EarlyStageVC

Initial Experience with Twine

Today Nova Spivack has taken the covers off of Twine and he will demonstrate it today at the Web 2.0 conference.  My prior post on knowledge networks was an attempt to lay the predicate for the concept of Twine as a knowledge network.  So I'll now make this more concrete to explain how I have been using Twine to build my own knowledge network during our initial alpha period.

Knowledge networking is what we VCs do in real life.  I am constantly asking

• "Whom do we know that knows about this" 
• "Didn't we talk to someone a year ago who knew something about this?" 
• "Isn't company X a likely customer of company Y and what do we know about companies X and Y"
• "Didn't [partner z] do a reference check that referred to this new technology some time ago?"

Like everyone, we make heavy use of the web, often sending to each other the  things we have found that might be of long-term interest or relevant to a current project. Within the partnership we communicate largely through email and then we meet every Monday to sync our activities and processes.  Organizational memory is largely in our heads.

My use of Twine is trivially easy.  I use two 'on-ramps'.  One is that I bcc: my Twine account with all my emails.  (I also set up some rules in my inbox to forward copies of certain emails to Twine as well, but my email rules are not as smart and extensive as Twine.)  The other on-ramp is I use the Twine bookmarklet as I browse with Firefox.   These two methods capture pretty everything I  consume in my business life.

As the emails come into Twine, Twine enriches the email to find companies, people, and places in the body. These enriched links connect to other content I have captured as well as Wikipedia and other sources.   So now I have a thread I can follow of what else I know, read, or can find that is relevant to answer the questions above.   This is less critical in the moment than it is  days or weeks after I  receive the new information.

I do the same thing as I browse.  When I find something of interest, I can immediately "bookmark" it into Twine and associate it with the things that I track in Twine.  (I have a personal account and am a member of several Twine  groups, including the Radar Networks Board of Directors group.  Other members of the group see the same information I have place into the group's Twine account. 

This is the real power of Twine.  All the information I have been accumulating has been intelligent interconnected as a personal semantic web of knowledge.  That mimics my own ability to recall what I know.  I don't find this that interesting, yet, because my use of Twine is relatively recent.  Ten years from now, my long term recall of what I knew today will be greatly diminished, unless I use Twine.  More immediately, everyone in my groups (Crosslink Capital, Radar Networks, etc.) benefits from attaching their knowledge networks to mine.  This really allows us to create a group diligence process that represents and leverages everything we, as a firm, know.  It means I know can truly leverage the knowledge and relationships my partners accumulate. The enrichment means we all get more than we put in as we use the product.  This basic process of structure knowledge capture and sharing is nearly universal in business, from major account sales processes to product design collaborations.  We all know that email is fundamentally broken as knowledge capture, retention, and sharing tool.

There is a lot in Twine I don't use, to be honest.  Photos, videos, and threaded discussions are all part of the application.  I don't need this, today, though perhaps in the future.  And there is a lot I'd still like to see in the application, including support for  meeting creation and calendaring synchronization.

The challenge with Twine is discovering all the consumer and business use cases and bubbling them to the top.  But for a terminal early adopter, I have to say it's really going to become an important enhancement to the way I communicate and accumulate what I know (and who I know.)

This is going to be a slower rollout than most web applications.  There is a lot we don't yet know about how to best package it as well as people's usage patterns.  The computing machinery behind the curtain is substantial.  So we still have a lot to do to understand some mundane but essential things like what it costs to support a user.  So please be patient.  The private beta is likely to last quite a long time until we get this right.  We are rapidly learning to live by Thoreau's guidance to simplify, simplify, simplify.

BBC & Mashups - What Would Karl Do?

About two weeks before my last post on Teqlo, I got an email from a producer at the BBC.  They wanted to talk about Teqlo.  (Actually they wanted to talk about Radar Networks, but stealth companies don't make for compelling telly, as they say across "the pond.") Josh Dilworth at Porter Novelli PR (Radar's firm) was kind enough to suggest they talk to me about Teqlo. The Porter Novelli team did an amazing job of getting feature stories on Radar in Business 2.0 and BusinessWeek.

