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return false;">Radio</a> / </span><a href="/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/about.html">About</a><span class="iphone-only"> / <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://feeds.feedburner.com/AVc">RSS</a></span><div class="clear-both"></div></div> </div> <div class="clear-both"></div> </div> <div id="middle_container"> <div id="content">  <div class="entry"> <a id="a0062789323"></a> <h2><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/twitter-fills-the-tank.html">Twitter Fills The Tank</a></h2> <p>This is hardly news since it leaked almost a month ago. Today our portfolio company Twitter announced that it has raised $35mm from two west coast venture capital firms, Benchmark and IVP. Union Square Ventures will also invest to maintain our ownership position, as will Spark Capital and several other investors.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://blog.twitter.com/2009/02/opportunity-knocks.html">Biz has the news on the Twitter blog</a>.</p><p>There's not much else to say other than I am thrilled that Twitter will be working with Todd Chafee and his partners at <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.ivp.com/">IVP</a> and Peter Fenton and his partners at <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.benchmark.com/">Benchmark</a>. The list of investors in Twitter just keeps getting better and better.</p><p>I'd also like to address one question I've read in a lot of comment threads regarding the recent twitter financing rumors - why raise money now?. Twitter has a very small team and has a fairly small burn rate given the scale of the service it operates and its growth rate. The money Twitter raised last year would have and could have kept the company operating for quite a while. </p><p>But there's a saying that I heard early on in my tenure in the venture business that still rings true.</p><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><em>The best time to raise money is when you don't need it<br/></em></div><p>That's what Twitter did. I think it's a smart move and I am particularly pleased that we've added two very smart and seasoned venture capital firms to the mix. Well done team Twitter.</p><fieldset class="zemanta-related"><legend class="zemanta-related-title">Related articles by Zemanta</legend><ul class="zemanta-article-ul"><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/13/twitter-raises-third-round-of-funding-from-benchmark-and-ivp/">Twitter Raises Third Round of Funding From Benchmark and IVP</a> (techcrunch.com)</li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://pulverblog.pulver.com/archives/008805.html">Congrats to the twitter team on their Funding Announcement</a> (pulverblog.pulver.com)</li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://valleywag.gawker.com/5153318/twitter-now-worth-230-million-according-to-investors">Twitter Now Worth $230 Million, According to Investors</a> (valleywag.gawker.com)</li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10163752-2.html?part=rss&subj=Webware">Twitter's Valentine's surprise: More funding!</a> (news.cnet.com)</li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.quantitativc.com/?p=975">twitter - latest round series D</a> (quantitativc.com)</li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10149663-2.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=Webware">Report: VC infusion values Twitter at $250 million</a> (news.cnet.com)</li> </ul> </fieldset> <div class="zemanta-pixie" style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;"><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/3a6f6437-c24f-40fc-a73f-2686db338228/" title="Zemified by Zemanta"><img alt="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" class="zemanta-pixie-img " src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=3a6f6437-c24f-40fc-a73f-2686db338228" style="border: medium none ; float: right;"/></a></div> <p class="posted"> February 13, 2009 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/venture_capital_and_technology/">Venture Capital and Technology</a>  | <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/twitter-fills-the-tank.html#disqus_thread">Comments (View)</a> </p> <div class="feedburner-ads"> <script src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918js_/http://feeds.feedburner.com/avc?flareitem=http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/twitter-fills-the-tank.html" type="text/javascript"></script> </div> </div>  <div class="entry"> <a id="a0062734757"></a> <h2><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/the-blogroll-i-want-for-avc.html">The Blogroll I Want For AVC</a></h2> <p>Way back when  I started this blog (2003), I created a blogroll. Back then it was pretty easy. There were a dozen or so blogs I read religiously. Blogs like <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://sethgodin.typepad.com/">Seth Godin</a>, <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.scripting.com/">Dave Winer</a>, <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.ventureblog.com/">VentureBlog</a>. </p><p>Over time the blogroll grew. Then I started using a feed reader and I found one, <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.newsgator.com/">Newsgator</a>, that would auto-generate a blogroll. That was pretty cool. I'd add a blog to my reader and it would get added to my blogroll.</p><p>But then I stopped using a feedreader about three years ago and my blogroll got stale. And one day I removed it.</p><p>Yesterday, I received an email from Allison Kellman. She asked:</p><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><em>Would you consider publishing a blogroll or a list of blogs you read often somewhere on your site?  I'd love to know what you're reading.<br/></em></div><p>And without thinking, I wrote back:</p><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><em>The only blogs I read every day are my wife, daughter, and brother</em><br/><br/><em>Everything else is based on links I see on the web</em><br/><br/><em>I wish there was a last.fm for blogs</em><br/></div><p>A last.fm for blogs! I want to scrobble my blogreading and publish it as a blog roll on AVC.</p><p>If it exists, please send me the link and I'll add it today. If it doesn't, please someone build it and I'll be your first user.</p> <p class="posted"> February 12, 2009 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/venture_capital_and_technology/">Venture Capital and Technology</a> , <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/weblogs/">Weblogs</a>  | <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/the-blogroll-i-want-for-avc.html#disqus_thread">Comments (View)</a> </p> <div class="feedburner-ads"> <script src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918js_/http://feeds.feedburner.com/avc?flareitem=http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/the-blogroll-i-want-for-avc.html" type="text/javascript"></script> </div> </div>  <div class="entry"> <a id="a0062689517"></a> <h2><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/status-continued.html">Status (continued)</a></h2> <p>A few days ago I wrote <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/hasnt-it-always-been-about-status.html">a post where I observed that status has become the ultimate social gesture</a>. </p><p> I think <a class="zem_slink" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://facebook.com/" rel="homepage" title="Facebook">Facebook</a>'s decision to open its status messages via the API is a very important moment in the emergence of status the the atomic particle of social networking. </p><p>And yet, I still have a problem. My brother (aka Jackson) commented at Facebook this morning on a twitter update I wrote about the weather in NYC I know that because Facebook sent me an email about it. I want to get that comment in <a class="zem_slink" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://twitter.com/" rel="homepage" title="Twitter">Twitter</a> (or any other service I might choose to use) and be able to @reply to it and get it back to him in Facebook. </p><p> That's the use case that has made status conversational and led to its ascendancy. So, what more needs to happen from Facebook and Twitter and the other status producing services to truly open up this conversation? </p><p> I want this pretty badly and I am sure a lot of you all do too.</p> <div class="zemanta-pixie" style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;"><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/29af0057-763c-4ec4-9198-ea4a0ff0c38f/" title="Zemified by Zemanta"><img alt="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" class="zemanta-pixie-img " src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=29af0057-763c-4ec4-9198-ea4a0ff0c38f" style="border: medium none ; float: right;"/></a></div> <p class="posted"> February 11, 2009 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/venture_capital_and_technology/">Venture Capital and Technology</a> , <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/webtech/">Web/Tech</a>  | <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/status-continued.html#disqus_thread">Comments (View)</a> </p> <div class="feedburner-ads"> <script src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918js_/http://feeds.feedburner.com/avc?flareitem=http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/status-continued.html" type="text/javascript"></script> </div> </div>  <div class="entry"> <a id="a0062631801"></a> <h2><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/truth.html">Truth</a></h2> <p>Last night <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.jessicasarawilson.com/">Jessica</a> showed me an essay she wrote after reading DBC Pierre's <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.amazon.com/Vernon-God-Little-DBC-Pierre/dp/0156029987/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234261166&sr=8-2">Vernon God Little</a>. In the opening paragraph she wrote:</p><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><em>DBC Pierre explores the effect of media on citizens, and the greater theme of truth, or rather lack of truth, in everyday life.<br/></em></div><p>It was a proud moment for me, because if there is one thing I hope to pass onto my children, it's the notion that there is no singular truth.</p><p>I was at a dinner last week where much of the NYC digerati (young and old) were assembled in a lovely apartment on the upper east side. After dinner but before dessert, the hosts initiated a discussion of the obsession of the moment: whither media. At one point, the argument came out that we need journalism to surface the truth. At which point, I sort of lost my composure and argued loudly that there is no truth.</p><p>There used to be a mantra at the upper right of this blog. I can't remember what it said exactly, but the gist of it was that there is no absolute truth, just your truth and my truth. I post my truth here everyday and I hope you'll drop by and share your truth with me.</p><p>This is the promise of social media. It's revolutionary. When you give every citizen in the world a printing press, you ought to expect revolution. And it is upon us.</p><p>I loved this paragraph in <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://nymag.com/news/media/54069/">NY Mag's piece on Twitter</a> which is in the current issue:</p><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><em>Now think about that for a second. In the midst of chaos—a plane just crashed right in front of him!—Krums’s first instinct was to take a picture and load it to the web. There was nothing capitalistic or altruistic about it. Something amazing happened, and without thinking, he sent it out to the world. And let’s say he hadn’t. Let’s say he took this incredible photo—a photo any journalist would send to the Pulitzer board—and decided to sell it, said he was hanging onto it for the highest bidder. He would have been vilified by bloggers and Twitterers alike. His is a culture of sharing information. This is the culture Twitter is counting on. Whatever your thoughts on its ability to exist outside the collapsing economy or its inability (so far) to put a price tag on its services, that’s a real thing. That’s the instinct Stone was talking about. If the nation has tens of millions of people like Krums, that’s a phenomenon. That’s what Twitter is waiting for.