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That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place…And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

Clay Shirky, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

Since I read these lines from Clay Shirky’s brilliant piece on the decline of newspapers, I can’t seem to get them out of my head.

Recognizing destruction when it’s occurring takes a tougher emotional toll on us than an intellectual one.  We may be acutely aware of what’s happening, but we still cling to familiar institutions.  It’s a very natural human reaction.  But once we begin to loosen our emotional grip on the past, we can break free.

Understanding what is to come in the wake of a revolution is an entirely different story.  It is what venture capitalists attempt to do every day.  But in reality, while we may be right on certain trends we certainly cannot predict the future with any degree of accuracy.  We therefore bet on talented entrepreneurs going at big markets in the hope that *they* will figure it out.

Many markets are being completely upended today.  The combination of increasing broadband penetration and speeds, rapidly declining personal computer costs, information and services moving to the cloud and recessionary pressures on many high cost traditional businesses has created the perfect storm.

But what will come in it’s stead?  What businesses will be built?  What models will be employed?

These are the questions being asked across a number of media and advertising markets today – the music business, the publishing business, the classified advertising business, the yellow pages business, the banner advertising business, the video business and the list goes on.

We have to change the way we think.  We have to ignore old models and old cost structures.  Forget the labels.  Forget the printing presses.  Forget the banner ad.

We have to start by asking what does the consumer or customer *really* want?  How can we deliver it to them as efficiently and effectively as possible?  What is the least it can cost us to deliver?  What can we fairly charge for it?

Let’s take the classified ad business as an example.  While the largely free craigslist has gone a long way towards annihilating a good portion of that market, does that mean there will be no value created in the future servicing local businesses looking to acquire consumers?

Certainly not.  But with our limited current view, we often fail to see the possibilities or even what’s happening right under our nose.

First of all, old school classified categories such as recruiting, autos and personals have all seen hugely profitable businesses built on the web (e.g. Monster, Autotrader, Match).  Now these businesses, or at least their current models, are themselves likely to be upended by better, more efficient models over time.  But new ones will certainly be built in their stead to service the same needs but with very different business and economic models.

Secondly, while craigslist is incredible at inventory and demand aggregation, it has other holes in its offering for local merchants.  Social marketing and payments solutions are just two examples where innovation has barely scratched the surface.

I continue to be intrigued by vertical content and marketplace businesses starting anew in the wake of the creative destruction we’re experiencing.  The businesses of tomorrow are being created today.  Keep ‘em coming!

I’d like to take a moment to gloat about Spark’s portfolio company Boxee.

A couple days ago Boxee held a Meetup in NYC that drew a crowd of over 600 people.  That is a truly remarkable feat for a company this early in its life cycle, or any company for that matter.

wrote a great post yesterday highlighting the strength of Boxee’s innovative product.  I want to focus on one thing the Boxee team is doing that I believe is the most important driver of their early success…and will hopefully be the ultimate driver of their long-term success.

Boxee’s excellent CEO is fanatically focused on providing the consumer with the best possible experience.  The team builds product with the customer need firmly in mind, solicits endless feedback and continues iterating in an unyielding attempt to deliver the customer what he wants.

This is the unmistakable mark of a great consumer company in the making.  Think as the best example.  Or what the folks at Zappos are building.  These companies engender goodwill beyond the products or services they sell.  Consumers root for them; They want to see them win.

Even during these earliest days, one can start to see the percolation of this same dynamic with Boxee.  As the NYTimes noted yesterday:

Avner Ronen, the 33-year-old founder and chief executive of Boxee, attributed its popularity to the company’s honesty and openness with its fan base. “We have been very open with our users, even about the bad stuff,” he said.

To be clear, this is not to say that a company shouldn’t have strong convictions as to what they want their product to be.  Jeff Bezos certainly exhibits incredible vision and clarity of purpose, and to a very skeptical crowd in the early days.  But it is to say that companies should always put the customer first in everything they do – listen to them, early and often.  This way they’ll love your triumphs, and more importantly they’ll tolerate your shortcomings and mistakes.

Boxee is certainly fighting a tough fight in the complex media landscape, but if they keep giving the customer what they want, they’ll do just fine.

Email from :

OK, hear me out…

Twitter for dogs.

Let me know about pre-money valuations and we can get started.

Gotta love those CollegeHumor kids!

Today the Spark Capital team announces a new seed program, .

Having helped incubate a number of start-ups in the past, I am personally very excited for this new initiative.  There is no greater challenge or bigger thrill than trying to build something from nothing.  We at Spark look forward to supporting entrepreneurs at the earliest stages of ideation and innovation.

It is also fundamentally important that we do our part to help bring this great country out of its current financial and economic malaise.  It is our time to rebuild.  And hopefully Start@Spark can do its small part to contribute to that rebuilding.

As said eloquently in this am:

So, this must be a terrible time to fund a start-up company. Correct? Au contraire. This may be the best time in the last 8 years to start a company. While capital is scarce, the tectonic plates continue to shift creating major rifts. The walls are coming down and the barriers to entering new markets are falling along-side.

Looking forward to hearing your ideas!

Firstly, I applaud Facebook for continuing to evolve their product in ways they think best serve consumers’ *expressed* needs.  Secondly, I think they’ve done some very smart things and some less smart things with the redesign.

But mostly, my thoughts can be summed up in one simple phrase (which I think I am coining here??):

It’s really hard to turn an elephant into a horse.

