Where are the Web Work tools?

I’m writing this on Friday afternoon. Through the magic of social networking I know that several friends of mine have “checked in” at local pubs and are already imbibing Portland’s finest. I also know that a former colleague now living in Denver is stuck at JFK. I know that one of my favorite VCs returned to San Francisco this morning from North Carolina via PHL and ORD. He shopped at Whole Foods for what I assume are ingredients for a dinner that I am sorry to be missing. Plus, a friend pointed me to the latest thinking on the possibility of parallel universes.

What I don’t know right now is whether my Web designer has picked up the latest copy I posted to our shared server. I don’t know if our dev team has decided to push the latest changes over the weekend. Tomorrow I plan to prepare our financials, but I don’t know if our accountant has made the updates to the chart of accounts. I have no email from him; I should have called him before he left for his beach house.

Like most people, at any given time I focus on three or four objectives. Why can’t I know as much about those as I know about the drinking habits of my friends? Why don’t I have activity streaming, location updates, automated availability, ubiquitous micro updates, and integral ratings and feedback from my colleagues and business partners working with me on my priority objectives?

I need something that will allow me to identify the group of people with whom I share objectives. We need to self identify the tasks we are contributing to and identify our dependencies. When I need something from someone in the group I should be able to request a task/deliverable from them. They should be able to accept or reject the request with feedback. My ideal tool would let me see the availability, location and status of everyone in the group. I should receive real-time updates for all activity related to tasks that I depend upon. Everything I do related to our shared objective should be available to the group and streamed proactively to those dependent on me.

Technology to do all of this exists today, but no one has yet packaged it into a useful tool. Microsoft’s lame attempt at collaboration services requires a bizarre collection of servers that can only be assembled by a certified SharePoint integrator. The result is overly rigid and can’t accommodate free-form workflows or easily accommodate participants outside the organization. Collaboration and unified messaging from IBM, Cisco, and Avaya are no better. So where’s the Zukerberg who will fulfill this 400 million user opportunity?

Today, while waiting for new tools, I’ll send out a couple of emails requesting updates from my web designer; I will leave a voice message for my accountant; and I will send a text to the head of our dev team. I’ve checked our project management dashboard: the last updates were posted Wed. The shared server shows the latest version of the Web copy is the one I posted yesterday; I have no idea if anyone looked at it. On IM, most of our folks are unavailable and two have status notes clearly posted during the Mesozoic era.

I know with the right tools I could have gotten so much more done before heading out for a beer.

All the news that's fit to print

Yesterday, I returned from 10 days in the mountains – fresh air, sailing, long hikes, lazy mornings. Nestled in the forest on a high mountain lake, our cabin has no cell coverage, and only dial up Internet. For my family summer vacation has come to mean forced withdrawal from electronic communication. But what I miss most when cloistered in our mountain retreat is the daily newspaper.

Friends joined us mid-week and parlayed the goings on of the outside world – the Obamas went to Russia, Billy Mays died, GM came out of bankruptcy, and Goldman Sacks was making more money than ever. Nothing earth shattering, but I still felt out of the loop not knowing.

We are living in the dawn of the digital age, a modern renaissance, but the decline and death of the daily newspaper really bothers me. I like holding a paper in the morning. I just absorb more info in my groggy morning state looking at news print rather than staring at a screen.

But the bigger issue is the news itself. The online sources that are displacing newspapers are largely opining about the news and not reporting. Researchers at Cornell analyzed some 90 million online articles during the election cycle last year – Aug to Oct 08. Of all the discernable story lines only 3.5% originated from an online source before appearing in a traditional news outlet. So 96.5% of all stories originated with traditional reporting and were later picked up and discussed online.

The implications are obvious. We need to find ways to preserve and support real reporting, real journalism. We can’t let reporting die with newsprint. Blogging as it exists today is not professional journalism. This is the challenge of the modern information age – come up with a business model that can support broad professional, diverse, independent journalism. Until that emerges, I will happily pay the recession driven higher subscription rates for daily delivery of the New York Times.

Startup Now: The Oregon Opportunity

While we obsess over the impact of the economic downturn and the State’s unemployment, we risk missing the incredible opportunity Oregon has. Obama recognizes this crisis is a once in a life time opportunity. Marching to the tune of “never waste a crisis”, the nation is collectively spending $1 trillion on not just solving the credit crisis, but recreating our social economic landscape.

We are going after climate change; international instability and terrorism; energy scarcity; and the aging population in the developed world, just to name a few. This combined with the international economic downturn is driving unprecedented global change. Oregon has the opportunity to play a lead role in this change and drive job growth at the same time.

