VentureBlog

The Lobby Conference

I spent this week in Hawaii at a conference I hosted called The Lobby. The idea behind The Lobby was to gather together a fantastic group of people with a shared interest in the future of media and facilitate a conversation among the participants. There were no speakers on stages, no panels addressing broad themes, no big name mucky-mucks invited to draw crowds, just a fantastically engaged and engaging group of subject-matter experts eager to connect and talk. Everyone who attended would have been those speakers, those panelists, those mucky-mucks at other conferences, but this conference wasn't about being the center of attention -- it was about participating. And man did everyone participate. From dawn to well-past dusk, the folks at The Lobby devoured the conversations. The energy was frenetic, a veritable Type A Power Plant. By the time I got on a plane to head home this morning I was literally spent. I suspect it will be weeks before I'm fully recharged. And I will take the next 12 months to follow up on everything I've learned, connect with everyone I've met, and prepare for next year's Lobby conference.

The Lobby would never have happened had it not been for the encouragement, expertise and friendship of the incredible Lia Lorenzano-Kennett. Lia is the high priestess of conference production. She was one of the first Producers of the Apple Developers Conference, ran Demo and Agenda, was the President of IDG Executive Forums, and worked with Walt and Kara to create the phenomenal All This Digital conference, of which she still is the Producer. When I first met with Lia to talk about my idea for The Lobby, she told me that she had always wondered what made a great conference -- was it the speakers or the audience? And she had always wondered what was the answer to the age old conference chicken and egg problem. Was a conference made great by the people who attended? Or did great people only attend great conferences? As The Lobby wound to a close this week, Lia turned to me and said "so now we know -- it's the chicken." And man were there some great chickens in attendance at The Lobby.

I would love to tell you more about The Lobby, but that's about all that I can say without breaching my own terms of the conference. The Lobby was from the very outset touted as an off the record conversation about the future of media. When attendees registered for the conference, they confirmed that they would not report on anything said by the other attendees. My theory was that if everyone felt comfortable that their discussions and conversations would not be reported beyond the confines of the event, people would speak more freely and we would all get a lot more out of it. I still believe that is true, although I am not certain how realistic it is to assume that in this day and age there is such a thing as off the record. It is too easy for information to be disseminated, either with attribution or anonymously. And what constitutes "off the record"? Is it still off the record if you report what was said at the event but don't attribute it to anyone in particular? Is it still off the record when you Twitter "having great conversations at The Lobby" or "Will sell bead clue for $100"? Is it still off the record when you post a public photo of the event to Flickr or Photobucket? What if that photo paints another attendee in a less than flattering light? Is it off the record if you simply report that you are attending The Lobby, even if you never mention more than the meals you had at the event? For what it is worth, my goal was to keep the content of the conversations off the record (attributed or otherwise, during sessions or at the bar, to a few or to thousands). My slogan for The Lobby was "the content is the conversation" -- off the record was about promoting open discussion, not creating a secret society. But it is a tough line to draw and I will continue to ponder these questions in anticipation of The Lobby 2. Until that time, I look forward to continuing to participate in the rapid evolution of digital media and hope that The Lobby has played some small role in that evolution.

Sick Blogging: Graphing Social Patterns and DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge

One of the good things about being home sick is that you have time to blog. So let me catch up on a couple of quick things.

Graphing Social Patterns Conference: The first one is that my friend Dave McClure has organized an interesting conference that is coming up called "Graphing Social Patterns: The Business and Technology of Facebook" The event is all about Facebook as a platform for other businesses and will have some great speakers like Tim O'Reilly and Reid Hoffman. The Facebook phenomenon is sweeping Silicon Valley and this is the first event to try to put it in some perspective. The conference is in San Jose from October 7th through 9th and you can REGISTER HERE to get a 25% discount on the conference (because VentureBlog isn't just about information, it is also all about value). Also, don't miss the VideoEgg conference called App Camp on how to build a real business on Facebook. VideoEgg have become The experts on rich media advertising and monetization of social media. Given that, App Camp will be a very interesting discussion of how to actually make money on Facebook. I have been saying for a long time that I believed social networking (or, the "social graph" in today's parlance) would become a core piece of infrastructure in all sorts of applications and the Facebook platform is the perfect extension of that observation -- now application providers can outsource the entire social networking infrastructure to Facebook and focus on the overlying application. It will be interesting to see how these applications and monetization continue to evolve.

DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge: The second random snippet of this fine sick day is Kara Swisher's quest for lunch with Jerry Yang. According to Kara, the Yahoo PR machine won't give her direct access to Jerry, so she is working on an end run to the problem. In support of the DonorsChoose blogger challenge, Yahoo has offered a lunch with Jerry for the blogger who gets the most donors to give money to schools through DonorChoose.org. Kara is hoping to earn that honor so that she can dine with Jerry and, no doubt, put it on video tape. The DonorsChoose blogger challenge is a fantastic way to help out worthy school projects. But since I'm late to the challenge, I may as well lend my support to Kara, who has chosen some great projects to fund. So if you are interested in contributing to some worthy causes, click HERE to get to Kara's DonorChoose page.

Hope you all are healthy. I strongly recommend getting flu shots. Trust me. Get the shots.

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.

Networking the Old Fashioned Way: Dodgeball

There are a lot of networking events in the Bay Area every day of the week. If you wanted to be a professional networker, this is undoubtedly the place to do it. But not all networking events are created equal. The massive gathering at a local bar may result in you rubbing shoulders with lots of like minded individuals but it will be loud and crowded and not particularly conducive to building real relationships. The nighttime panel on the startup topic of your choice is equally dubious when it comes to growing your professional network. While the conversation afterwards will require less shouting, it will probably be with other startup neophytes -- it is hard to attract seasoned professionals to take part in such events. The monthly trade organization gathering may well get you chatting with a number of similarly situated professionals, but it will do little to expand the breadth of contacts you have.

What is the solution to these networking woes? Dodgeball. After contemplating the profound networking opportunities on the dodgeball court, YouTube's Hunter Walk, Mint's Noah Kagan and I went about organizing the "First Annual Labor vs. Capital Dodgeball Tournament." And it was a big success. Lots of smart, fun entrepreneurs and venture capitalist came together to throw balls at each other's heads. And in between games of riotous ball-chucking fun, there were lots of opportunities to get to know each other. When folks headed back to work (or home) on Friday afternoon, there were lots of requests for the next Labor vs. Capital event on the circuit. We are still in planning mode but are contemplating Labor vs. Capital miniature golf, or Labor vs. Capital Paint Ball. Whatever it is that we choose, I think the result will be a pile of fun and some good clean networking on the side.

For those of you who didn't make it to the First Annual Labor vs. Capital Dodgeball Tournament, check out the latest installment of VentureCast. Craig and I recorded it at the dodgeball courts. You can even get the play by play of the finals of the tournament. It may well be our best remote VentureCast yet. And if audio from the dodgeball court isn't scintillating enough, check out the great video the folks at the Mercury News made.

It really was a pile of fun. I look forward to the next in the "Labor vs. Capital" series of networking events. Perhaps Labor vs. Capital curling.

Under the Radar

I've written a number of times about the Under the Radar program run by Dealmaker Media. I have always enjoyed the American Idol-like format of the event, particularly because I get to play Paula Abdul (although, according to Josh Kopelman, Paula may not be the model I'm looking for). The next addition of Under the Radar is taking place on June 28th at Microsoft in Mountain View. A new crop of startups looking to shape the future of entertainment and media will be facing off. And I'll be there to add my two cents. Among the startups presenting will be some interesting new gaming companies, including Bunchball, Hothead Games, Kongregate, as well as Sean Ryan's cool avatar company Meez, the most adopted third party Facebook application, iLike, and a bunch of other interesting companies. If anyone is interested in saving a hundred bucks on registration for Under the Radar, here's a link. Hope to see you there.

All Things Digital: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs

This year was the 5th addition of Walt Mossberg's and Kara Swisher's "All Things Digital" conference. I'm sure that it will come as no surprise to you that I have attended all five and intend to attend the next five as well. They say that first year conferences are a huge crap shoot because of the chicken and egg problem of attracting fantastic speakers and a fantastic audience -- you need one to get the other but can't get one without the other. By force of personality and reputation, Walt and Kara blew that away the first year by simply getting the most amazing speakers ever. The fabuloous audience quickly followed. But they created a problem for themselves.

