A belated thank you

When I started leading venture capital investments for Bessemer in 2003, I was scared out of my mind. I suspect a lot of young investors feel similarly. It's incredibly frightening to commit millions of dollars of other people's money to a young (typically loss-generating) startup. There's a good chance you'll never see that money again. It's nerve-racking. I learned to think of the concept of being a "fiduciary" in the following manner: it's actually a lot more painful to lose a bunch of someone else's money than it is to lose your own.

My response to the fear -- which, after nearly a decade in VC, hasn't subsided much at all -- was to start slowly and conservatively. My first investment was $50,000 in a two-person startup called Hypertag. The founders and I decided to shut it down 6 months later, and I got back about $35,000. I felt like crap, and in an effort to cheer me up, one of my partners jokingly told me to think about it as a 70% return. Two of my next investments were much larger but in later-stage companies: Gracenote and Gerson Lehrman Group. Those worked out well and helped to increase my confidence.

A couple of years later, I started to do some "traditional Series A" venture capital deals, which I define as 7-figure investments in companies that have raised no more than a few hundred thousand dollars and have little or no revenues. It's the scariest type of investment one can make because there's enormous risk combined with serious dollars at stake. Of course the tremendous upside justifies the risk, but it can easily take 4 or 5 years to know if a Series A investment was wise or foolish.

After seven and a half years making venture capital investments, I tasted my first Series A success a few weeks ago. The founders preferred not to disclose the news, so we kept it quiet, but somehow the sleuths at TechCrunch got the dirt and published it here.

I helped Fabrice Grinda get started with OLX in early 2006, and after he brought on co-founder Alec Oxenford, I led the Series A financing with General Catalyst's Joel Cutler later that fall. At $10 million, it was a very large first round of capital, and, like every other investment I have made, it was scary.

But Fabrice and Alec are a fantastic tag-team, and it was a pleasure to watch them in action over the last four years. It was also relatively low stress because the business metrics improved almost every single month since the day we invested. When the company's web sites surpassed 100,000,000 unique visitors in a single month earlier this year, I knew some large Internet leaders would soon come calling.

Despite it's $15 billion dollar market cap, I didn't know much about Naspers until recently. They're based in South Africa and have a uniquely global perspective that I've rarely seen in Internet management teams. Naspers proposed a strategic deal to OLX a few months ago that was too compelling to pass up.

It is with mixed feelings that I celebrate my first Series A success. On the one hand, it's nice to earn a profit and see validation of an early-stage conviction. On the other hand, we sold our stake in the company, so I no longer get to work with the talented founders and their star executive team nor will I get to benefit from the upside that lies ahead for OLX. I've become fond of Joel Cutler's comment that as investors, we were "invited guests." Together with the founders, we decided it was time for us to depart.

Now that the news is out, I submit a public statement of gratitude to Fabrice, Alec, Ariel, William, Mark and the many other key contributors. Thank you for all the fun and capital gains!

There's an App For That (on your TV)

Ever since the initial iPhone release in 2007, I assumed Apple would eventually extend its consumer device operating system to televisions. Benchmark's Bill Gurley predicted it here and even included a nice living room mockup.

To date, Apple has only delivered a mediocre tv attachment called Apple TV. Samsung, on the other hand, has delivered the real thing -- a television set on which you can load apps in much the same way you load them on your iPhone. To motivate developers to come up with some creative app ideas for its new line of TVs, Samsung is sponsoring a contest with $500,000 in prize money, and I'm delighted to serve as a judge alongside Mike Maples, Bob Borchers, Roelof Botha and Samsung's own Eric Anderson.

The winners will be announced at CES next January, and I hope to see some cool new concepts.

World's Greatest Cloud Service Provider

Along with several of my colleagues, I am particularly attracted to our cloud computing roadmap, and I spend a fair amount of time exploring related ideas and companies. It came as a bit of a surprise to find that the world's greatest cloud service provider was a virtual unknown just a week ago:




(Credit to my friends at Parallels for sharing this image with me.)