<br/></em></div><p>"His is a culture of sharing information" No, that is not <strong>his</strong> culture. That is <strong>our</strong> culture. That's where we are because every single one of us has a printing press in our hands at all times. I do understand that not everyone on this planet has a cell phone with a camera and an internet connection, but you get my point.</p><p>We've moved past the time when big institutions controlled what we read, what we thought, and what we believed. And we are arriving at a new place where each and everyone of us will report on our world and share it with others. Sharing is the new truth.</p><p>Sunday night the Grammys told us that <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1604582/20090209/plant_robert.jhtml">Robert Plant and Allison Krauss made the record of the year</a>. That's fine. That's their opinion. Mine is different. I believe that Okkervil River made the record of the year last year. But you know that because <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/12/top-10-records.html">I published that opinion on this very blog in December of last year</a>. Compare the Grammys to the <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://hypem.com/zeitgeist/2008/">Hype Machine's Music Zeitgest</a> and you'll see what the old world looks like and what the new world looks like.</p><p>If you want to hear some good new music, it's hard to find it on radio. I just went to <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.923krock.com/pages/2472418.php">KRock's website</a> and looked at the most recent songs they played. There's not one new song (that came out in the past year) in the most recent ten songs. It's all stuff that was popular years ago. Compare that to <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://fredwilson.fm/">fredwilson.fm</a>. On my radio station, we play new music. In fact, the music is so new on fredwilson.fm that I should be getting take down notices because half of the most recent ten songs have not even been released yet. And of the other half of the most recent ten, only one song is old and one more is a live cover. </p><p>How does fredwilson.fm get programmed? Sharing, of course. Each day I share one mp3 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://fredwilson.vc/">on my tumblog</a>. fredwilson.fm just pulls all those posts together and plays them in a stream in reverse chronological order. Today, I'm sharing a track from a new band of teenagers from NYC called <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://fredwilson.vc/post/77137112/everybody-else-care-bears-on-fire-in-the-fall">Care Bears On Fire</a>. This brings me to my next point. I've got a vested interest in Care Bears' success (which I disclose in that post I linked to).</p><p>We all have vested interests and social media allows us to promote them to each other. That vested interest could be economic (like my interest in Care Bears) or it could be political (like my posts in support of Obama last fall) or it could be familial (like my reblogs of <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://fredwilson.vc/post/71784578/this-is-amazing-gotham-gal-upside-down-banana">Gotham Gal's recipes</a> or <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://fredwilson.vc/post/72355720/i-miss-paris-but-am-getting-a-taste-of-it-daily-on">Jessica's photography</a>).</p><p>My partner Brad once asked his nephew why he preferred sports blogs to the sports sections in the newspaper. His nephew said "everyone has a point of view but with blogs, they are upfront about it". Indeed. I'm a Jets, Mets, and Knicks fan. That's the lens through which I view the sports world, sadly.</p><p>This culture of sharing is not limited to the written word. Log into <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://boxee.tv/">Boxee</a> and you'll see <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.flickr.com/photos/shingo/3212860240/in/set-72157612788098474">a screen that looks like this</a>.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e20105371d282d970b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="3212860240_4a485f599b" class="at-xid-6a00d83451b2c969e20105371d282d970b " src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e20105371d282d970b-500wi"/></a> </p><p>The very first thing you see when you log into Boxee are the recommendations from your friends on Boxee. Facebook's user interface is coming to your TV sometime soon. It's not going to be about what NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, or anyone else wants you to watch. It's going to be about what your friends are watching. It always has been about that but we just haven't had the TV interfaces that recognize that.</p><p>There I go again, talking about my vested interests (our firm has an investment in Boxee). That's my truth. </p><p>I've got to end this post because I need to turn it into a presentation I can deliver at <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.soccomm.com/">SocComm</a> in about three hours. So I'll end this post by linking out to a couple of other truths out there on the issues I've covered here.</p><p></p><p></p><fieldset class="zemanta-related"><legend class="zemanta-related-title">Related articles by Zemanta</legend><ul class="zemanta-article-ul"><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.rexblog.com/2009/02/09/19005">Drive-by thoughts on Twitter, Grammys and Alison Krauss</a> (RexBlog.com)</li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://gigaom.com/2009/02/06/why-does-everyone-heart-boxee/">Why Does Everyone Heart Boxee?</a> (gigaom.com)</li> </ul> </fieldset> <div class="zemanta-pixie" style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;"><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/38e4bd2f-999b-4a36-b427-852ccff753ab/" title="Zemified by Zemanta"><img alt="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" class="zemanta-pixie-img" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=38e4bd2f-999b-4a36-b427-852ccff753ab" style="border: medium none ; float: right;"/></a></div> <p class="posted"> February 10, 2009 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/my_music/">My Music</a> , <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/politics/">Politics</a> , <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/venture_capital_and_technology/">Venture Capital and Technology</a> , <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/weblogs/">Weblogs</a>  | <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/truth.html#disqus_thread">Comments (View)</a> </p> <div class="feedburner-ads"> <script src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918js_/http://feeds.feedburner.com/avc?flareitem=http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/truth.html" type="text/javascript"></script> </div> </div>  <div class="entry"> <a id="a0062581511"></a> <h2><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/when-greed-is-good.html">When Greed Is Good</a></h2> <p>For those of my generation, Gordon Gekko is the ultimate Wall Street caricature. Oliver Stone's movie <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.amazon.com/Wall-Street-Anniversary-Frank-Adonis/dp/B000RW3VD4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1234179922&sr=1-1">Wall Street</a>, in which Gordon is the main character, came out in 1987, just as I was getting out of business school and starting my career in venture capital. The big line in that movie is when Gordon says "greed is good."  Here's a ~3 min clip from the film and the whole thing is worth watching but the big line comes around 2:40 into the clip:</p><p><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/JaKkuJVy2YA&hl=en&fs=1"/><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="344" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918oe_/http://www.youtube.com/v/JaKkuJVy2YA&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425"/></object></p><p> </p><p>If you watched until the end, you also got to hear this line:</p><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><em>Greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but also that malfunctioning corporation called the USA.<br/></em></div><p><br/>That's the first thing I thought of when I read this morning <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/business/09bailout.html?_r=1&hp">in the NY Times</a> that the bank rescue plan that Geithner will announce tomorrow relies in part on private investors:</p><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><em>Administration officials said the plan, to be announced Tuesday, was likely to depend in part on the willingness of private investors other than banks — like hedge funds, private equity funds and perhaps even insurance companies — to buy the contaminating assets that wiped out the capital of many banks.The officials say they are counting on the profit motive to create a market for those assets. The government would guarantee a floor value, officials say, as a way to overcome investors’ reluctance to buy them.<br/></em></div><p><br/>The smartest people I know have been saying this has to happen for over five months. <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.informationarbitrage.com/">Roger Ehrenberg </a>has been pleading for the good bank/bad bank solution since the late summer early fall. In the good bank/bad bank scenario, the bad bank gets all the "toxic" assets and private investors are allowed to speculate as to their worth in an open and transparent market.</p><p>The single best comment I've received on this blog about the banking mess came last September from <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://disqus.com/people/JLM/#main">JLM</a>, who was hanging around this blog community during the election but sadly seems to have left the conversation, at least he's gone silent.  <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/09/to-splurge-or-n.html#comment-2642568">JLM said</a>:</p><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><em>Sometimes a bit of historic perspective is useful in trying to deal with TODAY. Remember that quote about being doomed to relive the history we ignore? Well we are not being very thoughtful about this. We have actually seen this movie before though maybe it was a shorter version.<br/><br/>Remember the S & L crisis and the Resolution Trust Corp? I do because I hit a very, very good lick in purchasing distressed properties from the RTC, pension funds, insurance companies, banks and S & Ls. I bought them for $0.20-0.30 on the dollar of replacement cost, fixed them up, owned them for about 5-7 years, had the numbers audited annually and sold them all to institutions in 3 transactions in 1995 --- 6,000 apartments, 100 warehouses, 7.5 MM sf of offices.<br/><br/>My partners were the likes of GE Capital (for whom I also fixed up some of their problems), Fidelity and private foreign investors. BTW, GE Capital is the smartest bunch of real estate folks I ever met and the best risk takers a partner could ever have hoped for. And they made a ton of money in the deal while conducting themselves like perfect partners and gentlemen. Private money jumped in big time!<br/><br/>I trooped around Wall Street trying to raise money for a long, long time and shared my contrarian investment strategy (and believe me the folks were looking for the lobotomy scars all the time) with the likes of KKR, Odyssey, Bear Stearns, Allen & Co, Leon Black --- the usual suspects. And guess what? They never gave me any money but they all went into the business themselves. Capitalism was alive and well.<br/><br/>Here's the bottom line: If the RTC had held every property and just injected a bit of management they would have recovered every penny of principal, every penny of interest at the default rate and they would have firmed up the national commercial real estate markets more quickly.<br/><br/>This is not some mythical academic theoretical tale. This is something that a bunch of guys did the last time the markets crashed (then it was more commercial than residential) and the government stepped in to bail out the transgressors. This is reality.<br/><br/>BTW, the final price tag on the RTC was about $200B last time around. How much would that be in today's dollars? Oh, about $700B maybe?<br/><br/>Here's a suggestion based upon what was learned the last time around --- <br/><br/>Let all the originators of the problem fail. Suck their capital dry. Punish them like a VC would punish the first round guys.