John Furrier

iTunes impact on traffic

See the impact of the iTunes integration.  Since being featured on the front page my show has been climbing.    On July 20th iTunes featured PodTech.net InfoTalk.  Feedback has been great. Thanks to my guests and friends for making it happen.

Catch a Rising Podcaster - Thanks Denise Howell

AO Summit was great.  There I got to hang with some of the insiders one of them Denise Howell was great and we did a podcast.  It was great.  It will be up on PodTech.net as I get the backlog out some time next week.

Denise had a nice post on me and PodTech.net - Thanks Denise.  See you at BlogHer

http://bgbg.blogspot.com/2005/07/catch-rising-podcaster.html

Scott Berkun Podcast up - Microsoft Lessons Learned in Project Management

Podcast up from Scott Berkun author of the Art of Project Management.

http://www.podtech.net/?p=78

Retired Microsoft early employee and executive project manager Scott Berkun on the Art of Project Management his new book published by O'Reilly.  I've read many books on business and this book is a must read for anyone in business school not just for project management but doing any new venture.  This book is a great resource for entrepreneurs, managers at innovative technology companies, or anyone managing projects.   This is the first of three segments.

What's very relevant about Scott and his book is that Scott was part of the historic team that took Microsoft from a super competitive company to a company that crushed it's competition.  This includes introducing new products and managing projects at a record pace which led to the utter distruction of Netscape in a matter of months.   I met Scott when he was part of the Internet Explorer 3 team - he knows what he's talking about.  Every MBA or business person should buy this book.  Jack Welch would have be proud of you Scott. 

I first met Scott Berkun in September of 1996.  Alot of folks don't know this but my brother and I pitched the Microsoft Internet Explorer team on the concept of autosearch first paid search engine.  It's a great story that I'll tell someday.  At the end of the day I was at the losing end of a three horse race (Goto.com, RealNames, Labrador).  oh those glory web 1.0 days

PodTech.net Podcasting Top 10 on PodTech - as of 7/23

PodTech.net has only been around for two months and the success has been overwhelming.  Thanks to all my guests - You are the content!

Special Thanks to Barracuda Networks and Michael Perone who really was a big personal and professional supporter of me.  THANKS Michael and Barracuda.  Barracuda is one of the primary reasons to do my show. 

Barracuda has the best product on the market and don't overcharge because they use open source technology and podcasting was a great way to get the word out. 

Here are the top ten podcasts on PodTech.net:

1.  Mark Cuban - Dallas Mavs, previous founder of Broadcast.com (sold to yahoo for 5b+)

2.  Dan'l Lewin - Microsoft, Cofounded Next with Steve Jobs

3.  Theresia Ranzetta - Accel Partners on Focused Media

4.  Charlene Li - Forrester Research on Blogs and Podcasting

5.  Mark Kvamme - Sequoia Capital

6.  John Markoff - NY Times

7.  John McDowall - Loyalty Labs

8.  John Patrick - Net Attitude and x-IBM

9.  Mark Fletcher (Bloglines) / Scott Johnson (Feedster)

10.  Keith Benjamin - Levenson Venture Partners

Caveat:  The latest podcast have the advantage of the prominent listing in iTunes so they got more visability to that audience. 

Mark Cuban Podcast and AO2005

Today I sat down with Mark Cuban at the AlwaysOn Innovation Summit to have a nice chat about things...what he's looking at, investment areas he's doing, the new consumer, and so much more..  The interview is at www.podtech.net

Tony Perkins is a Game Changer:  The Alwayson Summit is in my opinion is chaning the conference game...by making it open and free to the world (note: this is not conventional wisdom for conference planners) he has actually created a better conference.  It was the first time that I really saw a "new community" develop that actually contributed real time to the content of the conference...  For all that attended you know what I'm getting at... It was the chat screen that gave the speakers a dose of reality - it challenged the content.. and the big thing is that it produced value or "media production" as I call it.  It was awesome to see for the first time a virtual group changed the course and mood.  In talking to Tony he's going to harness it tomorrow have the the group do more by submitting in key questions. 

