Musings of a VC in NYC

The Amazon Tablet

I saw this picture at BGR yesterday and immediately thought "I want that."

We go back and forth in our family about Kindle vs iPad for reading. The Kindle is lighter and smaller. The iPad has a browser and other services for enhanced reading/researching as I blogged about recently.

What we all want is a hybrid of the two - a kindle that is a full blown tablet computer with a browser, apps, and an OS. It looks like Amazon is going to bring that to market this fall. I'm getting one for myself and one for the Gotham Gal. And I'm pretty sure my mom and dad are getting them too. It looks like a killer product.

Some More Thoughts On Kindle and Reading On An iPad

I posted yesterday about highlighting and sharing quotes from books. I figured I'd make it a Kindle weekend here at AVC and talk about one other reason I love reading on an iPad and how Amazon could make it even better for me.

When I read, particularly biographies and other non-fiction, I love to hop out of the book and onto the web to get more details. I've been doing this a ton while reading Life, Keith Richard's biography.

When Keith talks about growing up in Dartford, riding bikes around the Heath, I hop out of the Kindle app and into Maps and find the map of Dartford and check out satellite views of the Heath. It's like taking a quick trip there to get some context.

When Keith talks about Andrew Loog Oldham, their first manager, I hop over to Wikipedia and get the lowdown on the guy. It makes the story more interesting to me.

When Keith talks about how beautiful Anita Pallenberg was when he met her, I hop over to Google Images and see what he's talking about. It turns a story into a movie in my mind.

Reading on an iPad via the Kindle app makes all of this pretty easy. I do it all the time. But imagine if, when you highlight something on the Kindle, you get a few more options, like Maps, Wikipedia, Images. Clicking on one of them takes you right to where you want to go. It would be killer. I hope Amazon adds this feature. I'd use it all the time.

Sharing My Kindle Highlights

When I read a book, I tend to do a lot of highlighting. I like to share many of them publicly on the web. I'm currently reading Keith Richard's biography Life and you can see the public sharing in action right now on my tumblog.

For years, when I came across a highlight I want to share, I pulled out my laptop and manually typed the quote into Tumblr. I do that with hardbacks, paperbacks, and the Kindle app on my iPad. It's a pain in the butt, but the desire to share the quote is such that I've been doing it.

I was with my friend Steven Johnson yesterday and he told me about a trick that is a game changer for me and maybe you too. When you are reading on a Kindle (or a Kindle app), your highlights are sent to a private page at amazon.com. The address of my page (and yours too I imagine) is https://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights. If you have a kindle and do a lot of highlighting, go visit that page and you'll see all of your highlights.

From there, via the tumblr bookmarklet, it's trivial to share the quote on Tumblr. And so I suspect I'll be doing quite a bit more sharing as a result of this discovery.

Amazon has a gold mine on its hands but they aren't doing much with it right now. First off, they should let me make that page public or at least let me make some of the highlights public and showcase them on a public page. They should let me domain map that page so it becomes part of my social media presence. And they should let me connect that page with Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who does a lot of highlighting and would like to share many of the highlights with the world at large. Curation is a huge part of social media and discovery and pulling quotes from books and sharing them is a big opportunity and one that Amazon should work to unlock for us.

Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist

Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson have written a book with this title. It is now available on Amazon.

I got a preview copy and gave it a read. It's a textbook on venture capital deals. If you plan to do one of them, as an investor, advisor, or most importantly, as an entrepreneur, you should get this book and read it.

A friend of ours recently got a new job. Part of her job will be doing venture investments for her new employer. She reached out to me and said "I need a  quick primer on venture capital investments, how they are structured, negotiated, and documented." I pointed her to this book. She looked at its description and said "that's perfect."

I suspect it will be equally perfect for many people. Venture Capital transactions have been a bit of a black art for a long time. It played to the advantage of the VCs because we do these things all day long all the time. But, like a marriage, it is not good for one side to take advantage of the other. It is not like selling a house. You have to live with the other side of the transaction after the deal closes. So over the past ten years, the VC industry has done much to increase transparency and trust with entrepreneurs. I'm proud to have played a part in that. Brad and Jason have done a huge amount of work in this area as well and their new book is going to be required reading for many. Well done.