Oregon has the expertise and experience in the segments that matter right now:

• Alternative Energy
• Urban Design
• Medical Records
• Opensource Technology
• Mobile Technology
• Elderly Care
• Universal Health Coverage
  

Oregon has attracted young highly educated people who flock here for the quality of life and affordability. For instance Portland has among the highest percentages of college degrees, spending on book purchases, and broadband penetration.

Venture Capitalists invest in Team (the skills and drive of the individuals involved) and TAM (total addressable market – the size of the opportunity). Some smart funds like Voyager and Madrona see Oregon’s potential and have put people here. In the past Oregon has lacked the will to drive growth. Voyager and Madrona are here as not to miss a potential opportunity: they won’t drive anything. The initiative has to come from the Oregon community.

Local money has been shy and scarce. Worse, to date, the state shows little support for its own potential. Only trivial amounts of capital have made their way to Oregon startup ventures.
If we don’t invest in ourselves it is worse than just missing an opportunity. We marginalize our entrepreneurs and starve them to death. Why would anyone else invest in Oregon companies if we can’t even see fit to do so? It is like a mother not supporting their child, you start at less then zero.

Small businesses drive employment. Venture models have demonstrated the potential return of small growth companies. We have the opportunity to spawn high growth businesses that will deliver additional employment and high return on capital. These businesses will succeed because the crisis we face will economically reward new businesses the deliver solutions to our problems.

A proposal is a foot to direct $100 million of State controlled capital to Oregon startup ventures. This is the right move at the right time. This effort seems to have prodded our State Treasure Ben Westlund into action. He is now hosting an event on April 29 to catalyze Oregon investment.

The big question: will this result in putting Oregon’s talent and money to work? It is the right move at the right time and it deserves our support at every level, especially that of our elected representatives. Or will it just be an exercise by all parties involved to look like they are playing lip service to this grass roots push while fulfilling their fiduciary responsibility and maintaining the status quo.

Stimulate VCs

I am amused by the controversy caused by Tomas Friedman’s comments on stimulating venture capital. The discussion is missing the point. We shouldn’t be arguing if government money would help or hurt Venture Capital. Nor should we be arguing about whether funneling money through Venture Capital firms would create more or less jobs than giving it to GM or Ford. The discussion about venture capital is relevant because we should be discussing what kind of world we want to build.

The old world is dead. The one dominated by industrial giants. The ones listed on the Dow. Yesterday we sold that world and no one was buying. Today we are willing to pay less than we did more than 10 years ago. And all indication is we will discount it more.

So the question is: what's next? The die is cast; the government is the economic engine of the next several years. We the people get to decide what we put our collective capital and efforts into. We will invest in infrastructure and services. We will invest in bolstering manufacturing. We will remake the systems that deliver education, health care and social services. We get to reinvent and reprioritize how we produce and deliver food, water, transportation, and energy. And in our choices of what we build and how we employ, we will create a new world.

So I really don’t care if government money goes to any particular VCs. If Gurley can do better with just the private, pension, and endowment money, more power to him. What I do know is venture money a couple of decades ago funded people and ideas. Now it seems to go much more to companies with established revenue: companies that have little market risk. This use to be referred to as expansion capital. It was second round capital and came after development stage funding. Venture money use to focus on building great companies that create new emerging sectors. Now it goes increasingly to creation of products and services that may be attractive to large companies; essentially nothing more than off balance sheet R&D efforts.

I am all for stimulus dollars for VCs if it puts venture back in venture capital. Small growth companies have always been employment engines. There is perhaps no better way to create jobs than to invest in high growth companies. But the real win - new ventures will innovate and create the world we need. Saving jobs at GM won’t do that.

Like the New Deal and the Marshal Plan, this stimulus and recovery needs to be about building and recreating, not saving what was. So what kind of world do we wish to recreate. Let’s have that discussion.

The day Capitalism bought Socialism

Capitalism, Socialism and Communism have been pretty tired labels for some time. Our capitalism seems to be buying nothing but socialism today. Today the only investment anyone wanted to make in our capitalist system was the US Government. This would indicate that the global market believed that the most viable institution and the one that would provide the highest return on investment was our Federal Government. Perhaps a vote of confidence for the new CEO, Barrack Obama, but disconcerting that no one viewed any other investments as worthwhile. This surely isn’t Socialism—no one is voting with anything but money: neither a popular revolution nor even government policy is driving this apparent nationalization of the auto and banking industries.

