No More Meetings: Sidharth Kakkar

https://t.co/sqImsWhksS @firstround

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) March 28, 2023

EPISODE 62 Want to go totally asynchronous? Sidharth Kakkar on remote teams & autonomous cultures
The Secret to an In Sync Startup? Ditch Your Meetings and Try an Asynchronous Culture
After his first startup, Freckle, was acquired, Kakkar went through a self-reflection exercise where he captured every lesson he’d learned over the course of his six years as a founder in a massive 35-page document. He articulated – among other things – he didn’t need his employees on-site in San Francisco to find success. Over the course of the startup’s history, Freckle had undergone an evolution from an in-office to hybrid workplace before transitioning to fully remote. ................. Ditching geographical requirements, Kakkar and Lee believed, would give Subscript a leg up by being able to tap into high-performers from a global talent pool, as well as give folks the flexibility to do their best work. ........... One of our earliest engineers, Brandon, likes to be active and take a dance class after lunch, and he comes back to work refreshed .......... “You don’t want people sitting in front of their laptops when they aren’t going to be able to be productive.” ....... he canceled meetings — all of them (well, except for the fun optional ones like social hours). .......... he also freed up his own calendar as a founder and CEO, allowing himself the time to focus on the tasks only he can accomplish ........ a radically different workplace that’s fully asynchronous .......

no micromanagement, documenting everything, and treating hiring as a segmentation exercise.

.......... Rather than a standard all-hands, the leadership team sends a context-setting email every Sunday night, which includes a living document and a recorded video going over the OKRs and goals for the week. ........ Any team standups are conducted in Slack, where folks can post updates on their progress or ask for help unblocking an issue. ......... There are monthly social meetings, like playing an online board game together, or pairing up folks for 1:1 get-to know-you sessions. There are also regular all-team offsite weeks where folks get together in person. ......... To keep the culture buzzing, there are plenty of casual Slack channels dedicated to topics like “food” or “parents.” .......... At a fast-paced startup, it’s important that decisions don’t get delayed and projects don’t grind to a halt just because someone’s stepped away from their desk. You’ve got to bake in a culture that prioritizes autonomy — and give folks the context they need to make sharp decisions without gathering a group of colleagues on a Zoom call. ......... But to run a company with no meetings, you have to loosen your grip. ......... Instead of reaping the benefits of hiring top talent, you now have an entire company dependent solely on you and your ideas. The time you freed up by canceling meetings is now filled with making decisions that you hired a team to make. ........ As a founder, Kakkar believes your role should be thinking “about the system level things I should do differently so that bad decisions – or misaligned decisions – don’t happen.” In an autonomous workplace, employees are trusted to find solutions to the problems you hired them to solve. ......... “Everyone who works for me is better at their thing than I am at their thing,” points out Kakkar. Allowing people to work independently creates what Kakkar calls a “collective Subscript brain.” ........ “Even if you think someone's making a mistake, just let them,” advises Kakkar. “Plenty of times, what appears to be a misstep might instead be just an alternative route. The rest of the time, the person will learn a ton and will make fewer mistakes in the future” ......... Forcing your opinions on others can do immense damage to your workplace culture. Not only are you potentially wrong, as Kakkar says, “As CEO, I’m wrong very, very, often and I don’t think that’s unique to me as a startup founder.” ........... Employees lose confidence in their skills. “You’ve squashed their creativity and you’ve squashed their ownership chops.” .......... Employees become more concerned with your opinion than finding the right solution. “You want to avoid folks thinking through problems like, ‘If I don’t do things Sidharth’s way, then that means he’s going to think less of me.’ Which is quite detrimental to the business.” ......... Employees become dependent on you to make decisions for them. “Then you condition folks to think, ‘I better just run all my decisions by Sidharth.’ And that is the worst possible outcome that you could imagine.” ......... While junior folks may need a bit more handholding for some of their larger projects, it’s important to still leave space for them to build up their confidence on smaller tasks (and learn from mistakes that inevitably crop up). ........... Before you give an opinion, ask yourself, “Am I right or do I just have an opinion? If I am right, what’s the cost of being right?” You might discover what you have to say is better off left unsaid. ........... Trust others to do what they do best. Focus on the things that only you can do and leave the rest to everyone else. ....... no micromanagement is not the same as no feedback. ....... Remove the sting by letting employees know what to expect and when to expect it. Creating a predictable, regular feedback cycle is critical here. ......... Make it regular. ...... Make it simple. ...... Don’t skip your high performers. ........... Several years into a startup, you might find that your memories about the early days – and your early decisions – have gone fuzzy. Repeat founder Kakkar remembers from his Freckle era, “There were so many things that we basically ended up re-litigating that we had figured out three years ago because teammates come and go and you easily forget what you decided, why you decided it, and you end up asking the same questions all over again.” .............. at Subscript, everything is documented, “We try to make sure that all the logic of every decision we make is reflected in our collective Wiki – everything, even the smallest things.” The goal is that every discussion is in writing. ..........