Spam is everywhere, not just in email

About five years ago, I focused on building highly valuable businesses on the back of user-generated content. I led my first related investment in 2005. It was in a San Francisco-based startup called Yelp. Over the following 18 months, I led three other Bessemer investments based on the same fundamental roadmap: Wikia, OLX and LinkedIn.

One nice thing about the roadmap approach to investing is that when you discover a compelling roadmap, follow it and identify talented entrepreneurs who share your conviction, you end up investing in some great companies. LinkedIn, Wikia and Yelp are each now among the top-100 ranked websites by Quantcast. It's a bit harder to measure the size of OLX because it’s largely used by consumers outside the USA across several domains (http://www.olx.com.br, http://www.olx.pt, http://www.olx.ru and many others), but it is probably the largest site in my portfolio and reached more than 100,000,000 unique visitors last month. As satisfying as the success these companies have had pleasing consumers is that that each has a proven, working business model. I wish all of my investment roadmaps were as productive as the one based on user-generated content.

But it's not all happiness in user-generated content land. There are lots of challenges with it, and perhaps at the top of the list is that you don't actually control your site's content. That leads to troublesome spam.

Spam at Wikia

Wikia is a giant collection of wikis that anyone can edit. I think it was about a month after we invested that one my colleagues rushed into my office to ask when I last visited Wikia's home page. Without hesitation, I pulled up the site and was greeted by a massive image of two naked adults exploring one of the more creative entries in the Kama Sutra. Sadly, it feels as though for every well-meaning Internet consumer, there's at least one evildoer. (The ratio is probably much better than 1:1, but the evildoers each seem to make the "contributions" of 10 or even 100 people, and so the "effective" ratio is probably much worse than 1:1.)

Spam at OLX

OLX provides free classified sites in almost 50 languages in 100 countries around the world. They now collect more than 100,000 new free postings every day. These posts advertise the likes of a used car for sale, an apartment for rent or a job opening. Incredibly, OLX's computer algorithms automatically tag 50% of those new postings as spam and delete them immediately. FIFTY percent! Even more incredible is that OLX tunes its algorithm to be extremely conservative: if it might not be spam, they don't delete it. Once the computers are done reviewing the content, a crack team of customer service agents in Buenos Aires manually reviews every remaining post. The human reviewers end up tagging half of what's left as spam too! That means for every useful post, there are three pieces of spam. Left unchecked, the spammers would completely destroy the utility of OLX because you'd have to wade through gobs of crap to find real posts.

Spam at Yelp
Yelp is a site where consumers post their subjective reviews of local businesses. Yelp identified the spam problem early in its development, and came up with a highly effective way to filter out spam on its site. Spam in the context of Yelp is most often a shill review written to make a particular business look great or (its competitor's look horrible). The sentiment embedded in Yelp reviews about most local establishments feels real because most of the spam has been removed. The opacity of Yelp's spam filter frustrated a number of business owners, and so Yelp just launched a new feature to let consumers look at the reviews that were automatically removed.

The result is amazing. In a random sample of business profile pages I just visited on Yelp, the "filtered" reviews account for anywhere from 10% to 50% of the total! Much of the spam is truly shameless. My favorite reaction to Yelp's new feature was from The Next Web, and it's priceless:

Looking through the reviews that Yelp’s algorithm filtered out brings to mind a single thought: ‘Wow. It’s like viewing Yelp through Citysearch goggles.’

Everyone knows that not a day goes by when spam doesn't invade our email inboxes. We use filters and other defenses to prevent spam from destroying the utility of email. It is less obvious that, if left unchecked, spam would also destroy many of the most useful properties on the Internet. Thankfully, some of the best user-generated content sites have developed sophisticated techniques to keep the spam at bay. Let's just hope they keep innovating fast enough to stay a step ahead of the bad guys.

