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Top 100 Networked Venture Capitalists

Are DFJ, Sequoia, & Accel really the most effective VCs? TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld did an excellent summary of a 2007 academic study that examined how networked VCs were, as defined by the volume and nature of co-investing with other VCs and the value of the exits from those investments. The results are not too surprising but there are a few suprises in the top 10 — firms like First Round Capital and Dag Ventures significantly outperformed industry stalwarts like Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Benchmark Capital and Goldman Sachs. Check out the list as well as the full academic study that was published in The Journal of Finance inside the post.

Facebook Marketing for Dummies

Paul Dunay is the Global Managing Director of Services & Social Marketing for Avaya. Prior to that he held senior marketing roles at BearingPoint, Nuance, and Scient. He is a noted industry expert on social media and interactive marketing. His blog, Buzz Marketing, is widely followed as is his passion for racing sailboats in the middle of the winter. Paul has just finished co-authoring a book called Facebook Marketing for Dummies that will be published by Wiley & Sons this summer.

Paul has just released an eBook teaser on his new project that I thought you might find interesting. Some of his ideas are pretty interesting. Check out the ebook inside the full post

Orphan Tweets – A New Literary Form

Ever wonder about people who tweet once and never again? It turns out that there’s a lot of them. Many of their tweets, however, are amusing, ridiculous, or a bit poignant. Slate’s John Swansburg and Jeremy Singer-Vine just published a great piece entitled Orphaned Tweets: When people sign up for Twitter, post once, then never return. It’s kind of amazing that Twitter has developed into such a phenomenon that a literary form could be created from people’s one and only tweets. To ensure the ever growing repertoire of orphaned tweets the authors have coined a hashtag #orphantweet to let Twitters find and cherish other orphan tweets.

The Meaning of Words

A simple slideshow of some powerful images and words that might give you a different perspective of your life, especially in these difficult times.

Things VCs Never Say . . .

It’s tough being a VC these days. I bet their Tuesday’s are a little tougher when someone takes a few potshots at the entire VC class. Check out the tongue-in-cheek Slideshare presentation from ExpertCEO and let me know what you think.

Diary of a Cloud vs. Enterprise Software Salesperson - Day 983 of My Sales Cycle

Diary of a Cloud vs. Enterprise Software Salesperson - Day 983 of my sales cycle. Some Friday fun. This is a recap of a post written by Ramon Chen that recaps a classic “dog versus cat” diary that is running around the Net these days. Ramon takes the joke a bit further by creating a diary of a SaaS/Cloud salesperson versus a classic enterprise sales person. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who comes out on top in this battle . . .

Not Your Typical ‘We Met In A Bar’ Wedding Story

You have to appreciate the concept of restructured EBITDA multiples to get this post. The Wall Street Journal’s Jennifer Rossa reports on a highly amusing story about the first date between the daughter of Gores Group LLC CEO Alec Gores, Jennifer and her new husband, Long Street Capital Management’s David Fredston-Hermann.

Is The Winter of Tech Liquidity Event Discontent Over?

Bidding Wars, 7x revenue multiples, IPOs, refi-s, & rollups are signs that the death of tech related liquidity events perhaps has been overstated. This post reviews five recent events that demonstrate that some liquidity events are creeping back into the tech marketplace. Don’t confuse this with the Internet bubble heydays of the late 90’s or the private equity cheap debt fueled boom of 2003 to 2007. But even a few signs of liquidity after this long winter of discontent are welcome in today’s gruesome market.

Price Elasticity of iPhone Apps

Selling SaaS is hard. What could you learn from marketing/selling iPhone apps? A recent post by TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters entitled iPhone Applications Are Getting Cheaper goes beyond the typical simple explanations of the iPhone App Store phenomenon. Robin reviews a recently released report by Distimo, a young Dutch company that targets the market of mobile application distribution and monitoring services. For me, the App Store is a microcosm of what is going on in the tech industry today. Developers, often working in their basements or capital-light startups are creating hundreds of applications every month for the iPhone platform. Buyers as well as competitors can track market traction and revenues on daily basis. The market is both a combination of serious software (Bank of America Online Banking or E*TRADE Mobile Pro iPhone portfolio management application), social software applications (Facebook, Twitterific, etc.), and simply crazy consumer stuff like the farting application that was generating $10,000 a day. As someone who has spent decades marketing and selling enterprise and mid-market licensed software and SaaS solutions I would kill to have the information one can glean from App Store volume and pricing trends. There are a number of lessons one can learn from the App Store phenomenon and incorporate into your business.

