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The Rolling Stone Of Our TimeJanuary 6

Josh Stylman sent out a tweet yesterday that I agree with:

The Hype Machine is the Rolling Stone of our time - defining, interpreting and pushing culture. http://bit.ly/xuJt

I don't want to belittle what Rolling Stone was in terms of defining and interpreting culture. It's impact was much greater than music. In fact, I think it's political work in the age of Hunter Thompson and Richard Nixon was among its finest moments. And I don't mean to insult Rolling Stone by writing this in the past tense, but honestly it stopped meaning anything to me about 25 years ago.

But in this day and age, when you want to know what's happening in the music scene, you log onto the Hype Machine and see what's going down. It's participatory culture at it's finest. The Hype Machine is not programmed, it's a smart aggregator, like Techmeme or Real Clear Politics. The Hype Machine goes out and crawls the music blogs and figures out what's getting blogged the most

Always Treat Money Like It Is Your OwnJanuary 5

This should sound pretty obvious, but it isn't. And I think a lot of people have been violating this rule, particularly on wall street and in big corporations and the economic mess we are in is at least partly because of this problem.

One of my favorite investors on wall street is a guy I've known for almost ten years who has been in and around the hedge fund business for more than twenty-five years. Whenever he talks about his business or the funds he is invested in, he always cites how much of his own money in in his fund and how much of the fund managers he invests with have in their funds. The numbers are impressive. Often 25-50% of the funds he invests in are comprised of the manager's own money. His business was affected in 2008 like everyone else, but I have a lot of confidence that he'll come out of this mess way ahead of most others.

In our business, we have put a significant amount of our own net worth into our funds. It's often difficult to have a lot of your net worth tied up in illiquid assets like venture capital funds, but when you are writing a check every time you make an investment, it has a way of clarifying the mind.

This is particularly important when you are facing the decision to support or walk away from an old and  difficult/troubled investment. Most of the time, these kinds of financings are highly dilutive and very punitive if you don't participate. It's really tempting to put more money in because if you don't, you'

Default To PublicJanuary 2

I've been reading a "pre-galley" of Jeff Jarvis' new book What Would Google Do?  It comes out on January 27th. It's a good read, perfect for a flight. It's not too dense, full of great quotes and insights. I'm enjoying it. One of my favorite take-aways from the book is the value of public interaction.

Early in the book, Jeff quotes Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, saying that early on they made an important decision when each photo uploaded to Flickr "defaulted to public". The ensuing interaction around the photos gave life to the service and helped it become what it is today.

But my favorite story on this topic from Jeff's book is about Mark Zuckerberg while he was still a student at Harvard. It goes like this:

At Davos, Mark told the story of an art class he took at Harvard. He was busy starting Facebook and didn't have time to attend the class or study. The final exam was a week away and he was worried about flunking. So he went to the Internet and downloaded images of all the art that he knew would be on the exam (not sure how he knew that - Jeff leaves that part out). He puts them all up on a web page and adds blank boxes under each of them. Then he emails the web page to all of his classmates and tells them he just put up a study guide. The class responds by marking up the page, e

Making Something From NothingJanuary 1

I spent some time yesterday at Musee De l'Orangerie with two of my teenage kids. Its an art museum in the Tuleries housing the art collection of Walter and Guillaume and Monet's famous Waterlilies paintings. That's a Modigliani painting of Paul Guillame from the l'Orangerie collection on the right.

As we walked through the lower level which houses the Walter-Guillaume collection, I was struck by how many amazing paintings are in this collection. Its a tour de force and easily worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more.

And yet every single one of these paintings started with a blank canvas and some paint. And of course the mind and hands of a master painter.

So much of what we come to value in life starts this way. Google started this way as did Microsoft and Facebook.

People ask me all the time w

Things I Wish For In The New YearDecember 31 2008

No predictions for me. I'm done with that thanks to Brad Feld.

And I am also done with resolutions. I resolved to get off of Microsoft products in 2007 and failed miserably.

But I am looking forward to 2009 on this new year's eve and so I am going to list some things I am hopeful for in 2009. These are in no particular order, they are listed as they came to me.

1) A gas tax - Tom Evslin made the case for a $1.50/gallon gas tax the other day and I totally agree with him. His proposal would be to immediately refund the gas tax in the form of a lower payroll tax so that it doesn't actually take money out of the economy and people's pockets. That's a really good idea. But one way or another we are going to have to make using carbon energy more expensive so that alternative forms of energy and conservation can take hold.

2) An iTouch - I blogged about the iTouch recently. It's funny because it's now the number one search term driving traffic from google to this blog (other than my name and the name of this blog). I don't want to get caught up in whether it can play music or not or