<br/><br/>Don't use a penny of government money. If pressed, use government loan guarantees only. The only entity left with real credit is the US government. Use it. This will make the markets tell us what this crap is really worth. Right now the issue is the pricing.<br/><br/>Fix the problems that created this mess quick and do it publicly. No 100% mortgages even for Warren Buffet. No low doc mortgages. No financing of closing costs in mortgages. Make all borrowers have skin in the game. No leveraging capital 30-40 times for any financial instititions. No mortgage based derivatives of any kind --- why? Cause you cannot collect mortgage payments when the mortgage is "embedded" and "divided" by securitization. Teach the guys with mousse in their hair how to collect a past due payment. No extraordinary compensation for investment guys who are primarily salary men --- let them take a piece of their own deal if they want an equity style upside. No naked short selling. Ban short selling for 24 months. Then reinstate the uptick rule. Bring all hedge funds out of the woods and under the regulatory umbrella. If you want American markets, tax laws, securities laws, etc, then you have to be regulated. Lower the capital gains rate to 0% for five years --- because that's how long it will take to work this through. The private capital will come to that lowered capital gains rate like a moth to a flame and it will be immediate. Merge Freddie and Fannie and obtain meaningful merger efficiencies.<br/><br/>Stop the foreclosure process on residential real estate which can be salvaged. If a borrower can pay anything --- owes $100 per month but can pay $70 --- keep him in the house because real estate plummets in value the second it is empty and every foreclosure ever sold has been sold at a deeper discount than the foreclosure price. Make a trade. Rework the mortgage in return for a 50% equity slice above the mortgage amount. There is a certain irony in allowing the public to solve their own problems rather than just sending them the bill. It shortcuts the flow of money and it has a social benefit. Can every deal be reworked? No, but many can be and should be. <br/><br/>Oh, yeah, get rid of Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and Chris Cox.<br/></em></div><p><br/>That's even better than I remember it. I should print it out and mail it to every single legislator and policy maker in Washington. But my favorite part of it is this:</p><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><em>I hit a very, very good lick in purchasing distressed properties from the RTC, pension funds, insurance companies, banks and S & Ls.</em><br/></div><p><br/>It's time for America to get up off its ass and start looking for some "good licks". Howard Lindzon <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://howardlindzon.com/?p=4032">has it right. </a></p><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><em>This crisis of confidence will only be fixed by you and me<br/></em></div><p><br/>Greed is good when fear rules the roost and fear is good when greed rules the roost. Now is the time for greed.</p> <div class="zemanta-pixie" style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;"><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/fbcec592-e50c-4d48-8228-9f73c5f8ada1/" title="Zemified by Zemanta"><img alt="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" class="zemanta-pixie-img " src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=fbcec592-e50c-4d48-8228-9f73c5f8ada1" style="border: medium none ; float: right;"/></a></div> <p class="posted"> February 9, 2009 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/stocks/">stocks</a> , <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/venture_capital_and_technology/">Venture Capital and Technology</a>  | <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/when-greed-is-good.html#disqus_thread">Comments (View)</a> </p> <div class="feedburner-ads"> <script src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918js_/http://feeds.feedburner.com/avc?flareitem=http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/when-greed-is-good.html" type="text/javascript"></script> </div> </div>  <div class="entry"> <a id="a0062556653"></a> <h2><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/traffic-sources-in-the-past-week.html">Traffic Sources In The Past Week</a></h2> <p>I look at <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.google.com/analytics/">Google Analytics</a> about once a week and this week I noticed some changes. Here are the top ten sources in the past week:</p><p><br/><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e2010537193b0f970b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Google analytics" class="at-xid-6a00d83451b2c969e2010537193b0f970b " src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e2010537193b0f970b-500wi"/></a> </p><p>Delicious hasn't been among the top ten referrers in a very long time. Is it making a comeback?</p><p>Twitter, Techmeme, and Hacker News have been the top three after direct and google for a while now, but Twitter seems to be rising as re-tweeting is starting to really take off.</p><p>And Facebook has never been in the top ten.</p><p>It seems that status messages with links is starting to deliver significant traffic. That's a trend worth watching.</p><p>It would be great if other bloggers would post this information and we could share insights about what's working as traffic sources these days.</p> <p class="posted"> February 8, 2009 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/webtech/">Web/Tech</a> , <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/weblogs/">Weblogs</a>  | <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/traffic-sources-in-the-past-week.html#disqus_thread">Comments (View)</a> </p> <div class="feedburner-ads"> <script src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918js_/http://feeds.feedburner.com/avc?flareitem=http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/traffic-sources-in-the-past-week.html" type="text/javascript"></script> </div> </div>  <div class="entry"> <a id="a0062517825"></a> <h2><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/hasnt-it-always-been-about-status.html">Hasn't It Always Been About Status?</a></h2> <p><em>What’s the day? What's you doing?<br/> How’s your mood? How's that song?<br/> when it passes right by me<br/> It’s behind me, now it’s gone.</em><br/><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztvr09J7KK4">Fireworks, Animal Collective</a></p><p><a class="zem_slink" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://facebook.com/" rel="homepage" title="Facebook">Facebook</a>'s announcement that they are <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=193">opening up API access to user's status updates</a> (and more) is big news. The status update has become the ultimate social gesture. You could see this coming if you were watching carefully. All last year, Facebook, who is the leader in social networking and will continue to be as far as I can tell, focused on morphing the user experience, first to the news feed and ultimately to the status update as the primary user experience.</p><p>But Facebook did not invent the status update. I honestly don't know where the status update started but for me it was <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Instant_Messenger">AIM</a> where I first was asked to leave a short note telling people what I was doing. I've heard Jack Dorsey, <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.140characters.com/2009/01/30/how-twitter-was-born/">the inventor of Twitter</a>, talk many times about his inspirations for Twitter and one of them was the status message in AIM.</p><p>Much of the innovation in social networking is being driven by entrepreneurs in their late 20 and early 30s. These people were teenagers or young adults when AIM came out in 1997 and they rapidly adopted the IM interface for rapid (and rabid) communications with friends from their bedrooms and/or dorm rooms. The status update is ingrained in their social networking intuitions.</p><p>It seems to me, and I am certainly influenced as an active user of and investor in <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://twitter.com/">Twitter</a>, that status has emerged as the ultimate social gesture. If you look at traditional social nets, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc, etc, they offer many social activities; writing on walls, posting and tagging photos, sharing videos, listening to music, playing games, etc. </p><p>But as Joshua Schachter explained to me a few years ago now, reduction of services to the simplest user experiences is a powerful generator of focused activity. And that's what is going on at Facebook and across the social networking sector right now. Status is universal. Not everyone takes photos or videos, or plays games. But everyone has a status and it changes. It's also quick and easy to post a status message. And it's massively conversational (something we didn't quite realize until Twitter users invented the @reply).</p><p>I believe Facebook's recognition of status as the most important and most powerful social gesture seals the deal. Status is where it's at in social networking. This is very good for Twitter and its also very good for the other social nets who recognize this and move quickly to provide status updating features and open them up to the social web.</p><p>This is also very good for third party Twitter clients who will now be able to become status clients. We are going to see continued innovation in and around the status message. We can use filtering, semantics, indentity, social graphs, and a host of other important technologies to weave a real-time web around status.</p><p>Of course, not all social nets are the same. The big differences are around public/private and one-way/reciprocal following as well as market positioning. A service like Facebook, with its emphasis on privacy and reciprocal following serves the user who values privacy and wants to have a smaller and more intimate social experience (the private party). A service like Twitter with its default to public and one-way follow serves the user who wants to reach the broadest audience (the man on the soapbox). A service like LinkedIn, which has adopted the Facebook model (more or less) but is business focused will serve an even different user base.</p><p>All of these services will be generators of status and the real-time web is emerging as a result. My friend John Borthwick has been one of the leading thinkers about the implications of this real-time web and he penned<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.borthwick.com/weblog/2009/02/05/creative-destruction-google-slayed-by-the-notificator/"> an interesting post this week about the implications of all this on Google and the search ecosystem</a>.</p><p>John talks about attending a Christensen talk at AOL around the time of the AOL/Time Warner merger:</p><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><em>They [market leaders] think they are still disrupting when they are just innovating on the same theme that they began with.   As a consequence they miss the grass roots challenger — the real disruptor to their business.   The company who is disrupting their business doesn’t look relevant to the billion dollar franchise, its often scrappy and unpolished, it looks like a sideline business, and often its business model is TBD.<br/></em></div><p>It's interesting to note how Facebook is behaving in this regard. It's impressive as hell. Say what you will about Mark Zuckerberg. He's got the intellectual curiosity and honesty to see what's going on and deal with it. He's done it again and again, with the news feed, with the platform, and now with status. And the social and real time web is so much better because of it.