The speakers at their first "D" were just too good: Gates, Jobs, Diller, Larry and Sergey, Meg Whitman, Terry Semel, Mark Cuban. I mean, give me a break. Year two: Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Carly Fiorina, Masa, Henning Kagermann. Year 3: Gates, Jobs, Mel Karmazin, McNealy, Zander, Diller, Jerry Yang and Dave Filo. Year 4: Gates, Al Gore, Howard Stringer, Terry Semel, Vinod Khosla, Bob Iger (Jobs couldn't make it and was sorely missed). So what were Walt and Kara going to do to make their 5th anniversary "D" a special one? They touted the answer on their homepage -- "Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to Make Historic Joint Appearance at D5."

Now I have to admit that, as much as I looked forward to seeing Gates and Jobs spar on stage, I thought that perhaps Walt and Kara had gone a bit too far calling the Gates/Jobs smackdown a "historic joint appearance." The cardinal rule of showmanship is to under-promise and over-deliver. It is hard to imagine that calling a chat "historic" could be viewed as under-promising, and harder still to imagine that after advertising a talk as "historic," one could possibly over-deliver. But I was wrong.

The "historic" joint appearance of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs wasn't just historic, it was, in fact, awe inspiring. I envisioned a half-hearted quarrel, punctuated by clever but cynical jabs at one another. What I got was a history lesson taught by the principal protagonists of the story. As I sat and listened to Gates and Jobs recount their 30 year journey to bring the best possible personal computers to the world, it struck me that no two living humans have had a bigger impact on my quality of life than they (case in point, I am typing this blog post on my MacBook on Microsoft Word).

It would be hard to replicate the energy and mood of the room with simple words. It may even be hard to replicate with video. Nonetheless, I strongly urge you to watch the videos of the conversation over at Kara and Walt's great new "news and opinion site" called AllThingsD.com. In the videos you will see a pair of mature, thoughtful moguls. Bill Gates was erudite, statesmanly, and utterly charming. Steve Jobs remained the consummate performer, yet managed a bit more humility than is his norm. They traded fours like an old married couple. And their recounting of the history of the personal computer industry had the cadence of an on-again off-again romance. In the end, Jobs had the turn of phrase that brought us to our feet -- a snipped right out of a love letter -- "There's that one line in the Beatles song, 'You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead,' and that's definitely true here."

Great conferences are all about great theater. And I have never seen better theater than Jobs and Gates on stage together, modestly recounting how they changed all of our lives, in incalculable ways, forever. Hats off to Walt and Kara for orchestrating this once in a lifetime event. When can I register for D6?

Calling All Powerful VCs (and a few weakling entrepreneurs)

In a typical breakfast with my friend Hunter Walk, we spent half the time talking about business (online video, startup finance, the advertising ecosystem, etc.) and half the time talking about nutty ideas that would be fun. One such idea is coming to fruition. We decided that it would be a great idea to have a VC vs. Entrepreneur dodgeball game. Hunter dubbed it Labor vs. Capital Dodgeball, enlisted the help of his friend Noah Kagan of OkDork fame, and we were off and running.

After some planning and a lot of effort designing the t-shirts, we are ready to rumble. We have a fantastic group of entrepreneurs and VCs signed up so far. But we still have a few slots left for the game. So if you are a Bay Area VC (or a VC visiting from out of town) who used to be a professional athlete or are an entrepreneur who used to a Dungeon Master, here's the scoop:

Labor vs. Capital Dodgeball
Friday, June 8th
Noon to 2 pm
Sky High Sports in Santa Clara

Register HERE!

Not only will there be some serious dodgeball playing and pizza eating, but Craig and I will also be podcast from the gathering, thus making it a major media event. And best of all, the pizza, t-shirts and dodgeball are courtesy of August Capital, ComVentures, Greylock Partners, and Mohr Davidow (many thanks to Baris Karadogan, David Sze, and David Feinleib for lending a helping Amex).

I'll be training hard over the weekend with my kids. See you all on the battle field.