Whacky Twitter Apps

Here’s a post about three whacky Twitter apps that go to show how pervasive Twitter has become and far some people will go to integrate Twitter into their lives. Inside the post we present a little information about three Twitter apps that stretch the limits of credulity. The apps include Kickbee, a wearable device for pregnant women that detects the movements of a fetus and creates a Tweet about what is going on, the RFID Enabled Tweeting Enabled Cat Door, and Blankomat, The Coffee Machine That Tweets.

How to Pitch a VC the Marc Andreessen Way (aka Pitching Hacks at Stanford)

Entrepreneurs are always looking for the magic bullet that will help their venture get funded. The cold reality is that great stories and ideas are fundable - anything else simply won’t work. A simple test entrepreneurs can take to see whether they truly have a fundable idea is to build a simple, yet compelling VC pitch. Check out the Venture Hacks Pitching Hacks at Standford presentation in this post. If you build a pitch like this you probably have a fundable idea. If you can’t, check out an upcoming post of mine on developing and exiting a capital-light Web 2.0 business.

Are Your Revenues Stuck In Neutral?

If your company’s revenues have been flat to declining over the past eight quarters you are probably ‘Stuck in Neutral.’ There are no magic bullets when it comes to reversing long term flat to declining revenue trends for tech companies. Companies get ‘stuck in neutral’ for a reason. Most of the time it is a market problem versus a ‘people’ problem. Breaking out of the rut, however, takes courage and decisive action. This post presents an overview of three part strategy for getting your revenue growth back in gear. In the coming weeks we will explore each of the three strategies in depth.

Financial Literacy: Money Wheel Analysis

So your sales force has missed another quarter’s number like almost every other tech company. How can you turn the trend around. One way to start is to understand where the repeatable sales transactions are in your market place and focus your marketing and sales resources onto those opportunities. The Money Wheel is a proven analytical technique for discovering where the best repeatable sales opportunities exist in your marketplace. It can also be used to focus your demand generation investments on the most successful and profitable opportunities. Check out the presentation in this post for an overview of the Money Wheel concept and how you could apply it in your business.

Did Cisco Hand Out a Few Golden Eggs for Easter?

Cisco paid 8.4x last year’s revenues for Tidal Software and 6.1x ttm revenues for Pure Digital. Investors saw between a 6.7x and 7.2x return on their investment. Does it make sense to pay such premiums in today’s highly depressed technology M&A market? This post explores these deals and contrasts Cisco’s acquisition strategy against those of the great tech conoslidators from the 1980’s & 1990’s (Computer Associates, Sterling Software, & Platinum Technology). You shouldn’t be too surprised over which firm created the most shareholder value in the past decade.

Mountain Social Media Summit 2009

Here’s a short presentation about a few of the speakers coming to the Mountain Social Media Summit 2009 September 11-13, 2009 at the Unicoi Lodge and Conference Center in Helen, GA.  For more information check out www.mountainsocial.com
Mountain Social Media Summit
View more presentations from spatiallyrelevant.

Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley’s ‘Queen of the Net’: Economy + Internet Trends

Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley’s ‘Queen of the Net’, has just published an excellent 147 page presentation on the economy and Internet trends. The pitch is chockfull of typical investment banker stats and charts that dissect what has happened in the economy and Internet market, what’s happening now, and where the author’s believe the next wave of market opportunities lie. Not too surprisingly the authors believe that” Our bet = At margin, consumers spend more –not less –time on Internet in difficult times –it’s a cheap / efficient / transparent thrill! Undermonetized social networks / video / VoIPdriving powerful usage growth –opportunity for innovative marketers to capitalize on low CPMs.” Check out the entire presentation inside the post.

Monetizing Social Media: CiscoFatty.com

How a 1 page Google Ad heavy site converted the latest “Twitter gets you fired in 140 characters or less” scandal into cold hard cash for an opportunitistic social media monetizer. While CiscoFatty.com certainly does not represent the strategy most responsible parties would take, it is an example of how a creative person who has a rapid ability to execute can monetize short moments of Internet fame or shame. I am sure the folks at Cisco will take a pretty dim view of this site. It will be interesting to see how this all develops. While most folks are interested in the fate of the infamous ‘@theconnor’, I am just as interested in seeing how long Cisco allows this diminuition of their Internet brand identity to continue.

I Wish I Knew How to Monetize Social Media

Here’s why I’m sponsoring a conference that will among other things explore how social media technologies and solutions could be monetized. Social Media technologies represent perhaps the next great fundamental shift in the technology marketplace, but it certainly has some ‘Bubble’-like characteristics. It is premature to declare that Social Media is a bubble about to burst. Great technology, however, can’t be free forever.

