Super Angels, The Churning VC Game, And Catch Up Tech

Image via WikipediaThere's web services - aka dot coms - and then there's clean tech, bio tech, nano. Dot coms have become much less pricey. Anyone can rent server space with Amazon. Pretty much anyone can write code.

"You can learn the basics of Ruby in two days," a techie told me a few days back. "And it is all on Google, all the material is free."

Clean tech, bio tech and nano are still capital intensive.

But the biggest returns are in what I am going to call catch up tech. This is the world of microfinance and global infrastructure projects. An annual 10% return is the floor when it comes to these opportunities. If the wise guys - and they were guys - on Wall Street had known to pump excess capital a few years back into catch up tech rather than housing, we might have skipped the pain of the past few years. You pump up housing value, and you sell mortgage based securities to each other. That was like setting the house on fire starting from the basement.

Mike Arrington, TechCrunch: So A Blogger Walks Into A Bar…
Master Of 500 Hats: Fire in The Valley, Fire in My Belly... and Yes, Mike, I Have Stopped Beating My Wife.
Fred Wilson: Collusion
Quora: Who are the Super Angels that Michael Arrington is talking about in his 9/21/10 Techcrunch post, "So a Blogger Walks into a Bar..."?
Silicon Alley Insider: Hooray For Mike Arrington

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Gmail Bug

Hollywood, Silicon Valley, DC, Wall Street, American Hinterland

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TechCrunch: Zuckerberg, ‘The Social Network’ And The Rise Of The Terror Nerd: With The Social Network, Hollywood has made an artful attempt at taking the inferiority, fear and awe that it feels towards Silicon Valley and projecting it onto the cold, calculating (and fictional) Zuckerberg; “Creation myths need a devil,” spoken by Rashida Jones’ Marylin Delpy, is the most resonant line in the film..... people who understand how to code and build websites have power ..... Sorkin himself told New York Magazine, “I am not a fan of the Internet.” ..... Mark Zuckerberg is the perfect scapegoat for the whole damn thing, being someone who stole Hollywood’s cultural influence and built a half a billion strong distribution network it could only dream of, delivering a brutal blow to its business model as a side note.

NY Mag, NY Times, All Things D, CNet.

9/11 was Hollywood not doing its job. The Gulf Oil Spill was Hollywood not doing its job. When the political pundits were saying because the Cold War has ended and history has ended, it was Hollywood's job to point out otherwise. America always has had to violently tussle with chunks of autocracies. The fact that most of the Arab world was not democratic should have had alarm bells ringing, but did not.

America as a population should not have had to go through the trauma of a Gulf Oil Spill to start thinking seriously in terms of a zero emissions future. That emotional jolting should instead have and should come from Hollywood.

By that measure this Facebook movie is a stark failure. It does not even begin to fathom what it takes to build an epoch changing company. To say it is just fiction is not a good excuse.

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Email Solutions

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TechCrunch: Email Overload Fix: 3 Sentence Emails

Email has to be completely scalable. There can not be too much email. Not for nobody. That is the ultimate email solution. I could get 10 emails a day, or 10,000, and I still should not have to feel overwhelmed.

On the other hand, email has to have a holistic communication approach. It has to fit into the larger picture. That solution is multi platform.

One direction is condensing. It is about being able to visualize 10,000 tweets at once. Another direction is when you want to spend a lot of quality time with one or more people. Your communication platform should make that possible.

The inbox today is dreaded. That right there is a huge business opportunity, or two, or three. Gmail's Priority Inbox is a good step in the right direction, but it does not even begin to fathom the inbox of those who get deluged with emails.

Facebook helps. You get emails from people you are already "friends" with, or groups you signed up for. Strangers can email you, but they have to send out one email to one person at a time. Facebook email does cut out a lot of noise.

Twitter is my idea of the email client of tomorrow, but Twitter has been dragging its feet forever on adding features and simplifying its service.

The Gmail free phone is great. The voice feature of Gchat is great. Sometimes you want to dig into a conversation, and you want to zero in on a person, and text does not do it, so you talk. You get your headset going.

And then there is meeting in person. FourSquare can be a swell platform for that. FourSquare's social graph is special. While you are zeroing in on a person, you want to cut out all the noise, you don't want to be taking calls, you don't want to be seeing yet another incoming email.

For me blogging is an essential element of the larger complete communication platform. Being able to reach out to complete strangers who might also be talking about some of the same things you might be talking about is so very key.

But then all communication all the time is not what we could possibly be shooting for. Where is the time for non communication work? The time to get things done? The time to acquire new knowledge? Social is not 100% of the territory. Social is not 10% of the territory. The best communication platform knows when you are thinking, and lets you be: a phone that does not ring, a screen that goes into hibernation.

