Category Archives: fred wilson

winer’s on to something here – open source feedburner that is

Posted by Todd Sawicki on August 1, 2007 View Comments

Dave Winer has been bloggingabout feedburner in response to Google’s acquisition of the company.  Dave is concerned about how Google might co-opt feedburner to their benefit – ie. special tie-in’s to google reader for instance that might put other readers at a disadvantage (hmmm sounds a lot like what Microsoft has been accused of with regards to Office and Windows integration).  

Fred Wilson – VC extraordinaire (this is a compliment) and investor in feedburner (seriously has there been a better web 2.0 hit rate then Fred’s?) believes Dave is just whining unnecessarily - that if Google were to muck with Feedburner folks will just switch their feed aggregator to a Feedburner competitor.

My two cents (though probably only worth 1/10th of that):  I am in Dave’s camp.  I don’t think Google will do anything maliciously, but I do worry about the unintended consequences of google trying to improve the google reader-feedburner-analytics integration.  Integration points will go undocumented (because that happens with all software which is what I think happened with Windows per my earlier comment) and the marketplace will be forced to choose between Google’s “closed” platform and everything else.

Re: Fred’s point – I actually don’t think switching is a realistic alternative.  The switching costs are too high (as a VC I think Fred understands the value of high switching costs since it comes up in every competitive review I’ve ever been involved in).  My guess is that 80% of anyone’s RSS subscribers are passive and 20% active.  My assumption is the 20% who are active would take the time to switch the RSS feed, but you would likely lose 80% of your subscribers by switching feeds.  Is it worth the risk of losing perhaps 80% of one’s blog subs?  For most likely not.  For an analogy look at how many people switching cell carriers before number portability – essentially none.  One’s RSS URL is likely the equivalent of a cell phone number – change it and you lose touch with your network.  So as much as Fred says that we can all just leave Feedburner – I think he’s wrong – for the moment we’re stuck at the mercy of Google.  And being any more at the mercy of any company – Google included – is not a good thing.

it’s a bird, it’s a plane, no it’s super-vc!

Posted by Todd Sawicki on May 14, 2007 View Comments

Noted New York VC Fred Wilson’s comment on his non-involvement with any of the purported machinations going on with wallstrip, the online video show, raises a great point.  VC’s are not super-men/women or the masters of the universe that perhaps the public might perceive.  In almost every case, the credit for success and failure of a vc-backed startup goes to the team.  Yes, VC’s can stick their fingers and muck up the works but that’s only because founders let them – at least in my experience.  So the next time you see a huge success, congratulate the team, not the VC’s.

lies, damned lies and statistics

Posted by Todd Sawicki on May 6, 2007 View Comments

Fred Wilson’s post about the age of entrepreneurs in his portfolio was interesting amid his concern of a potential bias in the age of entreprenuers.  But more importantly is Paul Kedrosky’s rebuttal showing a survey of the age of entrepreneurs which shows a distribution that is pretty consistent with the age distribution of the workforce.  The moral of the story – giving a stat without a context is the easiest way in the world to misrepresent the point of the statistic.  In this case, Fred wasn’t trying to mislead anyone, but his concerns about whether he was hitting a mid-life crisis might have been assuaged he had been looking at the distribution the way Paul did.  Context is everything when it comes to stats. 

 Of course I just gave away the oldest marketing trick in the book when it comes to stats when trying to paint a favorable picture to an audience ;-)

 Age Distribution