Where Good Ideas Come From

I've been reading my friend Steven Johnson's new book Where Good Ideas Come From. Steven gave me an advance copy of the book. It is available for pre-order at Amazon [kindle here] and it will be released on October 5th.

I hope Steven is not a stranger to any of you. His books over the past decade are some of my favorites and his take on the intersection between technology, science, society, culture, and innovation is unique and important.

Good Ideas (as I call it) is an examination of the sources of creativity in all of us. It is a deeply scientific book but it reads more like a narrative, which is one of Steven's gifts. He tells wonderful stories about science.

I've been pulling quotes from the book for several weeks onto my tumblog (aka my commonplace book). If you follow me on Tumblr, you will have seen a number of them. I will keep doing that until I finish the book which may happen this week.

Steven showed me this four minute video last week on his iPad. It is an excellent (and whimsical) summary of the book and has all of the core concepts in it.

Steven gave a talk about Good Ideas at TED Oxford in July. TED just posted it to the web today. Here it is. It is worth watching if you have the time (17 mins long). If you watch it all the way to the end you'll hear a great story about the invention of GPS.

Good Ideas is as close to a must read for this audience as there is. It has informed and amplified my thinking about innovation and creativity and I am sure it will do the same for you.

Grumby

 I’ve been reading Andy Kessler’s novel, Grumby, about a tech entrepreneur in silicon valley. I’ve known Andy for a long time, since he was a hot shot tech analyst at Morgan Stanley in the early 90s. He’s written a bunch of books but to my knowledge this is his first novel.

It’s about a hacker who starts with a small idea, essentially building a better version of Shazam, and then takes it to a whole new level by hacking a toy and creating a sensation.

It’s your classic boom bust morality tale and I’ve witnessed at close range many of the mistakes the entrepreneur makes, and have made of few of them myself. If for no other reason, you should read Grumby so you are less likely to make those mistakes yourself.

But the thing I liked most about Grumby was the way that Andy wove so many of the important trends going on in technology today into the story. The Grumby is smart because it collects information and knowledge from its users. The Grumby is open so anyone can build apps for it. The Grumby is manufactured in China but the software running on it comes from all over the world.

If you are highly technical, you may have to suspend belief on many of the engineering feats they pull off. That is the beauty of a novel. It is the story that matters, not the facts and figures.

And there’s even a cameo by this blog in the book. Which of course I love.

If you work in the tech business and enjoy a good tall tale, I think you’ll enjoy Grumby. I read it in my iPad over the course of a week, mostly on planes. I think you could probably read it from cover to cover on a cross country flight.

No Conflict No Interest

The title of this post comes from a saying I've always attributed to John Doerr, one of the top VCs of the past 25 years and the lead partner at Kleiner Perkins.

In this day and age, having a financial interest in something means you've got a conflict and your opinion is somehow "tainted."

But that wasn't always the case. I'm reading a book called 722 Miles, about the history of the NYC Subway System. It was recommended to me in the comments to the blog post I did about the subway system a few weeks ago.

The original plan for the NYC subway system was drawn up by The Steinway Commission in 1891. It featured the main downtown line from south ferry, up Broadway, to Union Square, then forking off in two branches, one headed up the west side and the other headed up the east side. That plan had to be changed later in order to keep the construction costs below the mandated $50mm (a huge sum in those days) but it was in many ways the blueprint for what got built.

The Steinway Commission was the name attached to the Rapid Transit Commission called for in the Rapid Transit Act of 1891. The commission was charged with laying out the basic plan and assigning a franchise for construction and operation of the subway.

It was called The Steinway Commission because it was chaired by William Steinway, founder and CEO of The Steinway Piano Company, a major manufacturer and real estate developer in Astoria Queens. In addition to Steinway, the commission included John Starin, owner of tugboats and other waterway transit businesses, Samuel Spencer, a railroad executive, Frederick Olcott, a banking executive, and Eugene Bush, a railroad lawyer. All of these men had business interests that would be enhanced or possibly damaged by the development of a subway system.

