Generated Transcript

David Hornik

[00:00:00]
Welcome to venturecast. Sorry I’ve been absent. I’ve been on the conference circuit running around the first quarter of this year has been all conferences, all the time and that has been great. I’ve enjoyed it. But it’s nice to be back in the rainy Bay Area.

[00:00:20]
We have now officially tied a record. It’s the 29th of March. We’ve now officially tied a record for the rainiest March in the history of the Bay Area. So that’s, that’s a pretty dubious honor. We in the Bay Area are concerned that it’s becoming Seattle, but I’m sure this is an anomaly.

[00:00:39]
I look forward to the sun. Anyway, I’m driving up 280, heading to a board meeting and I wanted to just share a few thoughts on two things this morning that I’ve been thinking about. One is just the conference season itself. What have I seen, what I’ve been running around looking at. And then the second one is a post that I have on venture blog called Deal or no Deal that people have been talking bit about what are the implications and am I just plain wrong or is there more to it or whatever.

[00:01:11]
So there you have it. So let me first sort of give a thought or two about the conference season. I call it the conference season. Almost out of frustration there is this what I view as unnecessary density of conferences in January, February, March, and all you can do is sort of either hop to all the conferences and not be home much or you can pick and choose, which is always hard for me, or somewhere in between. So the conferences that I have attended over the last three months are the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas, the Entertainment Gathering which was Richard Saul Wurman’s follow up to TED and what he now believes or claims is his final conference ever.

[00:02:01]
We’ll see if he can hold that line. The Demo Conference which was, oh man. I’m forgetting if it was in Arizona. Or San Diego this year. But anyway, I guess that part doesn’t really matter.

[00:02:15]
I went to the O’Reilly E. Tech conference that was in San Diego. I went to the PC Forum this year also in San Diego and TED of course down in Monterey. So that was a pretty packed sort of every other week period of conferences and a pretty broad range of topics were discussed. A very interesting and broad set of people attended that group of conferences. And so just to give you a sense of the conferences and why I love to go to them, I’m happy to take the time out of my year to hop on a plane and.

[00:03:01]
Go to these things. Let Me just give you my sense of what each of these conferences is and why one might consider going in the future. So the Consumer Electronics show is an interesting one in the sense that it has become essentially the replacement for comdex. COMDEX used to be the massive tech confab down in Las Vegas. Everybody would go to, had folks like Mr. Gates as the keynote speakers and was increasing in size until the year 2000 when the bubble burst and essentially deflated COMDEX almost in its entirety.

[00:03:40]
And as the tech economy has rebuil unquestionably, what’s happened is while COMDEX has been discarded as a meeting place for most tech companies, the Consumer Electronics show has sort of replaced it as a meaningful alternative. Which is interesting when you think about it. I mean, the Consumer Electronics show at. Its core is just that. It’s a show about consumer electronics.

[00:04:03]
And so there are lots of plasma TVs and stereos and consumer electronics. But in the process, as a lot of what we’re seeing seeing has become a rush for convergence, where software and services are pushing not only from the network, but to edge devices like the television, the home theater, PC to telephones, smartphones, those sorts of things. The Consumer Electronics show has become not just a show for the devices, but also for the connected services that make those devices more meaningful and more useful. So at this point, the CES is, I believe it was at its largest ever this year, you know, absolutely monstrous to the point of making Las Vegas barely navigable, making the show floor so many acres of consumer electronics that it’s hard to really get your bearing. On the other hand, the good side, and I do view this as a step in the right direction, nearly everyone involved in some interesting consumer related technology, whether it is a piece of software, a service, a device, a connected device, all of these things that I’m seeing with increasing frequency at August Capital are everybody involved in these technologies is present at the Consumer Electronics Show.

[00:05:33]
And so it’s possible to see a broad range of interesting technologies and how they interact and in particular how they interact around the consumer. So I think that that is in and of itself sufficiently interesting that despite sort of the catastrophe of lines and masses and mess, the CES will continue. To be interesting to go to. And the other phenomenon that’s occurred as. A result of CES becoming this very large general phenomena is that it’s two phenomenas in one sentence, is that everybody shows up at the show and so they’re increasingly interesting conversations and dinners and parties, which are sort of the thing I find the most useful about any conference is the conversation around the conference.

[00:06:22]
So this year the folks at BA Ventures kindly invited me to a dinner where they had, I don’t know, 50 venture capitalists in and around the consumer spaces who were enjoying a good meal but talking about the things that they were seeing on the show floor and also the things that they’re investing in. And so that was quite interesting. And of course all of the big companies have interesting parties this year. Big fights over which was the best party to go to. Did you want to see the Killers or did you want to see, I don’t know, Black Eyed Peas?

[00:06:57]
And so lots of jostling for which. Was the best band to check out.