Web 2.0 Expo and the TechCrunch20 Conference

I spent today at the Web 2.0 Expo and am just stunned at the scale and scope of the event. Let me make one observation to start -- the venue of an event really makes a difference. It sets the tone of the event and sets the stage for the sorts of interactions you are likely to have. So the mere fact that the Web 2.0 Expo is at the Moscone Center says a lot. There are conference center events (Expo, SXSW), there are big hotel events (Etech, Demo), there are fancy hotel events (D: All Things Digital), and there are theater events (TED, Poptech). Each one has a different feel. No one is inherently good or bad. It simply sets the expectations for the conference that is to follow. As you can imagine that there is a different vibe in a fancy hotel conference than in a conference center event.

I took part in a panel today called "Venture Capital 2.0: Bright Future or Broken Forever." It was moderated by Mike Arrington and included some good friends from the investment biz, including Josh Kopelman and Jeff Clavier. It was one of the larger audiences I've spoken in front of before -- I'm guessing there were as many as 800 people in the room. Crazy. Mike tried hard to get the traditional VCs (me included) to fight with the angel guys (Josh and Jeff). His thesis was that angel investors will ultimately get all of the returns because there is so little money required to build a big internet business these days. While it isn't an unreasonable assertion, I obviously disagree whole heartedly. As I've said before, while it is certainly the case that it takes less money for a web startup to demonstrate traction, I believe it still takes significant capital for a successful internet startup to scale. Nonetheless, the entertainment value was high (which was likely Mike's real intention). And we had a great time agreeing with each other and disagreeing with Mike.

Speaking of entertaining, Mike took some time out of our panel to shamelessly plug his new conference, the TechCruch20. The idea behind the conference is to gather some of the most interesting new startups and products, and have them critiqued by a group of smart, entertaining and often-times controversial tech experts. He's already lined up Marc Andreessen, Chris Anderson (Wired Magazine), Mark Cuban, Dave Winer, and, of course, himself and Jason Calacanis (with whom he is organizing the event). The TechCrunch20 is going to take place at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on September 17th and 18th. I have no doubt that it will be a really entertaining event and look forward to attending. If you're interested in attending as well, I strongly recommend you register sooner rather than later because the conference is already well on its way to sold out (here's a LINK to the official TechCrunch20 website).

Under The Radar: Office 2.0

I want to be an evangelist. That seems like a great job. Your job description goes something like "run around and talk about what great stuff you do." Sometimes you get to evangelize to big companies. Sometimes you get to evangelize to startups. And lots of the time, like me, you find yourself on the conference circuit, where there is critical mass of people to be evangelized.

Why this focus on evangelism? I was just looking at the list of panelists for the Under The Radar: Office 2.0 conference coming up next Friday and the first panelist listed is "Jeff Barr, Evangelist, Amazon Web Services." Jeff is a great guy -- needless to say, I've bumped into him at conferences. I similarly first got to know Robert Scoble on the conference circuit when he was still a tech evangelist and pontificating for a living. (But that's a big company thing. Now that he's at PodTech, he has to do some work for a living.) Perhaps the best known evangelist was Apple's Mac Evangelist, Guy Kawasaki. Now, best I can tell, Guy is an evangelist for Guy. But he's damn good at it.

In any event, if you are interested in meeting Jeff Barr and learning more about what's happening in the business services space, I would highly recommend attending Office 2.0. Great companies like Stikkit, Teqlo and Mashery will be presenting, as will some returning standouts like EchoSign and iUpload. Increasingly, independent web services are finding their way into small and large enterprises alike. This is clearly a trend that is going to accelerate over time. Office 2.0 is a great opportunity to hear three dozen companies talk about how they are attacking this space. If anyone is interested in attending, register HERE and save some money.

In the mean time, if anyone is looking for an evangelist, I've got the attending conferences part down.

VentureCast at DEMO (Now in MP3)

Craig and I spent a good chunk of last week at the DEMO Conference talking with all sort of folks about technology, startups, finance, you name it. One of the challenges of DEMO is that all the startups there are in pitch mode -- the have had their media training and are on message to a fault. But we did manage to have some fun conversations with folks that didn't only involve them pitching their companies. The DEMO version of VentureCast should be available soon.

And speaking of VentureCast, a number of people have asked us about an MP3 version of the show because they aren't iPod users (did you know that there were actually people out there who didn't use iPods?). Courtesy of GruntMedia (aka Craig), we now have AAC and MP3, or you can listen to the latest show on our very own VentureCast page. So much VentureCast. So little time. Happy listening.