The Journal of Product-Market Fit

. The series of journal entries, which was started in the second month of Subscript, documents the startup’s path toward product-market fit and the problems they were thinking through at the time. ......... Kakkar says you can see how their journey went from high-level discussions around customer solutions and problems to more recent discussions about the core buyer, which is the finance leaders and other stakeholders and how they work together. “Over the course of reading through these documents, you can watch our thinking and our business evolve,” says Kakkar. .......... A discussion evolves.The natural next step, at least at Subscript, is an asynchronous, multi-threaded discussion coming together. Kakkar says the advantage here is, “You get a much richer discussion and clearer communication because if you misread something, you can ask more questions, and then if other people also misread it, then they can also see the explanation within the doc.” .......... The discussion has been had, buy-in has been procured, so a decision is imminent. As the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) for the project, Emily is the final decision maker. “Although opinions and discussion is welcome, no one else gets to make the decision.” .......... The loop is closed with feedback. Any significant project or strategic shift will probably have both aspects that went well and ones that could be better — capture retroactive feedback in the same doc so it can be applied in the next cycle. .......... Because this decision-making process was documented, time spent re-litigating can now be spent refining a process. “Let's say a new Client Success person joins and they start wondering about a particular process or project, ‘Wait, why do we do it this way?’ They now have a comprehensive document where they can get up to speed on context,” says Kakkar. And if they have new ideas, they can just create a new section at the top or create a new doc, reference this one, and then we could continue iterating.’” ............ “In Google, you can create and share a doc with someone that doesn't live in any folder or hierarchy. That means a lot of things basically go into the ether and you will never find it again.” Kakkar prefers solutions like

Confluence or Notion

that enforce hierarchy so documents can be located easily in the future. ........... Depending on the section, there are specific sub-categories. For example, in Product and Design, in addition to RFCs, there are Discovery Interviews, Feature Requests, and the Journal of Product Market Fit. .......... Think outside the Google Docs box. Don’t be afraid to stray from what’s comfortable. Play around with some of the more hierarchical solutions and see if they unlock additional organization potential for you. ............. Make discussions documentation-first. If you hope to document things after the fact, you won’t do it. So, instead, make writing the first step in big decisions. Then, it’ll be natural to update the document with the conclusion, and the documentation becomes a by-product of the process. ........... “OKRs are a tool that are very simple sounding but actually executing on them can be quite hard and nuanced,” warns Kakkar. ......... at Subscript, OKRs reside in a combination of a living document and a 15-minute weekly pre-recorded video. “People comment on the video and on the doc so there’s a robust discussion on it. In my view, it’s a significantly more powerful thing than an all-hands because you can engage in discussion way more frequently, which I think is quite important,” says Kakkar. ...........

Keep it simple: “We have monthly OKRs with usually only one, or sometimes two, objectives, and only 2-3 key results per objective — focus is really important.”