[00:07:04]
And coincidentally they also involve companies like Sprint or Microsoft or whoever. So always great to catch up with my friends from Yahoo at Consumer Electronics Show. Always good to see really interesting devices. And along those lines I was looking at in particular what’s the next interesting smartphone for me, I’ve been a Trio user, the Trio 650. I think it’s a great device.

[00:07:30]
I in the past have written about my belief that convergence was a bad idea, that there was no one who was going to come to a converged phone pda, and that we should just give up the quest. And then the trio 600 came out and I ate a little crow and said, you know, this is a pretty impressive device. I am really happy with the combination of the set of trade offs and I will keep just one device. And now we’re into the next generation and Palm has come out with the trio 700 and then the folks at Motorola have come out with the Motorola Q. And so I spent a fair bit of time at the Consumer Electronics show playing with the two devices and getting pretty excited about the idea that the Q may be an even nicer set of trade offs around, better form factor and the Motorola folks doing a better job of focusing on the phone interface and those sorts of things.

[00:08:28]
So it was looking forward to the reviews and the possibility of trying out a Motorola Q. In the past months there have been reviews that have thrown some doubt into my hopes that the Q was an even better converged device than the Trio, which I’m very happy with. So for the time being I remain on my trio 650, happily using the good link software in the background to do syncing with my Outlook stuff. And it really does a great job. I’m not complaining.

[00:09:02]
I was just as a gadget geek I was ever hopeful that there’d be more interesting stuff and I could buy a new device, but at this point, no new device. So anyway, that was the Consumer Electronics Show. I went to demo this year. As always, I’m a huge fan of demo. I think that Chris Shipley does a fantastic job of culling hundreds of companies down to a somewhat manageable set of companies.

[00:09:32]
This year it was, I think, I think 70, which it’s hard to. 70 is certainly more manageable than the hundreds, probably thousands, that Chris sees in anticipation of demo. But 70 is a lot to take in. And this year it felt like we were getting pretty big in demo. I mean, there were lots of people there, lots of demonstrators, a big demonstration hall.

[00:09:59]
It was just. It felt big, big, big, big. And I would say that as a. General matter, that of a theme for. This year is as people are getting more and more excited about what’s happening in the technology world and around startups and new technologies and those sorts of things, these conferences are getting bigger and bigger and at some point they will reach critical mass and have to be broken down.

[00:10:22]
Now, at the same time, I mean, demo, what Chris has done to solve that problem is to split it into two shows annually. There’s Demo Spring or Demo Winter, I think it’s just being called demo. And then there’s Demo Fall, which is the second half, half of the year demo. And so I think given the 70 or so companies that Chris chose for demo, if they maintain that sort of quality in Demo Fall, then there’s easily enough content and interest for two demos a year. But again, it just felt large.

[00:10:56]
I mean, I think there were 1,1200 people. And so at some point you say, gee, this is pretty overwhelming. There’s so many people here, so many companies, you can’t really see all that you want to see. But I. I don’t know how one solves that problem in an easy way. So just on the demo front, I mean, putting aside that, I think there were lots of interesting companies en masse.

[00:11:21]
There were increasingly, not increasingly. There continues to be, in my mind, a big value for all of the constituents at demo. And I’ve said this before, I think that the value of a demo is that there is a core group, sort of three core groups of constituents at demo, and it’s very symbiotic. And so I’m part of the swirling group of venture capitalists. And this year there were an increasingly large number of us, which, you know, some have questioned.

[00:11:55]
Oh, well, does that mean that you can’t find anything interesting at a demo? If there’s so many VCs from my perspective, I don’t go necessarily to find the next great company, although I have I funded six Apart and I funded Videoegg out of relationships I’d built at Demo conferences. But I go to Demo because I think that the group of people there are doing interesting stuff and thinking about the technology world in a way that is useful and interesting and that the long term relationships with those people will be valuable all around. Like I said, I think it’s entirely symbiotic. So lots of venture capitalists, that’s constituency number one constituenc number two are the entrepreneurs.

[00:12:40]
There are big groups of entrepreneurs there who are talking about their particular companies and with 70 companies that’s a pretty big chunk of companies and then the requisite marketing and PR and other resources to support those companies as they try and make a big splash at demo. And then the third constituency are the press. And Demo has always done a fantastic job of bringing in really interesting broad group of technology press from Newsweek to Businessweek to the online folks to bloggers to sort of all the folks that will matter as the word is spread about new interesting technology. So I think that Demo’s ability to bring all of those groups together has made it a really great and valuable conference for everybody who attends. For the companies, they talk with future investors, they can get out the word about their technologies in a pretty efficient manner from the press.

[00:13:47]
They get to see a lot of interesting stuff. The number of stories that are written about Demo during the Demo conference and after is really pretty impressive if you track it during the conference. And then from a venture investment standpoint. Hundreds of companies have been funded out. Of the Demo conferences either directly or indirectly.

