I need throw some change-ups over at The CIO Weblog. My projects and endeavors in the past 6 months have been outside of the backoffice operations space, and I’m lacking that first-hand practioner’s view as to what’s happening with CIOs, IT organizations, etc. I am in need of fresh material. In plain English, I’m getting stale. I’ve gotten feedback from folks that they liked my post on the NewsGator Enterprise Server and might like to see more posts like that in the future (e.g., on emerging software companies). Other things that people said that they would like to see are interviews with CIOs or other industry folks. Will try my best to seek these out, so if you are part of a software product company or consulting firm, a CIO, a manager in an IT organization, etc., feel free to pitch or contact me. Email preferred at sshu at s4management dot com.
Venture Flops, Missed Opportunities, and Burials
Just highlighting CNET’s new article on Top 10 dot-com flops along with two others in the vein of failures and missed opportunities:
- "Top 10 dot-com flops" (CNET)
- Bessemer Anti-Portfolio (MISSED big opportunities by BVP – hat tip: Zoli Erdos)
- Business Plan Archive of the dot com era (highlighted by me before)
And if we don’t remember the climate of the dot com era as well as we should, consider the WSJ’s tabular account of layoffs and shutdowns – they gave up tracking after Nov. 28, 2001.
On the CNET list, the one I have to say that I miss from a personal perspective is WebVan (which took the #1 spot of colossal failure). Didn’t have too much personal experience with the others on the list, but WebVan actually added value to my life. A shame.
King For A Day
Ten days ago I posted an innocuous link to something about "Ivy League Dating" and mentioned "The Right Stuff" dating website. Although my referral link traffic indicated that the search engines started hitting me just a day or two after I posted, I am the #1 search result on the MSN search engine today (when searching for the term, "Ivy League Dating"). I’m on page #1 for Google. There are many people that I talk with at 21Publish that are just learning about blogs and don’t believe how blogs and blog communities affect search engines. Although it may be a passing thing in a few years, it does seem to affect the engines now. And the trend does seem like it is going to stay with all of the search engine investments going on.
I have got to put up a hipper picture of myself on my blog if I’m going to be in this business.
Update (8/20/05): Now if you really want Ivy League sexy, you need to check out venture capitalist Brad Feld who noticed that the number of shares in secondary offering for Google are the same as eight significant digits of Pi.
An Excellent Post On Ventures And Worldwide Pressures
I’ve posted quite a bit about offshoring lately (e.g., here, here, here), and I’ve been more in tune with international business (now that I work for a German-HQed firm). This post over at SiliconBeat and the related threads are rich with information on deal sourcing, tides in the venture world, what macroeconomic tides many investors want to tap into, venture operations, the (un)scalable aspects of being the first resources in a start-up, plus much more (such as why later-stage deals have risen as of recent). The one thing that is not really covered in this post, however, and something I have not quite reconciled in my mind is the craziness of start-ups in the Valley right now. My hypothesis (which is neither complete nor a very constructive hypothesis) for the craziness is that the economics for certain start-ups has significantly changed (lower costs of entry), and that the reach of such companies can expand quite far. The utility of forming a hypothesis about all of this, however, gets at understanding where the money will be, where the money will flow out, where you want to be, and where you don’t want to be.
Outsourcing CIOs
Debra Chamra has a good article at Local Tech Wire on outsourcing CIOs. If your organization hasn’t thought about this before, perhaps a snip from the article’s section entitled, "Renting, Not Buying" provides good backdrop:
And why not? It is no secret to small and mid-size businesses that good tech help is not only hard to find these days, but potentially, hard to afford on a full-time basis. Known for creative solutions, these organizations have decided to rent rather than buy Chief Information Officers (CIOs).
According to Aberdeen Group senior analyst Stephen Lane, “The idea behind CIO outsourcing is that you’re renting an officer of the company. Ideally, that’s someone who has the experience to get your company started with IT while you’re building your own organization.” This movement goes beyond standard project-based outsourcing – an outsourced CIO becomes a member of the senior management team. Rest assured – while the role of CIO is relatively new, executive outsourcing is not a new endeavor. CEOs and CFOs have been outsourced successfully for years.
Handling Employee Blogs … Plus C-Level Censoring Of Blogs
See my blog post over here.
Interesting Post On New Capital Versus Hard Money And Pre-Venture Money & Sweat In Startups
Will Hsu has an interesting post on the jockeying and balancing that goes on between the outside financiers and founders (with respect to equity).
In a related area, I’ve sometimes been disturbed (not so much by the legal foundation) with respect to the "protections" for angel investors, non-founders, and early-in-the-game employees that get squeezed by later rounds of capital. Sometimes it seems like that the only real protection that these folks have come down to the integrity of the CEO, board members, and new investors in respecting what hard money (e.g., angel money) and hard sweat the employees have put in (for perhaps, very low wages). And where does the fiduciary responsibility of the board members fit with non-founders?
If you buy into my into my concept that it is impossible (or very hard) to provide legal protection to non-founders via investment rights agreements, etc., and if you further agree that board governance may be a little loose on obligations to non-founder employees, consider where the onus stands.
Update (8/18/05): BTW – in the case of non-founders I am conceptually all for performance-related structures, but the mechanics in today’s world seem very difficult to execute. Always interesting to search for new practices.
My First Amazon.com Book Review: “The Virtual Handshake”
I reviewed the book, "The Virtual Handshake" by David Teten and Scott Allen. My review is listed below and is also at the Amazon site. The American Management Association will publish "The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online" on August 30, 2005. Nice job by David and Scott.
As a person that sidewinded professionally into the social networking and blogging space over the course of a couple years, I wish I had the Virtual Handshake when I started my journey because it would have cut down the learning curve by orders of magnitude. The book provides a terrific overview of online and virtual networking technologies through detailed accounts of personal and business cases from around the world. Having a personal online presence has never been more important, and this book can show business people why it matters, how it matters, and where one can go to get started (in more areas than most can imagine). I have the Virtual Handshake as part of the required reading list for new employees not only because it’s the best concrete book on online networking in the market but also because I want people I work with to have a leg up in the world as individuals.
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