Recently in VentureBlog Administrative Category

A little over five years ago, Andrew Anker and I started chatting about blogging. There was plenty of blogging going on already for sure. But no one in the Sand Hill crowd was thinking about it. At the time there was still a prevailing sense that venture investing was a black box and any view into the box was a bad idea. Andrew and I talked about the fact that we didn't buy that. We thought there were all sorts of things VCs could talk about that would be interesting and valuable to entrepreneurs. Andrew proposed we start VentureBlog and came up with the tagline "A Random Walk Down Sand Hill Road" -- we laughed and VentureBlog was born.

Five years ago (technically, five years ago tomorrow), Andrew posted our "Hello, World." Andrew wrote that we would chat about what we do as early stage venture investors and concluded, "Mostly, we'll figure it out as we go along. No idea if this is a sustainable idea or not, but we're going to give it a go. Enjoy!" Since that first post there have been a few different folks come and go on VentureBlog, but, for better or worse, I have stuck around and kept on writing. I have tried my best to give a view into the black box and bring a little humor to it in the process. It has been a blast.

One thing has changed for sure since we started VentureBlog. There are now dozens of VC bloggers. From Sand Hill Road (Jeremy Liew, Susan Wu, etc.) to New York City (Fred Wilson, Ed Sim, etc.) to Colorado (Brad Feld, Ryan McIntyre, etc.) to Boston (Mike Hirshland, Jeff Bussgang, etc.) to Philadelphia (Josh Kopelman, Chris Fralic, etc.?). The problem entrepreneurs have is no longer finding information, it is sorting through it. So much has been written and so much more will be written about startups and entrepreneurship and Venture Capital. And I learn a pile from all of you every day. So thank you.

As for the question of whether or not VentureBlog is a sustainable idea, I guess the answer is "yes" and "no." I have been writing with varying degrees of frequency over these past five years. It is great to have a venue to share my thoughts when something jumps out at me. And I hope to continue writing for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, in the face of superhuman VC bloggers like Fred Wilson and Brad Feld, I feel deeply inadequate. How they manage to write day in and day out while finding time to do anything else is truly beyond me. My hat's off to them. And my apologies to those of you who feel that VentureBlog is too infrequently written to be relevant. I will try harder.

I greatly appreciate the conversations we've had here at VentureBlog. And I am thrilled to see the massive ecosystem of VC bloggers that has emerged. Many thanks to those of you who continue to read, link and comment. It has been a monumental education and a great privilege. And a huge thanks to Andrew for getting this whole thing started. Here's to the next five years.

In an incredible breach of blogging etiquette, I have decided to change the titles of my posts from Shameless Self-Promotion Week. When I started writing this set of posts, I thought it would be nice to have a unified look to the titles. Thus, I adopted the "Shameless Self-Promotion Week: [Company X]" title format. But I have decided that I really hate it. It doesn't say anything about the posts. It is hard to understand out of context. It was just a bad decision. So my apologies but I'm changing titles.

When I started writing VentureBlog four years ago, I posted a lot. There was no one else writing about the venture industry and I had a bunch to say. But over the last few years, lots of other great voices have emerged to discuss venture capital and entrepreneurship. And rather than write for the sake of writing, I only post when there is something that strikes me as significant. As a result, my posting has been, shall we say, less frequent.

If people had to go to VentureBlog.com to find out if I had written something new, it would no doubt be a pretty frustrating experience. But thanks to the glory of RSS, people who are interested in venture capital or entrepreneurship can simply subscribe to my RSS feed and be notified when I finally get around to posting something new. Do I think that it is worth subscribing to the VentureBlog RSS Feed? You bet. Do I think it would be worth checking VentureBlog.com every day for new content? Not likely. Which is precisely why I've been singing the praises of RSS since I started reading and writing blogs. It is an incredible efficiency tool and I only wish that every single web service out there had an RSS feed of its own.

I suppose that I am most grateful to RSS because it has allowed me to continue to serve an audience of interested readers without having to create content for content's sake. For all of you readers I am eternally grateful. It has been gratifying to watch my RSS subscriber numbers grow over the years despite the frequency of my posts declining. And I am thrilled to report that as of today VentureBlog has over 50,000 RSS subscribers. That is pretty exciting. So thank you all.

I have always enjoyed when Fred Wilson posts stats about his blog readership. It is definitely interesting stuff. In fact, I think that Fred, Brad and many of my other fellow VC bloggers, write blogs in part because they are interested in better understanding social media. That has certainly been a very pleasant byproduct of VentureBlog. So I thought I would share with you the data I receive from FeedBurner today about my RSS subscribers. While Bloglines and NewsGator remain the largest feed readers out there, it has been interesting to watch Google, Netvibes and Firefox growing. And it is particularly interesting to see what a big chunk of VentureBlog's traffic comes from Rojo -- no doubt the result of being part of a Rojo VC Feed (along with Fred, Brad, Jurvetson, Allan Morgan and others).

Thanks again to all of you who are subscribers. I truly appreciate it. And I will try hard to make it worth your while every time you click on that VentureBlog link in your news reader.

At last. I get it. I finally understand why it is that so many friends and colleagues have gently complained about the length of my posts on VentureBlog (and worse yet on SaysMe). It is, of course, abundantly clear to most of you reading this post. But it took personal experience before I got wise to the errors of my ways.