Leaders Can Fall Fast on the Internet

Just a few years ago, the industry-leading incumbent in the Internet local search category was IAC's CitySearch.com. It had an apparently unassailable position in local search with no meaningful competition.

Well, times have changed. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome gave a speech earlier this afternoon during which he mentioned a number of leading Internet companies such as Google, Twitter, Yelp and eh, er, um, one other which he couldn't quite remember.

New year, new blogs to read

Over the last few months, I added three new blogs to my reading list, and they're all related to venture capital and entrepreneurship.  Some are not new, but they're new to me, and I think they're all worthy of a regular reading.  Let's hope the respective authors each do a better job posting fresh content than I have been doing.

Jeremy Stoppelman, a founder and the CEO of Yelp, is offering up a smorgasbord of book reviews, humor, and observations as an entrepreneur on his relatively new blog.

Adam Fisher, one of my partners at Bessemer and the leader of our Israel office, started Savants in the Levant to blog about VC, entrepreneurship and politics with an occasional Israeli bent.

And last, but not least, Brian Feinstein, one of my Bessemer colleagues in New York, already has a year's worth of great posts on topics ranging from startup lessons to market opportunities on his blog.

The NY Times Says Yelp has Arrived

It's not often that the venerable New York Times publishes a glowing piece on one of my portfolio companies. This is a welcome bit of good cheer amidst the backdrop of a generally gloomy economy.  When I invested in the young company founded by Jeremy S. and Russ S. back in 2005, Yelp had attracted about 100,000 San Franciscans to its site.  Today, with more than 15,000,000 monthly visitors, it seems to have "come of age" -- at least enough to get serious coverage from the NY Times.  Yelp has more or less been a household name in Silicon Valley for a couple of years already, but I'm especially excited to see it turning heads now in New York as well.  

As the article points out, Yelp is not just about restaurants. It's good for everything from hair salons to insurance brokers. The courageous Megan C. even used Yelp to share thoughts on the doctor that performed her anatomical modification. Now that's what I call broad coverage.

Among the many reasons Yelp is succeeding is that it easily passes the multiple choice test for consumer internet startups that I blogged about 18 months ago.  Later this week, I'm hoping to post a similar multiple choice test for enterprise software companies, though I don't anticipate success with that test will lead to any articles in the NY Times Dining Section.

Humor without the lies, please

I admit that I'm a frequent reader of Valleywag, a low-brow blog full of silicon valley gossip.  It's often pretty funny, and I know many of the people referenced in the stories, which only adds to the entertainment value.

Last week, however, the blog ran an entry containing a fabricated story.  The entry was meant to embarrass Jimmy Wales, an entrepreneur we backed two years ago.  If there is such a thing as an Internet celebrity, Jimmy is surely one of them, so he is accustomed to being attacked by web "journalists" -- particularly those at The Register, where they seem to attack him on a daily basis.  If he read the Valleywag piece, I'm sure he just shrugged it off.  But since the piece referred to me, I would like to set the record straight.   

A few months after we invested in his company, Jimmy transitioned from CEO to full-time executive Chairman, and he and I were fortunate to recruit Gil Penchina, a long-time eBay executive, to assume the CEO role.  Valleywag reported some nonsense about Jimmy getting fired because of a bogus expense report. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

If it weren't enough that Jimmy founded Wikipedia and Wikia, he impressed me even more so a few weeks ago when he volunteered to forgo his Wikia salary to maximize the company's flexibility during this lousy economy. I wonder how many Valleywag staffers would ever consider such a sacrifice.

I hope Valleywag continues to entertain readers with witty observations and curious photos, but I wish its writers would substantiate offensive claims before clicking the "publish" button.  I wonder how many times I have laughed at fabricated Valleywag stories in the past.  Now I know to laugh but not to believe.

Portfolio Company Politics

I got nervous today when I heard one of my consumer internet portfolio companies had posted a political advertisement on YouTube. It seemed obvious to me that any consumer company is likely to alienate half of its customer base by making a political statement. No matter how well-executed the ad, it is guaranteed to hurt business as much as it helps.

