John Furrier

D Word in Silicon Valley

Shall I dare say the D word - Depression! Ok I've said it.

I have lived in Silicon Valley now for five years moving from Boston in 1999. As an entrepreneur in high tech, I've said it before and it's time to say it again ...we are in a major depression. Yes I used the D word. If your in high tech in Silicon Valley then you're living in a modern day depression. Networking events for entrepreneurs are like soup kitchen lines.

According to an AP story today they agree.

According to the study, the losses were especially pronounced in San Francisco, which saw high-tech employment shrink by 49 percent between March 2001 and April 2004. Boston also suffered disproportionately, with the number of high-tech jobs falling by 34.1 percent.

In talking to close friends who have lived through good and bad cycles (also known as 'spins' in the VC community) they tell me there are great signs of recovery. Key to success is to survive the down cycle and take advantage of the upcycle.

Personally I think that we've seen the worse and signs of investment and innovation are coming back (except the telecom sector - that will be a slow recovery).

Alec's Surgery

Thank you for all the calls and emails regarding my son's recent surgery. Alec went into Lucile Packard Childrens Hospital Thursday 9/9 for a kidney related surgery. The procedure was successful and Alec is doing fine. The doctor expects a full recovery and possibly baseball and skateboarding by next week.

We've lived in the Boston area and now in Palo Alto and between Childrens Hospital and Lucile Packard you couldn't ask for a better place to be for a surgery. The doctors have been fantastic. Dr. Kennedy was amazing. Two words: He's good! Alec will be back to school next week.

Thank you goes out to Joe and Margy, Erica and Rich, Joe and Lisa, Julie and Ken, and our friends and family for their warm prayers. Of course Linda has been a 'rock' staying at the hospital overnight advocating and caring for Alec.

9/11 Never forget

I'll never forget that morning 2001. I got up early on the east coast to write an essay for the upcoming Agenda 02 conference
and my brother Joe IM'd me to tell me what happened. I immediatly turned on the TV. WOW have things changed.

Because of that dark day three years ago, I changed my career focus to broadband wireless rather than search. I felt a moral responsibility to help develop technology that might have prevented and hopefully prevent an event from happening again.

Three years ago I wrote:
How can it be that we live in an era where doomed passengers recognizing their fates were able to call family members once the planes were hijacked? The "real time" information that those heroes received on United Airlines flight 93 saved countless lives in Washington, D.C. The real irony, however, is that although people on that plane were able to say their last goodbyes, we don't have the software and interconnected systems to inform us that the plane had been off course for 30 minutes or more before crashing. Conversely, people in New York City couldn't use their mobile or office phones and had to rely on email and instant messaging.

Let's face it; we don't have a real-time interoperable software environment. Our Internet environment is reliable and "always on," yet we don't have the software advances and interconnected intelligence to make these systems work in real time. The prospects for real-time software technology today are light years behind the advances in global telecommunications and networking. We need secure standards in order to develop real-time interoperable computing.

What has changed from three years ago? Nothing much. We need to do more deployment of intelligent broadband infrastructure. Homeland security today is a joke. Wireless broadband is the key enabler to a safer country.

Open Source VC

My theory is called "Open Source VC"

Arun Natarajan posted a blog called “Sand Hill Road Gets Blogging. Arun asked me to elaborate on my comment that blogs will become a primary due diligence vehicle going forward.

My theory of this paradigm change is based upon a new model of information or deal flow that the Internet creates. VCs who take advantage of it will be winners.

To highlight my thinking one only has to read Coase's Penguin by Yochai Benkler. This open source VC theory follows Benkler's thinking. Blogging is a phenomenon. Tony Perkins at the recent AO Summit calls this site and it’s vision "open source media".

Blogging evolution is the idea that involves thousands or even tens of thousands of individuals contributing to large and small scale blogs, ideas, or projects, where the central organizing principle is that the access remains free and most of the constraints are on subject matter and personal credibility. No one "owns" the rights in the traditional sense of being able to command how it is used or developed, or to control its disposition. The result is the emergence of a vibrant, innovative and productive collaboration, whose participants (in most cases) are not organized in firms and do not choose their projects in response to traditional ways but instead converge on common interests.

As an example, I have two main areas of expertise where I’m developing patents and product ideas: search infrastructure and broadband wireless. I’ve met several folks here at AO who I’ve never met that I could reach out on matters related to broadband wireless. On other blogs you have Brad Feld in VC (among others) and John Battelle for search and online advertising. Here I have access and can contribute thoughts too and collaborate with these folks…10 years ago this type of access both personally and intellectually where not available without serious time invested networking.

This paradigm of new information access will (and is changing) the VC world. It’s soon to be an “Open Source VC” industry.