MADE IN DETROIT

A message to @KevinHartz: Bring your money to Seattle

Thu, 10 May 2012 16:29:03 -0400

Hi @KevinHartz,

First, I should say I’ve long admired Eventbrite and what you’ve done there. Moreover, I use at least a handful of products from companies you’ve invested in on a daily basis. You seem like more of a quiet operator and investor, not overhyping yourself and your investments — just the type I (and most Seattle entrepreneurs) like.

Today I read a Wired piece on why you’re no longer making angel investments. In particular:

Hartz doesn’t like to invest his when there is so much sloshing around Silicon Valley.

…

Hartz is making follow-on investments in his current roster of startups, but he’s not looking to do anything new — it’s just too expensive.

To this I say, come to Seattle and invest. NOW. The weather is getting better, so don’t be put off by the potential of rain. More importantly, we need investors like you: folks who can provide value to startups; folks with operational and investing experience; folks with networks and connections in areas we lack.

As for your concerns on valuations: don’t be. Our valuations are fair — extremely fair — by Valley standards. We don’t have YC companies raising seed rounds at a $9-10M pre. Many local investors are grinding entrepreneurs on price, even after you discount for not being in the Valley. Hell, some of our entrepreneurs are leaving Seattle because deal terms are so bad for us up here (while others of us are banding together to build a great future of startups). Needless to say, you’ll be very happy with the valuations entrepreneurs are offering here in Seattle.

Meanwhile, while investors are busy trying to grind on price, entrepreneurs are busy building great businesses. For a long time, Seattle entrepreneurs have been known as the lifestyle business types, not necessarily wanting to build massive companies. Quite frankly, I was part of that: if I could build a few million dollars a year in revenue business, that sounded great. But recently, that mentality has changed (I know this because I’m part of it): we want to build massive businesses now. We want to be aggressive and take risks. Just look at what Rand has done at SEOmoz.

So we want to take risks. We want to build great, big, lasting companies. Our valuations aren’t out of control. Now we just need capital and investors who can mentor us to do so. This should be you.

Come take a trip up here to Seattle. We’ll gladly host you at Founder’s Co-op, and we’ll ensure you meet the best of the best if you’re up here for just a couple days. You won’t be disappointed.

If you’re interested, email me at iseff@appstorehq.com or call me at 406-426-1337.

Looking forward to meeting.

Thanks and talk soon,

Ian

Five degrees of separation

Wed, 09 May 2012 16:42:37 -0400

The average #Facebook user has 130 friends, ~8,000 friends of friends, and ~1,000,000 friends of friends of friends. via @Padday #WOMMA
— David Yarus (@DavidYarus) May 9, 2012

According to that, it looks like the formula for number of friends by degree of separation is:

if deg == 1 130 else 130^deg / 2 end

For first degree, that would be 130, second degree would be 8,450, third degree would be 1,098,500. Assuming this holds true for more degrees, four degrees of separation would be 142,805,000 people and five degrees would be 18,564,650,000 people, or roughly 2.6x the population of the world.

In other words, it appears it really only takes 5 degrees of separation to get to anyone on the planet.

"The bigger question, of course, is whether Formula One can allow itself to be perceived as being on..."

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:49:47 -0400

“

The bigger question, of course, is whether Formula One can allow itself to be perceived as being on either side of a national conflict, particularly while blood is being spilled. Now, please don’t tell me that sports and politics should not mix; that there can be something useful accomplished by holding international sporting spectacles in countries with poor histories when it comes to freedom and human rights. Is China any more open, free and democratic a society in the wake of the 2008 Olympics? Was Germany after the Berlin Games in 1936? I have a little personal history with this kind of thing: I was a qualifier for the United States team trials for the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, the year President Jimmy Carter kept the team home to protest the ongoing Soviet military action in, of all places, Afghanistan. I supported the Olympic boycott then, and I would today, knowing full well that supporting it or not are BOTH political statements. The simple fact is that politics and big-time international sport cannot be separated. Ask the organizers of any F1 Grand Prix, virtually all of which involve public funding, why they do it and the answer you’ll hear is some variation of “To bring us to the attention of the world.” What is more political than that?

Here’s the point: Formula One cannot just fly in, take a check, run a race, hand out the trophies and then leave town in those parts of the world where there is political repression, officially-sanctioned violence or economic exploitation. We are told that the Bahrainis are trying to work through their problems, and hopefully that is true. If there is a race, we will broadcast it. But to go to Bahrain as things stand right now only enforces the worst possible image of a sport that is supposed to be thrilling, inspiring, and conducive to national pride.

”

- VARSHA: A Rocky Road Ahead For F1?

Remember just a few months ago when we were talking about AAPL...

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 16:08:23 -0400

Remember just a few months ago when we were talking about AAPL exceeding XOM for the first time to become the largest company by market cap?

Seems quaint, what with the 45% difference between the two today.

Happy 2nd Birthday to my little guy! (Photo credit: @ashletate.)

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 11:35:28 -0400

Happy 2nd Birthday to my little guy! (Photo credit: @ashletate.)

I have a TON of respect for Kiss Metrics — and this blog...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:04:14 -0500

I have a TON of respect for Kiss Metrics — and this blog post was great — which is why I have no problem laughing at this.

The top three examples are what NOT to do for a headline about your product. The bottom is an ad at the end of the article for Kiss. Seems like someone should’ve read the article first? :)

The last two are 100% accurate.

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 13:02:03 -0500

The last two are 100% accurate.

uchicagoadmissions: Did you watch ESPN’s Top Ten Plays on...

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 17:41:31 -0500

uchicagoadmissions:

Did you watch ESPN’s Top Ten Plays on SportsCenter last night? If you did, you would have seen LeBron James, Dwayne Wade…and this Matt Johnson shot. With one amazing last-second move last night, Matt gave the Maroons a win over Emory and broke UChicago and UAA records with 49 points for the game.