It appears that I may have jumped too quickly to a conclusion.  This is the first political ad I have seen that appeals to both Democrats and Republicans.

Money fears

Doesn't this new version of the dollar bill do a perfect job capturing the essence of the Treasury Department's current state of mind?

Oh my Goldman

I got a first-hand sense of how badly Goldman Sachs felt the pressure of the crumbling financial markets this morning.   

At the start of a private company's board meeting I was attending, a director received a call on his cell phone.  One member of the board had not yet arrived, so the director answered the call in case it was the missing attendee.  He dispatched with the caller after about a minute.

The caller turned out to be his broker from Goldman Sachs who was calling to relay a simple message: If Goldman goes under, don't worry, your assets will still be safe.

I almost fell out of my chair.  The senior executives at Goldman decided the perceived threat to the investment bank was so great that they instructed brokers to call clients proactively to address concerns about the company's failure.  Wow.

He has no credibility, but I think he's 100% correct

For several months now, I have been privately telling anyone willing to listen that search advertising, though incredibly effective, is over rated. At first glance, it would appear that advertising to someone in context of his search activity is an utter utopia for marketers. What better time to advertise a DVD player, for example, than when a consumer types "DVD player" into Google's search box. I agree that in context advertising is as close to utopia as marketers will ever get, but they cannot ignore their other marketing efforts.

What many search advertisers are failing to consider is the impact all their other marketing spend has on their search spend. Back to my example: when you search for "DVD player" on Google, there's a reason why you're 100 times more likely to click on a link to Samsung rather than a link to Apex. For starters, you have heard of Samsung but you've probably never heard of Apex. Second, when you researched various DVD players over the prior few days, you read a lot of positive reviews about the Samsung product but saw next to nothing on the Apex product. Finally, Samsung has a high-tech, high-quality brand. Apex has a cheap, made in a low quality way kind of brand.

Today Bloomberg news reported that Brian McAndrews, an executive at Microsoft, predicts ad buyers will switch away from search advertising and towards display advertising. At face value, it looks like a desperate attempt from Microsoft, which is badly trailing Google in search, to pooh-pooh the segment where it is weak and try to persuade advertisers that banner ads are more important. It's definitely a convenient argument given Microsoft's massive quantity of unsold banner ad inventory and weak search market share.

However, there is an element of truth in the statement. Advertisers are failing to examine the impact their non-search advertising is having on search. They are attributing all of their advertising success to search simply because it is usually the last ad seen by a user before the purchase. Just because it's the last ad doesn't mean it's the only (or even most) important one.

What advertisers need -- and what I would like to invest in -- is a company offering a web-based analytic product that helps bring banner ads, email marketing and search marketing all into a single dashboard/framework. It would allow an advertiser to measure the impact of increased banner advertising on the efficacy of its search marketing. In other words, the tool would allow advertisers to properly measure and allocate performance across ad media.

I have yet to come across such a product. Have you?

What are you reading?

I always like to know what smart, tech types include in their daily reading. Yesterday, I learned that a very successful entrepreneur (and good friend of mine) named Chris Dixon put up a web site with links to a few dozen of his favorite blogs and websites, and this afternoon I finally got around to studying the list. I have been particularly curious to know what Chris reads because he always seems to know about the latest new idea at least a few weeks before I find out about it, and when I do finally learn about the new, new thing, it's often Chris that tells me about it.

I already knew about many of the links on Chris' new web page, but as expected there were a few gems that I hadn't yet discovered. I hope he keeps this up-to-date. Maybe it's time for someone launch a meta RSS feeder so I can get a feed of changes to other people's RSS readers.

My Click Fraud Theory

With the astounding growth of auction-based pay-per-click (PPC) advertising led by Google and Yahoo over the past several years, there is a great deal of discussion about click fraud. I think most people are completely missing the point. Those who are complaining about the issue really have nothing to complain about. Bizarrely, those who are getting screwed haven’t even uttered a peep.

