Elmo, the world’s most beloved red monster, joined Facebook earlier today, posting one “fan photo” and one 10-second video. Within hours, more than a quarter of a million people had joined his fan page, 500 “liked” his short video greeting and more than 100 Facebook users -- from Brisbane, Australia to Pesaro, Italy -- expressed their love for the scratchy voiced Aquarius. The move owes to the recent appointment of Dan Lewis, appointed earlier this year as the director of new media communications at Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational group behind the 40-year-old show “Sesame Street.” Lewis is a Tufts alum who cofounded the online sports community ArmChairGM.com, then sold it to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales for
2 min read · 09 March 2010
Yesterday, I wrote up part of my recent interview with Chris Dixon, an active seed-stage investor and the CEO of Hunch, a year-old consumer Web application company that Dixon formed with Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake. Hunch is a giant recommendation engine that aims to help users make up their minds, be it about a camera or what favors to serve at a Palm Springs party. Right now, a registered user base of roughly 200,000 people contribute most of the questions; they also populate the answers, a la Wikipedia. (In fact, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales joined Hunch’s board of directors in December.) Hunch also relies heavily on proprietary algorithms that gets smarter over time, so that ideally, when someone arrives at Hunch with a question in mind, they’re served answers by users with similar preferences to their own. Dixon, 38, thinks Hunch can be as big a leader in search technology as Google and Amazon someday, once it gets over some initial kinks, like making it easier for people to find and understand the service. The second part of my interview with Dixon follows:
5 min read · 09 March 2010
Chris Dixon, 38, may be the ultimate founder’s founder. He’s running his second startup, Hunch, after selling his first company, SiteAdvisor, for $74 million dollars four years ago. He’s an active angel investor in nascent startups and co-founded the $40 million seed-stage fund, Founder Collective, last year. He’s a champion of the early-stage scene in New York, where he lives and works. And Dixon, who’s as connected as they come on both coasts, is a prolific blogger who writes in plain English about the challenges of entrepreneurship, technology and venture capital. I talked with Dixon this afternoon about how he juggles his life as an investor with that of running a company that aims to be as big as Google and Amazon some day -- once it works out some kinks. What follows is Dixon on investing. Tomorrow, I'll post our conversation about Hunch, which Dixon launched last year with Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake: Recently, there was a widely read post by a New York entrepreneur who argued persuasively that New York is still a tough place to launch a startup -- unless you’re “Chris Dixon or anyone else who's already built a successful company and had a real exit under their belt.” Do you agree? Disagree? I do think there should be more seed investors, which is partly why we formed Founder Collective last year, a fund that’s location agnostic but mainly focused on New York area startups. There’s no lack of money in New York; there are plenty of rich people. But there hasn’t been the kind of smart money, if you will, that understands how to help a company get to the next stage and raise VC after seed money. You’re starting to see more of that -- New York is improving -- but I’m not in radical disagreement with him.
5 min read · 08 March 2010
For the Financial Page in this week’s New Yorker magazine, columnist James Surowiecki concernedly explores the “lucrative loophole in the I.R.S. code” that taxes investors’ carried interest as capital gains rather than ordinary income. The “persistence” of the code “is most important not for what it says about Wall Street but what it says about Washington,” he writes. Those interested in its preservation can afford to lobby Congress, and in fact, Surowiecki posits, if you work in private equity, “it’s possible that nothing the government does matters more than keeping this tax break intact.”
2 min read · 08 March 2010
The San Francisco Chronicle today profiled Joanna Rees, the politically ambitious founder of VSP Capital, a San Francisco-based venture firm whose doors opened in late 1996. Rees began exploring a run for mayor early last year. She has since launched a website describing her accomplishments, held at least one meet-and-greet and according to the newspaper, spoken with “well-placed people to determine whether she’d have a shot” in the November 2011 election. The story, which isn't yet available online, describes Rees as a “venture capital star” who waged “a bruising battle to break into the cutthroat male-dominated world” of venture capital. “Rees finds herself in much the same position now,” reads the article. “Once again, she wants to break into a blood sport dominated by men where she has no experience. And once again, she’s shooting straight for the top.”
2 min read · 08 March 2010
4 min read · 05 March 2010
Steve Anderson has been a number of things in his 42 years: a Stanford MBA, a general manager at Starbucks Coffee, a product manager at eBay, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, a senior director at Microsoft. Right now, he’s one of the best angel investors in Silicon Valley. Anderson began investing a pool of individual investors’ money in 2006 under the name Baseline Ventures. Since then, he has provided seed funding to 40 companies, a stunning 8 of which have been acquired. This morning, DocVerse, whose software invites users to collaborate on Microsoft Office documents and that had raised just $1.3 million, was acquired by Google for a cool $25 million.
5 min read · 05 March 2010
FreshGuide, a new coupon site that presents visitors with one exclusive daily offer to which they must respond within a limited timeframe, has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Baseline Ventures, NBC Universal, Hatch Ventures and Ron Conway’s SV Angel fund. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company is something of a hybrid, combining the discounts of a coupon site like Retailmenot with the local business profiles of an email event guide like DailyCandy -- with a countdown clock worked into the mix.
2 min read · 04 March 2010
2 min read · 03 March 2010
Oh no you didn't, Topeka. According to the San Francisco Business Times, in a bid to lure Google and its ultrafast fiber-optic network to its fine city, Topeka, Kansas has renamed itself Google, Kansas for the month of March. According to the paper: William Bunten, Topeka’s mayor, signed a proclamation to that effect on Monday -- his signature was right below “Google, Kansas -- the capital city of fiber optics” but also beside the embossed seal that still reads “The capital city of Kansas: Topeka.” The story goes on to point out that Hot Springs, New Mexico, tried a similar stunt decades ago, changing its name to Truth or Consequences after the popular '50s radio quiz show. Unfortunately, in
1 min read · 02 March 2010
