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In this interview with Nick Douglas, Venture Capitalist Jeff Clavier discusses the correct time for startup founders to seek capital, the role of the VC in an early stage investment, and the challenges of starting companies.
Link: sevenload.com
Nick Douglas discusses the VC and Entrepreneurship panel with Jim Lussier.
Link: sevenload.com
The other day, I sat down with Esther Dyson to interview her in advance of the Supernova2008 conference. Since Esther’s emails close with the saying, “Always make new mistakes,” I asked her if she often saw people making the same old mistakes, and what advice she had for them.
Now, I was thinking she might answer something along the lines of, I don’t know, venture capitalists still act like lemmings or entrepreneurs don’t give up on stupid ideas fast enough or something. Instead, she surprised me by saying, “I am appalled at the basics of email.” I asked for clarification, and the result comes out like a primer for pitching Esther, or anybody.
In brief, Esther says, “If people did email right, they’d get better responses.” I had to guiltily admit that I’ve perpetrated some of these sins; maybe even in the email I sent her asking for the interview in the first place. Shame!
Image caption: What Esther will look like if you send her good emails!
What about real spam? “The way to solve it is to put the burden on the sender, not the recipient. It’s too easy to send mail, and there’s no penalty.” She’s trying to solve this with Boxbe, a company she has invested in. Boxbe scores email from one to ten; Esther doesn’t look unless it’s below a 7.
How does Esther sift through all the emails she gets, in an age where we are all inundated with email? She suggests “self-restraint” – Don’t sign up for those lists. Learn how to filter better. Get better at saying no politely and promptly.
The theme for Supernova2008 is “Challenges of the Network Age” – and Esther suggests that the real challenge is human nature. She told me a brief anecdote about Conrad Hilton, founder of the Hilton Hotel chain, on the Tonight Show. Carson asked him (I’m paraphrasing), “You’ve played host to kings and queens, to captains of industry. Do you have any message for the world?” And Hilton replied, “Put the shower curtain inside the tub.” Esther’s message: approaching things from the recipient’s perspective costs you nothing and means so much.
I was fortunate to be able to sit down with Esther Dyson the other day in the MeetUp offices in NYC. I’ll get to Esther in a second, but first a word about MeetUp (where she is an investor and board member).
I first met Scott Heiferman, MeetUp’s CEO, when he was leading i-Traffic, an early interactive agency, probably ten years ago. I was impressed with him then and I’m even more impressed with him now. The MeetUp offices were bustling with youthful energy and I helped myself to their ample supply of fresh fruit (carefully guarded by an inflated dinosaur). Problems with the website that needed fixing were posted on the wall so everyone there could see the importance of customer service first-hand. Nice to see a company that’s not so full of its own Kool-Aid that it can’t focus on its mistakes. Of course the successes were posted too – lots of pictures of happy in-person MeetUp groups and their pugs, knitting, baby carriages, etc.
But back to Esther. I really find she just lights up the room when she walks in, and you want to give her a hug. Not sure why she has this effect on me, since technically she should be super intimidating, given her bio. But she’s got a great smile, and she’s totally matter-of-fact and not at all pretentious, and she sits down and curls one foot underneath herself and plays with her sock. So you sort of feel like you’re talking with your sister even though she’s one of the foremost opinion leaders of the tech world. She tends to wear jeans, and t-shirts branded with the names of companies she’s invested in. I like that she invests in companies, not clothes. What a great role model – for men and women alike.
I started by asking what Esther finds exciting and interesting these days. Healthcare was the first word out of her mouth, followed immediately by privacy, since the two are inextricable. Esther sees privacy finally hitting the radar screen of the average consumer; it’s not just for privacy advocates anymore. Examples?
“Facebook did something dumb, and consumers noticed” (see my previous ConversationHub post on this topic), she said, pleased that the notion of users controlling their own data is gaining currency. “When sites put ads on user-generated content, it’s not just privacy, it’s about self-presentation for that user. People are starting to say, ‘I want to control which ads go next to my stuff’.” She warns that companies who think consumers “just want revenue sharing” are missing a big part of the picture.
