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Technologies I want an excuse to use…

  • Cassandra, the Facebook-derived, neither-row-nor-column-oriented-quite, massively distributed data store.
  • New hybrid languages that run atop Java VMs: Scala and Groovy.
  • Hadoop.  Just ‘cuz.
  • The R statistical computing system.

This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by WMG.

Was looking today at a Facebook email (yuck) exchange regarding heavy metal and hard rock with an overseas pen pal. One of the links traded was to Ronnie James Dio’s “Holy Diver” video, a rockin’-ass metal song with laughably horrific production values in the vid.

That video in question I had found as a “related video” while surfing some other metal (probably Sabbath) on YouTube.

You heard me right: I probably never would have found out about Holy Diver if not for a bunch of dubiously-legit uploads to YouTube, which uploads, through the collective intelligence of commenting, tagging, and merely self-serving passively surfing users, became woven into a preferences graph that drove me into Dio’s grip. (Forgive me.)

WOE IS THE F-ING RECORD COMPANIES, THEY HAVE LOST SO MUCH REVENUE BOO HOO HOO BECAUSE I WATCHED A 20-YEAR-OUTDATED ROCK VID ON YOUTUBE, flail and rend garments etc.

Oh, wait — no, that’s not correct:

Yep, I bought the song. That is: the system works. Exactly like folks like Steve Jobs and the YouTube boys and your humble correspondent have been saying. There’s a place for freedom, and a place for commerce, and they can coexist. My anonymous and unknown friend in cyberspace puts up a crappy VHS-dub of Dio to share with me, I discover and rock out to it, and I buy the song.

But Warner Music Group (WMG) is operating on a plainly brain-dead policy. For instead of promoting that virtuous cycle above, they have chosen as a matter of policy to piss all over my unknown cyber-friend, me, RJD’s bank account, and indeed all precedents of good internet behavior. They have used the threat of violence-through-the-courts to have the link broken, and replaced with “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by WMG.” In WMG’s preferred universe, I never discover Holy Diver, RJD never gets his 10c or whatever from iTunes, and you never have to read this rant.

So, let me review the options WMG has:

1. Benign neglect toward music-sharing (especially of old and/or non-premium formats). Begets wider distribution of the catalog. Enables an increase in fan discovery and delight. Drives marginal purchases based upon that discovery and delight, and encourages the budding polyglot.

2. Relentless malignancy toward music-sharing. Squelches wider distribution of the catalog. Precludes an increase in discovery and reduces delight. Increases dependence on old, broken business model of top-40 radio and brick-and-mortar distributors, and cultivates mono-consumers who cleave to niche preferences.

In fair-mindedness, I must back down from the “brain-dead” accusation (see also my self-moderation imperative from earlier posts). There is, to be fair, one very good remaining reason why WMG might rationally choose #2 above. That is the legal doctrine that rightsholders like WMG must assert their rights or face losing them due to estoppel (I may have the legalese wrong). In other words, WMG may well have right-thinking, option #1 favoring executives, but if the general counsel raises the spectre of losing all copyrights, then that fear could drive an otherwise bad decision.

What we need is a law or court decision that provides some limited protection to copyright holders: a failure to enforce rights in one specific medium, format, or type of venue shall not be deemed a waiver of rights in any other medium, format, or type of venue. Then, WMG could let YouTube run amuck, with some sort of implicit understanding that HD videos or 128k audio would provoke legal action, but that sub-par stuff would not.

Otherwise, we end up in world where online video is Hulu, not YouTube. Don’t get me wrong — Hulu is fine for what it is: a way to rot your brain with mainstream media candy. It’s fun for catching “30 Rock” or “The Daily Show.” But YouTube is different and more important, culturally and economically, than Hulu, because it enables and empowers a different class of people to participate in the (potentially-)mass media.

Massachusetts Doesn’t Add Up

One nice thing about having a (practically infinitely) divisble currency unit is that you can use arithmetic to sum your accounts and settle them on a “net” basis.

Sometimes, such as in CDS clearing situations, this gets a bit hinky: lots of counterparties, etc. Sometimes, with lots of debits and credits on both sides, you really need to double-check to make sure you’ve got it all added up right.

But if I owe you A and B, I really ought to be able to pay you a sum C = A + B.

Not in Massachusetts.

