Monthly Archives: October 2011

Oct29

Up, Up and Away

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Up, Up and Away

There are a few opportunities that come up once in a lifetime, so when I was invited on a zeppelin flight out of Moffett Field in San Jose, I put aside the momentary thought that I lived in Phoenix and just made a plane reservation to go with my friends for a ride..

And what a joy! First of all, I bet you don’t even know the difference between a zeppelin and a blimp. Now I do. A zeppelin is a helium-propelled, lighter-than-air flying machine that has a skeletal framework. By contrast, a blimp is a pile of air contained in an unstructured shell. The zeppelin.we flew in has a cabin below it that seats twelve people.

A zeppelin flies at about 1000 feet above ground, meaning the windows can open and you can stick your head out, and if you look down you can see the details of the landscape in Mountain View, Palo Alto, and all the surrounding hillsides and salt flats. There was the Stanford campus, and Sergey Brin’s house. There were the Rainbow Flats and the Campanile. Since we didn’t have seat belts on, we could wander around the cabin and see the view from all sides.

This particular zeppelin, one of two in the US, belongs to a unique business called Airship Ventures (we suggested they change the name to Airship Airlines so people could know they could make reservations), a company funded by Brian Hall and his brother, and Esther Dyson. I think there are other “silent” investors. The business, a little older than a startup, is headquartered at Moffett Field, next door to another of my favorites, Singularity University.

The airship, made in Germany, was brought to the US by the investors because they wanted to revive its use for both entertainment (take dad for a ride on his birthday) and commercial uses (reach remote Alaskan islands where there are no bridges or roads). At the moment, it is sponsored by Farmer’s Insurance company, and that’s what Silicon Valley residents see when they look up at the ship in its “every day” incarnation. But it has also appeared in movies, where they photoshop out the Farmer’s logos:-)

Our day was a real special event. We got a tour of the largest wood framed hangar in existence, a talk about the dirigible’s history (yes, the Hindenburg was a dirigible, but it was filled with flammable hydrogen, not helium, which does not burn), topped off by a silent, beautiful float above the Bay Area

during the rush hour.

There is a special way to load and unload passengers from a zeppelin, because if you let go of it, it will fly away. While it is being held down by two guys, two passengers at a time get on, and then two get off. This helps keep the airship on the ground when it is supposed to be on the ground. It’s like keeping a frisky puppy on a leash. When all the previous passengers are off and all the new passengers are on, the guys with the ropes let go.

I mean, it is amazing! I would urge you to book a ride on the Farmers Airship if you are going to propose to your sweetheart, honor your grandfather, celebrate an anniversary, or take your team on a unique offsite. The entire experience is pretty incredible. It’s one of those gifts for the person who has everything, and while I won’t quote price, it is not out of the ball park. Personally, I think it belongs in the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalogue, although it’s not there (yet).




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Oct20

Angel Investing Bootcamp Encourages Women to Invest $100k in For-Profit Social Venture

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Angel Investing Bootcamp Encourages Women to Invest $100k in For-Profit Social Venture
Angel Investing Bootcamp Encourages Women to Invest $100k in For-Profit Social Venture

I’ve been a mentor for the Pipeline Fellowship since it began, and on my trip to NYC this week I was happy to hear Natalia’s geat news: the first class of women angels, ten in all, was graduating and had invested $50,000 in a woman-owned startup. Another $50,000 to match it had been invested by other angels. This is near and dear to me for obvious reasons: women make great entrepreneurs; and women can bring about social change. If you wuld see Natalia, who is young, beautiful, and passionate, you would share my belief that through this Fellowship she will change the pattern of women investing, and of women investing in each other.

So, as I head to the airport to go back to Phoenix, (unfortunately missing the party), here’s the story: the Pipeline Fellowship announced today that the 2011 NYC Pipeline Fellows have selected to invest US$50k in PhilanTech, marking a milestone in women investing in women for social change.

The Pipeline Fellowship also announced the launch of its alumnae network, Pipeline Angels, through which PhilanTech secured an additional US$50k investment.

PhilanTech creates innovative online tools to help organizations maximize social impact while minimizing environmental impact. The PhilanTrack® online grants management system helps grantmakers and grant recipients streamline the grants administration process to focus more resources on program and service delivery, and ultimately greater social impact.