....... Share ideas, not directives. “The set of ideas isn’t, ‘Do X, Y, Z. It’s more, ‘Problems A or B or C are the types of things standing in our way.” ....... Collect reflections to share org-wide. “Reflections can be anything from an awesome win that we had that is a great thing to celebrate together. Or it can be someone saying, ‘I’m really drowning in notifications.’ In the following week’s video, we pick a few reflections that make the most sense for everyone to have context on and use this as a prompt for more in-depth discussion, that obviously, happens asynchronously.” ......... everyone gets “the unvarnished truth” and the startup operates with full transparency. This style is often shied away from with executive leadership, because there’s a fear of discouraging employees by reporting on the negative. But if you want employees to operate autonomously, they need the full picture. ........... transparency means that big decisions are made in public — litigated in documents that anyone can access. Drafts of OKRs are in public, so anyone can comment. Both good and bad news is discussed publicly, so nothing is a secret. ........... The result is that everyone feels useful because they are being useful. .......... to hire for a unique culture, Kakkar views hiring as a segmentation exercise, similar to product-market fit ........... “Think of your company and culture as a product your employees experience. The people you need are the people who are interested in the product you're offering. This gives us very specific segmentation,” he says. “It's actually a non-trivial number of people who start interviewing at Subscript and say, ‘I'm sorry, actually, this thing is not for me,” says Kakkar. There’s even a “reverse sell” interview step in which Subscript co-founder Michelle Lee sits down with the candidate to unpack if they’re sure they’re up for the unusual culture. ............... Clear communication skills are just as important as clean code. ............. “There are questions that come up, like, ‘What do you mean I'm not assigned a ticket? What do you mean I can just do anything?’ That can be hard when you've spent a decade or two doing the opposite,” says Kakkar. ........... “It's incredibly freeing once they've made that transition, but at first it can feel a little uncomfortable.” .......... Although a meeting-heavy culture is the default for most companies, from early-stage startups to BigCos, there are serious advantages to asynchronous communication. Yes, offices allow for unplanned water-cooler moments, but what happens to the knowledge that comes out of those moments? ............. “What we've gained is this incredibly written, permanent, documented technology that has made so many things so much easier.” ............. “That’s one of the nicest things about being a founder — you get to build the company in which you’d want to work.”

@sikakkar Hello. No Meetings? :)

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) March 28, 2023

Diving deep into B2B SaaS metrics with Tien Anh Nguyen, former CFO at UserTesting
Subscript wants to rid the world of subscription revenue metric spreadsheets .

https://medium.com/@sikakkar
Sidharth Kakkar

I’m so ridiculously excited about this feature. This is what I always dreamed of being able to do at my last company - know exactly who our best customers are long term so we can focus on keeping them super happy and acquire most like them. It’s the 🔑 to…https://t.co/UE4kIHsCQ3

— Sidharth Kakkar (@sikakkar) March 25, 2023

E 13 is out w/ guest @sikakkar starting https://t.co/Ig5rSY0Y5g to solve his xls breaking @ $5M ARR from his last company he sold