Seriously, go Maroons!

A serious productivity question

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 17:33:14 -0500

A serious poll: Are you more productive (and able to finish everything you need to finish) when you have your day scheduled completely or when you leave your schedule open for free time throughout the day?

For instance, I have the following I need/want to complete on any given day:

Respond to emails.
Contact current users for feedback.
Contact potential users.
Write code.
Read and digest analytics.
Project management.
Product brainstorming.
Pay bills.
Fundraise and/or pre-fundraise.
People management.
Blog/social media/content marketing.
Recruit employees and/or advisors.

Obviously, that’s a lot of stuff. I currently keep my schedule open as much as possible, unless it’s committed to someone else. But I always feel as though I’m missing some of these things — should I be explicitly scheduling time for each?

"What is Detroit‘s Brand? If you’re not from there, you might only think of Detroit as the city with..."

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:08:20 -0500

“

What is Detroit‘s Brand?

If you’re not from there, you might only think of Detroit as the city with the massive population contraction. Or the one abandoned by the auto industry. Or the place with all the racial tension.

Or maybe when you watched the Super Bowl last year, you were introduced to a Detroit you hadn’t considered. You saw Eminem driving a Chrysler 200 through a hard-nosed, never-say-die, lunch-pail city with the Joe Lewis fist suspended proudly by the riverfront (ironically located just outside of General Motors’ headquarters).

Whatever your impression of Detroit, I can tell you that if you’ve never spent any time there, it’s wrong. You may think you know about the city’s grit, but unless you meet gritty Detroiters, you don’t. You may think you understand the concept of reinventing blight into opportunity, but until you walk through the Russell Industrial Center or the Heidleberg Project, you don’t. You may think that as an enlightened white person, you understand the psychology of blacks who are just a few generations removed from slavery. But until you walk through the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, you don’t. (And even after that, you don’t.)

”

- Detroit’s Brand Is More Than The Sum Of Its Advertising

Yes. YES. YES!

How you know you have great investors

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 12:36:16 -0500

I’m extremely lucky. I have great investors. Every day, I learn a ton about every topic imaginable from an active, experienced, smart, humble, and just plain awesome Chris DeVore. He’s not in some posh corner office or playing golf; he sits out in the same open space approximately 4 feet from where I sit.

Chris just closed an $8M fund for Founder’s Co-op. When the news was released, I realized the difference between good investors and great investors.

Good investors make money for their LPs. Great investors make money for their LPs and have entrepreneurs who love them.

The number of entrepreneurs backed by FC who are excited to see FC succeed with another fund is the surest sign that Chris and Andy are great investors. Just take a look at the tweets for that GeekWire article. Or take a look at the comments. They’re all positive and encouraging, and a large percentage are from entrepreneurs who have already been backed by FC and love them.

I’m extremely lucky. I have great investors. And I hope this latest fund is a big success for them.

Stale code

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:34:59 -0500

Developers talk often of code smells: cues that might mean your code isn’t written as well as it should be. There’s also a general notion that the best code never needs to be touched after being written. It’s so perfect that there are no bugs and it works for years without intervention.

I assert that, in a living and growing application, code which never needs to be touched has its own smell: the smell of stale code. Like all code smells, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it very well could be. With a startup, if you aren’t growing, you’re dying. With stale code, if you aren’t refactoring, you’re smelling.

Code that never gets changed tends to become legacy code more quickly than oft-refactored code. It becomes dead weight, people forget how it works, and thus it becomes a black box. It locks you into old, non-backwards compatible versions of frameworks and libraries.

Perhaps we should rethink how amazing our code is just because it never needs to be refactored?

3 simple rules for 2012

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 13:26:00 -0500

I decided to come up with 3 simple rules to live by in 2012.

Be a good person (have a strong moral compass).
Work hard.
Don’t take life too seriously. (You’ll never get out alive… thanks, Van Wilder.)

"The 2000 purchase of KB Toys, then one of the country’s largest toy retailers, became one of the..."

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 17:49:13 -0500

“

The 2000 purchase of KB Toys, then one of the country’s largest toy retailers, became one of the most contentious.

As in most Bain deals, the partnership put up a small fraction of the money — in this case $18 million — and borrowed the rest of the $302 million purchase price. Just 16 months later, the toy company borrowed more to pay Bain and its investors an $85 million dividend.

That gave Mr. Romney and the other partners a quick 370 percent return on their money. But it also left the toy company with a heavy debt burden. Before long, the company began closing stores around the country and laid off 3,400 workers. It filed for bankruptcy protection in 2004.

”

- Buyout Profits Keep Flowing to Romney.

I know lots of interesting things go on in LBOs/private equity deals, but this seems to me to be the pinnacle of Bain playing “who’s the bigger idiot” with banks… and winning.

Laugh. Think. Cry. That’s a heck of a day. Don’t...

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 22:50:00 -0500

Laugh. Think. Cry. That’s a heck of a day.

Don’t give up. Don’t ever give up.

It’s Jimmy V week. Donate now to cancer research (100% of donations go directly to research).

Dixie with no more casts! :) (Taken with picplz.)

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:39:41 -0500

Dixie with no more casts! :) (Taken with picplz.)

Lemonade: Detroit

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 13:58:08 -0500

Lemonade: Detroit

Keith is showing us SCIENCE at his UChicago lab. (Taken with...

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 14:59:12 -0500

Keith is showing us SCIENCE at his UChicago lab. (Taken with picplz.)

What up, Chitown. (Taken with picplz.)

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:17:54 -0500

What up, Chitown. (Taken with picplz.)

One day in Detroit and it snows. (Taken with picplz.)

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:23:40 -0500