Venture with Wit

Raising money is about finding VC (i.e Venture Capital) or BA (Business Angels). So lately, I've spent a lot of time searching for the right ones (VC/BA), the ones I will go after (I need to start somewhere). What I'm looking for is Affinity, something that does not fit in slide but which will team vision, cash and of course men.

So I'm looking for them using the web, tring to look  at what they have done and if possible (but it becomes easier with personal billboard -i.e: blog/space-) what they said.

So I try to check regularly a bunch of blog or sites that display "venture free speech". Since my last visit (ten days ago), EquityKicker (a VC blog) has published three posts i simply loved :

Mr Brisbourne is a must read if you are a web-entrepreneur. Here's what he says :

"As I’ve said before to me the web is re-organising around people instead of sites.  The parallel between the browser (or maybe early portals) and social networks makes sense in this context.  As in the early days of the web there is a whole lot of web2.0 (or social) activity out there, but it is still quite hard to do things that are useful.  You can quite easily parallel MySpace today with the early Yahoo!.  The difficulty of driving revenues from traffic in social networks also echoes the experience of the early web.  All of which goes to explain why intuitively we are all so excited by what is going on. The logical conclusion of this piece of analysis is that there is still a long long way to go in the current wave and that there will be more $1bn companies formed.  Looking for a Google parallel which combines a smart way to organise online identity (ie your social life) and then a slick monetisation play is an obvious place to go"

We started working on U.[lik] because we tought that there was a lot to do (& a long long way to go) and that it was possible to build something that will handle other aspects of the information overflow. Here is  4 paths I acknowledge.

1) Content:  Long Tail+Dematerialization = Pandora box of content = content like water = Hyperchoice problem. What you need is a filter (either active or passive) and  that's a huge market.

[sorry the video is in french]

2)Identity: Social life is about identity. But, I need to make it right for me before i go out there. Equity kicker sees a tremedous market for Identity managment but before we get to that point we need to be able to deliver online your "multi-faceted" identity. There's still a lot of space for great companies (all the last successes are part of the identity puzzle). Tastes, hobbies and knowledge are not overcrowded and offer great opportunities with lower costs.

[See my full post on  Virtual identity]

3)Social: Social network are in their early days. They will have to come closer to real life. One of the main challenge is attention. Over the last few months I discovered alpha products working on this... and they seems to have a bright futur too. Here is one of the example I like most. 

"Across consumer markets, attention is becoming the scarcest - and so most strategically vital - resource in the value chain. Attention scarcity is fundamentally reshaping the economics of most industries it touches; beginning with the media industry." Umair

"Part of the problem is that we've built a model off of social networks instead of attention networks and there's a very subtle difference between the two. Attention networks recognize power. They recognize that someone may actually have a good collection of references or be a good photographer and that someone else may want to pay attention to them even if their own collections are not worthy of reciprocation. Attention networks realize that the world is not an undirected graph." Apophenia

[Source: The Multi-Source Interference Task: an fMRI task that reliably activates the cingulo-frontal-parietal  cognitive/attention network]

4)Why Challenging is possible: Here is one point that google hasn't manage to solve. Moral judgments can be expanded to Opinions, Tastes and actually to anything that is Implicit & Personnal. So if you only follow that track there are greats opportunities. Two caracteristics makes Entertainement a very good underlying market :
-Entertainment goods are "experience goods": one knows the value (actually it's more his value) after having experienced it.
-Entertainment goods needs Attention.

[Full interview is available on Youtube]

 

Conclusion: Social is not about searching, it's about finding. That's why we believe in suggestions/recommandation. One needs to have a simple filter to estimate the value he will derive from any items (either it is News, Entertainement or People). So I fully agree with Equity and I think it's time to Kick. 

There are a bunch of really good posts on his blog to go further.

They give faith and believe in disruption.

 

Disclosure:
- Equity Kicker is the avatar/aka of Nic Brisbourne a partner @ Esprit Capital Partners (explaining the pun in the Title)
- Leafar = Raphael Labbé = a co-fonder of U.[lik]
-  Stowe is wrong & EquityKicker is right !

Comments

[Rédigé par: Nic Brisbourne]

Thanks for the kind words Raphael. There is a shortage of European companies going after this opportunity, which puts you in a good place.

Let me know if you are going to be in London - it would be great to catch up.