Elections = Money :-(

The cost of the national political process in the USA is entirely out of control.

Every other pundit I hear or read of late nonchalantly discusses that Party X’s war chest is bigger than Party Y’s war chest in State Z, therefore Party X will win. They assert, implicitly but clearly, that close races are about absolutely nothing more than spending. Karl Rove provided a particularly skillful such treatment earlier this week on NPR.

Each election process we go through seems to bring forth new record spending. The $2.6B+ estimate on these current midterm elections will purportedly represent an increase of on the order of 20% over the last midterm elections. 2008 should be fiscally impressive.

Maybe I’m just naive, but I don’t see how the public wins if elections are largely just about money.

S

The World’s Best Anti-Depressant?

My son is in kindergarten. For some reason that now eludes me, we didn’t make the bus today and I brought him to school.

I don’t know how you bottle it up, but wandering around an elementary school just might be the world’s best anti-depressant.

I don’t see how any human being could hold onto fears, gripes, complaints and their ilk with scores of smiling, bouncing, singing kids skipping past you!

S

Manic Mondays – VC Partner Meetings

Jeff Bussgang of IDG Ventures wrote an interesting article this week about the venerable VC Monday Morning Partners Meeting. As a serially-offending entrepreneur, I’ve had plenty of VC meetings over the years and thought I’d expand on one of the important comments Jeff makes about closing or pre-closing the other partners in the firm.

Entrepreneurs thus need to be careful to think through how to sell an entire partnership on their opportunity, not just the sponsoring partner. Get to know each of the decision-makers before the meeting and draw out their hot-buttons. Don’t be afraid to ask for direct meetings with a subgroup of the partners to try to win them over.

It is worth noting that, generally speaking, sponsoring partners do not bring companies into Monday Meetings capriciously. You should not be afraid to ask for these meetings, and you should ask, of course, but in sincere situations, based on my experience, the sponsoring partner will generally work hard to facilitate these meetings with minimal nudging on the part of the entrepreneur.

It should give you pause for thought if the partner says they are interested in taking your deal to the partners meeting, but is not actively helping you meet and pre-close the other partners. That is fairly illogical behavior if their ultimate goal is to participate. There are exceptions to every rule of course, and small firms of 2-3 partners surely behave differently than firms with a dozen partners.

And finally…

First, unless the firm is run by a single managing general partner who makes the ultimate decision, all decisions are typically made as unanimous, consensus-driven. This means anyone can veto a deal if they don’t react well to it.

Jeff qualifies his statement with “typically”, and that is certainly appropriate. Do keep in mind that every partnership is different. It is your job as the entrepreneur to learn how that partnership works so you can plan optimally. Ask the partner you’re dealing with. Find an LP or two to talk to. Connect with independent Directors who serve with the firm’s partners on company boards. Seek out other entrepreneurs the firm has funded (or perhaps even better, firms that didn’t make it beyond the Monday Meeting).

It might be a cliché, but as Sun Tzu suggested, all battles are won or lost before they are fought.

S

Educating Consumers about “Erosion of Privacy”

How do you educate consumers about the erosions of their online privacy? What percent of Internet users understand that this is an issue? Can they be educated before it becomes moot?

I’m a privacy nut. I’m not psychotic about it, but I pay attention. I do not subscribe to the minority opinion that online privacy is dead and we should all open our kimonos and call it a day. To wit, I’ve been spending 80+ hours a week the last year of my life working to prevent that minority opinion from becoming reality.

Nearly every day I run into some web site, piece of software, or the like that gives me pause. The latest was Firefox 2.0. I’ve been a Firefox fan and user for a long time now. I have used the search tool on the Firefox Navigation bar extensively – it’s a great tool. With Firefox 2.0, the text entry field has a new feature: while you type, it can make suggestions (returned from the search engine you’re querying) re: what you are searching for.

While this seems innocuous (and it certainly is not non-helpful), it changes things. Historically, if I wanted to search for illegal steroids or bible quotes or indulge a random fetish, I could take an explicit action to search for those concepts on Google (et. al.) with the knowledge and understanding that Google would make a record of my search for future use. But with this new Firefox feature, Google not only gets all my search terms, but also a keystroke-by-keystroke stream of the meta-data that leads up to each of my searches.

For example, type “test” into the box for Google and it suggests, among other things, testosterone, testicles, and testament. What information could a smart set of heuristics extract about me from that? What if they could marry that with my history of completed searches? And so on and so forth.

Maybe the search engine companies won’t track these sorts of things, but I’m not willing to bet money on that. As the attention economy matures (and it is quite immature right now), these sorts of preparatory actions and other meta-data about our intentions and attentions is the kind of thing that will be leveraged – they will have to be leveraged for companies to maintain competitiveness.

This “Show Suggestions” feature defaults on when you install Firefox 2.0. I hope the Firefox development community thinks hard about defaulting it off instead.

Ultimately there are only two ways to manage this issue. Either the community of users picks up the torch and demands its rights; or the community of tool creators picks up the torch and works with “privacy as the default” thinking. The latter seems hopeful. The former seems daunting. The alternative makes my stomach turn.
Concerned,
S

The Lemonheads are back!

If you’ve ever been a fan of The Lemonheads or Evan Dando I highly recommend checking out the latest in The Lemonheads saga – aptly named, The Lemonheads.

It’s been on heavy rotation (okay, well, the bits have been generating serious network traffic) in S-land as of late.

S

Please, may I pay your exorbitant parking fee?

I had a bizarre parking experience a few weeks ago that I’ve been meaning to blog about.

Early one morning I had a meeting scheduled at The Charles Hotel in Harvard Square. I like The Charles Hotel. I have spent many-a-night enjoying jazz gigs at Regattabar, have had many meals at Henrietta’s Table, and my wedding reception was at Rialto. I’m certain I cannot count how many meetings I’ve connected for at The Charles.

So this particular morning the weather was nice and I decided I’d take the motorcycle instead of the cage. Big mistake, apparently.

The Charles Hotel garage adamantly refused to let me park my bike in their garage. I was willing to pay their exorbitant parking fees. I was willing to pay them in advance. I was willing to park in some out of the way space they couldn’t possibly fit a car – this was “free money” for them.

In the end, after cycling through a couple levels of “garage management” (this whole ordeal quickly became an exercise in satisfying my curiosity re: their behavior, not my need to park the bike), I was allowed to alight in a boxed-in, not-car-accessible corner that otherwise would surely have sat empty for the few hours I was at the hotel. They collected their regular parking fee upon my exit.

What confused me is that I could not get a straight answer as to why they have this “no motorcycles” policy (which was not posted at the entrance, AFAIK). One person I spoke with just didn’t know – it was just “the policy”. This is never a good answer for the customer. Another person said the gates wouldn’t open up for something as light as a motorcycle. This seemed specious since I had to pay a human being upon exit, and one can reasonably assume they have control and mastery of a pair of “gate up” and “gate down” switches/levers/etc. Another person said bikes could get around the gates without paying. No motorcycle I’ve ever seen – there are only a few inches of clearance to the wall, and going under would only work if you laid the bike down.

So does anybody know why a garage would have such a policy? Do most garages have a “no motorcycles” policy?

S

PS: The One Kendall Square garage in East Cambridge next to Landmark Theaters has a “no motorcycles” policy (posted at the garage entrance) however, they provide FREE parking for motorcycles on the other side of the garage outside. Now that’s class!