Month: April 2011

Go Forth And Invest

This headline caught my eye this morning: US VCs Raised $7.7 Billion In Q1, Highest Influx In A Decade. Of course, if you've been following the news in our industry, you know there's a raging debate on over whether we are in "another bubble." This news will of course…

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This headline caught my eye this morning: US VCs Raised $7.7 Billion In Q1, Highest Influx In A Decade. Of course, if you‘ve been following the news in our industry, you know there’s a raging debate on over whether we are in “another bubble.” This news will of course be interpreted as evidence that, in fact, we are back to bubbly levels…after all, one decade ago was when we had our last big hurrah, right? When VCs gave mostly incompetent founders way too much money, and the whole thing came crashing down around us.

Well, yes….and ten years ago, there was no way our industry, social culture, or technological infrastructure was ready for the big ideas VCs wanted to fund.

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Watch This Space: The Next Generation of “Social Networks” Won’t Look Like Facebook.

Lately in talks and private conversations, I've been thinking out loud about the role of Facebook in our lives. It's an extraordinary service (and company), and deserves its extraordinary valuation. But its approach to our "social graph" is limiting, as I and others have pointed out quite a bit. While…

Lately in talks and private conversations, I’ve been thinking out loud about the role of Facebook in our lives. It’s an extraordinary service (and company), and deserves its extraordinary valuation. But its approach to our “social graph” is limiting, as I and others have pointed out quite a bit.

While in Mexico I had the chance to sit with a couple of entrepreneurs who have an idea I feel is deeply *right* about social networking, and it couldn’t be further from how Facebook works today. I can’t outline what the idea was, but I can say that it hit the same nerve, that we are on the precipice of entirely new ways of thinking about our relationship to others as leveraged over digital platforms, and while Facebook may well be the oxygen or the landmass of this ecosystem, it won’t be the entire ecosystem itself.

To that end, this piece in TNW hits on some parts of what I’m on about. In it, the author writes:

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Guy’s Enchantment

I'm a Guy Kawasaki fan, so this isn't really a "review" as much as an appreciation for his new book Enchantment. I read it over this weekend, it's the kind of book you could skim in an hour, or spend a lot of time with. I fell somewhere in…

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I’m a Guy Kawasaki fan, so this isn’t really a “review” as much as an appreciation for his new book Enchantment. I read it over this weekend, it’s the kind of book you could skim in an hour, or spend a lot of time with. I fell somewhere in the middle, stopping every so often to consider his advice and apply it to situations I find myself in all the time. (Disclosure: Guy works with my company FM in various ways, but I’m writing this mainly because Guy, in his enchanting way, asked me to blog my thoughts here.)

Enchantment is, in essence, a book of simple advice for succeeding in business, and I found myself agreeing with most of it. Guy is a folksy writer and he loves simple anecdotes, the book is full of them. I rolled my eyes when he encouraged us to “make a checklist,” or to smile when meeting someone, and smile with integrity at that. But he’s right, and I realized that every time I see Guy, or see pictures of him, he’s got the real deal smile working, and it really does work to put whoever he’s meeting into an open frame of mind.

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