</p><fieldset class="zemanta-related"><legend class="zemanta-related-title">Related articles by Zemanta</legend><ul class="zemanta-article-ul"><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.benbarren.com/?p=4395">facebook finally opening up feeds to the beast</a> (benbarren.com)</li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_opens_up_lets_develop.php">Facebook Opens Up: Lets Developers Access Status Updates, Notes, Links, and Videos</a> (readwriteweb.com)</li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/02/facebook-opens-status-api-say-goodbye-to-twitter/">Facebook Opens Status API, Say Goodbye to Twitter</a> (allfacebook.com)</li> </ul> </fieldset> <div class="zemanta-pixie" style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;"><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/1e20b517-956a-4252-891b-efd834e1a54b/" title="Zemified by Zemanta"><img alt="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" class="zemanta-pixie-img " src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=1e20b517-956a-4252-891b-efd834e1a54b" style="border: medium none ; float: right;"/></a></div> <p class="posted"> February 7, 2009 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/venture_capital_and_technology/">Venture Capital and Technology</a> , <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/webtech/">Web/Tech</a>  | <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/hasnt-it-always-been-about-status.html#disqus_thread">Comments (View)</a> </p> <div class="feedburner-ads"> <script src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918js_/http://feeds.feedburner.com/avc?flareitem=http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/hasnt-it-always-been-about-status.html" type="text/javascript"></script> </div> </div>  <div class="entry"> <a id="a0062468269"></a> <h2><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/zemanta-for-webmail.html">Zemanta For Webmail</a></h2> <p>Let's start with the disclosure part. Union Square Ventures is an investor in <a class="zem_slink" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.zemanta.com/" rel="homepage" title="Zemanta">Zemanta</a>. I'm talking my own book here.</p><p>Zemanta is a tool that recommends content to you *while* you are composing it. Here's a post I wrote last September that <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/09/zemanta.html">explains how Zemanta works and why it's so great</a>.</p><p>Until now, Zemanta's content recommendation service (which I use <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/policy/0/7571/46243">via a Firefox extension</a>) has been limited to blogging platforms but all that changed yesterday when <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.zemanta.com/zemanta-for-mail/">Zemanta added gmail and yahoo mail </a>as supported content creation services. Now, if you have the Zemanta extension installed, when you go to gmail or yahoo mail, you'll see a button that says Zemanta that lets you use the content recommendation service while composing an email.</p><p>This demo screencast shows how you could use Zemanta's service while composing an email to a friend about a visit to Paris:</p><p><object height="300" width="400"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"/><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3083977&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1"/><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="300" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918oe_/http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3083977&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400"/></object><br/><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://vimeo.com/3083977">Zemanta on Gmail</a> from <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://vimeo.com/zemanta">zemanta</a> on <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.</p><p>If you are a regular user of Gmail or Yahoo Mail you can simply <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.zemanta.com/download/">download the Zemanta extension</a> and give it a try. If you do, let me know what you think.</p><fieldset class="zemanta-related"><legend class="zemanta-related-title">Related articles by Zemanta</legend><ul class="zemanta-article-ul"><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://thenextweb.com/2009/02/06/zemanta/">Zemanta Now Makes Your Emails More Interesting</a> (thenextweb.com)</li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/02/hands-on-add-photos-links-to-gmail-yahoo-with-zemanta.ars">Ars Technica: Add photos and links to gmail and yahoo mail</a></li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.cloudave.com/link/zemanta-for-email-but-why">Zemanta for Email - But Why?</a> (cloudave.com)</li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10157644-2.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=Webware">Zemanta now helps you write e-mails</a> (news.cnet.com)</li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.centernetworks.com/zemanta-gmail-support-blogging">Zemanta Launches Rich Email Widget and My Take on a Potential Business Model</a> (centernetworks.com)</li> </ul> </fieldset> <div class="zemanta-pixie" style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;"><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/ff37c874-4c1b-4b85-ba68-e6a6df1c6bed/" title="Zemified by Zemanta"><img alt="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" class="zemanta-pixie-img" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=ff37c874-4c1b-4b85-ba68-e6a6df1c6bed" style="border: medium none ; float: right;"/></a></div> <p class="posted"> February 6, 2009 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/venture_capital_and_technology/">Venture Capital and Technology</a> , <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/webtech/">Web/Tech</a> , <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/weblogs/">Weblogs</a>  | <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/zemanta-for-webmail.html#disqus_thread">Comments (View)</a> </p> <div class="feedburner-ads"> <script src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918js_/http://feeds.feedburner.com/avc?flareitem=http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/zemanta-for-webmail.html" type="text/javascript"></script> </div> </div>  <div class="entry"> <a id="a0062412887"></a> <h2><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/latitude.html">Latitude</a></h2> <p>Google added a new feature to its <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.google.com/mobile/default/maps.html#utm_campaign=en&utm_source=gh0smm&utm_medium=ha&utm_term=google%20maps%20mobile&dc=gh0smm">Google Maps software for mobile phones</a> this week. The feature is called <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.google.com/latitude/intro.html#dc=gh0sla&utm_campaign=en&utm_source=gh0sla&utm_medium=ha&utm_term=latitude">Latitude</a> and you will get it if you download the latest Google Maps version.</p><p>Before talking about Latitude, let me first say I have tried a ton of third party apps for my blackberry and the only one that has really stuck is Google Maps. It should come standard on every blackberry. It's that good.</p><p>At some point last year, Google added "my location" to Google Maps for mobile and that was a game changing move. Having a map on your mobile phone that always knows where you are is fantastic. It makes getting directions a breeze and it also gives you confidence that you are going in the right direction when you are lost.</p><p>With Latitude, Google has taken the somewhat obvious next step of connecting all these mobile devices with maps and "my location" on them. Latitude allows you to invite people to see where you are on their phones and allow you to see where you are on their phones.</p><p>Once I got the new Google maps software on my phone, I immediately invited my family and my colleagues at work to my Latitude service. I am not sure who else I'll invite but I don't think it will be that many people. This is not like Twitter or Facebook where you get value out of having a large network (at least I don't think so after playing with it for a bit last night).</p><p>But for my office to be able to see where I am when I am late for a meeting or to be able to locate my daughter in the Marais in Paris and be able to get walking directions to the cafe she's in is tremendous.</p><p>There may be other applications for Latitude that aren't immediately obvious to me and I'd love to hear your thoughts about it in the comments. But for me, this is another killer feature and Google is slowly doing with maps what they've done in search - running the table on the competiton.</p><fieldset class="zemanta-related"><legend class="zemanta-related-title">Related articles by Zemanta</legend><ul class="zemanta-article-ul"><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://timesonline.typepad.com/technology/2009/02/google.html">Google Latitude: keeping track of your friends and family's every move</a> (timesonline.typepad.com)</li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li">Om Malik: <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://gigaom.com/2009/02/04/with-latitude-google-fires-another-shot-at-mobile-operators/">Google Fires A Shot At Mobile Operators</a></li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://domainmacher.com/2009/02/04/google-gets-into-the-mobile-social-game-launches-lattitude/">Google Gets into the Mobile Social Game, Launches Lattitude</a> (domainmacher.com)</li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://r.zemanta.com/?u=http%3A//www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/04/google.latitude/index.html%3Feref%3Drss_tech&a=2974074&rid=a59d7f6d-201a-479d-8c89-47c10471b554&e=97045a54ad36a54a75cf2f6d1f951d2a">Google Latitude tracks friends' locations</a> (cnn.com)</li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://r.zemanta.com/?u=http%3A//abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory%3Fid%3D6800142&a=2978043&rid=a59d7f6d-201a-479d-8c89-47c10471b554&e=c34b53e73e83cadc37ddc24cc8e2db1c">Check Google Maps to Find Your Kids</a> (abcnews.go.com)</li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/02/google-latitude-adds-location.html">Google's Latitude Adds Location-Sharing to Mobile Phones</a> (radar.oreilly.com)</li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/04/google_latitude/">Google will tell your mates where you are</a> (theregister.co.uk)</li> </ul> </fieldset> <div class="zemanta-pixie" style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;"><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/89a34b94-4e2e-4876-82d3-6628d3c8178a/" title="Zemified by Zemanta"><img alt="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" class="zemanta-pixie-img " src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=89a34b94-4e2e-4876-82d3-6628d3c8178a" style="border: medium none ; float: right;"/></a></div> <p class="posted"> February 5, 2009 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/venture_capital_and_technology/">Venture Capital and Technology</a>  | <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/latitude.html#disqus_thread">Comments (View)</a> </p> <div class="feedburner-ads"> <script src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918js_/http://feeds.feedburner.com/avc?flareitem=http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/latitude.html" type="text/javascript"></script> </div> </div>  <div class="entry"> <a id="a0062357682"></a> <h2><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/profile-pictures-and-online-identity.html">Profile Pictures and Online Identity</a></h2> <p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e2011168460213970c-pi" style="float: right;"><img alt="Twitter follows" border="0" class="at-xid-6a00d83451b2c969e2011168460213970c " src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e2011168460213970c-800wi" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;" title="Twitter follows"/></a> I was moving around my twitter account this morning, looking at my timeline, my direct messages, my recent followers, and the people I follow. I started looking carefully at all the avatars and thinking about the people behind them. The image on the right is the profiles of the most recent seven twitter accounts I've chosen to follow.</p><p>It's really interesting to see what people choose to use to represent them online. The simplest thing is a headshot and I suspect that's what the majority of people use when they are asked to upload a profile picture. That's what Kara Swisher chose (she's the top profile, my most recent follow).</p><p>But even with the headshot, some people go for the funny picture, adding some character to their profile. Mike Doughty (second profile) has his head on the table and some sort of box between him and the camera. Stuart Ellman (fifth profile) is dressed as the court jester (probably a halloween pic). Both of those profiles tell us a bit more about those two.