While recent studies have shown that women-led startups and companies with diverse leadership teams are more likely to be successful, only 12% of entrepreneurs who received angel investments in the first two quarters of 2011 were women, according to a report by the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire. By the same token, only 12% of U.S. angel investors were women, and only 5% were minorities.

The Pipeline Fellowship is shifting the gender balance in angel investing and increasing the flow of capital to for-profit social ventures. “The Pipeline Fellowship is committed to increasing diversity in the angel investing community and training a new generation of angels to invest for good,” stated Pipeline Fellowship Founder & CEO Natalia Oberti Noguera.

“Companies that create social value in addition to financial value not only create jobs, but also additional societal benefits, such as increasing resources available to underserved communities,” said Dahna Goldstein, PhilanTech’s Founder, “And companies creating value should have equal access to capital, regardless of whether they are led by men or women.”

Though Goldstein’s business model was attention-grabbing, even garnering her the honor of being selected as one of Bloomberg Businessweek’s “25 Most Promising Entrepreneurs” in 2009, investors didn’t get it enough to offer her funding.  According to Goldstein, the Pipeline Fellows got it.

“Dahna is a smart, experienced entrepreneur and a dedicated social leader, who is passionate about bringing tech tools and efficiencies of business to the social sector,” observed 2011 NYC Pipeline Fellow J. Kelly Hoey.

According to 2011 NYC Pipeline Fellowship Mentor and 2008 Ernst & Young Entrepreneurial Winning Women award winner Kathleen Utecht, “Entrepreneurs are the backbone of our economy and it is vital that investors seek to make above market-rate returns and a positive impact on our society. The Pipeline Fellowship is leading the path to an improved way of investing and creating a new generation of successful women investors.”

The investment was announced at the 2011 Pipeline Fellowship Investment Announcement Reception hosted by AHAlife and keynoted by Peabody Award winning radio host, MacArthur Fellow, and urban revitalization strategist Majora Carter.  Carter declared, “I want to dismantle the barriers keeping us from making ‘equality’ profitable and I’m excited to work with this community of investors to maximize the change we can leverage together.”

“We are extremely proud to collaborate with the Pipeline Fellowship to support women investing in women,” added AHAlife Founder Shauna Mei, “At AHAlife, we have been very fortunate to have several women angel investors who were instrumental in building our curated media-commerce company.  AHAlife was one of the first technology startups to receive significant women angel backing and we hope to have started a major trend!”

The Pipeline Fellowship will expand to Boston this fall and is preparing for its second NYC edition.




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Oct16

Why Mainstream Media Can’t Understand OWS

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Why Mainstream Media Can’t Understand OWS

20111016-171240.jpg

Although i live in Arizona, i was in New York this weekend and i went to show my support for OccupyWallStreet. it was one of the most exciting things i have seen in my life, for as i suspected, this movement is not about left and right, it is about up and down. But it isn’t about class warfare either; it is about crowdsourcing solutions.

The Occupy movement will never be understood by the media or by the current political establishment, because it is a movement of questions, not answers, and circles, not poles.
Early this morning when I was there, two circles of “residents” were seated on the concrete. One was listening to a lecture on the Fed, and what it does and means, and discussing how to get more educated about the financial system. The other was talking about what to do (or more accurately what not to do) with donated funds (“let’s not use them to make ourselves more comfortable because that is not what this is about”).

When I went to the Press table there were several representatives of the people who take notes on little pads, otherwise known as Journalists. They’re the only people who don’t take notes on smartphones, recording audio, video, and photos. That’s only for citizen journalists and tourists, who want to make sure they share reality.

The people with the pads all came with rehearsed questions. You could see they already had a concept, a point of view, a story they wanted to write. And it was the job of the poor, sleep-deprived spokesperson, crawling out from under a blue tarp, to say “we don’t know the answers yet.That’s why we are here: to find them”

From all the signs I saw today, the common purpose is to unite against a financial system that has cheated most of America. If there is an enemy, it is not one political party or the other, it is government that has been bought off by banks and multinationals. It is not an anti- business or an anti-government movement ; it is more like an anti-greed and anti-selfishness movement.