We need new monikers and conceptual frameworks to discuss and understand a system that has more than current supply and demand at work. We need to be able to conceptualize a system that is driven by climate shifts, demographic shifts, technology shifts, social and religious realignment. Without the global flow of money resulting from transnational resource purchases there would not have been a market for the highly leveraged mortgage backed securities and disastrous derivatives. The dimensional flattening that a pure monetary view imposes doesn’t even provide the facility to discuss quality of life issues that Baby Boomer aging and health care concerns generate. The “externalities” of terrorism or carbon driven climate change can’t possibly be evaluated in a system that only accounts for tax revenues, military expenditures and rising costs of resources.

Many of you are far more creative than I – what do we call this new global reality? What models do we bring to bear to set priorities and make tradeoffs on where we put our collective efforts? The complete lack of interbank lending, zero interest on T-Bills and a negative yield curve tell me the one we have is inadequate.

We the Lobby

I just received and email from Barack Obama. It is my fourth from the President Elect’s transition team since he won the election. He invited me to track his progress at www.change.gov. I think government needs a lot of change, a lot of renewal, and I like that I am being asked to be a part of it. Our next president is keeping me up to date and has even promised to talk to me on Youtube every week.

We are reinventing participatory democracy. I was one of 1.5 million people that voluntarily financed Barak’s campaign. When 1,500,000 people write checks, that is public financing – that is participatory democracy. I followed the campaign on the Internet at my.barackobama.com and www.johnmccain.com, and on youtube and cnn.com and twitter and countless other sites that have seamlessly become part of my daily routine.

Critics may say that this “social networking” is just pandering to young; it is treating Internet users like a special interest. This is just flat wrong. 74% or the US population is on the Internet. My mother is on the Internet. (I wont mention her age but a demographer would not call her young.) More people use the Internet than have ever voted in a US election. Access is free to the public at every taxpayer funded local library. Orders of magnitude more people get information from the Internet every day than have ever ordered a publication from the government printing office. This is the new participatory democracy.

But an interested, active, informed public is only half the equation. Our representatives need to do their part. We need leadership that will similarly change, redefine and renew representative government. We have seen in the last 8 years the result of isolated and out-of-touch leadership: one that loses the popular vote and boasts of a mandate; one that blatantly practices cronyism and divides and disenfranchises the populous by claiming that dissent is unpatriotic and un-American.

Leadership in the Internet age communicates on the Web and through email. It restricts the role and influence on corporate lobbyists while soliciting continual input from the people. I want a representative government: I don’t want to vote on legislation directly. Abdication of legislative authority, like that seen in the ballot initiative process in states like California, is a travesty of democracy. I want strong political leaders that will listen to the voices of the people and represent our interests. So I will post my comments, write my blog and respond when Barack or any of his team send me an email. We the lobby: for the people, of the people, by the people.

It Matters

It is hard to imagine what it will feel like if next Wednesday morning we wake to McCain/Palin as Pres/VP elect. Like most of you, I have seen savings and 401K disappear over the last year. Every aspect of work has gotten harder. Every aspect of life is more expensive. I am someone who bought a house in the last two years and have the queasy feeling of being upside-down. And, I still have a hard time defending our countries actions to my overseas friends.

These are challenging times. We are in a deep hole and we need to climb out. More than effort, that takes motivation. How we feel, how we work together, how much energy we put into it matters a lot. In all the character assassination, name calling, petty distractions and false controversy that dominate the end of this campaign, it is easy to lose sight of what is needed. It may be sappy, but it is time to return to what lit this campaign up in the beginning.



I hope you will vote for Obama. I hope to wake up Wednesday excited and energized. It matters.

Hope vs Fear; Change vs Reform

To me this election is a dramatic comparison of aspiration vs. fear. Never have I felt there was so much to gain and so much to lose. The Bush presidency has shown that leaders mater. I know in my gut that what we do in the coming months will in large part dictate my son’s standard of living and quality of life. We get to choose our motivation: aspiration or fear.

The language of this election reveals all. The Democratic convention was dominated by language including: Change, Economy, Energy, and Jobs. In contrast the Republicans spoke of: Reform, Character, God and Taxes. It’s like the Republicans want a first class seat on the Titanic. I would rather find a better way to cross the ocean.

Passing The Torch

“The next generation”, “passing the torch,” it has seemed that we have heard it all before. But this week I embraced the contextual filter of generational shift and everything has become clearer.

