Last night Andy and I hosted the first installment of VC Demo Days. Basically a classic rip on the traditional demo day, where this time the VCs pitched to about 250 entrepreneurs as to why you should take their money. Some interesting insights:
—True Ventures has partner meetings 2x weekly - entrepreneurs can’t wait a week and they take pride in speed and transparency.
—First Round Capital was founded on the premise of re-inventing the VC space and since they’ve launched have built great community and products through things like Key Hire Wire, CEO Emails, Secondround.com, and their recent Exchange Fund.
—Brian Hirsch and Greenhill are really funny. They took the best prezo award hands down. (note the pic above is from the video)
—Metamorphic loves high valuations - they are believers above and beyond everything else.
—IA has the best domain expertise to help you solve big data problems. If you’re an entrepreneur in this space they should be your first call.
So much more insight than I can put into this quick blog post but it was great to see everyone and we’re really excited to do this all again in a few months.
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Ways to be cool.
“Justice Scalia said he doesn’t care what people find out about him on the Internet,” said Fordham Professor Joel Reidenberg. So Reidenberg challenged his information privacy law class to cyber-stalk Scalia as a lesson in the transparency of personal information online. The students compiled a fifteen-page dossier on Justice Scalia, including his restaurant preferences, the value and location of his home, and photos of his grandchildren.” — Great article by Kashmir Hill on information privacy. Creepy but insightful.
Last night, we kicked off Tech Founders NYC at AOL Ventures (AOLV) and it was awesome. Josh from GoodCrush literally called it “the best thing to happen to the NYC tech scene ever!” In all seriousness, it was great to see the huge turnout of engineers and I can’t thank Francis and Jake enough for including me in helping bring it to life.
A quick aside - when I started at AOLV a few months ago I was really happy to be given a ton of freedom around bringing events to our offices to add value back to the NYC ecosystem and help get AOLV out there. After a few months, it’s become pretty clear to me that the biggest resource needs are out of the engineering/technical community. As a result and other than the current things that I’m helping out with, we’re likely to only host engineering/technical meetups going forward (it’s all I can handle).
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I met a great company today in the email space and couldn’t help but think to myself how much the larger web-mail properties could use some of the thinking and solid things that many of these emerging players are creating. Email, for the most part, still sucks and I’m amazed that the category hasn’t really evolved. Some things that I am seeing that are awesome right now in email:
1) Social CRM - Isn’t it crazy that I still don’t know who I have been out of touch with? Where is the pane that maps to my sent mail folder and tells me who I have not connected with in 30, 60, 90 days? Better yet, where is the form email that gets deployed (i.e. ‘hey, we should catch up’) based upon how far out our last point of contact was? While still early and just scratching the surface, I really like how businesses like Etacts, Gist and Rapportive are thinking through this.
2) Scheduling - Going back and forth with emails trying to schedule meetings is a nightmare. Unless you are in the walled garden it’s really tough to map schedules and get something on a shared calender. I like tungle.me and think you should too.
3) Task Management - Do you star emails? Do you put all your emails in a folder as follow ups or, better yet, keep them all in your inbox? Craziness. Likewise, I’m a big fan of sites like Basecamp but for simple tasks that are not complex projects I don’t really want to work through a separate environment. Producteev is a good solution that I am starting to use.
4) Organization - Things like confirmation emails really annoy me. I can’t do anything with them and they only really help me on the day of the trip (what’s that confirmation number again?). Tripit and others take a novel approach to that email and really help from an organization standpoint.
Other than these folks, I’d like to see some companies think more around the funnel of the inbox and what really needs to get to me directly. Email overload is not even funny anymore, and it’s not like we are all going to unsubscribe from everything tomorrow. Why can’t newsletters have a separate pane that refreshes every day? They don’t really need to hit my inbox and I rarely read them anyways. Why can’t someone parse transaction emails or email alerts effectively to take them out of my inbox and place them somewhere else (i.e. I don’t necessarily need the email telling me that I need to pay my AMEX- why can’t that automatically show up in a chat window, a calender invite, a calender alert or maybe be added as a task automatically)?
There is still a ways to go and this is hardly an exhaustive list, but I love how these and other folks are thinking through the problems within email.