-star Facebook at a $15 billion valuation. Just to put things in perspective, that places Facebook as the fifth most valuable internet company, sitting squarely between Amazon at #4 and Interactive Corp (which runs Ask.com, Hotels.com, and a slew of other sites) at #6. Heady stuff for a company that's estimated to be at a $100-150 million revenue run rate. By point of comparison, Interactive Corp did $6.3 billion in revenue last year. On a much different business model with a much different growth profile. So we'll ...
10.30.07

The Marquis de Lau Phenomenon in Venture Capital Books, Entrepreneurship, Life, VC | Comments
There's a curiously engaging book called How Proust Can Change Your Life, written by Alain de Botton, that looks at Marcel Proust's life and works (novels) in the context of universal life lessons. Chapter 2, entitled "How to Read for Yourself," conveys the notion that Proust believed in novels as "a kind of optical instrument" (Proust's words) with which to examine one's own life. De Botton relates the story of Lucien Daudet who had occasion to visit an art gallery with Proust: Daudet tells us that they went into a gallery hung with a painting by Domenico Ghirlandaio. It ...
10.29.07

Career Discovery and LinkedIn Make Sense Entrepreneurship, Life, Media | Comments
There's a lot I like about career discovery startup Path 101's intended trajectory. As I wrote last week, the company is "tackling 3 million+ publicly posted resumes on the web (and any others the company can get its hands on) and working on organizing that information." Such work could hold exceptional value. As a stats junkie, I'll be personally interested in playing with the data, some albeit bizarre hint of which is offered to me every year by my alma mater. It's pretty intriguing stuff. Consider that the most lucrative major at Princeton last year turned out to be philosophy. ...
10.28.07

The Forgotten Form Entry E-Commerce, Media | Comments
I'm curious as to what's happening to certain of our online form entries. Most of them comprise of address, email, or other information that is plugging directly into a back-end database and either serve as query against or populate preset tables. These are permission-based entries which we, as consumers, thoughtfully offer and generally understand use. There's another set of entries, though, that's interesting as accident or "personal query." A couple specific examples: 1) The errant password entry - many of us now utilize multiple passwords for our online services and occasionally input one mismatched to the service we're accessing. In a worst ...
10.25.07

Boycotting "Entrepreneurialism" Entrepreneurship | Comments
Earlier this week I heaped praise on a La Quinta Inns & Suites ad campaign, and a kind reader pointed me to their ad agency, Mullen. So I fished around on the Mullen site to get a better sense of their excellent work and ran across the following: "You can measure Mullen by its numbers. But we believe you should also measure us by our culture. It begins with two words: collective entrepreneurialism." I sighed. There's something so antithetical to the startup mentality in the word "entrepreneurialism." It's lengthy, and ends in an awkward mess of vowels and ...

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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 meant to help open doors in the financing world. Go ahead and explore.