I am not a Gen X’er or a Gen Y’er, or a “tweener”; technically I am a boomer born in the diminishing tail of that curve. I have watched “slackers,” and “grungers” and seen MTV repeatedly “rock the vote.” It is easy to be a little jaded toward “the rise of the next generation”.

Now the generational shift is for real. Don Tapscott calls them the Net-Gen and there are as many of them as baby boomers. The shift is as profound as that to the “greatest generation” which was shaped by the great depression, WWII and the Marshal plan; and the “baby boomers” who were molded by civil rights, Viet Nam and the Cold War.

This generation gets to deal with the energy transition, climate change, the rise of a global middle class, the decline of US global dominance, etc. Looking at the election, government, policy, and global economics through this filter is very valuable.

Taking my own advice

When should you start a company? This is the quintessential entrepreneurial question. A running debate rages: when do you have a feature rather than a company? When is a company being started because it should be rather than when it merely can be? What does it take to make a company successful? This debate heats up appropriately when exits are plentiful and lots things get funded that shouldn’t.

When potential entrepreneurs ask me when they should start a company? I tell them you should start a company when you can’t do anything else. When you have an idea that has such a grip on you, you can’t sleep at night. When you know it would be far worse not to pursue a venture than to fail miserably trying. If you have any intelligence at all, it is the only way you can do such an irrational thing as start a company.

It is called risk capital for a reason. Over half of all funded ventures fail: by most accounts fewer than 30% succeed in any meaningful way. The exercise of venture investment only becomes rational when 20% of the ventures in aggregate can provide ridiculous returns (better and 10 to 1). With diversity and persistence this looks somewhat rational and perhaps even highly lucrative when managed across multiple funds with portfolios of companies.

But take a specific venture, there is no rational for it being a good idea. In my experience companies succeed when they are meant to succeed; when all the stars align. It is like the old advertising adage: “we know half our advertising is a useless waste of money; we just don’t know which half.”

Don’t get me wrong, you need to do all the right things to succeed: identify a market; develop a compelling value proposition; get the right people; manage your cash well; keep maniacally focused, etc. etc. But all that’s not enough. You also have to have uncanny instinct (or maybe just dumb luck). When a prospective venture posses you, dominates your thoughts, doesn’t let you sleep, and jolts you from aha moment to aha moment yielding seeming clairvoyance, then you know it is time to start a company. New Stealth Co has that grip on me. I am going to build a wildly successful company and it will change the world.

To see the future go to China

I spent the last 10 days in Shanghai. The first thing you notice is scale, the second is smog. Shanghai makes places like San Francisco, Portland and Seattle look quaint. It has the density and building size of Manhattan but rather than Manhattan’s 13 by 2 mile foot print with 1.5 million residents, the central planned area of Shanghai is square, about 26 miles on each side, and has over 10 million people. There are 5000 buildings over 18 stories tall in this one city alone.

China is moving large percentages of its population from rural areas into its cities. Their cities have increased by 300 million people in the last decade. This means that China has built urban infrastructure to accommodate a population the size of the US in only the last 10 years.

The governments of China and Shanghai developed the master plan of Shanghai in 1995 and they are on track to complete it by 2010. They are planning an International Expo in 2010 to celebrate this accoumplishment. You can see the master plan at the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum, a must see if you visit Shanghai.


I was in Shanghai in 2006 when it had 3 subway lines. On this visit they had 8 operating subway lines. They know transportation, especially in the inner city, is one of their largest challenges: so they simultaneously built 5 additional subway lines through an already developed city.

Just to show off they put in a Magnetic Levitation train that runs from the airport some 16 miles into town. It takes 8 minutes for an average of 120 miles per hour. Its top speed is 435 km/hr making it the fastest train on earth.



You can judge China to be good, bad, idyllic or evil: there is no question it is a totalitarian government with a sketchy record on human rights. However you should appreciate the magnitude of the challenge of developing a country with 1.2 billion people. China has literally built a city from the mud that is one of the most highly productive and cosmopolitan on the planet. And in so doing, it is raising the standard of living and quality of life for 10s of millions of Chinese people.

Transformational times

Today in the Times, William Safire of all people brought clarity in my mind as to what this presidential election is about – Transformation. We need transformation right now. It needs to start at the White House and it needs to carry through every aspect of our social economic system – every level of government, every community. As we resist the changes that are taking place around us, we just make our lives and our society that much more difficult. This could not be clearer after 8 years of Bush: Iran, deficit spending, the falling dollar, declining education, diminished position in the world, weakened military, divided populous, increased dependence on foreign sourced petroleum, job losses, recession, etc, etc.