A good communication platform knows when you are on vacation. When you are off, you are off.
I have been impatient with Twitter. (User Friendly Twitter? Get Out Of Town) And I have been impatient with Gmail.

You should be able to visualize 100,000 tweets right on the Twitter website. And perhaps for Gmail the next big push after the Priority Inbox will be the word cloud. I should be able to say, create a word cloud for all my unread emails for the day. And when I hover over each word, I should see the names of each sender associated with that word, with the option to click and go to that specific email.

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Fixing The Economy: Drastic Job Creation

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Drastic job creation by the US federal government - as drastic as the bank bailout, as drastic as the stimulus bill - is what is needed, I think. And this has to be about creating and paying for the jobs of tomorrow.

But we can not take the FDR comparison too far. The biggest difference is that today America is in a global world. The global cooperation has not happened yet. The global institutions have not been created yet.

So many big things have to happen at once. Rapid pace political reform that sets America on the path to total campaign finance reform would be one, but instead you have the drama of old man Rangel dragging his feet all the way to jail time.

There are monetary moves to be made, and Paul Krugman has talked about this. I like the idea of letting inflation go up one notch so it becomes expensive for the private sector to keep sitting on the two trillion dollars it is sitting on.

I am leery of only construction jobs. I have not seen a big push for universal 100 MB broadband yet. A big chunk of that is political work that does not cost the government any money. It is about introducing some major competition in to that sector.

There is one overriding theme though. Most people seem clueless.

How to Fix the Economy: An Expert Panel: a paper forecasting high unemployment, low housing prices, and very low growth through 2017..... An expansion in credit, debt, and deregulating over the past 10 or 20 years got us here. ..... it will take time, but it need not take time. ...... We are unwilling to do drastic things that will improve the situation of households. You can do that by raising their income so they can meet their debt burdens. ...... Without drastic reforms to entitlement programs in the United States, we are really talking about something that will feel like the 1970s—but last for 20 to 25 years. ..... We should be thinking about modernizing our housing sector, improving the kind of mortgages we offer, and encouraging innovation. ...... Half of the budget is Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid... Nondefense discretionary spending is 4 percent of GDP. ..... I don't think we are going to modernize Fannie and Freddie very soon. Fannie and Freddie hold the preponderance of mortgages in the United States. ...... Non-Fannie and Freddie mortgages trade in the 6-to-8 percent category, as opposed to the 3½-to-4 percent category [for Fannie and Freddie mortgages]..... Roosevelt did things fast. He created the 30-year mortgage within months of his taking office. We need that kind of spirited innovation. ..... The most difficult issue was Too Big to Fail, and that was not dealt with. We are going to be creating even bigger financial institutions ...... We would have moved toward solving the problem if we had broken up the large institutions where they are not too big to fail. ...... It is jobs that are affecting housing prices, not the other way around. Mainly it is the failure to generate convincing economic prospects that keep people from hiring. ....... 16 percent of [Americans] would like to have jobs but don't. ..... something on the order of a 30 percent cut in Social Security taxes for four years. That would create immediate incentives for hiring. ....... continued backlash against domestic institutions ...... The key reason firms aren't hiring is that the economy is growing so slowly ...... more public projects .... Public projects are part of what we should be doing—New Deal, Civilian Conservation Corps-type projects—because unemployment is sapping the national morale. ..... general revenue sharing ..... the global economy faces a serious structural condition, and that is lack of global aggregate demand in which the developing countries continue to save and the developed countries no longer can finance prior levels of consumption ....... encourage China and other Asian countries to develop internally as opposed to simply externally for export. ...... we are not just broke once. We are broke about six times over ...... When a government is in an unsustainable fiscal position, spending more money does not improve the economy. ....... The only one that has the capacity to borrow in sizable amounts is the U.S. government. ..... to suggest that the government now contract fiscally in terms of reducing its deficits to me is simply going in the wrong direction. ..... people are very upset. They feel that the country is not theirs, and that a small group of wealthy people who get bailed out and bribe the government are in charge....... The issues are not that clearly understood today. The system is more complex. What has been legislated is a Rube Goldberg contraption. And that is wrong...... The engine of global growth is shifting from the United States to other countries ...... Firms are not buying new buildings, but they are buying new computers. ..... The most important thing we have going for us is our entrepreneurship and flexibility. ...... We are creating a Financial Oversight Council which will be worrying about systemic crises, and an Office of Financial Research, which is going to be collecting data. When we had this crisis we didn't know what was happening. ...... create jobs for the future, as opposed to jobs for current consumption ...... for the Federal Reserve to continue the quantitative easing and be even more innovative. They have to do more.

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