Somehow this would seem less objectionable if it weren’t for the fact that I was trying to dissolve an inactive corporation so as not to have to keep shelling out tribute. You can (send one) check out any time you like, but you can never leave…

The Downturn, REAL vs. FAKE VCs, and REAL WEALTH

In early October 2008 I was asked by a local entrepreneurial booster group for a quote giving VCs’ take on the state of the financial world. Here’s what I wrote (but was too busy/lazy to blog) at the time:

  • REAL VCs have committed funds from stable, liquid, institutions who are not going away (state governments, universities, pension plans, countries).
  • REAL VCs have partnership agreements that last 8-10 years and aren’t tied to the current level of the NASDAQ or the price of anyone’s house.
  • FAKE VCs are everyone else who claims to be a VC but isn’t like the above.
  • FAKE VCs may be nice people but since they aren’t REAL VCs, you don’t know what you’re dealing with in working with them. So be cautious and “know your investor” if you are going to rely on them for your short- to mid-term capital needs.
  • Don’t sweat it; unlike the financial economy, early stage firms are inventing and creating and building things to sell in the real economy. Yes, you’d rather sell your company into a bubble. But great companies are often built in downturns and sold in upturns. Keep building and selling.
  • All the REAL WEALTH that humanity has ever created has been the result of new invention and teamwork. All of this CDO/MBS/hedge fund nonsense is just pushing around money. You, the entrepreneurs and inventors, are the real engines of true wealth creation and we VCs are honored to play a role in helping you do so.

All of this seems at least as true and relevant today as in the first days of October. So let’s all take a deep breath and keep this in mind: human ingenuity (Founders, CTOs, Visionaries) conceives new wealth; human effort and discipline (Engineers, Salesmen, Managers) bears it into the world; and the acceptance of it by markets (Customers, Sponsors) makes it viable and sustainable. VCs play our own humble role by advising the foregoing and making calculated risks of our (and our investors’) wealth and time. This is a GOOD THING, and furthermore, this is a cycle that despite its rough edges CREATES NEW WEALTH. That is not the case with all of the now-trashed asset classes (which were largely about flipping the same old bad ideas to one another) and the whining rent-seekers who (mis-)managed them.

If you’re reading this, you’re almost certainly a geek or a startup-world person. And that means you, like me, have a unique opportunity and burden to do the right thing in this crappy economic time.

So, please. (This goes for me too.) Turn off CNBC. Close the browser window for Yahoo! Finance. If at all you can, block out this volatility and pandemonium among the wealth-re-arrangers. And, please, focus and redouble your efforts on creating wealth and value that ultimately will be what allows our humble race of tool-wielding mammals to conquer ignorance, disease, malnutrition, isolation, Malthus, and generally the heat-death of the Universe.

Things Pictured on "The Stuff of Thought"

Here is an attempt at an exhaustive list of objects drawn as colorful icons on the cover of the hardcover 2007 edition of Steven Pinker’s “The Stuff of Thought.”

  • fork
  • trash can
  • sunglasses
  • lamp, desk
  • salt shaker, pouring
  • football helmet
  • door (safe vault?)
  • film canister, 35 mm
  • mortar and pestle
  • plunger, toilet
  • vial, poison
  • condom
  • speaker, tweeter and woofer
  • cup with toothbrush
  • straitjacket
  • medicine dropper, dropping
  • monitor, computer
  • pills, medicine (capsules)
  • glove (gauntlet)
  • hammer
  • sardine tin, half-open
  • padlock, open
  • briefcase
  • teabag
  • hand grenade, pineapple
  • ice cream cone
  • pinwheel
  • bandage, adhesive strip
  • roll (paper or textile)
  • cigarette or joint
  • paintbrush, dripping
  • dynamite or firecracker, fuse lit
  • bullhorn
  • brassiere
  • toaster, bread popping out
  • bowling pin
  • Martini glass, with olive
  • Game Boy
  • toilet
  • cell phone
  • underpants, briefs
  • teacup and saucer, sugar cube above
  • computer with keyboard (different from computer monitor)
  • blow up doll
  • cigarette or joint (again)
  • flag, atop pole
  • pistol
  • dildo or vibrator
  • hatchet or axe
  • television set
  • handcuffs
  • clock face
  • roll, toilet paper
  • popsicle or creamsicle, bitten
  • straitjacket (again)
  • electric chair
  • lipstick
  • kitchen mixer or egg beater

I think (from the first hundred pages) that each of these items is referenced at some point within the text. But how interesting that the only two items that Steve-o repeats are a straitjacket and a cigarette or joint.