Click fraud takes place when someone clicks on a PPC ad with no real intent of actually following the link. The result, of course, is that an advertiser has to pay for a bogus click. Many advertisers are complaining about being charged for bogus clicks and are even demanding refunds. Somehow they managed to force Yahoo to settle a lawsuit for about $5 million and Google actually coughed up $90 million in a similar instance.

This baffles me because any reasonably sophisticated advertiser shouldn’t really care about click fraud. Why? Because if they’re using any of the dozens of off-the-shelf tools to measure their PPC ad conversion rates, they would be automatically lowering their PPC bids to maintain an acceptable ROI. An advertiser simply shouldn’t care if he pays $1 per click for 10 clicks that yield 10% conversion and a single customer or if he pays $0.50 per click for 20 clicks that yield 5% conversion and a single customer. In either case, the advertiser has paid $10 to land a new customer.

Given the real-time tracking capabilities inherent in auction-based PPC, click fraud gets priced into the equation automatically. In my example above, the bogus clicks drove conversion down by 50% (from 10% to 5%), and advertisers adjusted their bids from $1 to $0.50 per click. Yes, in theory the advertiser may suffer temporarily from fraudulent clicks before he has a chance to adjust his bid downward to compensate for the lower conversion rate, but today’s automated systems figure this out pretty quickly. Any real damage to the advertiser is inconsequential.

So why are advertisers complaining? I don’t get it. Perhaps they haven’t all figured out how easy it is to use tools from search engine marketing (SEM) experts such as Efficient Frontier, SearchRev, iCrossing, iProspect (or many, many others). These SEM experts offer reasonably cheap software to solve the problem through automated bidding.

Perhaps some advertisers believe only their ads are being clicked fraudulently. Click fraud targeting a specific advertiser, does, in fact, hurt that advertiser. He can reduce his bid to maintain his conversion rate and ROI, but now he will get a much lower number of clicks because his competitors can afford to bid higher if they aren't suffering from the same click fraud. Though I acknowledge that advertiser-targeted click fraud is possible, I believe most click fraudsters are just trying to make money for a certain publisher rather than trying to deplete the ad budget of a certain competitor. So, I'm at a loss to explain why advertisers seem to care so much about click fraud.

Even more confounding, however, is that the companies who are really getting screwed haven't started screaming about it. In fact, we haven't heard anything from them. The companies on the losing end of click fraud are high quality web site publishers. When an unscrupulous publisher engages in click fraud to increase revenues, the result is reduced conversion rates for advertisers, who, naturally, lower their bids. Because of the way most advertisers participate in Google and Yahoo PPC auctions, when they reduce their bids, the reduction applies to every publisher in the Google and Yahoo networks.

If publisher A is engaging in click fraud, which causes lower PPC bids from advertisers, publisher B gets screwed. Publisher B doesn't generate any additional clicks, but now he's getting less revenue for each click. In a sense, publisher A just stole money from publisher B. My theory is that the publisher getting screwed the most is probably AOL.

I suppose it's not too surprising that high quality publishers aren't complaining because it's virtually impossible to detect this phenomenon. This is especially true because Google provides publishers with such a minimal amount of information about their advertising performance. Perhaps one reason Google is holding on so tightly to the lack of transparency in its system relates to keeping click fraud off the agenda of high quality publishers.

My Simple Multiple Choice Test For Consumer Internet Startups

Anyone thinking about starting or joining a consumer Internet startup should be able to answer the following question, and if the answer is "d) none of the above," then I'd suggest looking for a new job.

So, here's the question: does your company attract users with any of these things?