What Tony actually did was include more people in the conference, the overall attendees grow, the physical audience is happier, and the content and presentations are optimized.

Great stuff at AO2005

Podcasting Future

I fell off my chair twice laughing my ass off yesterday....The first time was when I read Frank Barnako's article on the "Death of Podcasting" - I knew it was non-fiction when he lead with two quotes Dave Winer, the authority on the technology and pioneer and guru, being portrayed like some high school tinkerer podcasting to please his family and then to make things funnier Frank positions Mark Cuban as an expert who's quote was a shot from the hip after a few beers after the Mavs just got bounced out of the playoffs ...  Great reporting Frank ... position the expert like a high school tinkerer and the tinkerer as the expert... (Those days of controlling the perception are over....the world has changed forever with blogs and now podcasting)

The second time I fell off my chair laughing was then reading Steve Gilmore's response to Frank's non-fiction.    Steve slams home his point down the line on Frank.  Steve 15-Love. Frank your serve.

I think it's BS that Indies will be a labor of love only... it's the mass crowd of Indies who will dominate and define the future... It reminds me of 1984.  Being a computer science guy from the 80s and I remember people saying that Indies of those days (software developers) would be insignificant to develop on this PC platform...

I think that you're looking through the wrong lens in your analysis of this trend.

www.podtech.net - PodTech.NETwork

Forrester's Charlene Li Podcast

Charlene Li is up on www.PodTech.net - Great InfoTalk

Topic:  Blogs and Podcasting Changing the Nature of How Companies Communicate.

Great interview with Charlene Li from Forrester on where the Blog and Podcasting trends are going.  I’m very impressed with the work that Charlene is doing and very impressed with her business model.  It’s just so simple & pragmatic that it’s perfect.   Charlene is putting the finishing touches on a upcoming report on “How marketers can use RSS”.

Sound Bites:
Blogs and Podcasting Changing the Nature of the Email Newsletter:  Does blogs and podcasting make the email newsletter obsolete?

Changes the nature of email newsletter.. hearing from mkter “I don’t want to give up my email newsletter in favor for RSS” but actually they (corporate marketers) can now shift the heavy lifting forcing into email newsltetter to RSS  - have email newsletters play on a different role … for example: instead of holding a product launch for another 2-3 weeks waiting for the next email blast …now with RSS marketers can put it up whenever you thinkg the right time – and get feedback and conversations back and forth very social and control goes back to marketing.

Forester using Blogs as Conversation Platform:
Forrester using blogs to use as an outlet to get ideas out there… Premium written research is great for “big ideas” and the blog is perfect for the little ideas.   It’s all about influence at Forrester.  Charlene has no problem giving out the little ideas and enjoys talking directly with the people via the blog and soon a podcast.   Ultimately it’s a mixed model.  Forester business model:  free information & research via blogs, industry events, ..etc and premium information & research via the paid subscriptions.

Big Prediction next five years:   RSS
RSS but it won’t be called RSS ..it is like calling the web http or IP protocols …underlying transport of data that gives user control and dictate which applications will be written …we (users) won’t have to wait for some app to be developed…  example: JotSpot work with wiki  -create an application on the fly that a user wants not waiting for some developer.  Dynamic consumption dictated and controlled by the user.

PodTech.net is on iTunes - Traffic surging

iTunes users subscribe to 1 million podcasts in two days, Apple reports

Podcats may be a relatively new phenomenon, but if Apple’s iTunes experience is a gauge, consumers are embracing the new form of delivering content. In just two days after the introduction last week of iTunes 4.9, which helps users manage their podcast subscriptions, iTunes customers subscribed to more than 1 million podcasts from the new iTunes Podcast Directory, Apple reports.

With the new release, iTunes users can find and subscribe to podcasts, a sort of radio program delivered in a digital format to subscribers one at a time. With iTunes 4.9 , every time there`s a new episode of a podcast, it`s automatically downloaded to their computers and auto-synced to their iPods. iTunes also allows users to manage multiple podcast subscriptions with simple organization and display by episode and date.