</p><p>Some choose to use a photo of something or someone else. Lauren (fourth profile) seems to have chosen a family photo of some kind. Howie (sixth profile) has a photo of his friend and Springsteen's guitarist Nils Lofgren. We don't get to see these people's faces, but they are telling us something about them nonetheless.</p><p>I've been online since the early 90s and I've gone back and forth on what kind of profile I like to use. But for the past couple years, I've settled on the image that I now try to use everywhere online. It's my online brand and I stumbled on to it accidentally. I thought it might be interesting to share with all of you how that came about and what I learned from it.</p><p>In the middle of 2006, <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://howardlindzon.com/">Howard Lindzon</a> approached me about getting involved in a web video show he was going to produce called Wallstrip. In the initial incarnation of Wallstrip, there was going to be a daily video talking about the stock of the day, and then there was going to be about a dozen bloggers who would do a short post on what they thought of the stock as an investment idea.</p><p>Howard asked me to be one of those dozen bloggers. I thought about it for a while and then agreed to do it. Then, unbekownst to me, he asked an artist friend of his in Phoenix named <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.iggyart.com/">Jenny</a> to go on the web, find photos of each of the dozen bloggers, and draw up a sketch that he could use as their Wallstrip avatar. This was mine.<br/><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e2011168461e78970c-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Fredwilson" class="at-xid-6a00d83451b2c969e2011168461e78970c " src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e2011168461e78970c-120wi"/></a> </span> <br/>From the minute I saw it, I liked it. It uses my favorite color (green) as the backdrop and the eye color (my eyes are sometimes blue and sometimes green and sometimes something else). It looks like me, but not too much.</p><p>So I began to use it a bit here and there around the web as I set up new profiles. But by no means was it the only profile picture I used. For corporate oriented services like LinkedIn, I'd use my Union Square Ventures headshot. For social nets like Facebook, I'd use a regular headshot. I used a photo of me taking a photo on Flickr for a long time.</p><p>But then I started to realize that the Wallstrip avatar was becoming my online identity. People would comment about it all the time. Around the time we sold Wallstrip, Howard asked Jenny to do a real painting of it which I now have in my office at Union Square Ventures. It's a real conversation starter.</p><p>So sometime last year, I just decided to go with it everywhere. It's at the top of this blog and everywhere else I have an online identity. And I think that decision is having some important effects.</p><p>As I said earlier in this post, it's become my online brand. It's simple, small, and very recognizable. By putting it everywhere that I am online, I've used frequency and reach to power home that the avatar is me. It's become my visual handle and it's also a signature and a sign of authenticity. </p><p>But there's also a risk in standardizing on an online identity. Someone could grab that image and use it to pretend to be me. That's a concern and probably one reason why many people choose to change their profile picture/avatar on a regular basis. It hasn't happened to me yet, but I am sure it will and then I don't know what I am going to do about it.</p><p>Online identity is a big issue and a big opportunity for entrepreneurs on the web. It seems like Facebook is quickly becoming a major provider of online identity authentication and that's a smart move for them and a good thing for the web as a whole. But there is still a ton of opportunity out there to provide services in and around what Facebook and others are doing. Because online identity is powerful and becoming more intertwined with offline identity every day. My avatar is a good representation of that. </p> <p class="posted"> February 4, 2009 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/venture_capital_and_technology/">Venture Capital and Technology</a> , <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/webtech/">Web/Tech</a>  | <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/profile-pictures-and-online-identity.html#disqus_thread">Comments (View)</a> </p> <div class="feedburner-ads"> <script src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918js_/http://feeds.feedburner.com/avc?flareitem=http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/profile-pictures-and-online-identity.html" type="text/javascript"></script> </div> </div>  <div class="entry"> <a id="a0062303318"></a> <h2><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/how-to-write-a-misleading-headline.html">How To Write A Misleading Headline</a></h2> <p>I know I don't have to explain this to anyone because it's done all the time, and I've done it plenty myself. But this headline <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/venture-capital-returns-dip-below-zero/">from Claire Cain Miller's post on the NY Times blog yesterday</a> is a good example of accentuating the negative in the headline:</p><div style="margin-left: 40px;">Venture Capital Returns Dip Below Zero<br/></div><p>Here's the facts from <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://venturebeat.com/2009/02/02/vc-performance-dipped-back-in-q3-2008/">a VentureBeat story on the same data</a>:</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e201053707f97a970b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Venture-capital-returns-q3" class="at-xid-6a00d83451b2c969e201053707f97a970b " src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e201053707f97a970b-500wi"/></a> </p><p>So let's look at this data. Venture returns across all funds and stages are 6.6% for a three year period, 8.6% for a 5 yr period, 17.3% for a 10 yr period, and 17.1% for a 20 yr period. Venture as an asset class has outperformed the public markets by 7.7% over a three yr period, 5.5% over a 5 yr period, 15.2% over a 10 yr period, and 8.4% over a 20 yr period.</p><p>And the headline that comes out of that data is that "venture capital returns dip below zero"?</p><p>The thing that really bugs me is if not for FAS157, which <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/the-valuation-b.html">I posted about a few weeks back</a>, we wouldn't even see negative returns for VC in the past year. FAS157 is an accounting ruling which requires venture capital firms to mark their investments up in good markets and mark their investments down in bad markets. I am not sure if this was an intended consequence or not, but FAS157 is going to make venture returns more highly correlated with public market returns than they have been in the past.</p><p>I'm quite sure that the -1.6% one year return for the venture asset class is driven by the roughly -33% drop in the NASDAQ from september 2007 to september 2008. Many venture firms, including ours, use NASDAQ traded companies as the comps in our FAS157 valuations.</p><p>But talking about one year venture returns is like talking about the score in one inning of a baseball game. Venture capital is a long term asset class. I recieved a distribution last week from a fund that I helped raise in 1994, fifteen years ago. Returns develop over a long time horizon in venture capital and focusing on what happened in the past year is not useful.</p><p>I'll end this rant/post by saying that the venture business does have issues. It has not produced the kinds of returns this decade that it is known for and is expected to produce. Generating a 8.6% return over the past five years is nothing to brag about. But venture has outperformed the public markets over any time frame you want to talk about and I think it will continue to do so. And the venture business is going through its own restructuring, forced by dwindling returns and financial stress in the limited partner base. There will be fewer firms, less capital, and less competition and overfunding in the next ten years than there was in the past twenty years. So I think its a very good time to be investing in venture capital right now if you can put money with a good manager. But that doesn't make a good headline, particularly in these times.</p> <div class="zemanta-pixie" style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;"><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/74cc5060-65d1-4228-817b-a1f9a3d13a11/" title="Zemified by Zemanta"><img alt="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" class="zemanta-pixie-img " src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=74cc5060-65d1-4228-817b-a1f9a3d13a11" style="border: medium none ; float: right;"/></a></div> <p class="posted"> February 3, 2009 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/venture_capital_and_technology/">Venture Capital and Technology</a>  | <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/how-to-write-a-misleading-headline.html#disqus_thread">Comments (View)</a> </p> <div class="feedburner-ads"> <script src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918js_/http://feeds.feedburner.com/avc?flareitem=http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/how-to-write-a-misleading-headline.html" type="text/javascript"></script> </div> </div>  <div class="entry"> <a id="a0062260048"></a> <h2><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/super-bowl-ad-ratings.html">Super Bowl Ad Ratings</a></h2> <p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.thummit.com/">Thummit</a>, a relatively new company started by, among others our new FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, ran a survey via twitter and web of the super bowl ads. Here are their results. Click on the link that says "The Worst" to see the ads that got the least votes.</p><p><script type="text/javascript" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918js_/http://rate.thummit.com/js/WidgetScripts.js"></script><div style="visibility: hidden;" id="linkInnerDiv"></div><script type="text/javascript">checklinkvisibility("linkInnerDiv");</script><object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/4984c7f952390a81/4984c821da730bb1/4984c7f952390a81/d7d516ed" id="W4984c7f952390a814984c821da730bb1" width="1" height="1"><param name="movie" value="http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/4984c7f952390a81/4984c821da730bb1/4984c7f952390a81/d7d516ed"/><param name="wmode" value="transparent"/><param name="allowNetworking" value="all"/><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/></object></p>If you are curious how they compiled these results, <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://ratetest.thummit.com/Home.aspx">the methodology is outlined here</a>. </p><p>Let me know in the comments what you thought was the best and the worst. </p><p> I liked Hulu, Bridgestone, and Doritos.</p> <p class="posted"> February 2, 2009 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/webtech/">Web/Tech</a>  | <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/super-bowl-ad-ratings.html#disqus_thread">Comments (View)</a> </p> <div class="feedburner-ads"> <script src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918js_/http://feeds.feedburner.com/avc?flareitem=http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/super-bowl-ad-ratings.html" type="text/javascript"></script> </div> </div>  <div class="entry"> <a id="a0062252074"></a> <h2><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/living-in-public-doesnt-have-to-be-destructive.html">Living In Public Doesn't Have To Be Destructive</a></h2> <p>Jason Calcanis has <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://calacanis.com/2009/01/29/we-live-in-public-and-the-end-of-empathy/">a very interesting post up at Calacanis.com</a> about life in public and the costs associated with it. He starts out with the story of Josh Harris which is told in the Sundance winning documentary <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/we-live-in-public.html">We Live In Public</a>. And then he goes on to discuss the very real tragedies that have occurred to people who have taken online life, social networking, and lifestreaming too far. He discusses some laws of human behavior he's observed:</p><p>Godwin’s Law: <br/>At some point, a participant, or more typically his or her thinking, will be compared to the Nazis. </p><p>Harris' Law:<br/>At some point, all humanity in an online community is lost, and the goal becomes to inflict as much psychological suffering as possible on another person.