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November 2009

Nov 30, 20093 notes

J. Cole, Lights Please

Hip-hop fans, watch out for J. Cole…

Nov 30, 2009
#Music
Lying & Entrepreneurship

Jonah Lehrer wrote a very interesting piece recently entitled Lying & Creativity.  In it, he makes the profound point that learning to contain our inclination to confabulate, or lie, is fundamentally at odds with our urge to create.

Quoting Picasso, Lehrer writes:

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” From the perspective of the brain, Picasso is on to something, as the frontal lobes (and the DPLFC in particular) are the last brain areas to fully develop. And so the super-ego settles in, and we become too self-conscious to create. Obviously, we need the frontal lobes to function…but every talent comes with a trade-off. When we repress our urge to confabulate we also repress the urge to create.

In reading this, I was struck by how similar this idea is to something I’ve often observed in entrepreneurs.

Talented entrepreneurs seem to have a unique ability to put aside fear and convention and channel creativity and persistence with an almost reckless abandon.  Nothing will stand in their way.

So is this quality of entrepreneurship, or business creativity, unique to certain types of people?

For those of us out there contemplating taking the plunge yet having difficulty doing so, take comfort in Jonah’s claim that this is something we all have within us.  As he says about a patient in his piece:

Such confabulations tells us something important about the mind: spontaneous creativity - the ability to make up a story on demand - is a fundamental feature of human cognition. We’re all natural storytellers, weaving narratives out of the confusion. In other words, SB’s brain damage didn’t lead to some special new mental capacity, which the rest of us are missing. Instead, it released a latent creative capacity that we all have, if only we learned how to stop holding it back.

So if you’re out there cooking up an idea, but afraid to jump in with both feet, lie to yourself.  You may get something out more beautiful than you imagine.

Nov 29, 200914 notes
#Entrepreneurship
“During the hiatus, many advertisers, including sports-apparel maker Nike, still employed Mr. Woods and his image to sell products. But interest in the game fell. The average number of viewers who watched network broadcasts of eight golf tournaments without Mr. Woods dropped 47% compared with the previous year, according to Nielsen.”—

Woods Cancels Meeting With Police, Says Accident Was His Fault - WSJ.com

Wow!  TV viewership of golf dropped almost 50% with Tiger’s absence.  Talk about moving the needle.  Tiger has to be the highest impact athlete for his sport as any, ever.

Nov 29, 20093 notes
“My mother and he always celebrated Shabbat dinner on Friday night. And they always had lobster.”—

Op-Ed Columnist - The Wizards’ Wizard - NYTimes.com

RIP Abe Pollin.

Nov 29, 20092 notes

Animal Collective, What Would I Want? Sky

Giving the new EP a spin this weekend.

Nov 29, 20091 note
#Music

Hot Chip, Take It In

New Hot Chip.  Take it in!

Nov 28, 20096 notes
#Music

Beach House, Norway

The first single from their upcoming album.  A beautiful, autumnal track.

Nov 27, 20097 notes
#Music
Nov 26, 2009
Nov 26, 20092 notes

Thao with The Get Down Stay Down, Easy

Sad people dance too.

Nov 25, 2009
#Music
Nov 24, 200957 notes

Tom Waits, Trampled Rose (Dublin 8/1/08)

Some new live Tom Waits to get you warmed up for Thanksgiving.  Almost as good as a scotch.

Nov 24, 20094 notes
#Music

zachklein:

Girls - Hellhole Ratrace

My song of the weekend.

Nov 23, 200928 notes
#Music

Cut Copy, Hearts on Fire

Been feeling Cut Copy lately…

Nov 22, 20091 note
#Music
Nov 20, 2009

Ima Robot, Dynomite

Saw the amazing Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes show last night.  So today a little shout out to where it all began – Ima Robot.

Nov 18, 20092 notes
#Music

Vampire Weekend, Cousins

The new single.  Turn it up.

Nov 17, 200913 notes
#Music

bijan:

Come In Please - Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros

I can’t wait to see this show tomorrow night at the Bowery Ballroom

Ditto.

Nov 16, 200915 notes

Anya Marina, Whatever You Like (T.I. Cover)

I missed cover Friday (crazy week), but this should make up for it.  Hat tip to The Hype Machine once again.

Nov 14, 20097 notes
#Music
Nov 13, 20093 notes

Yeasayer, Ambling Alp

OK, so I’m officially on the Yeasayer tip.  Brooklyn, once again, FTW.

Nov 12, 20092 notes
#Music

Radiohead, I Might Be Wrong (Live)

Emblematic of my yesterday.  If only Tumblr had let me post it when I tried…

Nov 10, 20092 notes
#Music

Incredibly powerful imagery.

Nov 8, 2009

Missy Elliott, The Rain [Supa Dupa Fly]

Going old school with a little Missy today.

Nov 8, 200910 notes
#Music
“The Jay-Z/Sinatra link isn’t so far-fetched. Both grew up on the poor fringes of New York — Sinatra in Hoboken, Jay-Z in the Marcy projects in Brooklyn — and made A-number-one through mastery of craft, business smarts and exploitation of their own hyper-masculine poise. Theirs is the story of the bad boy made very, very good, who breezes stylishly through high society with an impossibly glamorous woman on his arm, yet never loses his street-smart edge.”—Jay-Z Boasts He’s the New Sinatra - NYTimes.com
Nov 7, 20092 notes

Vampire Weekend, Everywhere (Fleetwood Mac cover)

Simply beautiful.  Enjoy.