- subscript has no meetings!
- list of learnings from being a 1st time founder

Listen, subscribe on all podcasting channels https://t.co/gQ2EoMmJcB

— Second Time Founders Podcast (@SecondTF_pod) January 18, 2023

Happy Holidays

Charlie Bit My Finger
Charlie O'Donnell At His Inspiring Best

Silicon Alley

Image via Wikipedia

New York Times: Manhattan’s Tech Start-Ups Settle in the Flatiron District and Chelsea: a decade after the dot-com crash stopped the rapid growth of the city’s booming Internet sector, a high-tech corridor has developed in the Flatiron district and neighboring Chelsea. ...... “Within five years, you’re going to have a true Silicon Alley. Every company that’s a tech start-up will be here.” ..... The older, small office buildings in the Flatiron district have attracted start-ups, while large companies like Google and IAC/InterActiveCorp have found homes in Chelsea. ..... It is no accident, for example, that General Assembly, a new educational institute, meeting place and co-working environment devoted to technology entrepreneurs, was established at 902 Broadway, at East 20th Street, in the middle of the Flatiron district. ...... a lot of young companies, a lot of designers and artists, and a lot of venture capitalists working in that neighborhood ..... “There’s a pretty exciting start-up scene now that there wasn’t in 2003 ..... the loftlike space that the Flatiron district offers, in relatively small footprints ...... a lot of buildings with high ceilings and natural light, overlooking Madison Square Park ..... “You get the amenities of a Midtown building but the flexibility of a loft in Brooklyn,” Mr. Kirven said. “Obviously without the Midtown rents, either.” ..... Prices are substantially lower than in Midtown and other prime office neighborhoods. ..... The Kaufman Organization has also helped Paperless Post, Break Media and Zemoga find space in the neighborhood. ...... “A lot of landlords are looking at 10-year leases,” Mr. Dunn said. “As a start-up, there’s no way to do that. Even a three-year lease was a scary thought.” ...... Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital and IA Ventures, have offices nearby. ...... If start-ups look to Flatiron for its small spaces, larger tech companies are choosing Chelsea for its sprawling floors. ....... “There’s a psychological barrier to going to a different floor to talk to somebody,” Mr. Nevill-Manning said. “Having 800 people on a single floor means we’re much more productive and much more creative as a result.” ....... public amenities ..... Hudson River Park, the High Line, Chelsea Piers and the concourse of Chelsea Market. ..... “From a recruiting point of view, a lot of those connections get made virtually,” Mr. Nevill-Manning said. “They know where to find us online.”

Hola Charlie, A 50K Opportunity

Fred, How About Some Money?

Charlie, here's what I believe an opportunity of a lifetime for you and your firm. This is First Round Capital's chance to step into FinTech.

Vinod Khosla's Entry Into New York City

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AllThingsD: Khosla Wins the Bidding War for GroupMe, New York’s Startup of the Moment GroupMe, a New York startup that lets users send group text messages to to their cell phones, didn’t exist in April. Now it’s worth about $35 million..... Original investors including First Round Capital, Betaworks, Lerer Ventures and Ron Conway’s SV Angel, who put some $850,000 into the company earlier this year, are all slated to invest again. ..... a bidding war for the right to fund GroupMe broke out in the past few weeks. The company ended up with multiple term sheets to pick from before signing with Khosla Monday. ..... GroupMe works on any run of the mill “dumbphone”, and part of the company’s pitch is that salt of the earth folks (Church groups! Hunters!) have been using it since it opened up in August. ..... Hecht and Martocci left jobs at very red-hot startups — Tumblr and Gilt Groupe, respectively ..... The two formally hatched their plan at TechCrunch’s Disrupt Hack Day event in May. .... what investors are really hoping for, at least right now, is that GroupMe follows the same trajectory of another zero-to-hero New York startup — Foursquare. It’s worth nothing that Khosla tried very hard to fund that company’s last round, but missed out.

Seed Money

Image via CrunchBase

It is much cheaper to start a dot com today than it was in the late 1990s. What I do for free on the Blogger platform today had to be built from scratch for a dot com I was part of in 1999. Amazon got rid of servers for you. Only a few days back Google dropped a bomb: now anyone can create an Android app. Elementary programming is now like flipping the light switch.

The need for early stage funding is not as dire as it used to be. But the need for later stage funding is still dire. I am going to argue that is also going to change in the next wave of innovation. There will be companies like OfferPal Media that will help you monetize early and strong. There will come a time when most startups will need little to no money early stage, and little to no money late stage. Asking a startup to both build a great service and to monetize that service is like asking coders to buy and upkeep servers. Makes no sense.

But this newish development is not just about there being less need for big, early money. This also is about saying investors need to get down and dirty with their investments. They don't need to put in daily involvement like members of the executive team, but showing up once in a while for the Board meeting and getting your fee perhaps does not cut it no more. You need a more hands on approach.

The dot com domain is going to stay fertile for a long, long time. To see saturation in that domain is to suggest the human mind will attain satiation at some point, and I just don't see that happening. The human mind has been programmed to stay permanently hungry. Content creation, content curation, content search: they will stay in play.