</p><p>IAS:<br/>This disease affects people when their communication moves to digital, and the emotional cues of face-to-face interaction–including tone, facial expression and the so called “blush response”–are lost.</p><p>And then Jason goes on to explain one of the reasons he moved from blogging to an email list:</p><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><em>One of the reasons I stopped blogging was because the dozen negative comments under every blog post I wrote started wearing me down. I’d write for an hour and the immediate reward was four people, under 12 different accounts, slamming me.<br/></em></div><p><br/>And then Jason drops this bomb:</p><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><em>We’re all canaries in the coal mines now, like Josh Harris was back in the ’90s. We’re harvesting our lives and putting them online. We’re addicted to gaining followers and friends (or email subscribers, as the case may be), and reading comments we get in return. As we look for validation and our daily 15 minutes of fame, we do so at the cost of our humanity.<br/></em></div><p><br/>I'll plead guilty to the addicted to comments part. The conversation that develops after I post is the greatest reward I get from writing it. But "harvesting our lives" at the "cost of our humanity" is not my experience.</p><p>Jason is right that too many people hid behind anonymity when they participate online and that leads to rude and agressive behavior. Most of the nasty comments we get on this blog are from people posting anonymously. With the advent of comment profile systems like disqus and now Facebook connect, I think we are slowly building real accountability into the commenting process. And that's a very good thing.</p><p>But I reject the idea that you give up your humanity when you choose to put your life online. I've been doing it for over five years and I've not experienced that very much. But I think you need to have some rules. Here are some I've developed.</p><p>1) Keep your family out of it until they want to be in it<br/>2) Be nice.<br/>3) Demand that others are nice back.<br/>4) Encourage the community to police the comments. Early on Jackson was my "bouncer" and now Kid Mercury has assumed that role.<br/>5) Take the nasty comments lightly and use humor to defuse them.<br/>6) Do not delete comments unless they are hateful to others, porn, or spam.<br/>7) Ignore the trolls even though it kills you<br/>8) Be careful with photos. They greatest lesson I got was when I posted a photo of me on vacation looking smug. Bad move that I learned a lot from.<br/>9) Give more than you take.<br/>10) Enjoy yourself. Talking, discussing, and debating is fun. Keep it that way.</p><p>Jason ends his post talking about empathy and the need for more of it on the Internet. I'll second that request. But I think what we need more of on the Internet is mutual respect and authenticity. And unlike Jason, I don't see things getting worse. I think they are getting much better these days as more and more of our society moves online and brings with them the manners they have in their offline life.</p> <div class="zemanta-pixie" style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;"><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/653aee00-0c25-4b1f-8f6c-ec2245eee791/" title="Zemified by Zemanta"><img alt="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" class="zemanta-pixie-img" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=653aee00-0c25-4b1f-8f6c-ec2245eee791" style="border: medium none ; float: right;"/></a></div> <p class="posted"> February 2, 2009 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/venture_capital_and_technology/">Venture Capital and Technology</a> , <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/webtech/">Web/Tech</a>  | <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/living-in-public-doesnt-have-to-be-destructive.html#disqus_thread">Comments (View)</a> </p> <div class="feedburner-ads"> <script src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918js_/http://feeds.feedburner.com/avc?flareitem=http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/living-in-public-doesnt-have-to-be-destructive.html" type="text/javascript"></script> </div> </div>  <div class="entry"> <a id="a0062218640"></a> <h2><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/techmeme-tips.html">Techmeme Tips</a></h2> <p>I always assumed that <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://techmeme.com/">Techmeme</a> was some kind of algorithm that Gabe had built to sort through a universe of rss feeds he pulls into his system. I think that's certainly the base of the service. We can only guess what the algorithm is, but it certainly has to do with the weight of the content source (maybe something as simple as <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.techmeme.com/lb">the leaderboard</a>). And it also has to do with the number of authoritative content sources linking to the post/story. Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine.</p><p>But this week Techmeme launched something that suggests there is a lot more editorial selection in Techmeme than I previously thought. Here's a Techmeme link to the post I wrote yesterday.<br/><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e2011168393ad1970c-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Tip screenshot" class="at-xid-6a00d83451b2c969e2011168393ad1970c " src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e2011168393ad1970c-500wi"/></a> <br/>Look at that last link that says "Thanks: atul". That's a link to <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://twitter.com/atul/statuses/1165676145">a twitter message to @techmeme from Atul</a>. So what happened here was Atul saw the post and thought it should be on Techmeme and twittered this:</p><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><span class="entry-content"><em>tip @<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://twitter.com/techmeme">techmeme</a> When Talking About Business Models, Remember That Profits Equal Revenues Minus Costs </em><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://tinyurl.com/chzv7f" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><em>» link to When Talking About Business Models, Remember That Profits Equal Revenues Minus </em>Costs</a></span><br/></div><p>I somehow missed <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://news.techmeme.com/090128/twitter-tips">the post Gabe wrote on Wednesday of this week announcing the service</a> but I think this is a great idea. There are always going to be great posts that are outside of the universe of rss feeds that Techmeme follows. And now, the readers of Techmeme who don't blog get a role in the decision about what gets up there.</p><p>I think this is a great move by Gabe and it also produces <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://search.twitter.com/search?q=tip+%40techmeme">a great Twitter search feed of links people are submitting</a>. Sweet.</p><fieldset class="zemanta-related"><legend class="zemanta-related-title">Related articles by Zemanta</legend><ul class="zemanta-article-ul"><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.rotorblog.com/2009/01/28/techmeme-uses-twitter-to-get-news-tips/">Techmeme Uses Twitter to Get News Tips</a> (rotorblog.com)</li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.thesocialbookmarker.com/2009/01/gabe-rivera-is-genuis.html">Gabe Rivera is a genuis</a> (thesocialbookmarker.com)</li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/28/uh-oh-now-you-can-suggest-stories-to-techmeme-via-twitter/">Uh Oh. Now You Can Suggest Stories To Techmeme Via Twitter</a> (techcrunch.com)</li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://thenextweb.com/2009/01/29/stories-techmeme-tweet/">A New Way To Get Stories onto Techmeme. Tweet them.</a> (thenextweb.com)</li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://venturebeat.com/2009/01/28/techmemes-newest-human-contributer-you/">Techmeme's newest human contributor: You</a> (venturebeat.com)</li> </ul> </fieldset> <div class="zemanta-pixie" style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;"><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/38d21f86-91ce-4b1a-9d31-141c7aa40ef7/" title="Zemified by Zemanta"><img alt="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" class="zemanta-pixie-img " src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=38d21f86-91ce-4b1a-9d31-141c7aa40ef7" style="border: medium none ; float: right;"/></a></div> <p class="posted"> February 1, 2009 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/venture_capital_and_technology/">Venture Capital and Technology</a>  | <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/techmeme-tips.html#disqus_thread">Comments (View)</a> </p> <div class="feedburner-ads"> <script src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918js_/http://feeds.feedburner.com/avc?flareitem=http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/techmeme-tips.html" type="text/javascript"></script> </div> </div>  <div class="entry"> <a id="a0062204304"></a> <h2><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/when-talking-about-business-models-remember-that-profits-equal-revenues-minus-costs.html">When Talking About Business Models, Remember That Profits Equal Revenues Minus Costs</a></h2> <p>There is no shortage of discussion about Internet business models these days. And they almost always focus on revenues. But revenues are only half of the value creation equation. The other half is costs.</p><p>Let me explain. Businesses are worth the net present value of future cash flows. Cash flows means profits basically (capital expenditures are important but I'm going to leave them out of the discussion on this post). So a business is worth the sum of all of its future profits, discounted back to a net present value. For those who don't want a lesson in finance, you can simplify this theory even more by using a cash flow multiple as a proxy for a net present value. I like to use a 10x multiple for cash flow as a simplistic proxy for net present value.</p><p>So with that simplification, the value of a business is approximated by 10 x (revenues - costs). You can focus on creating value by driving revenues or you can focus on creating value by driving profits. And they are not the same. Because costs don't have to grow linearly with revenues.</p><p>Chris Anderson wrote a very good piece in today's WSJ called <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123335678420235003.html">The Economics Of Giving It Away</a>. In that essay, Chris wrote:</p><p style="margin-left: 40px;"><em>Meanwhile YouTube is still struggling to match its popularity with revenues and Facebook is selling commodity ads for pennies after its effort to charge for intrusive advertising led to a user backlash. And news-sharing site Digg, for all its millions of users, still doesn't make a dime. A year ago, that hardly mattered: The business model was "build to a lucrative exit, preferably in cash." But now the exit doors are closed and cash flow is king.</em></p><p>Chris goes on to suggest that Internet entrepreneurs are going to have to get people to step up and pay for something instead of just giving everything away for free because advertising isn't going to foot the bill for every company. That may well be true and we are certainly thinking that way for most, if not all, of our portfolio companies. But Chris's examples, particularly Facebook and Digg, are examples of companies that might benefit from looking at the cost side of the profit equation at some point (maybe not yet).</p><p>Let's look at Craiglist. I've heard people estimate that they are doing close to $100mm in annual revenues at this point. Many say, "they could be doing so much more". But the Craigslist profit equation is interesting. They apparently have less than 30 employees. That's about $4mm/year in employee costs. Let's assume that they spend another $6mm per year on hosting and bandwidth costs and other costs. So it's very possible that Craigslist's annual costs are around $10mm/year. Their value equation then is 10 x (100-10) = $900mm. That's almost a billion dollars in value for a company with only 30 employees.