Against Blogging, or Why I Am Discontinuing This Futility

1. An experiment in radical openness.

I started blogging in 2002/2003 as a way to post bug fixes that I’d discovered up onto the Web in a way that I and others could quickly find them. For example, if I got an “Parse Error #123 in dorklib.so,” and I found out how to fix it, I’d post up both the error message and the fix so that anyone searching on the error message would find the fix right away.

That worked really well for that limited purpose. I didn’t get a lot of traffic, but I did get a decent amount, and folks tended to leave positive comments. I wasn’t influencing crowds, but I was improving a few people’s lives each week at no marginal cost to me. Karma bonus. Bloghisattva.

Then, right after coming to work for Voyager Capital in late 2005, Web 2.0 and the social web were really taking off. I got the news, and decided I needed to really dive into the culture of “radical openness.” Sort of getting on board with the MySpace generation (I’m a few months away from actually being a member — rather, I’m the youngest possible “Gen Xer”).

The idea is pretty simple: dive into the conversation, push your ideas and your self and your self-image out there. Privacy is old school, promiscuity is the new fad. I covered this in “Your Old-Ass Values Are Broken.” It seems to work well for some people. Fred Wilson, a well known VC, has lots of readers for his cartoons of gay jokes, tales of how much he plays video games, and posts saying things like “fuck Apple”. Decorum, farewell! You have been relegated to the recycle bin of history!

When Real Grownups, like Fred Wilson, do the high-personality, low-filter thing, you end up with something like an unvarnished truth: lots of input, fairly low signal to noise ratio, and occasional obscenity or flagrancy — but in exchange, you get a measure of honesty, a personal “voice” that engages the reader, and an (imagined) human connection with the writer.

So, as I stated in “Plan Less, Write More”, I decided to do less — a lot less — planning, filtering, and proofreading, and just let it hang out. Hey Fred, wait up, I’m hoppin’ on board too!

But, there are a couple of problems with that idea.

2. I rant too much when I’m radically open.

The main problem is pretty reducible to an abstract model. Fred writes pretty much every day. So do most of the 20 or so bloggers I regularly read — generally, at least a couple entries a week. At that rate, most of the entries end up being pretty tame and moderately well thought-out, even though they have this “unvarnished” quality.

But I’ve been blogging once or twice a month on average. Why do I blog so much less than a real “blogger?” Well, because it hasn’t been a priority for me. So, my entries tend to happen when I get particularly worked up about sharing something with the world — in chemistry terms, I have a high “activation energy” for putting out a blog post, and so I only post when I’m agitated.

The effect of this, of course, is that I seem to rant a lot. If I’ve come up with a novel observation on the VC industry, or a new tech trend I think is interesting, but I’m not worked up over it, I probably won’t write about it. But if I’m having a shitty day, and some software bug or ill-considered policy really tweaks me off, then bang, I settle up the bill with an excoriating blog rant faster than you can say “Fred’s your uncle.” (Sometimes, happily, I think better of it before pushing the post out to the Web, but often not.)

So, I end up with a strong bias toward rants. Probably not the best.

3. Domain blogging would be good.

What could fix this? Well, “domain blogging” is one possibility, where I create a single blog based on one topic and really hammer on it. (I’ve tried vainly to separate things into categories here but they end up pretty spread out with no critical mass in any one.)

The problem with domain blogging in my main domain of activity — venture capital finance of early stage tech companies — is that the best and meatiest observation and analysis of the industry is the worst possible thing you can put into a public blog.

My job is all about relationship, resource, and information asymmetry. We make it our job, eight days a week, to cultivate relationships with the right people, to raise funds for our discretionary deployment, and to form proprietary opinions on market and technology trends. Then, we go around trading and arbitraging these things, like for like, and for equity in a startup, and eventually for dollars returned to our investors.

So, the meatiest things I could post here would be about those relationships, or resources, or that information. Which, of course, is like laying out a dish of dollars for all your competitors to see.