That’s it for now.

The Sunday NYTimes ran a eulogy of sorts for Bear Stearns on this first anniversary of the bank’s collapse.  Five of my former colleagues shared their thoughts.  I thought I’d share some of mine.

I started at ‘The Bear’ the summer after my sophomore year of college.  I will never forget coming to work and seeing Ace Greenberg, the firm’s legendary Chairman, sitting out there on the trading floor every day in his patented bow-tie – just one of the guys.  It was immediately clear to me how qualitatively different the typical Bear employee was from the traditional Wall Street mold.  They were smart and scrappy; there was nothing fancy about them.  I felt very much at home.

When I joined the banking group the following summer, things heated up considerably.  I started working ridiculous hours, but was amazed at the opportunities afforded me as a young, inexperienced summer analyst.  I’ll never forget flying around the country on a roadshow with the SFX management team.  I was just a kid, and here I was!  The Bear meritocracy in full effect.

When it came to deciding which firm to join full time, I was set on going back to Bear even though I had offers at other “better” firms.  The unique culture suited me.  I felt I had a chance to be heard, to make an impact.

My analyst years at Bear were a remarkable training ground.  I met incredible people, a number of which I still count as some of my closest friends.  I was able to work on fantastically interesting deals with the biggest media companies in the world.  And most importantly, I learned to understand the value of hard work above all else.

We were the little guy in a sea of established big guys, and we had to work harder and be smarter to even get in the room.  That discipline was instilled in me at a very young age by my father, but it was actualized at Bear.  Every day, we put on our gear and went to battle.  And we did not like to lose.

Thank you Bear for all that you taught me, all the memories and all the wonderful friends.  You are greatly missed.

The re-launched Pitchfork.com is flat out excellent.  I’ve been a big fan of the site for years, but it took a quantum leap forward with the recent redesign.  The editorial sensibility is as sharp as ever, the layout is incredibly clean and easily navigable, the use of lists is a great way to synthesize content into smartly digestible bits and the ability to sample more music and videos was sorely needed.  All in all, it is an outstanding face-lift for what was already the gold standard in music editorial on the web.

The Pitchfork redesign and my friend ’ asking if Pitchfork had become ’the man’ got me thinking more broadly about the evolution of editorial filters.

Outside of expensive video production and serious investigative journalism, the barriers to content creation are largely non-existent today.  Content is flowing like water on the web.  As a result, ways to filter and curate that content are becoming ever more important for overstimulated consumers.

Technology has enabled new types of open, ‘pull’ filters previously impossible at any degree of scale in a closed, analog, 'push’ distribution world.  It’s always tough to appropriately categorize and label these things, as the specifics often fall into multiple buckets, but I generally think of two categories for these new curators: Platforms and Aggregators.

Platforms such as , (both Spark companies) and others easily enable me to get a constant flow of great suggestions from friends and other trusted voices.  Folks put stuff out, and I decide what I want to consume. Twitter has effectively replaced my news reader (more on that another day), and I get a ton of music on Tumblr from folks I follow like , , , Bijan, Fred and many others.

Aggregators such as Techmeme and The Hype Machine present information pulled from editorial sources across the web deemed most relevant to their respective audiences.  They are not purely user-driven platforms, but rather aggregate and curate largely through technology built to measure relevance.

Brands are all the way on the other end of the spectrum and are of course more traditional in their approach to content – they are fundamentally human created and edited offerings.  This is where the Pitchforks of the world reside.

Maintaining and certainly building brands with so much noise out there today is incredibly difficult.  And given the openness of the web, even great brands are reliant on these platforms and aggregators for distribution.  I get Pitchfork updates through Twitter; I read NYTimes content through Techmeme.

And that’s exactly what is so impressive about Pitchfork.  They stuck to their guns through the ups and downs and smartly built and grew a best-of-breed niche web brand from scratch – one that rises above the crowd, leveraging these new distribution points but making it worth spending some real time on the site itself.  For this they will be rewarded with a business that continues to generate revenue, albeit less than what Rolling Stone made in its hayday, but with a much lower cost structure and therefore a profitable, sustainable model.

So to Dan’s question, yes Pitchfork has become ‘the man.’  But I don’t think they sold out.  What they did instead is build arguably the best niche music editorial brand on the web.  How many others in the music business can say anything that positive?

Pitchfork is the new model for niche web media properties.  Well done.

The hoopla generated this week by the recent Skittles website redesign has been remarkable.  For all three of you that haven’t seen it, the Skittles.com homepage is now a daily rotation of various social media sites from to to Wikipedia today.

The Internet was all ‘atwitter’ about the move, generating buzz around the brand  in a way I’ve rarely seen it – positive or negative.  And the haters have certainly come out in full force.  I can’t even count the number of blog posts I’ve read decrying the Skittles stunt as stupid, inane, pathetic, silly – you get the idea.

And that is exactly the point.  What Skittles has pulled off is brilliant. Brands spend millions of dollars in a desperate struggle to generate buzz.  Skittles did it without spending a dime.

So I don’t care what anybody is saying about the quality or relevance of the campaign.  Skittles took a huge risk by opening their brand to the user community.  In return they did that elusive thing marketing is always trying to do: they got everyone talking.  And positive or negative, it just doesn’t matter.  Because in the end, the only thing folks will remember is the rainbow of fruit flavor.

I think I’m going to go out and buy a pack of Skittles.