There are times for transformation and other times for steady management: this is a time for transformation. Like Roosevelt, Kennedy/Johnson, and Reagan, Obama is the right leader for our time and it is time for transformation.



It is Mar. 3 and perhaps I should have come out more forcefully earlier. I hope in a couple of days I will be able to join the legions of potential voters who can enthusiastically carry Obama to a victory against McCain.

I think Clinton and McCain are both good people. Either could make a good president. But either would be merely a caretaker while we bumble toward real transformation. Others have made the case better than I can for Obama. I just hope we can transcend issue and fear based politics that Clinton is predictably playing well. Just look at the summary of the last news cycle in the WSJ today –

Hillary Clinton told crowds in Ohio Sunday that her campaign is "about solutions," not feelings. Barack Obama said he is tired of questions about his religion and said he was a devout Christian.

Hillary sounds like an IBM salesman while her campaign has successfully forced Obama to respond to fear mongering.





I find it despicable and I wish Clinton and the Democratic party leadership would realize this is not about Hillary, it's about us, it's about the country, and it's about the world. I use to think that my vote, my voice, and a single person, even the president of the United States, mattered little in the scheme of things. But the election in 2000 and the thought of how things might be today if a few people in Florida or Ohio voted differently has changed my mind.

Brush aside the ashes and kneel before Zod no longer

The tectonic plates of the Web are moving again. Some people say the Web 2.0 bubble is going to burst reminiscent of the 2000 Internet bubble. Many of the dynamics are the same: the money being thrown at sites that are little more than ideas will dry up; early exits at silly valuations will diminish; trendy sites that are cool but deliver little value will fade away. User aggregation as a business model will again fall from grace and Web 2.0 as a category will disappear.

What will emerge is a new generation of sites and applications that incorporate the characteristics of Web 2.0 – social networking, data tagging, rich media content, mashable functional components, and immersive user interfaces. The sites that survive and emerge as the new guard of Web properties will have a monetization model that drives real and growing earnings.

Like all generational transitions some past participants will die out, and some past leaders will fade to the background. I predict that Yahoo and Microsoft will have little presence in the next round of Web apps. Yahoo was the early leader in Web applications and to this day is far and away the market share leader. You could make the argument (as Tim O’Rielly does ) that Microsoft is purchasing Yahoo to consolidate a dominant position in Web apps. Statistically this is true but a closer look at Microsoft yields a different story.

Microsoft has been working through a 6 month re-org that has consolidated the Online Service Group and the Windows Business Group under Bill Veghte. This puts the Web assets into the group responsible for SMB, and SME software products. This group lives and dies by software license sales to business customers and will find it difficult to advance an ad or subscription recurring revenue model. Worse it is consolidated under Senior Software Architect Ray Ozzie who has always had an enterprise software view of the world.

Yahoo itself took its eye off Web Apps some years ago when their lead architect Zod Nazem shifted his focus to project Panama, an advertising targeting engine. For the last several years search and advertising has consumed Yahoos focus and resources. The death nil for Yahoo apps came when Zod left last June. Yahoo still has market share but is demonstrating no leadership.

Microsoft is aligning around two pillars: 1) software and 2) search advertising. When acquired, Yahoo will be folded into pillar (2) - the search advertising group - headed by Senior Vice Presient and former aQuantive CEO Brian McAndrews. Microsoft and Google have both done the calculus and determined that their growth lies in capturing the increasing flood of online advertising money.

They will continue to be players in Web apps but it will be far from their focus. This leaves the field wide open for the next generation of SaaS and Web applications. Once again the applications of the new Web will emerge out of the ashes of too many failed companies (and millions of Venture dollars) that chased the latest trend – this time Web 2.0. And hopefully, this time the Phoenix will sport labels other than Microsoft, Yahoo and Google.

Leadership – The next President

I understand the significance of the top candidates for president being a woman and a black man. There might even have been a time that it was important to elect a president just to set such a precedent. This is not that time. There is too much at stake.

It seems likely that a democrat will win the White House. Obama and Clinton have nearly identical policy positions. However, the deciding factor should not be race or gender. Leadership is what maters.

We need to focus on the leadership ability of these candidates. Trust, judgment and intelligence have to be part of it. Especially after seven years of lies, missteps and blunders. However, based on how divided the country is and how much our position in the world needs to change, we need to focus on the ability to inspire change and action.

At this stage, the greater leader seems to be emerging clearly. The next few weeks will be very interesting to watch.