Within the world of VC, my situation is generalizable, but not universal. Back to our exemplar par excellence (sorry, Fred), there actually are some circumstances in which radical openness within the domain is a successful strategy. If you can, leveraging the Web, get a dominant mindshare among the wired crowd by means of your openness, you might cast a much larger shadow than you really have, and actually attract to yourself valuable relationships, resources, and info. But it’s a fat-tail game even within the fat-tail industry of VC, and it’s risky: it’s like shooting the moon in Hearts. Or like chopping blocks of ice with your hand. If you break through, you’re golden! But if you don’t, you’ve only managed to harm yourself in the process.

It’s probably OK for me to keep posting observations on the quirks of the industry, or purely functional / mechanical advice for newcomers, like my “VC Jargon” post.

4. Don’t shit where you eat.

There’s another issue with domain blogging, too. The more senior, and more independent, the VC blogger, the more he can get away with. Junior executives of any stripe remain, in certain ways, beholden to the norms of their seniors. (I touched on this in “VCs and the Naughty Bits.”) Even a completely independent entrepreneur, unless he wants forever to bootstrap or self-fund, can’t stray too far from the comfort zone of his investors while in the public eye. (Nobody’s smacked me down for this yet, but at this rate it’s only a matter of time until I piss off the wrong person.)

I used to think that, amongst the giants of this industry, I was like a court jester — free to say whatever I thought, or whatever might seem funny or entertaining, even if it involved the king. How could the king get upset at a mere jester? A few events I’ve been to recently have changed my mind. Do you really want to be introduced over cocktails to someone whom you’ve accused (even indirectly) of having the skill set of a “retarded chimpanzee?” Yeah, me neither. Seattle’s a small town, but guess what? Silicon Valley’s a small valley (sic), NYC’s a small metropolis — in fact, it turns out it is a small damn world, after all. The chances of me sitting next to any given F50 CEO, Senator, Rails core developer, or hedge fund manager are individually pretty small, but OR’ed together and over a few years, end up approaching p=1. Might not want to badmouth too much (even if it is sort of in good humor and mostly about the issues, not the people).

(Note that it does not escape me that this is one of the self-reinforcing traits of capitalism: every step up the ladder of wea
lth and influence that one takes is simultaneously a greater investment in the same system and a deeper barb into one’s flesh. One is less and less able to speak truth to power the higher one gets; gotta keep one’s reputation for playing a good clean game. Want to silence those upstart rabble-rousers? No need for a hit man; just give ‘em promotions and fat raises.)

5. The problem with Steely Dan.

Blogs are ostensibly written for the outside world to read. The author is dying to be a star, and make them laugh, right? But we all know that really, blogs are written for the writer to write. The further out the long tail the blog is, the truer this is, until N(readers) approaches 1, the author himself.

At the peak, I had just over a thousand uniques monthly to the blog (most were RSS readers). Yay! Even I can’t go visit my own blog from a thousand different cybercafes each month, so there must have been some actual readers. But let’s make no mistake: I was getting no material (in either sense) benefit from my readership, so we can pretty much assume I was writing just for moi.

And so, predictably, I indulged myself with things like addressing the “gentle reader” and making gratuitous references to Steely Dan or Beatles lyrics. This alone isn’t a huge problem, but it doesn’t exactly help mitigate the other issues. (“Hey, this VC associate just said my developers must have ordered extra lead paint chips on their breakfast cereal before coding the UI for my product, but then he threw in a line from ‘Pretzel Logic’ in the same post. Maybe he’s not so bad after all!”) Jackass allusions are fun easter eggs when a co-conspirator spots them, but they just confuse everyone else and make them think you’re off-kilter.

6. Technical commentary is still appropriate.

Technical commentary, including bug fixes and product reviews, are still very much appropriate. I think that using adult language is still probably OK, too, although after reading the now-infamous Zed’s commentary on Rails I am rethinking just how cool it actually is to use the potty-mouth when talking about software.

7. Conclusion and next steps.

Sadly, this means I will be stripping most of the humanity and voice from the blog. Which is OK since, frankly, the “radically open ranting voice” wasn’t the best version of my voice anyhow. It also means I’m going to back and strike all the “big red words” from this little blog, or at least the most rant-a-licious parts. Sure, they’ll still be cached somewhere, so an amateur historian of the inconsequential could still see just how indiscreet I once was. But this isn’t about revoking or burying what once I said, but merely taking it off display, thus failing to renew implicitly my imprimatur.

