Above the Crowd

It is reassuring to see the press take a more modulated view of the swine-flu risks, especially as it becomes clear that both deaths and incidents have been overstated in the past week.  Our “instant on” media has an insatiable appetite for the scintillating story.  These days, you can actually sense the disappointment in the news anchor when a category four hurricane is downgraded to a category three.   Some people rationalize that this hysteria serves a noble purpose, in that it prepares us for the worse.  This, however, ignores the fact that there are tremendous real economic costs to overreaction, and that sometimes overreaction has far reaching negative impacts which can be many times greater than […]

Mr. Geithner: In the late 1990’s, in response to the obvious financial shenanigans of large companies like Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom, Washington handed us the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.  I have no idea how effective Sarbanes has been at reducing fraud (it obviously did not prevent our current economic malaise), but I do know one thing.  Sarbox created a significant burden and tax on small companies that desired to tap into America’s public capital markets, and one that could have long-lasting negative impact on the long-term success of startups and innovation in America.  It’s pretty simple, Sarbanes-Oxley can costs $2-3mm to implement, and also is a huge burden […]

“Little Joe never once gave it away Everybody had to pay and pay”                   — Lou Reed, Walk on the Wild Side The consensus seems to be that social networks have a monetization problem.  On this topic, both the leading technology industry blogs  and the world’s top news organizations  agree.  The problem is not that these sites have no revenue.   I “guesstimate” that MySpace and Facebook have annual revenue run-rates of approximately $650mm and $450mm respectively – highly reputable numbers.  The perceived problem relates directly to revenue per user or page view, as these are two of the most heavily trafficked sites on the […]

While it may seem hard to believe in such a dire hiring environment, one of our investments, LiveOps , has excess “demand” for workers. That’s right — excess demand for workers .  For those of you that don’t know, LiveOps is a very, very cool company.  Their core technology is a SAAS “contact center in cloud.” Just like anyone’s call center, it is a four-9’s operation that is highly resilient. What’s different, and very unique, is that the agents on the other end don’t actually work for LiveOps – they work for themselves. So far, over 20,000 “crowd-sourced” agents are now working from home on […]

Many companies and visionaries have pontificated about the future of video ads and different techniques for monetizing online videos.  A big part of this is driven by the fact that while YouTube is a huge user success, its a less proven monetization success.  On a recent trip to NYC, an idea came up which I can’t get out of my head, and the more I think about it, the more I believe that it is the Holy Grail for the future of online advertising.  But before I disclose the big “ah-ha,” a few caveats: 1) No one will ever monetize commodity content well.  If the same […]