The Ramblings of an Itinerant VentureBlogger

Hello VentureBlog readers. Are there still any of you out there? My hat is off to folks like Fred Wilson who blog religiously on a daily basis. While I post a thing or two daily to my personal Vox blog, that's usually a picture, a quote, a video. Fully formed sentences are a bonus on my Vox blog. But what it lacks in structure and depth, it makes up in cute pictures and video of my kids. Sure, my mom is willing to read VentureBlog and pretend she gives a crap about liquidation preference because I'm her son, but when it comes to cute pictures of her grandchildren, she'll check that blog with OCD consistency. My mom's desire for more info on her grandchildren, however, is no excuse for neglecting VentureBlog. And so I return to the hallowed pages of VentureBlog (I hope it is more hallowed than hollow).

Do you ever read a newspaper column and get annoyed when it is just a bunch of little snippets without any overriding theme or structure. Lazy, lazy, lazy. Well, for the sake of easing back into VentureBlog, this post is going to smack of those lazy columns. Sorry about that. I'll try to do better next time.

First things first, welcome to the New and Improved VentureBlog. Do not be confused by its near identical appearance to the old and not yet improved VentureBlog (particularly if you are reading this via my RSS feed :)). VentureBlog is now running on MT4. There's been a ton said out there about MT4 -- lots and lots of praise for its depth, simplicity and beautiful new UI. I second all of that (and not just because I'm an investor). It is a pleasure to use and the MT team deserves a pile of credit for continuing to raise the bar for blogging software.

Not surprising to most of you, I'm sure, I spent the beginning part of this week at the TechCrunch40 conference. While folks like Walt Mossberg, Kara Swisher, Chris Anderson, John Battelle, make it look easy, the conference business is anything but. It takes a pile of planning, a huge amount of leg work, some real personality and a fair bit of luck to make a new conference work. But Mike, Jason and Heather pulled it off in a big way. The TechCrunch40 had the necessary mix of startup energy, investors trolling the halls, journalists chasing down stories, and ice cream bars. So congratulations to them for a great conference. If you couldn't make it to the TechCrunch40 and want to get a feel for the energy in the halls, Craig and I recorded a VentureCast show there that I am sure Craig will be posting shortly.

While I was at the TC40 event, I bumped into Michael Copeland. Michael is a great guy and an equally great journalist. It saddened me to see "Fortune" on his name tag. I don't have any problem with Fortune. I like the magazine and I'm thrilled that Michael is writing for them now. But it was just a reminder of the terrible decision by Time Inc. to shut down Business 2.0. The crew at Business 2.0 worked hard to understand and articulate the underlying trends that continue to power this round of Internet innovation. They weren't content to simply write about the fads after they had been outed by the blogosphere. They dug in. I was lucky enough to attend a couple of the Business 2.0 gatherings of their "Next Net" companies. They were lively debates orchestrated by Erick Schonfeld and the rest of the Business 2.0 editorial team. It is a shame that there won't be any more of those gatherings. Maybe Michael can carry the tradition over to Fortune. [I wrote this post on a plane this morning and then read this evening that Erick Schonfeld has joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor with Arrington. That is fantastic news for TechCrunch -- Congratulations to Erick, Mike and Heather.]

As is par for the course, I didn't actually spend much time in the conference hall during the TechCrunch40. But during one interesting session in which Marc Andreessen and Dave Filo were explaining to Chad Hurley how they invented the Internet, I peaked in and saw Eric Savitz in the front row blogging away madly. Have I ever mentioned on VentureBlog how incredibly great Eric Savitz is? He really is. Unfortunately, because he writes for Barrons he blogs mostly about the public markets. Somehow he managed to even make posts about earnings calls entertaining. And when he is blogging at things like TechCrunch40, his stuff is just awesome. If you haven't read Eric's blog, go check it out now. It has been really impressive how quickly his blog has become one of the standard bearing tech blogs.