And so now, gentle reader, this author as you have known him must say adieu. Not radically closed, quite, but back to the paleo-openness of Web 1.0 goes this blog.

Microsoft: Clueless or Actively Hostile to Search?

I know that large enterprises have traditionally taken a lot longer to get clues, both generally, and specifically around search. To some extent, this is just a factor of organizational size: Voyager‘s awesomely successful enterprise search marketing company, SEMDirector, is helping enterprises learn to adapt to this brave new world, and creating a lot of value doing it.

Of all big enterprises, Microsoft is one that we’d expect to be relatively early on the search bandwagon. After all, they’ve largely reoriented the company around search and advertising.

But inexplicably, the very best assets that Microsoft has from a search-marketing content perspective — the gigs and gigs of support info and (heh) bug workarounds on their massive, persistent, ubiquitous installed base — are piss-poorly optimized for search!

Sometime, try searching for something like, oh, say:

exchange server pop mail marked as read  

…which you might do if, like me, you’re frustrated that MSFT’s latest version of Exchange server can’t seem to support POP3 access without flagging all the POP’ed messaged as read (thereby screwing up the flawed but de facto organizational method that Outlook has trained us all to use over the years). (Yes, it’s a real problem; no, I haven’t found a solution.)

Well, the first several hits are forums, blogs, and ISV’s offering solutions. Somewhere around 9th place comes a hit from Microsoft, though, and you’re thinking: “Great! these forum postings are people complaining, but the solution will just be right here in the handy Microsoft link! Boy, what smart guys they are!” So you click on Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 Solution Center

…and what you get back is a huge page full of what I can only describe as “useless crap”. Twenty or thirty topics, all loosely grouped around a product, but nothing apparently on my problem. A confusing mess of acronyms and key terms.

Sigh. OK, So then you pull out the backup. Use your browser’s in-page-search (cmd-f) to find “POP.” Surely, one of these thirty topics is about what I want, I just need to find it here. (Though, isn’t that what the search engine was supposed to have done? Whatever.)

Search: “POP.” A few instances, but nothing relevant. OK, Search: “marked as read.” One instance, but describes the opposite of my problem. How about “marked as unread.” Also irrelevant.

Now you sit back and scratch your head: Every single other link in Google, prior to the Microsoft link, was relevant (if not useful) to my particular problem and my carefully worded query. Now comes the link from the very author of my misery, the Leviathan, and NOT A SINGLE G.D. SENTENCE is relevant to my problem!!

And that’s when it hit me: Microsoft’s “support” pages are actually search engine spam.

(And Google has properly detected this: that’s why for Microsoft’s own product, and despite Microsoft’s huge “Google Juice,” its own support pages rank a pitiful 9th.)

The answer to what needs to be done is fairly simple. (Our friends at SEMDirector could walk you through it.) Push the search engine juice out to the edges of the graph (leaf nodes with real info, rather than these pseudo-indices which serve only to conflate keywords together that don’t belong on the same page); let real human end-users discuss topics, using words that come naturally to them (and hence to other help-seekers); engage external bloggers and forums both to push info out into the ecosystem and to get deep links back in to the leaf nodes.

(Back in 2004, I was seeing this kind of search-friendly behavior on HP’s server support forums, and it was AWESOME. But then, that was all about running Linux on a well-engineered, open platform.)

All of the above recommendations are anti-hierarchical, control-ceding, conversation-seeding moves. They require a mental move from hold on tightly to let go lightly. I’m talking about not just opening the kimono, but playing volleyball on the nude beach. Do you think that a company unable to do that with its support pages is going to be able to embrace a whole new and orthogonal, search-and-ads based strategy?

Customer Satisfaction Owners: Read Your "noreply" Messages!

A quick thought: If you have responsibility for customer satisfaction at a company that relies heavily on the Web for customer experience, you should seriously consider making a practice of /reading the emails that come in to your “noreply” spambot addresses/. (Of course, you should /not have/ noreply addresses; it’s so f’ing insulting to your customer it’s beyond belief.) Essentially, if you want to see the misery of your least happy customers, the total flaming death-threat rants of your spurned customers, the pleading, pathetic missives penned into dodgy webmail interfaces and painstakingly drafted for maximum persuasive effect in solving the customers’ issues, and not least the Tourettean shitstorm of schizoid freakouts that result from when the former (bivalent term) customers have their first emails to “noreply” bounced and yet, beyond all logic and reason, reply again to curse the souls of the whoreson mongrel ancestors who brought a demon like you forth onto the Earth — then you must look into the heart of darkness, the festering cistern of the bit bucket to which you have relegated your hardest problems. Yeah, I got my email reply to a support ticket bounced from a “noreply” address today. Helpful stuff, too, had anyone been around to read it.