In recent weeks I have found myself with less time than usual for blog reading (this is caused, at least in part, by my acute addiction to Six Apart's new blogging platform VOX, which now occupies far too many minutes of my day). As a result, I find myself scanning quickly through Bloglines. And when one scans quickly through a feed reader, the first thing that falls by the wayside are the really long posts. They just take too much effort. If the writers of those long posts are lucky, they are saved for a later day. If not, they are clicked and cleared, without a read.

I have no doubt that many of my VentureBlog posts have fallen victim to such Machiavellian reading techniques. So in an effort to attempt to learn from experience, I am going to try to keep my future posts to a more manageable length. I'm sure I'll still have my occasional missive. But, for the time being, I am going to try to write shorter and more often and see how it goes. Wish me luck.

PS: Not so good so far. This post on writing shorter posts is now 4 paragraphs long and 267 words. Oy veh!

For those of you reading this on VentureBlog.com rather than on an RSS reader, you may have noticed a new feature on VentureBlog. There is now a search box powered by Rollyo, my friend Dave Pell's company. The cool thing about the Rollyo search box is that not only can you search for a term on VentureBlog, but you can also search for a term on all of the venture capital blogs listed in my blogroll (labeled "Top VC Blogs" in the search box).

The VB Rollyo search is a pretty great resource. When I started writing VentureBlog three years ago, there was virtually nothing on the web about the real nitty gritty of venture capital. If you were looking for information about the venture capital industry, you could search on Yahoo or Google but would find a pretty patchy bunch of resources. Now, given the number of interesting venture capital blogs, there's a huge amount of information about all aspects of the industry available online. And all of it is now searchable really simply using the Rollyo search box on VentureBlog.

My hope is that other venture capital blogs will adopt the Rollyo venture capital search as well. That way, no matter what venture capital blog you're on, you can search all of them for additional info on any topic you may find of interest. I started writing VentureBlog in hopes of providing a resource for entrepreneurs who were looking for information about the venture capital industry. The combination of the many great VC blogs that have emerged and now the simple ability to search them all, has well exceeded my original ambitions. I hope that the readers of VentureBlog find the Rollyo venture capital search as useful as I do.

My father's father was a pharmacist. He had a small pharmacy and soda fountain in Collingswood New Jersey. During the school year my grandparents ran their pharmacy. But when summer rolled around, my grandparents closed their store and headed for Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony. For the entire summer my father and his parents would listen to classical music. When the season ended, my grandparents packed up and headed back to New Jersey to reopen their pharmacy.

I have no doubt that my grandparents lost customers over the summer. But my grandparents considered it a worthwhile tradeoff -- cultural and spiritual fulfillment in exchange for customer attrition. I am afraid I have no such grandiose excuse for failing to blog over the summer (here's what I did this summer). None of the cultural or spiritual fulfillment, all of the reader attrition. But, like my grandfather, I'm returning from the summer feeling recharged and look forward to blogging with greater frequency. Thanks for hanging in there with me.

OK, so the new VentureBlog hopefully looks like the old one. Over the weekend, I finished the move of VB off my overtaxed home server and onto Media Temple's shared server host account. Among other features, it comes with Movable Type pre-installed and is a much more robust system than I've got at home. DNS is currently propagating, if you're reading this post then you're on the new site.

I also moved VentureBlog to moderated comments as part of this changeover and I'm having some issues getting it up and running. VB was built two years ago and used a lot of early 2003 template formatting so I had to cut and paste between new and old to keep the old look but get the new features. The good news is, I have an "in" at Six Apart and probably can find the time to get it fixed in the next couple of days. The bad news is, you may not be able to comment until then.

There's also a few minor things, like our "Most Popular Posts" page, that I've had to take down. Over time, I hope to add that back.

As we approach our two year anniversary (the first post was February 23, 2003), we would all like to thank you for your continued readership and comment. This site has turned into a lot more than any of us who started it ever expected it would.

Update: Comment authentication fixed! Comment away...

Once again, VentureBlogger David Hornik has burst onto the larger media landscape, this time with an article about VC blogging in Venture Capital Journal. Congrats to David especially for the smirky cover picture although I don't understand how they could write an entire piece about VCs and blogging without once mentioning that David's invested in the largest independent blog company (i.e., Six Apart, where I work).

David's way too modest to note this himself, but one of his earlier posts has been picked up in a longer form on News.com. It's worth checking it out if for no other reason than the hedging... I'm sorry, I mean recontextualizing that David does.

On a related note, we are being deluged with a lot of new readers from News.com. Welcome! Please enjoy our site and in particular we'd like to draw your attention to our most popular stories page.

Two short administrative announcements about VentureBlog. The first is personal: I am joining SixApart as EVP, Corporate Development. I plan on continuing to contribute to VentureBlog although I would expect my posts to get more infrequent and less specific to venture capital. I guess both have already started to happen anyway.

In other news, to beef up the editorial ranks of practicing venture investors we've added Martin Tobias as a guest contributor. His should be the next post on the site. Martin will also expand the geographic focus of VentureBlog as he invests for Ignition Partners in the Seattle area. Please join us in welcoming Martin.