And yet they largely did the right thing, got the plan approved, and eventually funded and built. None of them ended up with the franchise (that went to August Belmont, who also built Belmont Park, one of the three legs of the Triple Crown in horse racing).

At the turn of the last century in NYC, there was an alignment of business and political interests that got things done that seems lacking in today's political environment. We have a taste of that in NYC with our current Mayor Mike Bloomberg who has brought a business mind to job of governing NYC. But on the national level, we see much less of this kind of thing.

It's really too bad because interest implies knowledge and understanding and leads to good decisions if the people involved have integrity and the ability to put the interests of the community first and their financial interests second. The business leaders of NYC were able to do that in the late 19th century and early 20th century and we have them to thank for our wonderful subway system.

The Happiness Project - A New Year's Resolution

 Over the past day, as our family made our way back from Buenos Aires, I read a new book called The Happiness Project. The author of The Happiness Project is Gretchen Rubin and I met her last year (the one that ended yesterday) as she was finishing the book and building an audience for it on The Happiness Project blog.

It's a great time of year to read a book like this. I consider myself a very happy person. I love my job, I've got a great wife/partner in the Gotham Gal, my kids are wonderful, and I have been able to build a life where I can do most anything I want to do. And yet, I got many excellent ideas on how to be happy/happier from this book.

Basically Gretchen decides one day a few years ago that she could be happier. She undertakes six months of hard core research into happiness, then spends a year putting all that she learned into practice. And, of course, she comes away from that year a happier person.

I hope many of you choose to pick up this book and read it. It took me less than a day of on and off reading to get through it so it's an easy read. Gretchen's an established author and she writes in a flowing easy way. You'll get lots of practical tidbits on things you can do to become a happier person.

The thing I liked most about the book are Gretchen's "Four Splendid Truths" which she discovers one by one throughout the year she practices happiness. Gretchen outlined them on her blog earlier this year and they are:

First Splendid Truth
To be happier, you have to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.

Second Splendid Truth
One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy;
One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself.

Third Splendid Truth
The days are long, but the years are short. (click the link to see my one-minute movie)

Fourth Splendid Truth
You’re not happy unless you think you’re happy. 
corollary: You’re happy if you think you’re happy.

I can see myself adopting these, particularly the first two in my daily life. My dad once told our family that he realized that making my mom happy made him happy. I always like that advice and I am going to try to do it myself (my new year's resolution).

I'd like to end with a few words on Gretchen's adoption of blogging and social media during her happiness project. In the second month of her twelve month program, she decides to start a blog. It becomes the Happiness Project blog. She figures out how to set up a TypePad account, she decides to blog six days a week religiously, and she starts using Facebook and Twitter. That's how I met Gretchen. Her husband, who is featured prominently in the book and who I've known for a dedade, emailed me last summer and said "my wife Gretchen is getting totally into this social media stuff and I wonder if you might give her some advice". We met for lunch and I gave her a bunch of advice, but was impressed at how much she had already figured out on her own. My best contribution to her social media toolbox was Nathan Bowers, who redesigned my blog and hers last year. Like the old AVC, the Happiness Project blog had become cluttered with widgets and was in need of a facelift.

But regardless of how she used social media, it is featured prominently in the book. Every chapter after she starts blogging is filled with comments from her readers outlining the ways in which they adopt the core  techniques differently than she did. It gives the book a completely different feel. Instead of reading about how Gretchen gets happier, you read about how lots of people get happier in their own words.

And she built an audience for the book in advance. I did some rudimentary web metrics yesterday afternoon and its hard to tell with blogs, but I believe the Happiness Project blog has about 2/3 of the monthly audience this blog has. That would put it somewhere around 75k to 100k readers every month. Her twitter has almost 14k followers and she has about 1,800 friends on Facebook.

And guess what? The book's been out a few days and is currently number 30 on Amazon's list of bestsellers and number 15 on Amazon's list of "hot new releases".

So let's all buy her book , get a bit happier, and show that social media can put an author at the top of Amazon's bestseller list. That would be a great thing to see.