Going back to Healthcare as a topic, Esther described some of her experiences with 23andMe, where she is an investor and board member. It’s a company that has combined DNA testing with a graphical web interface; “you spit on the kit and send it to the lab”.
It outsources the DNA analysis to a third-party lab, and focuses on the task of making the data meaningful. It presents both individual data about you and your health risks, along with visualizations of your genetic closeness to the people with whom you are sharing data (by two-way permission). You can share just aggregate, quantitative data, or specific health data as well.
They do an analysis of 500,000 SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms or “snips”, which were new to DNA lingo ten years ago. Then they send you the results, along with tools for how to look at and understand the data. Esther recruited 30 of her family members to participate, and in true Esther style she posted pictures on Flickr.
23andMe has selected some anonymous prototypes participants can measure themselves against, one of whom is an African man; this was the most dissimilar person Esther found when comparing her family’s results, being 69% alike on the selected data points. The most similar people in her data set were two of her sisters, who were 89% similar. People are generally about 84% like their parents and range from 82% to 89% like their siblings.
She was careful to point out that much of this information is not necessarily actionable or especially surprising, unless you don’t know your parentage (or discover previously unidentified relatives). It’s just “more information” – something for the curious to think about. Although it’s expensive for not being tangibly useful, she says, “I’m a big fan of knowledge and informed behavior. There’s no better way to understand risk than when it is visually displayed and personal. It’s one thing to know you should eat your vegetables, and another to consider that information in the context of a personal 23 percent genetic risk of getting diabetes. The number itself may not mean that much, but it’s about you.”
For now, it’s the pioneers or the curious who will seed the 23andMe database and jump start the system, and they do it out of a love of knowledge or a desire to help others. “The first users are the benefactors,” says Esther. “The later users will be beneficiaries.” Later, when enough people’s codes have been collected and we start to see the precise impact of our genetic commonalities, the database will be more helpful for health purposes. So it’s still early days.
Which social networks are of interest? Esther likes Facebook as a platform, saying they are doing a lot of things right. She likes Dopplr – it’s “exactly” what she is interested in which is why she invested (read why on one of her Huffington Post blog posts). She loves Flickr (also an investor) and posts faithfully nearly every day. How about Twitter? It’s “too much”, she says. “I do space, healthcare, am involved in such different sectors … most of what I do is meaningless to most of the people I know. I don’t want to impose.”
I asked Esther what she thought of the whole Microsoft-Yahoo drama we’ve seen playing out over the past few months and days. Her take: “It’s absolutely the right move for Microsoft to drop Yahoo … They shouldn’t want to beat Google, they should do their own thing. It’s stupid … They should make a big effort in health care, which is the last frontier besides education. But they should make mostly small acquisitions and grow organically. That’s why this is exciting; ther’s lots to build, not just buy.” Esther explains that despite Microsoft’s negative reputation with some, their assets as a company are extremely strong. They have a great deal of consumer trust, they know how to sell to governments and large institutions, and they have a very international reach. Her recommendation is not to buy one thing and grow it, but to buy many things and grow their strength in the sector. (One of Esther’s portfolio healthcare companies, Medstory, sold to Microsoft in early 2007).
Esther argues that healthcare desperately needs data-based analysis, combined with an emphasis on users’ control of their own data. We’d all get better privacy with better control of records if healthcare data were kept online. Right now there’s “paper flying around”, she says, and when doctors request patient records they either get nothing, or they may get way too much information, not just what’s relevant to their request. Of course Esther’s already shared these recommendations with Microsoft executives, so maybe we’ll see some more action on this front.
Stay tuned for a shorter post about the second half of our interview, where Esther shares some advice for the best way to approach her with a pitch.
Twitter feed -- follow it for news and notes.
Supernova 2008 Facebook group.
IRC channel -- live web chat. To get around issue of IRC being blocked at UCSF- use http://is.gd/yKa - MIbbit.com
IT Conversations -- audio podcasts.
2007 Video Interviews by our blogging team.
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