ITunes has done what possibly no one else could have accomplished, propelled podcasting into the mainstream.

Sequoia Capital Podcast with Mark Kvamme on Entrepreneurship

I did a great podcast at Vertical Leap conference with Mark Kvamme of Sequoia at www.PodTech.net

Here is the transcript of that Podcast

Mark Kvamme - Sequoia Capital at Vertical Leap Conference

John Furrier (JF): Welcome to the PodTech.net InfoTalk series.  I’m here with Mark Kvamme, with Sequoia Capital. 

Mark Kvamme (MK): Great!  Thanks for having me. 

JF: Welcome to the PodCast.  Sequoia Capital, obviously in

Silicon Valley

, is known as one of the premier venture capital firms.  It goes back to Don Valentine, who is obviously like the main man over there.

MK: One of the early guys of venture capital. 

JF: He’s like a god.  I’m young, so he probably doesn’t know who I am, but he did Cisco, he did Apple, LSI Logic.

MK: Oracle.

JF: He built up huge wealth and great companies.  You guys have done investments in Yahoo and Google.  I mean, Sequoia is a rocking VC company. 

MK: Well thank you for saying that.  I should say one thing.  It’s the entrepreneurs who do that, we just happen to be fortunate enough to work with some great, great people. 

JF: Well, some entrepreneurs like me would claim that your rocket fuel has a little bit of extra octane.

MK: I don’t know about that.  It’s about working with great people.  Great people with great ideas and it’s fun.  I have the best job on the planet.  Everyday I have guys coming in with new ideas and cool stuff, and on top of that there are young, they’re aggressive.  Just the other day we had two young entrepreneurs come in – they are 18 and 19 years old – and these guys…  We just say, we’ve got to go do this!  These guys are on to something.  So it’s just a blast.  It’s so refreshing.  It’s kind of funny, investing people that are the same age as my oldest son…  but other than that.

JF: It’s another generation.  I do a whole InfoTalk series with sort of the next generation about all kinds of changes, even with people in the VC community.  They say, “Hey, times are changing,” but in the end of the day it’s the same game.  You guys invest money into companies to build big businesses.  We’re here at the Vertical Leap Conference in

Santa Clara

that’s put on by Vertical Search.  Let’s first talk a little bit about Vertical Search.  You’re on the panel, you had mentioned that Sequoia had just done a big investment of $100,000.   There’s a big myth out there, well I’ve got to be ready to go to Sequoia.  Not true. 

MK: Not at all.  I would say in many cases, the best companies we’ve worked with are two guys in a garage that have just tinkered with an idea, and they just need a little bit of help.  Really at the end of the day, what we do is help entrepreneurs build companies.  In fact our tagline is “The entrepreneurs behind the entrepreneurs.”  If they need $100,000, or whatever, that’s the fuel.  If it’s $100,000, $500,000, $750,000, whatever the number happens to be….  What we want to do is find partners.  People that have the vision, have an idea of where they want to go, and basically our capitals, if you will, is what gets us into the game, if you will. 

JF: Well, I love investors who love entrepreneurs, and you guys obviously do that, but a lot of entrepreneurs are scared: “Well, am I ready to go there…  They’re going to eat me alive…  They’ll (VCs) will dilute me.. Well at the end of the day it has nothing to do with delution, if it’s an early stage deal.  It has to do with people, partnerships.  You guys have proven that you have done that.  Explain in your own words that whole myth about vulture capitalists.  The times are changing, the technologies are coming out now are exciting.  What is your philosophy and what would you tell those entrepreneurs out there?