</p><p>The web can do that in more than one company. Last month, Spencer Ante reported that <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_52/b4114082618241.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_top+story">Digg's annual revenues were around $8.5mm</a>. Everyone was saying how bad that was. And maybe it is, but I don't know. It wasn't the revenues that shocked me. It was the costs. Apparently Digg's costs for 2008 were about $14mm and they have over 70 employees and are planning on growing that number to 150 in 2009. Digg is entirely peer produced. It could take a Craigslist approach to its business and keep its headcount to around 30. Then it might be close to breakeven and could grow over time to a business with $30mm to $50mm in revenue and $10mm in costs and $20mm to $40mm in profits. Apparently Digg has been looking for an exit in the neighborhood of $300mm. They could get there with a lean cost structure possibly more easily than investing heavily in new stuff.</p><p>Facebook also comes to mind. Last winter, <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080131/chatty-zuckerberg-tells-all-about-facebook-finances/">Kara Swisher reported that Facebook was planning on generating revenues of $300mm to $350mm in 2008</a> and that it would have profits of $50mm, meaning its costs would be $300mm in 2008. She also reported that Facebook would take its headcount to about 1000 by the end of 2008. As Chris said in his WSJ piece, Facebook has been widely derided for the low CPMs it generates (pennies in Chris' words). But instead of deriding the revenues that Facebook is generating, maybe we should be in awe of a $350mm revenue stream coming from a company that produces no content of its own. Why does Facebook need 1000 employees? Why does it need to spend $300mm per year? There may be good reasons. International expansion can be expensive and so is building out a large sales organization. But of course, none of that has to happen. Could Facebook instead cut is headcount back to 500ish and become incredibly profitable and still grow like a weed? I don't know that much about what is going on inside of Facebook and I am not trying to be critical of any one company. I am just trying to make a larger point.</p><p>Let's talk about the biggest and most valuable Internet company of them all, Google. Google has one incredibly amazing business - keyword advertising. It relies on its own search service and deals with other search services and content partners for the audience that drives the keyword business. If you stripped that business out of Google, you'd probably have a business that has gross revenues of $20bn, net revenues of $13bn, and operating profits of $8bn to $10bn. That business is worth the approximately $100bn of market value that Google has right now. Everything else is valued at zero becuase it has a lot of costs and no revenue. Could Google unlock a lot of value by giving up on everything else they are doing? Maybe not, but they probably wouldn't lose much value either. I am not suggesting they do that, by the way. But again, I just want to make a point.</p><p>The web can create incredibly high operating margin businesses. Craigslist has an operating margin of 90%. Google's keyword business has an operating margin north of 60% (based on net revenues) and possibly higher. Could Facebook and Digg copy those models and create a lot of value on revenue numbers that many think are pitifully small? I think so.</p><p>We have a bunch of companies in our portfolio that have done a lot with very little. For example, Tumblr has less than 10 employees, Disqus has 5, Twitter has around 20, Boxee has around 10. These companies are reaching large audiences and creating scale that can be monetized in many ways. We didn't tell these companies to stay small. They told us they could do a lot with a little. And watching them do just that has taught me a lot. Yes, they will all grow this year, most of our companies will. But if they continue to do a lot with a little, their business models will be built on operating margins that are very high and can create a lot of value without a lot of revenue.</p><p>I think that's an important part of the economics of the web that are left out of most discussions of Internet business models. Yes, we are turning analog dollars into digital pennies in many cases. But we are also doing the same thing on the cost side, maybe even more so. And I think that "operating leverage" is going to create a lot of value.</p> <div class="zemanta-pixie" style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;"><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/5b0a002e-582c-4830-9d74-23304067f940/" title="Zemified by Zemanta"><img alt="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" class="zemanta-pixie-img " src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=5b0a002e-582c-4830-9d74-23304067f940" style="border: medium none ; float: right;"/></a></div> <p class="posted"> January 31, 2009 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/venture_capital_and_technology/">Venture Capital and Technology</a> , <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/webtech/">Web/Tech</a>  | <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/when-talking-about-business-models-remember-that-profits-equal-revenues-minus-costs.html#disqus_thread">Comments (View)</a> </p> <div class="feedburner-ads"> <script src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918js_/http://feeds.feedburner.com/avc?flareitem=http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/when-talking-about-business-models-remember-that-profits-equal-revenues-minus-costs.html" type="text/javascript"></script> </div> </div>  <div class="entry"> <a id="a0062143914"></a> <h2><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/content-matters.html">Content Matters</a></h2> <p>Barry Graubert writes the excellent<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.contentmatters.info/content_matters/"> Content Matters</a> blog and he's got <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.contentmatters.info/content_matters/2009/01/five-questions-for-fred-wilson.html">an interview with me</a> up there today.</p><p>Here is one question and my answer:</p><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><em><em>CM: Historically, as the economy comes out of recession, it creates transformation and change. Which segments have the potential for transformation in an eventual recovery? </em></em></div><p style="margin-left: 40px;"><em>FW: Every industry that is based on knowledge or information or some other form of non-physical matter (atoms vs bits) is going to fundamentally transform and <strong>this downturn will be the darwinian forcing function. Think about energy and power systems, banking, media, education</strong>. They all have that aspect to them. <br/></em></p><p>There's four more questions and answers so click on <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.contentmatters.info/content_matters/2009/01/five-questions-for-fred-wilson.html">this link</a> and go check it out. As a bonus and a treat for me, he put a great clip of the Replacements playing I Will Dare back in the 80s at the end of the post.</p> <div class="zemanta-pixie" style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;"><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/dacb1714-ff06-41a0-a227-efa8c6576df9/" title="Zemified by Zemanta"><img alt="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" class="zemanta-pixie-img " src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=dacb1714-ff06-41a0-a227-efa8c6576df9" style="border: medium none ; float: right;"/></a></div> <p class="posted"> January 30, 2009 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/venture_capital_and_technology/">Venture Capital and Technology</a>  | <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/content-matters.html#disqus_thread">Comments (View)</a> </p> <div class="feedburner-ads"> <script src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918js_/http://feeds.feedburner.com/avc?flareitem=http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/content-matters.html" type="text/javascript"></script> </div> </div>  <div class="entry"> <a id="a0062126278"></a> <h2><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/goodbye-martin.html">Goodbye Martin</a></h2> <p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e201053702dfdd970c-pi" style="float: right;"><img alt="IMG_2546" class="at-xid-6a00d83451b2c969e201053702dfdd970c " src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e201053702dfdd970c-320wi" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;"/></a> I saw<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://twitter.com/pkafka/status/1159312234"> this tweet</a> today and my heart sank</p><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><em><span class="entry-content">Terrible news from @<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://twitter.com/HLMorgan">HLMorgan</a> @<a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://twitter.com/martin">martin</a> killed in plane crash at Santa Monica airport yesterday.</span><br/></em></div><p></p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://twitter.com/martin">Martin Schaedel</a> was someone I met on the internet and got to know a bit over the past few years. He was a funny and mysterious guy. I am not sure he really lived anywhere. He was a VC or an entrepreneur or something else. He was always scheming and working on something.</p><p>As Jared Kushner, who Martin introduced me to, said in an email to me this afternoon:</p><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><em>He had great energy, a thirst for adventure and some of the best networking skills I’ve ever seen. <br/></em></div><p></p><p>Everytime I met with Martin he would introduce me to at least five people I had to know. That's how he was. </p><p>It seems that his thirst for adventure did him in as he died in <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2009/01/airplane-crash.html">a plane crash at Santa Monica Airport yesterday</a>. His <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://twitter.com/martin">twitter feed</a> suggests that they were doing some stunts.</p><p>I looked all over the Internet for a picture of Martin. He <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.flickr.com/photos/hellomartin/tags/vc/">took photos of people everywhere he went</a> but there are no photos of him that I could find. That's typical of the mystery that always seemed to surround him.  [update - <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://mcp2008.tumblr.com/post/55179610">finally found one</a>, not great, will keep looking] [update#2 - michiel sent me a photo of martin which I added above]</p><p>His blog is called <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://hellomartin.com/">Hello Martin</a> but today, unfortunately, we have to say Goodbye Martin.</p><p>Update: Twitter says goodbye to one of its own. <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%40martin">This is worth reading</a> particularly if you knew him.</p><p>UpdateNextDay: Martin spent the morning of his last day strategizing with the team from <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://gumgum.com/">GumGum</a>. This photo is from that session and perfectly captures the Martin I knew. Thanks to the GumGum team for sending it to me. And this is <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://lundxy.com/?p=3250">the best post I've seen on Martin</a> from a really good friend.