It doesn’t involve giving up all your worldly goods to show solidarity; it involves just showing up to show your solidarity. The goal is to make the people’s voices, so long drowned out, heard. It’s to remind the banks and the government that the citizens are the people, and that the American people are getting angry and impatient at the top 1%.

Oh, and it is by no means all kids. Plenty of people my age are out there. We may not be sleeping in Zuccotti Park, but we are there all the same, some in body and many more in spirit.




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Oct15

Why I Will Occupy Wall Street

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Why I Will Occupy Wall Street

I thought the students would never wake up. The cost of college has been rising for thirty years,  the need for science and math skills is also rising, and we have an entire generation mismatched for the available jobs. Occupy Wall Street is a great awakening to how the growth of education as an industry financed by banks is no different from the growth of a health care industry financed by banks. The.Same.Six.Banks.
 
The  cost of education in both money and time has halted our innovative momentum and caused smart people like Peter Thiel to discourage kids from going to college as a way of getting an education. 
 
The conservative agenda, which includes defunding public education to avoid raising taxes, has hardly been questioned, or even noticed. But it has had monstrous compounding effects.
 
The  loss of tax support has forced public colleges  to raise tuition in order to serve students, and that makes college loans necessary now even at once-free state institutions.
  
Profit-driven private  education came along to  replace public education. But easy guaranteed loans make it possible for people to go to “private” colleges who are unprepared and can’t even finish. The combination has produced a generation of students, graduates and drop outs, of both public and private colleges, who can look forward to a mountain of lifetime debt in exchange for mediocre educations, many in fields with no jobs.Debt controls everything else in the economy. While we are the slaves of our college loans, or home loans, and credit card debt, no one can take a risk or cut anyone else a break. Doctors carrying $100,000 in debt cannot afford to treat uninsured  patients on a sliding scale as they might wish. Good teachers can’t afford to stay in teaching.
 
Why do banks make loans to students with no credit? Because the  Federal government  guarantees them.No risk and all the reward. You can’t avoid repaying your student  loans. The banksters always make out.
 
I must be slow, because I am just figuring out how much the influence of  money is everywhere, especially in places where it was traditionally unimportant. 
 
Back in the day, teachers and doctors went into their professions because they were committed to the field. If you weren’t interested in money, but in a life of service, you went into teaching and medicine.
 
But both of these professions have been corrupted by the whipsaw machinations of our banks and our collusive government,, which encourages debt, begs us to keep consuming, and makes all the rules  for ordinary human beings to do whatever the “banksters” want. 
 
All  this debt hasn’t improved either system. Education is no better, and in many cases worse, than it used to be. In health care, we pay more and get less than any other developed nation.
 
This is why I will visit Occupy Wall Street while I am in New York this weekend. To me, it is even more important than Ground Zero. The real terrorists aren’t offshore; they are in our own government and financial  systems,working in tandem to perpetuate themselves at the expense of us.
 
 It is finally time to demonstrate. I was waiting for the students to wake up, because it is really their battle -but now I will join them, because it is mine on principle. It may not be my future that is at stake, but it is my legacy




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Oct14

Flowtown Acquired by DemandForce: Congrats Dan and Ethan

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Flowtown Acquired by DemandForce: Congrats Dan and Ethan
Flowtown Acquired by DemandForce: Congrats Dan and Ethan

The following is an expression of joy more than journalism.

Flowtown has been acquired by DemandForce, the number one small business marketing company. The details are on Ethan’s blog.

Suffice it to say here that they received a funding round 13 months ago, had to do a pivot as a result of one of Facebook‘s TOS changes, and have now been acquired by and have both joined a company that has really good alignment with Flowtown‘s original purpose — to make small business marketing simple and successful.

I’m so happy for them that I didn’t even ask for more details. I don’t care. I am an evangelist and flowtown is a textbook startup-pivot-success story.

When I met Ethan he was doing a video podcast about investment. It was something I wasn’t sure would work, although I thought it was very cool. This was before Gary V made videocasting famous. But it was the first step in an entrepreneurial vision.

Ehtan was barely out of college. We were at SXSW; the details of the conversation are a blur. (I exaggerate a liitle here for effect.) I do remember  I fell in love with Ethan’s energy, and I knew that whatever he did would be successful, because he had that awesome drive –even though I didn’t see the clear road to riches in what he was doing at the time.  I told him that pretty brutally, and also told him he could count on me when he needed me. I believed in him.