MK: It’s funny, I just met a couple of entrepreneurs in the lobby and the fellow said, “Well, if I send you an email it’s just going to go into your junk mail box.”  And I said, “No, in fact we just recently funded a company that was a total cold call.”  There was this idea in the world that if I don’t get introduced by a venture capitalist by somebody they don’t know real well then the deal won’t get done.  Well, you know, if Don Chambers calls us up and says, “Hey, look at this,” then we’ll absolutely look at this.  But I’ve gotta tell you, you know, Joe Smith, and this company we funded – a company called InfoBlocks – One, it’s a total cold call, from Stew.  Just an email.  The guy’s in

Chicago

.  We don’t invest in

Chicago

.  Well, one of my partners, took a look at it and said, “Whoa, these guys are really on to something.”  He sat down with the entrepreneur and said, “We can do something.  Why don’t you come out to

California

?”  Sat in front of the whole partnership and we ended up moving the company over from

Chicago

and the thing is just rocking and rolling.

JF: Let’s talk about that.  You had mentioned “on to something.”  Let’s drill into that.  That’s what it’s all about.  It’s not about, “Well, I have this 20 page document, 20 page PowerPoint, conservative projections.”  At the end of the day entrepreneurs need to communicate to you about what they’re on to.  Cause that’s what’s going to get your radar, right?

MK: Right.  Well, I gotta tell you…  Maybe I shouldn’t admit to this, my partners might be listening to this –

JF: They will be.

MK: You don’t really read the whole business plan.  Because if you cannot describe what you do in two declarative sentences, you don’t know what you’re doing.  In fact, if you can do it in one declarative sentence.  Take Google, for example.  Larry Page said that Internet is about finding people, places, and things, and we do it better than anyone else.  Two declarative sentences.  That’s pretty good.  Yahoo’s the same thing.  Cisco: “We network networks.”  I got it. 

JF: It’s a bumper sticker that summarizes their entire execution roadmap, and technology vision and value to customers. 

MK: Exactly.  And what we have found many times – a company I saw today… I’m going through the deck and they guy’s explaining the business really, really well, and we come to the mission statement and the guy says – I actually had to stop the guy and say, “I get it, let’s move forward.”  Because –

JF: Stop there.  The rest is just assumptions, and vagueness…

MK: Exactly, and everyone can do their spreadsheet magic.  It’s amazing how every company gets to about $100 million dollars in five years.  It always happens that way.  The key thing is the guy that’s got the spark.  It could be an 18-year old, it could be someone –

JF: Well, to be fair, I listened to your panel and you said that some deals aren’t going to get venture backed because…  entrepreneurs will put $100 million in there.  But the secret is, you said, is to be on to something, and then extrapolating the possibility that this could be $100 million, not some fake, jammed in spreadsheet that says $100 million because you want to see it.  It’s about convincing you. 

MK: Well what we’ve got to do is, we’ve got to see that there is a market that will emerge.  And kind of the rule of thumb – and whenever you do a rule if thumb it’s kind of dangerous, right? – but the rule of thumb is that it’s got to be a $400 or $500 million dollar market, because it’s going to be very difficult for anyone company to get more that 20-25% market share.  So if you can feel that it can go that way…  And another thing - I’ve got to tell you.  The world’s best companies are hyper frugal.  For example, Yahoo was done on $750,000 dollars.  I mean, our investment on Cisco was $3 million and from what I understand they almost touched none of it, because they were selling product.  What are the other names… Oracle.  I mean, here’s Google that’s built a multi-million dollar company and they didn’t use much of their venture capital. I mean, they used millions of dollars but it wasn’t that much.  So frugality is something that’s so important.  Really understanding.  And the entrepreneur needs to understand that every dollar they save is a dollar they don’t have to raise in the future. 

JF: So there’s a term that I’ve been bantering around, and I’ll just come out first time publicly and say it: seed execution.  The role of entrepreneurship and venture capital is kind of changing.  With the internet as the standard platform, you were mentioning in there that, with this Web 2.0, you don’t need  $3 million dollars to do a prototype there’s no technology tax anymore to go out Oracle, buy the Sun Servers, and then, is there some traction there?  If there’s traction you’ll know it right a way.  So, in the end of the day entrepreneurs really need to have that seed execution.  Do you see that in your investments?

