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- JibJab’s 2008 Year in ReviewDecember 23 2008
- JibJab a risin’December 20 2008
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Congrats to Gregg and Evan and the JibJab team — the site just cracked the top 100 largest U.S. websites!
- It’ Been a Busy Downturn for PolarisDecember 18 2008
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As the year draws to a close my partners and I have been reflecting on the incredible events that will make 2008 one for the history books. Clearly the extraordinary market decline and the recession have brought fairly extreme challenges to pretty much everyone, and neither VCs nor the entrepreneurs we back have been immune. It has been a challenging year.
Without in any way minimizing the economic storm clouds all around us, we nonetheless saw lots of accomplishments across the portfolio during the year and want to make sure we steal away from all the ominous news and conversation for a minute to reflect on those accomplishments and the entrepreneurs who made them happen. In fact, it is in the face of downturns that the passion, determination and sacrifice of great entrepreneurs shines the brightest. And as we look back over 2008 it struck that we are incredibly fortunate to have our portfolio filled with so many great entrepreneurs who are as determined as ever and are figuring out how to weather the storm and build great businesses.
Just over the last 3 days I have spent substantial amounts of time with a handful of my Bay Area portfolio companies and entrepreneurs — from Automattic and Quantcast and LOLapps and Sprout and Black Arrow (Jason from Plinky is off to NYC for meetings so I didn’t see him) — and came away from each truly energized by what they are doing. Each of these teams certainly is mindful of the economic climate, but e
- Making Money off MicrobloggingDecember 17 2008
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A year and a half ago, just before SXSW, Matt Mullenweg told me that Twitter was going to be the hot new thing at the Conference, and urged me to check it out. So I did. I tried it for a couple days. Nobody else I knew or cared about seemed to be using it. So I declared it an example of digiterati navel gazing, and gave it up.
I began tweeting again about a week ago. It is a different story this time around. While I am thoroughly tired of Jason Calacanis’s hourly updates on his life, I am really enjoying keeping tabs on a number of folks ranging from other VCs to smart entrepreneurs/angel investors to some of my portfolio entrepreneurs. And, I sense doing so will help me stay on top of what is going on, and occasionally give me a chance to broadcast messages I want to get out there (I have yet to try it for portfolio recruiting but certainly plan to).
I am convinced that microblogging is here to stay, and that Twitter is on its way to becoming a platform of sorts.
More interesting to me than my personal use of Twitter is the broader question of how investors can make a great return out of the emergence of a microblogging platform. This morning I read that Twitter is hiring a product manager for monetization; and also that Stock Twits jus
- WordPress.com Hits 5 Million BlogsDecember 16 2008
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At last year’s Automattic Holiday dinner, somebody asked Matt Mullenweg how many blogs he thought would be up on WordPress.com (at the time there were 2 million) a year from then. Matt predicted 5 million.
Last night was a year later, and someone reminded Matt of his prediction. Eerily, WordPress.com saw its 5 millionth blog go up today. Scary.