The next thing I knew, he was in San Francisco and  had founded Flowtown with Dan Martell.  it was growing, and he contacted me to do some evangelism. I introduced the product to all our entrepreneurship programs, everyone who used it loved it, and I was sure it would continue to grow.

Soon after that, I found out he was funded by Dave McClure, a really wonderful friend of mine (and everyone else’s). And I met Dan Martell, his co-founder, through GeeksonaPlane.

They were cruising along with steady revenue when they were forced to pivot. They were transparent and awesome about it, telling all their customers they’d be out with something new soon. Even if you never follow links, just follow the one above and see how a classy and elegant pivot is explained to customers who were left behind. It’s right out of The Lean Startup.

Dan and Ethan launched a new Flowtown, first with the Timely product, and then with their concept of gift marketing. And then they were acquired.  Demandforce has acquired the existing products, the technology, and the team.

The first question I asked was whether Timely, on which I depend, would go away. No. And it will continue to be free. Here’s what Ethan says:

If Dan and I continued to build Flowtown independently, Demandforce is exactly the kind of organization we envisioned building. Demandforce’s customers are dentists, auto-garages, salons, spas etc… and with 24 quarters of over 80% year-over-year quarterly growth they are a leader in marketing automation for the small business, now reaching 80 million consumers.

Now as part of Demandforce we will be able to move our vision and products forward 10x faster and work at a scale we could have only dreamed of before.

What does this mean for our existing customers?

All of our technology and products are being integrated into the Demandforce platform with some new things yet to be unveiled.

● Flowtown (Gift Marketing) which helps businesses with social gifting campaigns will be integrated into the Demandforce D3 product. We will continue to support the existing version for the next 2 months.

● Timely.is, now with over 26,000 professionals, will remain exactly the same and will continue to be free. In addition we’ve already integrated Timely to become the social publishing tool inside the Demandforce D3 product

And believe me, we haven’t heard the end of Ethan Bloch and Dan Martell. These are two of my favorite entrepreneurs, and I really wish them well.

End of non-journalistic love fest.

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Oct4

Apple Without Jobs is Like a Ship Without a Rudder

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Apple Without Jobs is Like a Ship Without a Rudder
iPhone 4S?

Image by TimDuran79 via Flickr

The Apple announcement today was like  90 minutes of foreplay with no orgasm. Here we are going into Christmas with no products we can’t do without. No iPhone 5, and no new IPad. And I already have a Nano watch.

That being said, yes, I am going to get the iPhone 4s, but not because I think it’s a major improvement. I’m faking it.

I’m getting the iPhone 4s for practical reasons, not for love. I am getting it because a major issue  with the iPhone for me is not being able to change carriers when I travel overseas. A phone that’s unlocked represents more in savings than I’d spend on the new phone.

Am I happy about a better camera? Of course. I don’t have a digital camera anymore; the iPhone camera is the only one I use. So the better it is, the better I will like it. Especially with 1080p video, which I will use to take better pictures of dogs.

Will I try SIri? Of course. But I tried it once before, and found it good for only a limited number of things. It can’t answer your every question, or solve all your problems. I wonder if I will work it into my every day life. I hope it will help me when I am driving.

And where is the Facebook integration Scoble thought would be there? So much appears to be missing, and I don’t know whether it’s because the rumor mill was really off base, or whether something else was supposed to happen and just didn’t materialize in time.

Actually, as a result of the announcement today,  I’ve decided I will do something I have been meaning to do for a long time: get an Android phone. I already know it will be whatever is introduced at CTIA next week, which is supposed to have Ice Cream Sandwich. I will use that Android phone on Verizon, so I can finally make a phone call. I will use the iPhone 4s to play out the end of my contract with AT&T.

I’m so sorry Steve Jobs is so ill. He would never have played things this way. And I absolutely know this is the future of Apple. It’s over, baby. The coolness is over. The floodgates have been opened for competition in every product line.

Unless artificial intelligence becomes the iPhone’s unique selling proposition. I hope that’s true. Only truly exceptional artificial intelligence is worthy of the Apple I know.

 

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