MK: Absolutely.  A company I just invested in is a company called Motorsport.com.  This guy wants to be the destination to buy power sports equipment, so he’s starting first in the motorcycle business.  A guy named Bill Butcher.  So he starts the business up in the state of

Washington

with $40,000, okay?  He’s growing at over 100% a year, he’ll do a $30 million grow rate, growing very aggressively, he did the whole thing on $40,000!  We recently made an investment in a company called Zappos.  It’s a multi-hundred-million dollar company where their first investment was maybe $100, $200 million bucks. 

JF: It’s about tricking the business model.  It’s like tricking that business model.  I’ve got it, it clicks. 

MK: One of my partners, Mike Moritz, says it’s like we’re looking for the matches that start the forest fire.  It’s a single match.  Anytime you have to pour gasoline on something to start the fire, you’ve got a problem.  That’s why in the late 90s, early 2000s the gas was called cash, and we were just pouring as much cash down that pipe as possible, but you know, it doesn’t really happen.  You’ve really got to make it start from the ground up. 

JF: You really can’t manufacture that.  You’ve really got to let natural causes and effects take advantage of that. 

MK: Exactly. 

JF: Let’s talk about venture capital for a minute.  I imagine that Sequoia Capital has had billion dollar funds.

MK: Actually no, we never did.  Our largest fund was just under $700 million.

JF: But aren’t you guys getting smaller?

MK: We are.  Our last fund was under $400 million.

JF: What does that mean for entrepreneurs? 

MK: What that means is –

JF: Less money, or more opportunities?

MK: No, no, no, no, no.  What it does is…  People thought venture capital was an asset class and all of a sudden all of this money was pouring into the venture capital business.  If you really look into the venture capital industry, it’s a cottage industry, and if you take the top kind of… funds, they’ve done very, very well.  One of the things we like to say is that we’re only as good as our next investment.  Yeah, we’ve been very fortunate to be investors in Oracle, and Apple, and Cisco, and Yahoo and Google and so on and so forth, but we’re only as good as our next one, so we’ve go to be very, very focused on that.

JF: You’ve got to use the return.  You’re the investor.

MK: Exactly, exactly.  Every single one of our investors, you know, they’re very happy in Sequoia 8, that it was a successful fund, they are very happy to be in Sequoia 7, or whatever it happens to be.  We’re investing in Sequoia 11 right now, and those are the investors we have to pay attention to.

JF: And aren’t your entrepreneurs, I mean, some of them don’t get it, but at the end of the day, you’re a financial partner.  You have the same goals – liquidity. 

MK: Well, yeah, I mean, but here’s a very interesting point.  We’ll use Google since it’s everyone’s lexicon right now, Google could have gone public many years ago.  They had the revenue, they had the growth rate, they had everything.  But they didn’t because they wanted to build a great company.  We don’t look at what’s our liquidity event, is it a flip, is it a, whatever, is it going to go public, is it going to be bought, whatever.  We don’t look at that.  We look at if can it build a world-class company.  And if we can build a world-class company then things will take care of themselves.  Second, in today’s kind of wacky world …it’s actually kind of better to stay private much, much longer.  So I would say, our predisposition, if you will, is wait.  Let’s make sure we have a world-class company that can really perform in the public markets before we take the thing public.  We don’t need to take the thing public just for a quote on quote liquidity event.  We’ve been very fortunate enough to have our returns over the years to do the right thing for the private company.

JF: The nice thing about private companies, too, is that you can really pivot in scale faster once you innovate the business model.  Google is a great example.  They were one of the classic, great search engines of time, but they were, you know, in the post-dot-com they really mopped up the ad business.  I mean, they pivoted on that. 

MK: Exactly.  And a lot of people, you know, 2002, 2003, a lot of people would go, “How does Google make money?  Are they making any money?”  Well, they were doing pretty well.  It was actually good to keep that quiet.  One of the things we talk about a lot is start up companies really only have two advantages over the large companies: speed and stealth.  And so, if you can go faster, and you can keep it quiet, and continue that growth rate, it’s even better.  And in that case, there are many investments we don’t even announce that Sequoia’s an investor, because if Sequoia’s an investor then it takes of the stealth, it makes it more known in the community. 