1. an inherently viral idea
2. search engine optimized content that grows naturally with usage
3. the ability to spend money to acquire users with a very fast payback
4. none of the above
   

Why do I think those three things are critical? Because without at least one of them, you're building a Field of Dreams. Though it worked for Ray Kinsella (played by Kevin Costner), it simply doesn't work for Internet entrepreneurs. I have met too many people under the delusion that if they build it, people will come. With tens on millions of web sites competing for eyeballs, it just doesn't work that way online.

There's also a group of startups who think they have passed the multiple choice test, but that's because they have misunderstood the answers. This blog post is my attempt to clarify them.

1. An inherently viral idea
Very, very few sites can correctly offer this answer because very few concepts are inherently viral. You may have a great site and may rightfully think users will tell their friends about it, but you probably don't have a viral site. You're not benefiting from a viral idea, you're benefiting from word of mouth. Word of mouth is nice, but it's not nice enough to form the foundation of a business. To be viral, the utility of your site/service needs to grow substantially as your friends use the service. Great examples of inherently viral services include Skype (with no friends to call, it's useless), Facebook (you can't trade messages with your friends if they're not on the site) and LinkedIn (you can't access your business network if you haven't established it on the site). Bessemer had one fantastic investment success with Skype and is hoping for a second with LinkedIn. Too bad we missed out on Facebook.

Viral ideas are the most powerful of all because they grow exponentially. Skype had 500,000 users less than a month after beta launch in the summer of 2003 and has reached more than 100,000,000 people since.

2. Search engine optimized content that grows naturally with usage
Almost everything starts with Google and its search engine brethren these days. If you can build a service with lots of web pages that get indexed by Google and show up naturally as top results for a large number of searches, you will get a lot of free traffic. It sounds simple. But it's not.

There are dozens of techniques and tricks to building search engine optimized (SEO) web sites, and there are countless firms who will sell you advice on how to do it correctly. Most importantly, though, the idea underlying your site must lend itself naturally to SEO. First, consumers have to be doing a lot of searches for content on your site. Second, your content has to grow -- ideally through contributions from users. Bessemer had a very successful investment in Site Advisor (acquired by McAfee) that leveraged SEO distribution. Several of our current investments -- OLX, Wikia and Yelp are SEO-driven.

3. The ability to spend money to acquire users with a very fast payback
If you can spend money to make money, you can control your own destiny. Generally, you have to be in the business of selling something to consumers. Online retailers are great examples of companies in this category. If 2% of visitors complete a purchase and if the average purchase is a $50 with a 30% gross margin, then you can afford to spend $0.30 for a visitor. Assuming a small fraction of the eventual purchasers will become repeat buyers, you will have a profitable business. Retailers and subscription sites like Improvement Direct and Match are great examples. In fact, most of the IAC properties fit in this category. Online media properties that monetize through advertising can rarely spend money to make money. It just costs too much to acquire a customer.

There are a few companies like LinkedIn and Yelp that benefit from more than one of the user acquisition techniques mentioned above. LinkedIn is primarily viral but leverages SEO through its personal profile pages. Yelp is primarily SEO driven but has a viral element among its core contributors who invite friends to the service to share and compare reviews.

There may be one other compelling customer acquisition strategy for consumer Internet companies, but in my mind, the jury is still out. This fourth technique leverages the open APIs for widgets offered by MySpace and many of the leading social networks. Although it's clear you can drive tremendous usage through widget-based distribution, I'm not yet convinced that these widget companies will develop viable business models.

Small Businesses are Starting to 'Get' Local 2.0

As an investor in Yelp, I was delighted to discover this blog post by Peggy Wynne Borgman, the owner of Saratoga Spa. In it, she admits to ranting about the dark side of user generated content for months before recently changing her tune and "falling in love" with Yelp.

Initially, I wondered: why the sudden change of heart? Had a savvy business person at Yelp managed to bribe Peggy into becoming a fan? Nope. This love affair is genuine.