Quandry... Can't talk about the new Teqlo positioning, gotta stay with the "mashups are cool and we do 'em" positioning. What to do? No time to consult the leading ethicist of our time - Karl Rove. Had to make the call on my own.

As a mentor of mine once said. "the Plan doesn't change until the Plan changes."  Notwithstanding the last post, we have not officially announced a new direction; so we are still officially going the same old direction until we go in a new direction.

The result?  BBC Video Link Love.

Here's a pointer to the web page for the show Click that was about Twitter, Teqlo, and other cool stuff.  Here's a pointer to the full 22 minutes of video (Teqlo is at about 10:00 minutes in).

And here's five minutes of me talking about the emotional range of fear, greed, love and loathing that make early stage investing so much fun.

Radar Begins To Raise Its Head

We had a board meeting yesterday at Radar Networks. 

One of the 'truths' of the VC business is the "Oh Shit" board meeting.  Generally, this is the board meeting where you find out the underlying basis for your investment was flawed.  John Jarve at Menlo Ventures holds the record.  As I understand it, he fought resistance from his partners to even get the UUnet investment done early in the Internet boom, AND at the first board meeting after the close the Company was already out of money! (I may have these facts wrong, but it still makes a good set-up.) He had to come back to the well after the Oh Shit Board meeting. UUnet ended up being a monster hit for John and for Menlo.

There is another "Oh Shit" board meeting.  This is the one where the idea begins to show real form and you finally see the materialization of your investment thesis. Software is a visual medium.  Imagine describing Visicalc to the Apple II user in 1979 while it was in development.  "Well you see, it is this non-procedural, general purpose, non-command line thing that solves equations."  Doesn't sound like a Killer App. 

Yesterday the team at Radar took many of the pieces they have been building and assembled their first real, usable demonstration of the platform they have built.  They have spent the better part of a year building a semantic applications platform. Now that the foundation is built, the scaffolding is quickly being raised. Nova's feeling bullish enough about this that he has started to open up a little bit about Radar.  At least he is telling the World what it isn't.  Dan Farber also picked up on this to give it some perspective.

Actually to all you VCs who have asked me about why I am interested in the Semantic Web as a theme and what I have seen that's interesting, I would suggest you read his post.  It does a nice job of laying out a larger framework for semantic applications in the course of beginning to define the sandbox in which Radar will play.  He does a nice job of trying to de-hype the Web 2/3/4 sequencing into more tangible and technical distinctions.

Web 2.0 + 1

I spent three days this past week at the Web 2.0 Conference in SF.  For the most part I felt like it was a waste of time (and $2500).  The time spent in the halls was great, seeing people I know and connecting with interesting people.  I didn't need the conference to figure out that Video is the new Black. The content of the Conference was mostly homogenized, pasteurized, and commercial. I guess it reflects a mainstreaming of the idea of Web 2.0 and a move to extract value from the mainstreaming by the conference organizers and the bigger Internet companies. I don't blame them.  I'd do the same.  I just need to look elsewhere for innovation.  Innovation doesn't happen in the mainstream.

I figured I'd hold this opinion to myself -- until I saw John Markoff's article in the NYT today.   He's reflecting the same conclusion and showcasing Semantic Web companies as the next vanguard of the Web  -- Web 3.0.  I'm ecstatic that he chose one of my companies, Radar Networks, as an illustration of where the Web is going.  I'm a little disappointed, though.  We don't plan to raise a Series B until early next year; so this visibility is a bit too early for us. Well, better too early than not at all.

(John, in case you read this, if you think Radar is interesting, take a look at Teqlo, too.  What Radar is to content, Teqlo is to applications. And Teqlo's going alpha next week.  The Recombinant Web is coming. Web 2.0 + 1 and that 1 is You.)