JF: You get on the radar, because Sequoia’s got a great name.  It wakes up the sleeping giant, if you will. 

MK: Know with things like Google Alerts, well, if you put in Sequoia Capital on Google alerts then every time something comes up about Sequoia, people are going to know about it, right?  So what we do is say, guys, It’s very important for us to stay very quiet.  Let’s just grow this thing the right way, and it’s not necessarily the thing  -

JF: Yeah, you guys don’t need PR.  I saw the thing – I spoke to Greg Macaddo over there about doing a PodCast and he was like, well, we don’t really promote ourselves, cause you guys have a great name.  You don’t need promotion.  You don’t have to say we did an investment in this company for the sake of promoting it, right?

MK: No, but what we do is, it’s very important to us to have these entrepreneurs come to us with their ideas.  So, we don’t want, we want people to know we make $100,000 investments.  We want people to know we will invest in an 18 and 19 year old.  We want people to know we’ll invest in things that people thing, “Ahh, it’s not completely baked yet.  I’m not quite sure.”  We want people to understand that.  We’re actually in a very enviable position because we’re seeing a lot of stuff.  It’s like many people said no to Cisco before they walked into our doors because we were actually investors in 3-Com, so we say what was happening in local area networks, and the fact that people were trying to connect local area networks, so when the Cisco people came in, the man and wife came in and said, “Hey, we’ve got this idea for networking networks.”  We say, “Whoa, that’s a huge market, we’ve got to be involved.”  So the entrepreneur doesn’t necessarily sometimes see the whole picture, so it’s very important to come in as early as you like.

JF: I mean, my philosophy is, starting this company, is I tell everyone what I’m working on because good ideas will fall on good ears, like Cisco fell on great ears.  They’re like, “Well, we’re in the LAN business, we don’t see this, what are you talking about, connecting clouds, what?  Networks with networks, what?”

MK: Exactly.  “What?” 

JF: “Why would someone want to do that?”  No one’s talking about that right now.

MK: That’s another thing – you’ve got to be careful.  We have these waves.  The one other interesting thing I’ve found doing this – I’ve been doing this for about six years – is that an entrepreneur will come in and have this idea that will blow your socks off, and I guarantee you that in the next two weeks we’ll see another company doing almost the same thing.  And we’ll see another company.  The ideas go in waves. It’s fascinating to see.  PodCasting is a great example – you just start seeing all of these PodCasting companies and PodCasting opportunities.

JF: I was at Gnomedex and I heard an entrepreneur, and I won’t say his name – he’s known in the industry, he’s done a couple of start ups – sketching on a piece of paper and he’s talking to a potential investor or partner, and he’s talking “Aggregation…  oh we’re going to do this…”  And I said two things just as I walk by.  And I won’t say what it was, but you get the idea.  And he says, “ Who told you about my idea?”  And I go, “I’ve been working on that for about a year.”  I mean, it’s true. 

MK: There’s nothing new under the sun at the end of the day. 

JF: I mean, everyone wants to aggregate the blog industry, the PodCasters.  “I’m the Aggregator!”  Yeah, everyone wants to be, but who’s going to be?  Well, Sequoia’s investing, that’s good news.  We’re approaching our segment limit, but Sequoia is here, in the trenches, they aren’t in the Ivory Tower, they actually read their emails, doing 100K deals, you’re in the trenches, they are at Vertical Leap looking at Vertical Search.  Mark, thanks for the PodCast!

MK: Thanks.  Well let me just give you two things.  My phone number: 650-854-3927.  And my email address: [email protected] and we’d love to hear your ideas – new ideas and new entrepreneurs. 

JF: Who said VC’s weren’t accessible? 

MK: We’re here.

JF: Thanks for the PodCast.

MK: Thanks very much.