Nov 6, 20092 notes
#Music

Frank Sinatra, New York, New York

Obligatory.

Nov 5, 20096 notes
#Music
Staying The Course

There’s been a lot written lately about VC seed programs and some of the issues they present for entrepreneurs.  Most notably, Chris Dixon has written a number of excellent posts on the topic.  See here and here.

We’ve approached seed investing at Spark a bit differently, and we think it helps alleviate some of the concerns Chris and others have raised.

The basic premise of Start@Spark is that we want companies who ‘start’ at Spark to 'finish’ at Spark.

This first principle is the key driver of how we think about seed investing, and it has a number of very important implications for the firm as well as entrepreneurs:

1) We approach seed investments with the same level of scrutiny that we do all investments.

2) We take active roles in all the companies we seed.

3) We go into seed investments expecting to fund companies in subsequent rounds.

4) We are flexible in how we structure seed investments as well as subsequent rounds of financing to not disadvantage the entrepreneur.

This ultimately results in only a handful of seed investments to which we bring everything Spark has to bear.  While we may be giving up the option value of having many small seed investments from which to cherry pick, we in turn gain a much closer relationship with the companies that we do seed which goes a long way towards ensuring that they get subsequent financing.

So why do we do seed investments?  Fred Wilson wrote an excellent post recently on slow capital.  There are many benefits to taking a staged approach to investing.  It gives everyone a chance to learn, get to know each other better, understand business and capital needs more clearly, create a disciplined, milestone-based culture and generate results that help attract new investors.  And in the off-chance it becomes apparent that the business prospects are not what everyone hoped, reach the appropriate but difficult conclusions together.

There is also the macro reality that capital requirements for many web services businesses have come down precipitously.  It is important that venture firms adapt to this landscape and continue funding the best and the brightest at the earliest stages of development.

There are many advantages to taking seed money from a quality venture firm.  It just needs to be done right.

Nov 4, 200911 notes
#Venture Capital #Seed Investing #Spark Capital

John Legend, Save Room

Shout out to fellow Penn alum JL.  10 years, baby.

Nov 4, 2009
#Music

Nirvana, Lithium

New, live, Nirvana.  Still (and always) excellent.

Nov 3, 20091 note
#Music

Julian Casablancas, 11th Dimension

The new one from the Strokes front-man is a good one.  Eager for the album.

Nov 2, 20093 notes
#Music
The Myth of Free Classifieds

My friend Jeremy Philips wrote a great review for the WSJ recently of The Curse of the Mogul, a new book on the plight of the media industry by Jonathan Knee, Bruce Greenwald and Ava Seave.  I recently started reading the book, and it’s quite a good read.  But I want to focus here on one very insightful point Jeremy made in his piece:

For an example one need look no further than online classified advertising—which, the authors say, was the “first killer moneymaking application” on the Web. Leading online players around the world, charging fees, have withstood challenges from rivals offering listings free—suggesting significant competitive advantage. Craigslist, mythology aside, has been charging for job listings in its home market of San Francisco for more than a decade.

With all the (deserved) hoopla around the "free" craigslist and its tremendous success, it’s important to remember that craigslist actually charges for key categories (e.g. jobs, real estate) in big markets (e.g. SF, NY).  Not only is this where they make their money, but its also how they make the site useful.  Without separating the wheat from the chaff in these key markets, the service would likely be overrun by spam and unusable for consumers.

This reality is consistent across all classified category leaders on the web. Leaders in Jobs (Monster, CareerBuilder), Personals (Match), Autos (AutoTrader), Real Estate (HomeAway) all have paid listings model that drive their business.

There are current attempts to buck this model, most notably Zillow in real estate and OLX in international markets.

Early on in the life cycle of a business such as Zillow, having a free platform is key to amassing listings and eyeballs.  I’m very curious to see how their model evolves over time though, as they continue to drive audience and scale of listings.

OLX doesn’t suffer from some of these issues in their smaller markets with low supply volume.  And it is my understanding that they are moving towards a paid listings model for exposure in key scale markets.

The only solution to this problem as I see it is a technical one that can separate the relevant listings from the noise for each unique end consumer.  This is seemingly a very challenging data normalization and search/algorithmic (or potentially social data/behavioral) problem that I haven’t seen a great solution to yet.  If you are out there cooking one up though, I’d love to hear about it…

Nov 1, 20092 notes
#Internet #Classifieds #Paid
Email AutoReply of the Year (thus far)

I received the following response to an email I sent today:

I am offline until mid December and will respond when I return.  If this is an urgent matter, please contact my assistant…

Jealousy is an understatement.

Nov 1, 20091 note

Drop The Lime, Devil’s Eyes (Luca’s B-Live Club Mix)

Continuing the electronic theme this Halloween weekend.  Trending hard on The Hype Machine right now.

Nov 1, 2009
#Music
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