There is plenty of room on the cutting edge. But then there is plenty of room if the entire world is your stage. You have to be willing to go wherever there might be opportunities for growth.

And money does not differentiate between one sector and the other. New hot domains will emerge. Clean tech, bio tech, nano tech are the obvious names being bounced around. And there are old names. I believe microfinance could easily digest a few trillion dollars. All that money the Wall Street junkies sunk into real estate the past decade and brought the house down for the rest of us, if they had been innovative, they would have taken some of that money into microfinance.

Summary statement: things are exciting, and are getting heated up. I can't even see five years out, let alone 10.

Fred Wilson: Some Thoughts On The Seed Fund Phenomenon

I blog because it helps me think through a lot of issues we face in our business ...... it still takes on average $20mm to get a web startup to sustainable positive cash flow. But the vast majority of that capital will be required after the business has "traction." ..... What has changed in technology venture capital is not so much the total capital requirements, but when they are required. ..... Dennis and Naveen had built the service all by themselves and had just lured Harry onto their team. They needed no capital to do that. In fact they did not even have a bank account when we went to close our seed investment...... The deals that work get very competitive when it is time to raise real money. ..... First Round Capital, the grandaddy of the web 2.0 super seed funds, has now evolved into a firm that is twice as big as our firm in terms of investors and they have more capital under management than we do. And I've met a couple investors who are talking about creating "seed bridge funds." I think that's a great idea..... We are still figuring out to evolve the VC business to reflect the change in financing needs of entrepreneurs and we aren't done by a long shot.

Paul Kedrosky: The Coming Super-Seed Crash

a combination of ease of entry, lower capital requirements, failing incumbent venture capital (VC) firms, and general fervor has driven the emergence of a host of new "super-seed" firms. These small-ish outfits -- usually running less than $20m -- specialize in seeding a bazillion companies, following on in very few, and generally trying to be fast-moving and networked. ..... Nor does it mean that incumbent VCs will once again rule the world with mega funds. Many of them, like the dinosaurs, have turned out to be evolutionary dead-ends that couldn't adapt with a changing financial landscape. ..... Declining average cost of company creation is driving declining average cost of venture firm creation. ...... Incumbent VCs make up shit about the inadequacies of super-angel funds ..... Venture capital is hard, whether practiced by brain-dead VC incumbents, or by smart and nimble super-angels. Most VCs, and most angels, fail -- it's just that its takes 10 years to kill a VC fund ..... as incumbent VCs justifiably vanish en masse, niche overshoot seems almost ecologically inevitable among super-seed funds.

Chris Dixon: It’s Not That Seed Investors Are Smarter – It’s That Entrepreneurs Are

was a very common occurrence before the rise of seed funds, due to VCs pressuring entrepreneurs to raise more money than they needed so the VCs could “put more money to work.” ..... I thought the brands of the big VCs would help me and didn’t really understand the dynamics of fund raising. ..... Today, entrepreneurs are much savvier, thanks to the proliferation of good advice on blogs, via mentorship programs, and a generally more active and connected entrepreneur community. ...... prominent seed funds will outperform top-tier VC funds

John Boyd: The Rush To Early Seed Stage: Later Stage Implications And Top 7 Mature Themes

every time I turn my head there is another seed incubator popping up. .... Things are not as active in traditional venture capital funds as many struggle to raise super sized funds and maintain the flow of fees. Angels and incubators, on the other hand, are exceedingly active. ...... While some of these early stage deals will be capital efficient even in later stages, many will still need relatively large raises that angels and incubators just can't handle. ..... an early stage deal has to reinvent itself multiple times. ..... Some really famous seed investors use the shotgun approach. ..... Early stage investing requires an ability to go from failure to failure without any measure of diminished hope or exuberance. To me that implies a lot of the ex-corp dev guys and lawyers who are now active seed investors may drop off. ....... My relationships with teams I've invested with early on are like family as you are often in some pretty thick battles with them. ....... Right now we don't have enough competition in broadband and too much spectrum is tied up warehoused in too few hands.