I wish I knew the answer to how to mometize social media. Since I don’t know the answer I am going to engage face-to-face with social media types at a conference I am co-sponsoring — Mountain Social Media Summit 2009 (www.mountainsocial.com). Hopefully spending a few days together with passionate people will move me a step closer to answering the question of how to monetize social media.

How Many Angels Can Dance on Top of a Product Manager Pin?

In medium to large scale technology companies roles tend to become more specialized. Have you ever tried to figure out the differences between a product manager, a product marketer, a project manager, and a program manager? This post excerpts a few portions of Jon Gatrell’s The 4 PM Confusion in Technology Companies article which does a great job, leveraging Dilbert of all things, to describe how each of the roles fit into a contemporary technology company today.

How to Calculate the Enterprise Value of Private Companies

Here’s a simple 4 step process for calculating the enterprise value of private companies. Calculating the enterprise value of public companies is pretty easy since many Internet stock sites will calculate it for you. There is no equivalent available for private companies. The analytical approach presented in this post has been used successfully for many years to develop enterprise value estimates for private companies.

How Much Are Mashable.com, DrudgeReport.com, & Gawker.com Worth?

Ever wonder how much revenue leading blog sites generate? Or what they’re valuations are? Then check out this post which discusses 24/7 Wall St.’s Douglas McIntyre’s recent post on the Top 25 Blog Valuations. All of your favorites are covered in the analysis — Gawker.com, Huffington Post, Drudge Report, Perez Hilton, Mashable.com, TechCrunch, Daily Kos, Politico, etc. See estimates of their revenues, profitability, and valuations. The numbers and expert analysis are interesting to say the least.

If I were the Twitter Product Manager for a Day . .

My good friends at SpatiallyRelevant had a rather amusing post the other day. In their piece entitled The people at Google are Smarter than the Twitter Folk you can read the ramblings of a highly frustrated Twitter user and not so closet East Coast style product manager.

Carlyle’s “How the Global Credit Meltdown has Changed the World of Private Equity — For the Better”

“The big public-to-privates are gone in the way of the dodo.” Leon Black, founder of Apollo Management LP at the Super Return conference in Berlin this week where 1,200 attendees gathered to bemoan the state of the private equity industry. This post provides a few salient quotes from the conference attendees as well as a copy of Carlyle’s David Rubenstein’s “How the Global Credit Meltdown has Changed the World of Private Equity — For the Better” presentation

The Hedge Fund Transparency Act or “We have to Disclose WHAT to the SEC!!”

Private equity and venture capital firms face daunting disclosure requirements under the recently introduced Senate Bill 344 entitled “The Hedge Fund Transparency Act”. The nation’s private-equity firms and VC’s with over $50 million under management would be forced to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, while also divulging the value of their funds and names of all investors. Additionally such firms would be subject to the Anti Money Laundering compliance regulations that all financial institutions are subject to now.

What Color is Your Social Media Kool-Aid?

Perhaps the tastiness of one’s Kool-aid is all that matters to be an expert. Maybe it isn’t about metrics, evangelism, references and case studies after all

Cost of Financial Illiteracy: How to Calculate Enterprise Value

How much is your public company or a potential acquisition really worth? Understanding the basics as well as the complexities of Enterprise Value is critical. Too many executives rely upon market capitalization to assess their value or the value of a potential acquisition candidate. This post walks you through a discussion that is happening in executive suites across the country today as well as providing a basic primer in Enterprise Value mechanics.

Why Google Employees Quit, Why Web 2.0 is Over, & Why Your Newborn Needs A Gmail Account

Ex-Googlers talk frankly about why they quit, hedge fund meltdown, Pew Internet study on adults and social networking sites, managing your brand identity on social media sites, and why your newborn needs a Gmail account.

SaaS Revenue Primer: Tiering Analysis

Not all customers are the same. Tiering analysis helps companies to segment their customers by size and contribution so that marketing, sales, & support strategies and resources can be optimally aligned. This is the second installment of the SaaS Revenue Primer series

SaaS Revenue Primer: Flux Analysis

Many technology executives and investors struggle at times to understand the dynamics associated with SaaS revenue streams. The traditional software revenue model based on license fees, maintenance fees, and professional services does not exactly translate into the SaaS modelMost SaaS applications use a ‘pay-as-you-go’ model where customers pay monthly fees based on a number of factors. Aside from understanding SaaS components it is critcally important to understand the dynamics inside of the revenue stream.

The Cost of Financial Illiteracy Part II

Financial Illiteracy is costing your firm millions of dollars. If you and your took the test in the first financial illiteracy post you probably came in a little short. This post lays out a simple, internal program you can run to give your marketing and sales team some basic financial literacy. Follow on posts will focus on the application of financial literacy concepts in your day to day business to help increase sales and profits