Peggy figured out that the "web 2.0" experience for local search is about two-way communication. She discovered that Yelp provided her with a way to monitor her spa's reputation very efficiently. Now, she checks Yelp daily. Any time she notices an "issue" with her spa's reputation, she can address it by starting a dialog with the unhappy customer.
In many cases, she manages to get a second chance with these disgruntled customers and win them back.

Before Yelp's existence, these unhappy customers would simply stew on their bad experiences and trash the local vendor among their friends. The poorly performing local merchants never even knew they were doing such a bad job. Thanks to Yelp, business owners get access to timely feedback and, more importantly, they can address issues that emerge in the feedback. Isn't it every business owner's dream to know what customers think and get a chance to fix the problems?

Sleeping at Night for $5 a month

Several months ago, I confessed to being a Scan Artist. I bought a fantastic, speedy desktop scanner from Fujitsu and converted almost every paper record in my home office into a PDF file. I don't keep hard copies of anything anymore.

There are many virtues to a paper-free life. For those of us living in small Manhattan apartments, the space saved by eliminating paper files was enough, by itself, to motivate my transition to committed scanner.

Remote access is a second virtue that I really enjoy. I have configured my home network to make it easy for me to log on to any of my home PCs from virtually any internet-connected computer. (Eventually, I intend to post more on this to solicit comments on the 'hackability' of my home network. For now, I'll continue to pretend that security through obscurity actually works.)

There is a third benefit of paper-free living that I have been hoping to realize for months, but only last week did it finally become a reality. With all my important home/personal records on paper, a house fire or flood would have been disastrous. With everything stored digitally, I thought it would be trivial to keep an off-site copy of everything. After investigating a number of alternatives, I couldn't find a cheap and reliable way to maintain a backup.

I thought about copying my files onto DVDs, but the manual process is much too laborious. I thought about copying them to my laptop, but I have more than 50 gigabytes of data to backup, and my laptop hard disk doesn't have sufficient capacity. There are dozens of online backup services but none offers what I want:

• At least 100 gigabytes of online storage with the potential to add more as my document library grows.
• A large, profitable company standing behind the online service (or some type of distributed infrastructure that does not depend on the balance sheet of a small company)
  
• A way to encrypt my files, before they leave my desktop, so I can rest assured that my sensitive records will never be read by anyone else.
  

Here's the solution:

• For $25, buy Syncback from a small publisher called 2 Bright Sparks. The product is cheap but fabulous. It is infinitely configurable to back files up from one location to another. The destination can be another local disk or directory or it can be a remote FTP server. You can schedule and group backups with dozens of options including on-the-fly encryption of files into 256-bit AES encrypted ZIP archives.
• For $4.99 a month, get a Home Hosting package from 1and1 Internet. It comes with two free domain name registrations, 100 GB of online disk space accessible via FTP with 1 TB of monthly bandwidth. It also includes some free email accounts.

Syncback runs as a service on my home server and synchronizes all of my documents, photos, and music with an external USB hard drive where it stores the copies in encrypted ZIP form. On a weekly basis, it then sync's the encrypted ZIPs with my 1and1 FTP server.

The only gotcha was the time it took to complete the first backup. My roughly 50GB of data required 22,000 minutes (that's almost 16 days!) for the initial synchronization. Of course from now on, it's just the incremental changes that get copied, so it will be a lot faster. It was a very painful reminder that cable broadband isn't really broadband in the upload direction.

Now if one of my neighbors drops a lit cigarette into the trash and sets my building on fire, I can focus on getting my family to safety without having to grab a hard drive while rushing to the fire escape.

Changing gears

Changing gears -- smoothly and at the right time -- is something that the best venture capitalists do extremely well. By changing gears, I mean shifting from one investment theme to another.

After building expertise in big box retail investing, for example, it's no easy feat to abandon that knowledge to pursue something totally different like communications investing. Yet that is precisely what BVP partner Felda Hardymon accomplished a couple of decades ago. He led Bessemer's early stage investments in companies such as Staples and Sports Authority in the 1980s, but when he felt the trends supporting retail investments were no longer favorable, he pursued other roadmaps. He started learning about networking and communications technologies and used that newly developed expertise to invest in companies including Cascade, Sahara and Sirocco, all of which were phenomenal successes.

