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Kauffman Confirms the VC Shakeup that OMERS Predicted

4 days ago by Michael Cayley

Storm Coming

The Kauffman Foundation just released an indictment of the way big investors (like pension funds and foundations) place their money with venture capital firms.  In a report entitled, “We Have Met the Enemy … and he is us.” Kauffman calls into question some of the VC world’s most accepted ideas.

“To fix what’s broken in the LP investment model, institutional investors will need to become more selective and more disciplined investors in venture capital funds. The best investors will negotiate better alignment, transparency, governance, and terms that take into account the skewed distribution of VC fund returns.” says Kauffman in their report.

To that end, Kauffman says its new approach to venture capital investing will be:

  • Invest in funds of less than $400-million (mc: like FloodGate, USV and 500Startups?).
  • Develop a small portfolio of direct investments in startups.
  • Directly co-invest in later round deals.
  • Shrink the size of their allocation to venture capital. Read more →
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News

The Beginning Of The End? Hacker News Adds a Bookmarklet.

February 19, 2012 by Derek Andersen

Bookmarklets are all the rage. They’re simple to build, easy to use, and give users a good reason to add you to their Bookmark Bar and into their top 10-20 sites. Pinterest is driving bookmarklet awareness and usage, but I’ve seen a number of Beta sites that are using it including our own Commonred and Stash. Now Hacker News has one thanks to Phil Kast. What will be interesting to see is if this contributes to a slow painful death of the core Hacker News community.

To date HN has wisely held off on creating a social sharing plugin for website to easily get more up votes (similar to Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and every other social site). This has helped it maintain the quality and core developer audience but also containing its growth. This is by design. Hacker News can drive anywhere from a few thousand to tens of thousands of pageviews to anyone that gets into the top 2-3 spots on the homepage. This number has increased dramatically over the past few years. The value to publishers of exploiting the site for easier ways to get votes is massive. Adding a bookmarklet is one small step in that direction.

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News

Another Apple Milestone That No One At Apple Cares About

February 13, 2012 by Derek Andersen

I had a timely lunch today at 1 Infinite Loop today in Cupertino. A friend of mine is leaving Apple Friday for a well-funded stealth mobile startup and we were celebrating his departure and the experience he’s about to have as he leaves corporate America. On the walls near the cafeteria were several murals left over from the Jobs memorial a few months ago. This quote was particularly relevant:

If you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.   

Good advice for my friend and for Apple. Today and this month could not have been better for Apple. Fiscal Q1 results were at record highs 3-weeks ago, stock closed above $500 for the first time today, and more iPad 3 announcement details leaked setting up the massive March 7 unveiling (sorry Jason). And yet as I walked around Apple campus, I couldn’t help but notice how no one seemed to care. Oh except the blogosphere. They always care. Read more →

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News

Google Wave Is Down For Good. If Only You Cared

February 1, 2012 by Derek Andersen

While almost no one falls into this category, a few of us still occasionally use Google Wave. For all the hate it created, Wave had a couple of great use cases that made it the perfect product. For instance I’m on a lunch group list that uses the polling, threaded chat, and mapping features to help pick where to go to lunch each week. It is amazing for that. The problem is the Friday lunch coordination market is not a billion dollar opportunity ripe for disruption. As a result Google has shut down all write capabilities of the site and it’s now read-only. Read more →

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News

Hide Yo Kids, Hide Yo Wife, SOPA is Coming For Everyone Up In Here

January 18, 2012 by Derek Andersen

With all the SOPA madness reaching insane outcry levels, some people like me are wondering what everyone is going to do with all their free time once this is squashed once and for all? There seems to be such widespread hate and dissatisfaction by basically everyone not named Chris Dodd.

Some protests have been very creative and well organized. In fact it’s the most impressive marketing I’ve seen by rogue bands of anti-marketing developers in quite some time.  But despite all the coverage and protests about it, this one by OSnews is by far the best. So hide every Obama war room meme you’ve ever cherished, SOPA gonna find you. Check it out here.

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