As a bookend to Shameless Self Promotion Month, I should mention that over the summer I funded a great company called Jaxtr. Jaxtr is what I like to think of as "social telephony." You can put a Jaxtr widget on your blog, social network, eBay listing, etc. and enable click to call. Jaxtr then establishes a virtual phone number for you that is local for the person calling -- if someone is calling you from India, they get a local India number, same in Europe or China or Iowa. And because the number is virtual and lives on top of a voip platform, you can then control the destination of those incoming calls. It can come to your cell phone, your home phone, Jaxtr voicemail, whatever you prefer. Better yet, you can determine the path of the call by individual. These features are just the beginning for Jaxtr, which will increasingly take advantage of voip and the social graph (oh crap, I swore I wouldn't use that term) to create more control, leverage, cost efficiency and fun for users. I'm thrilled to be involved with the company (along side many of the earliest Skype investors). Incidentally, I did get a fair number of comments and emails telling me that Shameless Self Promotion Month sucked and that I should cut it out. Fair enough. We now return to our ordinarily scheduled program of pontification and sarcasm.

I guess that's enough for now. Sorry for the rambling. It is good to be back.

Comments

[Deva Hazarika]

David,

If you have any problems w/ Jaxtr, drop me a line. I know lots of deep, dark secrets about Konstantin!!!

[Daniel Bull]

Your comments have inspired me to start blogging... Since the ventureblog fad is coming to an end and I am a band wagon destroyer who takes no prisoners... It seems like the right thing to do... I am already having fun at everyone else's expense...

This is the East coast entering the West coast dominated blogosphere...

Q.

How does someone get introduced to a VC company? Dodgeball is good... but is there more to it?

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Rambling can excel when all ten fingers are as fast or at least equal to the speed of ones own thoughts. Rambling is what allows us to make a natural connection with our life rather than the forced yoke of the tag. For where does an online tag often lead us other than deeper into a world we already know to collect pieces of knowledge that we do not know.

So tags make IMHO assist to us accumulate and collect and fill ourselves until we reach a point that we become an island of pure knowledge filled excellence. Who needs Google when are so filled, what wonderful party tricks we can accomplish when we can repeat for verbatim what it is we know - rather than question why it is that we need to know it. One day our ability to relate fully how Google can change the human mind will bring us to developing a 21st Century mind - until then we will remain principally Child of the 60's social theory or worse subservience to etiquette of an Age of Reason.

Rambling is the ship that takes one temporarily off that island. You and I know deep down inside that the world we actually exist in is rather small. Eventually the degree's of separation are slim inside the island and for all our talk of changing the world, if we are not the 3% that control the worlds financial resource, we can also be the 3% that control the information resource.

In an age where the conformity is twitter rambling is a refreshing shower that bathes that can channel the human spirit via the mind. In a world we are all busy either creating media channels or new ways of thinking and doing, the channel of humanity requires both a willingness to think and an ability to do. Rambling is as important to our discover as the ability to Twitter, as detailed art is to abstract or pointillism is to classical brush strokes.

I will finish up my Kwai Chang Caine walk here me finish my thinking here with what makes rambling most human and it is exactly that, that rambling is the nearest physical equivalent of our own thoughts but in in the Island we live in, it is also a professional death, if we cling to the safety of remaining branded dolls.

Of course those follow Biblical principles know of the adage "Say Little Do Much" - but online written rambling is not speech, it is as I have thought out aloud, it is thought. Video and Audio can turn thought into a sensory component that are mechanical but virtual eyes and ears, but rambling apart from being an affront to those who value reason, is what our minds do naturally.

The ability to see and hear has nothing to do with having physical eyes and ears or virtual video and audio, that ability comes down to both the quality of our human spirit and the true depth of our personal intelligence. It is not for me to say who is intelligent or who is not, but few people get away with rambling and that is because of what we are taught and how we are conditioned. To teach is to think and today the true prize goes to the life time learner, not the individual who delivers a lecture. Why would I even think of rambling to deliver a sermon, speech or a point of view - these are thoughts expressed through the filters of professional maturity, human pertinence and personal relevance - so if I cannot hear my own self think then how do I know I am learning?

I will pack up my bags and find a new destination, I found my brief time here constructive and creatively applied - and just like Kwai Chang Caine of the offline world I think much but in reality say very little. Rambling is simply an intelligence that harvests our own thoughts but also a stupidity when it is absent of any personal process. The intelligence in rambling is our ability to let our thoughts go and the freedom to think so we can improve ourselves as individual human beings, rather than simply tagging and being so tethered to social media to collect more thoughts and package them as more knowledge and therefore actually serve to create that much more virtual distance to where resides the accumulated density that shapes the Island of Technological Excellence.

M.

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