It's a daunting task when faced with learning about a new area, but it's a critical part of the venture capital process. Without expertise, it's impossible to make good investments (without getting very lucky), so that means you have to make bets on areas to investigate before making bets on specific teams and companies. Pick the wrong area, and you're screwed. Pen computing in the early 90s is nice example of a bad area to have selected as there isn't a single success to come from that wave of innovation despite quite a few contenders.

My own investments have spanned a number of areas, and each one has required a meaningful amount of study before I felt comfortable making a related investment. I've spent time in the world of consumer electronics (Gracenote), information services (Gerson Lehrman Group), data security (eEye and Determina) and the consumer Internet (Yelp and Wikia) to name a few. I have been working hard on a couple of new roadmaps over the past 6 months, and I hope to blog about investments in those areas later this year.

Many months ago, my colleague Justin Label began pursuit of a roadmap in clean technology. He just started to describe the transition in his new blog Venture Again. I intend to add it to my RSS reader once he gets around to setting up a feed. Justin, here's a hint!

Update: An RSS feed for Venture Again is now live here.

Shorts and Longs (Cont'd)

Several months ago, I wrote my initial "shorts and longs" blog entry covering a few things I'd bet against (shorts) and a few things I like (longs). Here's a new entry in the longs column: the US economy relative to the rest of the world.

There has been a lot of talk about the US losing its leadership position to China and/or India over the next few decades. I think it's going to take a lot longer than that. Here are some interesting facts I read in a David Brooks column in the New York Times.

• The US economy accounted for 30.52% of the world's GDP in 1971. Today it accounts for 30.74%.
• The US accounts for 40% of the world's R&D spending.
• The US produces more engineers per capita than China or India.
  
• US unemployment rates for scientists and engineers are no lower than the rates for other professions, which implies the US has no real shortage of these talents despite countless press references to the contrary.
• At least 22 out of the top 30 universities in the world are American, and more foreign students come to American universities now than before 9/11/01.

There are plenty of problems with the US, and the country's culture of unrelenting consumption will certainly come back to bite the economy at some point. But the US is so far ahead of every other nation on so many dimensions, it's way too early to start even thinking about a global economy led by any other nation.

Howard Dean Started It?

Howard Dean is often credited with being among the first to tap the power of the Internet to further the goals of a political campaign. It didn't end well for Mr. Dean, and I'm not even sure he deserves all the credit he gets for injecting the Internet into politics. I am convinced, however, that he was on to a big idea.

Since the 2004 Presidential race, there has been very little discussion in mainstream media of the Internet's role in politics. An entrepreneur named Jimmy Wales is in the process of changing that.

Jimmy is most well-known for pioneering the Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia available in dozens of languages with millions of articles. Wikipedia is run by a staff of just two or three full-time employees because all the content is published and edited wiki-style -- i.e., by consumers. More recently, Jimmy launched Wikia, a Bessemer-backed startup. Wikia extends the Wikipedia concept to all types of content, not just the type that belongs in an encyclopedia.

Just last week, Jimmy announced his personal role in leveraging Wikia to provide the broadest, most open platform for politics on the Internet. And like everything Jimmy touches, this latest concept is flourishing quite nicely. The Campaigns Wikia is a place where people truly engage in the democratic process -- sharing ideas and debating political issues. In just a week or so, the site is already loaded with content, and almost 1,000 pundits have signed up to get involved.

It will be very interesting to witness the impact of Campaigns Wikia and other Internet platforms on future elections.

T-Shirts, Pens, Mugs and Belt Buckles

It's not uncommon to see company promotional materials in the form of t-shirts, mugs and pens.

This is my first sighting of a new form of logoware: an imitation diamond-studded belt buckle. Perhaps the start of a new trend?