NBC F—ing Gets It; Why Don’t You Other Media Types Dig?

Who here has seen The Office — American version? Yeah, I thought so: it a pretty darn worthwhile download. (Those of you who are puzzled at why I called it a “download” rather than a “TV show” had best get with the picture: “push” style TV is dead to an entire rising generation of attention-greedy, affluent knowledge workers. We consume our video via iTunes and BitTorrent, thank you very much.) Here’s the twist, though. If you google around for the character names, you’ll run across “blogs” set up for the characters by NBC. (In the past, you may have found such things done by rabid fans, as for the series Arrested Development, or outsourced to niche creative geniuses like my man Elan Lee, but now we’re seeing the oldest of old-line players get on board.) What’s so special about this? Well, think of it this way: those blogs are in-character and professionally written — but not just for the main characters! In fact, some of the funniest stuff that NBC has put up is for an ancillary character, downtrodden boomer office schlepp Creed. The blog is exploring and fleshing out an entire new space and giving depth to a minor character, with production value and infrastructure underpinning it. Which, if you think about it, is an extension of the ostensible value the network adds in the first place (plot, character, production, etc.), but instead of being constrained to 22 minutes a week of airtime, they are going deeper and wider. Previously (pre-Web world), you couldn’t justify paying a creative to create this deeper world around each character, because it wasn’t economical to put it in the show. But now, the show is kind of just a long video ad for the web property… The blog creative work plus the quick release to iTunes can only mean that someone at NBC really f—ing gets it! And kudos to him. Because most of the media industry deserves to die in shame and penury, but the product manager for The Office is a goddam hero of the revolution. Finally, I want to share with you this gem before some corporate assclown takes it down: more Creed Thoughts on all-you-can-eat-buffets contains the bachelor boomer’s thoughts on nutrition-in-bulk by means of buffet restaurants, including musings on fat waitress seduction and plate-diameter pricing models. But the real reason that that this is an ingenius and genuine bit of fan outreach is to be found in the comment section.  His commenters have been cheering him on with crude, even vulgar commentary, engaging with him as though he were a kind of dirty class clown sitting in back.  And NBC — either out of ignorance or winking complicity with the engaged fans — has left the crude comments there, unedited.  It’s a bit unfortunate that the example here is such a crude one, but folks, this is real social media, and it’s why the sucess of The Office‘s franchise is different not only in degree but in kind.  Whoever is moderating that blog is either way out-of-it, or with-it, and I suspect the latter.

Everything Old Is New Again: Innovation to Adoption Lag

There are a lot of problems in software that aren’t solved well in a ubiquitous product (think PIMs, Personal Information Managers; they all suck royally despite everybody’s best efforts, and the OSAF Chandler project has taken years trying to redesign the very concept, with little to show for it to date). But there are precious few problems that haven’t been solved at all.

In fact, a ton of things that are being held up these days as “innovations” are rehashes of old concepts from the 90s, or the 80s, or sometimes even the 70s. Today this came into sharp focus when I saw this bit from a circa 1999 document on the Semantic Web by the Right Reverend Tim Berners-Lee. Here he asks, then answers, a question:

<blockquote> Surely all first-order or higher-order predicate caluculus based systems (such as KIF) have failed historically to have wide impact?

The same was true of hypertext systems between 1970 and 1990, ie before the Web. Indeed, the same objection was raised to the Web, and the same reasons apply for pressing on with the dream. </blockquote>

Then, while searching for some theory on append-only databases (such as would be used in a revision-control system), I came across this 1994 piece on “collaborative filtering.” That report in turn points to earlier work on “Information Tapestry” from the early 1990s.

So: 1970-1990, hypertext exists and is studied in CS departments. 1995, Netscape IPO. Early 1990s, collaborative filtering exists and is studied in research labs. 2006-2007, rise of Digg and Delicious.

I think there’s a very strong case to be made that VCs should stop looking for “innovation,” per se, and start looking for 10-20 year old CS masters’ theses that touch on an emerging market space…