Fred Wilson, 2006: Web 2.0 Is A Gift, Not A Threat, To VCs

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Fred Wilson's Insight

At the end of his talk Fred Wilson says, "I think that was about 15 minutes, and now I will take questions." That so impressed me. Because that was exactly 15 minutes. How did he do that? I was watching him, he was not looking at his watch. This guy obviously has a black belt in pitching. His body has become a clock.










Okay, this clip 10 is huge. "Why would you want to live in an office park and suburbia when you are 21 years old when you could be living in Williamsburg?" I love this city, so does Fred Wilson. He loves it because he has called this city home a long time. (Did he grow up here?) I love it because this is the first hometown I ever had. I have a refugee's love for the city.

I think this city needs to go head to head with Silicon Valley. Fred shares that thought. I dig that. Silicon Valley is the big, old established company. New York City is the startup.



"The same qualities that make you a great entrepreneur make you a terrible manager." I so buy into that. Visionary startup people need good old school COOs. Keep the trains running on time while I go shake things up.



Fred Wilson is a VC like Al Pacino is an actor. This guy was born to be a VC. You will not see this guy retire for a long, long time because he loves his work so much.

I don't see Fred Wilson invest in my company, not now, not in any of my future rounds. He does what he calls "web services." That is his "domain expertise," his phrase. I make it very clear I am not in the dot com (Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era) space, at least that is not my step one, or two, and those two steps are a 10 year run easy. There we part. But that at some level makes it even more interesting for me to follow him online. I am not someone waiting in the wings thinking only if he knew me well enough, or he liked me enough, he would put his money down on my venture. The conclusion that he is not going to ride my boat gives me a certain detachment, a certain objectivity to enjoying him. Makes me more carefree.

His is my favorite solo blog. The guy is an avid user of many of the products of his portfolio companies. Like Dennis Crowley said some place when he was asked why he let Fred invest in his company. "Fred's entire family is on FourSquare!"

Like I said to the First Round Capital guy Charlie the other day over email, I have heard a lot of good buzz about you and your firm, that you do early stage very good, what I have not figured out yet is if you are stuck in the dot com space.

Fred Wilson: VC
Fred Wilson: A VC
Fred Wilson

Fred says he is in the "web services" domain, but he also bemoans the fact that New York City has not, has not shown any signs of producing a 50 billion dollar company. A company that is worth 500 million is a successful, wonderful company, but it is small. At 10 billion you are mid size. 50 to 200 billion is big. Fred's portfolio is crowded/littered with small to mid size promises. My company is going to be big. (An Immigrant Story For Brad Feld) In my book you can't stick to the dot com space and in the same breath bemoan not seeing any big promise on the horizon. Those two thought trains don't go together. I see a train wreck. So at some level I do feel like maybe I am not totally done with the guy yet. I should not write him off for me completely. 

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Social Capital And The Venture Capital Game

This article in TechCrunch reinforces with sound data what you could have guessed on your own or rather, what is wisdom in the tech circles, that social capital matters. What you know is important, sure. We would like to believe there is a meritocracy. But who you know is als

Image via CrunchBase

o important, very important. It is not true that social capital is less important in a meritocracy. Not everyone has to have 10,000 friends, or even a thousand. How many people you know and stay in touch with depends on your personality type, career domain, success, how busy you keep, and a few other things. Can you smile? Can you say hello?

Maybe you know a lot, but would it not be swell if you could team up with people who also know a lot? Teaming up with people with similar goals and interests can take you a long way. Teaming up with people who compliment your knowledge and skill set is the only way to go. And then there's social

Image via CrunchBase

capital for social reasons. Who do you want to hang out with? Partying is also important.

And then there is the social capital social media cocktail. You can manage your bank account online. You can also grow, nurture and manage your social capital online. We live in such a day and age.