</p><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e2010536fab147970b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Martin" class="at-xid-6a00d83451b2c969e2010536fab147970b " src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e2010536fab147970b-500wi"/></a> </p><fieldset class="zemanta-related"><legend class="zemanta-related-title">Related articles by Zemanta</legend><ul class="zemanta-article-ul"><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://laist.com/2009/01/28/two_dead_in_plane_crash_at_santa_mo.php">Two Dead in Plane Crash at Santa Monica Airport</a> (laist.com)</li> </ul> </fieldset> <div class="zemanta-pixie" style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;"><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/8d10e0a7-0460-4e39-9921-d6c28075de7f/" title="Zemified by Zemanta"><img alt="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" class="zemanta-pixie-img " src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=8d10e0a7-0460-4e39-9921-d6c28075de7f" style="border: medium none ; float: right;"/></a></div> <p class="posted"> January 29, 2009 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/venture_capital_and_technology/">Venture Capital and Technology</a>  | <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/goodbye-martin.html#disqus_thread">Comments (View)</a> </p> <div class="feedburner-ads"> <script src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918js_/http://feeds.feedburner.com/avc?flareitem=http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/goodbye-martin.html" type="text/javascript"></script> </div> </div>  <div class="entry"> <a id="a0062087700"></a> <h2><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/our-investment-strategy.html">Our Investment Strategy</a></h2> <p>My partner Brad was inspired by a visit from David Swensen to the Charlie Rose show to <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2009/01/arguing_from_fi.html">lay out what we invest in and why</a>. It's a great post. Here's my favorite line:</p><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><em>Our investment strategy is to arbitrage the difference between the capabilities of the new medium and readiness of the existing economic and social structures to exploit those capabilities.<br/></em></div><p>Click on that link and go read the rest. And let us know what you think in the comments (here or there).</p> <p class="posted"> January 29, 2009 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/venture_capital_and_technology/">Venture Capital and Technology</a>  | <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/our-investment-strategy.html#disqus_thread">Comments (View)</a> </p> <div class="feedburner-ads"> <script src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918js_/http://feeds.feedburner.com/avc?flareitem=http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/our-investment-strategy.html" type="text/javascript"></script> </div> </div>  <div class="entry"> <a id="a0062087524"></a> <h2><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/advertising-this-blog.html">Advertising This Blog</a></h2> <p>I've been getting quite a few questions about this lately so I figured I ought to explain the text ads that some of you are seeing around the web for this blog. Here's a screenshot I was sent yesterday by a friend:<br/><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e2010536f76245970b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="Avc sai" class="at-xid-6a00d83451b2c969e2010536f76245970b " src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e2010536f76245970b-500wi"/></a> </span> <br/>I've heard a number of rationalizations for these ads, which have been running for almost a year now, including banner advertising arbitrage, a desperate attempt to shore up declining readership, and taking advantage of declining keyword pricing.</p><p>The truth is simpler. I want to use the services of every Union Square Ventures portfolio because I believe that by being an active user of our portfolio's products and services, we can be better investors.</p><p>One of our investments is a provider of a keyword advertising service for small and medium businesses called <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.clickable.com/">Clickable</a>. Clickable makes it drop dead simple to buy keyword ads across all three major keyword marketplaces (google, yahoo, microsoft). You get daily reports that are simple and easy to understand. And you get recommendations on how to improve your campaigns like "drop these keywords", "change your copy", "increase your prices on these keywords", etc, etc.</p><p>So I've been running a campaign to drive traffic to this blog since Clickable went into beta. On a typical day I'll get about 100,000 impressions, about 10-20 clicks, and I'll spend less than $5. Yes, spending $150/month driving traffic to this blog that gives all of its ad revenue to charity seems like a silly idea.</p><p>But I've learned a lot about keyword advertising during this process. For example, I've noticed that my keywords are generating a lot more impressions (and more clicks) for me in the past four months. I think that points to some important changes in the keyword marketpace.</p><p>But most importantly I've learned a lot about Clickable and how its service works. And I've been able to give the company feedback on how to make the service even easier and more helpful to a small advertiser like me. At $150/month, you can't get much smaller.</p> <div class="zemanta-pixie" style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;"><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/49e7624c-1bf6-456f-8c7a-9366eb936630/" title="Zemified by Zemanta"><img alt="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" class="zemanta-pixie-img" src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=49e7624c-1bf6-456f-8c7a-9366eb936630" style="border: medium none ; float: right;"/></a></div> <p class="posted"> January 29, 2009 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/venture_capital_and_technology/">Venture Capital and Technology</a>  | <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/advertising-this-blog.html#disqus_thread">Comments (View)</a> </p> <div class="feedburner-ads"> <script src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918js_/http://feeds.feedburner.com/avc?flareitem=http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/advertising-this-blog.html" type="text/javascript"></script> </div> </div>  <div class="entry"> <a id="a0062027260"></a> <h2><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/disqus-adds-friendfeed-integration.html">Disqus Adds FriendFeed Integration</a></h2> <p>A couple days ago <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://disqus.com/">Disqus</a> (one of our portfolio companies) <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://blog.disqus.net/2009/01/26/posting-and-pulling-comments-from-friendfeed/">announced that they had added FriendFeed integration</a>. This is a feature I've wanted for basically the past year and I am thrilled that they've been able to work with <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://friendfeed.com/">FriendFeed</a> to make this happen.</p><p>There are two or three steps. The first one (the or step) is adding your blog's feed to FriendFeed. I've had my feed there for the past year so that was not a necessary step for me. Then you go to the account services page in disqus and add the FriendFeed service, and finally you add FriendFeed comments in the disqus administration panel. It took me about a minute to do the whole thing.</p><p>For AVC community members, there are two benefits. The first is if you leave a comment in FriendFeed, it will show up on this blog at the bottom of the comments. You can see them <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/twenty-two-years-of-job-creation-wiped-out-in-one-day.html">at the bottom of this post from yesterday</a>.<span style="text-decoration: underline;"><br/><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e2010536f45042970b-pi" style="display: inline;"><img alt="FF comments" class="at-xid-6a00d83451b2c969e2010536f45042970b " src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://www.avc.com/.a/6a00d83451b2c969e2010536f45042970b-500wi"/></a> </span> <br/>It also works the other way. As you can see at the bottom of the FriendFeed comments section, you can post a comment from this blog to FriendFeed.</p><p>This isn't perfect in my mind because the FriendFeed comments are not part of the main discussion and are posted at the end of the comments section. I'd prefer that they were fully integrated into the conversation. I also don't know if disqus will email me these FriendFeed comments, and if they do and if I reply to them, will they get posted both on this blog and on FriendFeed? If the answer to that last part is yes, then this is a very big deal to me. I hope Daniel and/or Anton will stop by and answer that question in the comments to this post (and on FriendFeed!).</p><p>I don't participate in the FriendFeed discussions and as a result, there aren't many on my content at FriendFeed. Disqus gives me an email (think blackberry) interface to the conversation going on here in this community. And so I am able to be in it all day long even though I am rarely at a desk in front of a computer after 7am most days. If disqus can extend the mobile email interface to FriendFeed, then I can engage there too and I'd get a lot more value out of that community too.</p><p>In any case, the comments the posts I write here and send to FriendFeed are no longer silo'd at FriendFeed and that's a great thing. Give it a try and let me know what you think.</p><fieldset class="zemanta-related"><legend class="zemanta-related-title">Related articles by Zemanta</legend><ul class="zemanta-article-ul"><li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://thenextweb.com/2009/01/27/disqus-adds-friendfeed-integration/">Disqus Adds Friendfeed Integration</a></li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.inquisitr.com/16573/finally-disqus-gets-native-friendfeed-support/">Finally, Disqus gets native FriendFeed support</a></li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.winextra.com/index.php/2009/01/08/disqus-friendfeed-ff2disqus-the-problems-they-show-us/">Disqus, FriendFeed, FF2Disqus - the problems they show us</a></li> <li class="zemanta-article-ul-li"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://mashable.com/2009/01/27/disqus-friendfeed-sync/">Disqus and FriendFeed Tie the Comments Knot</a></li> </ul> </fieldset> <div class="zemanta-pixie" style="margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;"><a class="zemanta-pixie-a" href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://reblog.zemanta.com/zemified/c80c5d8e-49c8-4dff-aade-40edcff11526/" title="Zemified by Zemanta"><img alt="Reblog this post [with Zemanta]" class="zemanta-pixie-img " src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918im_/http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_b.png?x-id=c80c5d8e-49c8-4dff-aade-40edcff11526" style="border: medium none ; float: right;"/></a></div> <p class="posted"> January 28, 2009 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/venture_capital_and_technology/">Venture Capital and Technology</a>  | <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/disqus-adds-friendfeed-integration.html#disqus_thread">Comments (View)</a> </p> <div class="feedburner-ads"> <script src="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918js_/http://feeds.feedburner.com/avc?flareitem=http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/disqus-adds-friendfeed-integration.html" type="text/javascript"></script> </div> </div> <div class="align-center content-nav"> <div class="pager-inner"> <span class="pager-right"> <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc//page/2/"><span class="pager-label">Next</span> <span class="chevron">»</span></a> </span> </div> </div>  </div> <div id="sidebar"> <div id="about" class="side-block"> <p class="large"><strong>Fred Wilson</strong> is a VC and principal of <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://unionsquareventures.com/">Union Square Ventures</a>. His wife is <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://gothamgal.blogs.com/">Gotham Gal</a> and his daughter <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://www.jessicasarawilson.com/">Jessica Wilson</a> blogs too.</p> <p class="align-center"><a href="/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/social-networks.html">Fred's social networks</a> | <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/mailto:fred@unionsquareventures.com">Contact</a> | <a href="/web/20090214022918/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/about.html">Full Bio→</a></p> </div> <div id="subscribe" class="side-block"> <div id="rss_subscribe"><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20090214022918/http://feeds.feedburner.com/AVc" id="rss_icon" onclick="Element.toggle('rss_subscribe'); Element.show('rss_sub_options'); return false;"><img src="/web/20090214022918im_/http://www.avc.com/template-images/rss-subscribe.png" alt="RSS icon" title="Get blog updates via RSS." width="103" height="48"/></a><a href="#" onclick="Element.toggle('rss_subscribe'); 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