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Leveraging Ideas

Ideation on social media, venture capital and startups

Emailing Important PeopleNovember 20

I wanted to share my thoughts on sending emails to potential investors, or more broadly, to anyone you deem ‘important.’

It’s my belief that email is poor medium to ‘launch’ a relationship. What I mean by this is not that you shouldn’t cold call or meet people via email – in fact, email is probably the standard and preferred method for being contacted (especially for a first correspondence). However my experience has been that nothing substitutes for meeting someone face-to-face; the tipping point for most relationships. Keeping this in mind, what’s the easiest way to get an in-person meeting with someone you’re dying to meet? The answer is using social leverage. Get intro’d through a friend. Knowing someone in common makes a HUGE difference with dates, investors, landlords, potential employers, etc. If you are truly unable to find a mutual connection, first realize you need to network more and second send only a short and concise email void of excessive flattery. The email should contain a) clear reason for the meeting (hopefully

Would Google Pay My SMS Bill?November 14

I was thinking this morning how much I’d like to have all my text messages forwarded into the cloud, storing these conversations and allowing me to search against them much like Gmail does with email messages.

It also got me thinking that if Google picked up my tab for SMS ($5/mth) I’d gladly allow them to do what they wanted with the data and/or serve me ads.

I’d imagine that the social graph information in text messages is extremely valuable, especially since text messages are often at the top of people’s hierarchy for communications importance and tend to be very much real-time.

Does anyone already have such a service? The only thing I found on a very quick pass was an iPhone app called TreasureMyText.

Additional Thoughts?

Is Advertising at the End of the Road?November 14

Assuming the economy comes back from the recession-depression thing that it’s in now, when it does, we will have completely moved on from advertising….

…No one needs advertising, and there are much better ways to sell products.

Remember that perfectly targeted advertising is just information…

-Dave Winer

Bank Failures: Blame the RepublicansNovember 8

Peter Thiel with some interesting insights on the root cause of the 2008 bank failures…

… Peter explained, he recognized that the leading investment banks were in much deeper trouble than their share prices reflected. How might a hedge fund profit from that insight? Betting against the entire sector would have been clumsy. What a fund would need to do, he decided, was bet against one bank at a time. But how could anyone predict the sequence in which the big investment banks would founder?

Peter mulled the problem. Then it came to him. “I realized that, the more Republican the institution,” he explained, “the sooner it would go down.”

Events unfolded just as Peter had predicted….

Why? Why did the most Republican banks suffer mortal wounds while the least Republican survived? “I have three explanations,” Peter told me. “I’m not sure which one is right, but I am sure at least one of them is.”

• A hostile federal bureaucracy. Despite a Republican in the White House, the bureaucrats who staffed the regulatory agencies, the Treasury and the Fed remain unfriendly to the GOP. Consciously or not, they proved unforgiving toward Bear, Lehman and Merrill but sympathetic toward Morgan and Goldman.
• An inability to accept reality. At the most Republican institutions, the principals believed in free markets–only too devoutly. Even Milton Fr

Interview with Mike Velotta of Lore SystemsNovember 7

I am happy to announce a new sponsor to LeveragingIdeas: Lore Systems

Lore is in the managed services space, providing hosting, consulting and infrastructure services to businesses of all sizes. I am super psyched to have Lore on board because I personally know the company and they are doing some really interesting stuff. I am hoping to do a number of interviews with Lore’s founder, Mike Velotta.

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Me: I know you are a tried and true entrepreneur. Can you give us the back-story on Lore?

Mike: Absolutely! Around 1994/1995 I was an engineer for Microsoft and we were starting to get creamed by Solaris, Oracle and Netscape who were all making servers, databases, etc.Microsoft was losing market share but had the foresight to know that a huge boom was coming. They came up with a strategy of creating spinoff businesses focused on Microsoft infrastructure (providing co-located and managed hosting for windows environments) but without pushing the Microsoft brand. It was an awesome opportunity…Microsoft was basically our VC and life was great.

Howe