The Top 100 Networked Venture Capitalists TechCrunch Do venture investors

Image via CrunchBase

with the biggest and best networks end up producing the best returns? ....... “better-networked VC firms experience significantly better fund performance,” as measured by how many of the companies in their portfolios exited via an IPO or acquisition. ...... all the other venture firms who co-invested with it in funding rounds ...... The more co-investors a venture firm has, the better its network. The better its network, the better its overall returns. ....... better access to deal flow, talent, advisers, potential customers, and potential exits. ..... “to get a high score, you need to co-invest often with others that also co-invest often.”

Image via CrunchBase

1. Draper Fisher Jurvetson
2. Sequoia Capital
3. Accel Partners
4. Intel Capital
5. First Round Capital
6. Dag Ventures
7. New Enterprise Associates
8. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
9. Benchmark Capital
10. Ron Conway

Whom You Know Matters: Venture Capital Networks and Investment Performance


Whom You Know Matters: Venture Capital Networks and Investment Performance -

Fred Wilson
Facebook And Mashable: Social Media And Social Media Blog
Is Google Wave Social Enough To Challenge Facebook, Twitter?
Is Reading Socializing?
Define Social Media

From The Netizen BlogRoll

One afternoon in NYC Just as the brand started in the UK as the David to many Goliaths in aviation, mobile telephony, and financial services, the Virgin companies in the US are Davids offering a fresh value-for-money alternative to the bigger, bloated, legacy institutions... On Fallon.
A Pause From The Regular Programming For A Commercial
Securing An Independent: Identify Candidates
Sarychev Peak Volcano in Stereo
Bring the world to your event
First Round Capital Office Hours Comes to...Our Office

The King of Twitter He’s still dead. All that follows is discussion and wouldn’t we re

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ally rather discuss it with our friends than Al Sharpton? ...... If the Iraq War was the birth of CNN could Iran and Jackson mark the start of their decline in influence? ........ Neda. Piece by piece, the story came together before our eyes, in public. The journalists added considerable value. But this wasn’t product journalism: polishing a story once a day from inside the black box. This was process journalism and that ensured it was also collaborative journalism – social journalism ..... n Twitter, the trends were all but filled with Jackson – except for the Iran election, which was still there, in the middle. That renews my fai

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th in us.
Is Blogging Evolving Into Life Streams? Scoble spends more time promoting Friendfeed than his own blog ...... many of the top 100 blogs all look like mainstream media, with a team of writers, photographers, and editors. ..... the iPhone has resulted in 400% increase in uploads to YouTube ..... he’s slowed down on blogging and increased his activity in Twitter and Friendfeed ..... he’s losing his thought leadership, his voice is lost in the noise

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• Let the Interwebs make your life-altering decisions for you (shannonturlington.com)
• How Does Your Body Language Reflect Your Personality Type? (huffingtonpost.com)
• TheFunded reveals blacklisted VCs (venturebeat.com)
• Qualcomm Ventures Invests $9 Mn in GIS Firm MapMyIndia (contentsutra.com)
• Khosla Ventures Adds Pierre Lamond (blogs.wsj.com)
• Draper Fisher Jurvetson Lowers Fundraising Target For Its Tenth Fund (paidcontent.org)
• Lilliputian Ties Down $25M (xconomy.com)
• VC Firms Adapt to New Reality (myventurepad.com)
• Ooma Raises $18.3 Million, Resets Valuation (gigaom.com)
• Investment Banks are a Misnomer (startupprofessionals.com)
• Apple Exec Joins Venture-Capital Firm (blogs.wsj.com)
• Where are you on the Tweetire Curve? (sethlevine.com)
• A Dark Summer (fiveyearstoolate.wordpress.com)
• Investors: Angels vs. Venture Capitalists (startupprofessionals.com)
• IPOs return: Facebook and Twitter next? (money.cnn.com)
• Why China Isn't "The Next Silicon Valley" (techcrunch.com)
• VC Bootcamp By DFJ Gotham Ventures and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (slideshare.net)
• The Cisco of smart grids? (money.cnn.com)