[00:14:08]
And more importantly, there are lots of really interesting conversations that are had at, in and around Demo. This year I spent a lot of time hanging out with my friends from the Omidhar network and they’re just seeing. Lots of interesting stuff, thinking about it. In a great way. So it was a pleasure catching up with them at Demo and catching up with them then again at the O’Reilly e Tech conference.

[00:14:32]
I’m sure I’ll see them at other conferences as they continue to look at things in and around, broadly speaking, social software and and new media space in ways that they can both bring investment dollars to bear and make money, but also try and use networked technology to make the world a better place. Which is Pierre’s mission, at least a piece of his mission as I understand it. So talking with folks like that about the things they’re seeing and the things they’re working on is incredibly valuable and something that’s hard to do while you’re sitting in your office. You can do it on a one off basis, but I can only have so many breakfasts and lunches in any given. Although I have on occasion had a couple of breakfasts in a day or a couple of lunches in a day.

[00:15:18]
But it’s precisely why I’m getting so fat. So I need to minimize that. Well, gee, where are we? Demo? Okay, so this roundup of the conferences has become longer than I’d anticipated.

[00:15:33]
Maybe this will be two podcasts, the. Conference podcast and then the Deal or no Deal podcast separately. In any event, what else did I see? What else did I go to? So I will sort of brush aside the Entertainment Gathering, which is Richard Saul Wurman’s conference.

[00:15:51]
I think that it was an interesting group of people. It was a big thing conference. But it being Richard’s last conference and sort of an outlier, all I can say is it’s always a pleasure to hear Yo Yo Ma play his cello. It’s always a pleasure to hear interesting things discussed. I will say the highlight of the conversation at EG was unquestionably Will Wright’s discussion of his new video game, Spore.

[00:16:24]
Will’s the guy who created the Sims. And Spore is just this unbelievable thing. It’s going to basically allow you to go from single cell organism to evolve into space traveling aliens. And it just looks so incredible that I cannot wait for it to come out. I think it’s going to be about a year, maybe a little less than a year at this before it’s launched.

[00:16:50]
But if it’s half the experience that was demoed at the Entertainment Gathering, it’s not only going to be a monstrous financial success, but it’s just going to be incredibly entertaining and in some ways educational game that shows how things evolve over time and societies evolve and all this stuff. So bringing all of that gaming and intellectual horsepower to bear on a single game. So looking forward to that. What else, Ted? I mean, I guess I’ll jump into.

[00:17:23]
The TED Conference since it is sort of the progeny of Richard’s earlier work. I will say that I think it’s evolved into something even better and even stronger. I mean, I am an unabashed promoter of the TED Conference as something that. Is.

[00:17:48]
Both incredibly intellectually entertaining, but also creates an environment for lots of really great interesting connections and the opportunity to have conversations on a deeper level than you might ordinarily have if you were at you know, at dinner or simply talking with someone in a meeting or whatever. So, I mean, that’s my view of the value of the TED Conference. The TED conference, by the way, is technology, entertainment and design. And all of those things are sort of brought together in a format that results in people hearing interesting things they hadn’t thought about, learning a set of things that they didn’t know, and then, more importantly, lots of chances to interact with this eclectic group of 1000 people who’ve come together to hear the latest. And most interesting things there are to.

[00:18:46]
Be said about the world of physics, and then to hear about new forms of design and new design disciplines, and then gaming and then music.

[00:19:01]
And increasingly, the TED Conference has also had a piece of how can you bring these things to bear and doing a better job of keeping the world a great place? And that takes on all sorts of forms. I mean, maybe that’s just how do you build a better building? So it’s in the context of that.

[00:19:21]
The context of architecture, but maybe it’s. Actually how do you build a great new network? Or how do you build. How will chips change the nature of how people communicate? And can we lower the cost of those communications to connect parts of the world that haven’t previously been connected?

[00:19:43]
Those sorts of things. But as a general matter, I mean, the thing that’s incredible about the TED conference is that it brings together a set of speakers who are world class and make people think a lot, but as interesting and probably more so, as the crowd of people that attend the conference. And so I always enjoy the opportunity to catch up with people. I haven’t seen folks from Disney and Microsoft and new media, old media around all sorts of interesting questions of how technology is evolving, how people are evolving around technology, how design is impacted, impacting usability, all of those sorts of things. So I can’t say enough good things about the TED Conference.

[00:20:29]
I always have a fantastic time, so much so that during the year I blog occasionally. On the ted blog, it’s tedblog.typebad.com because it’s an opportunity to write about the. Things I wouldn’t otherwise write about. Most recently about the researchers at UC Irvine who found an individual who has greater capacity for recall than anyone documented sort of in the history of studying the human brain. This woman can recall at any given date what happened on that day, what she did, what famous people died or lived or what occurred, what was the weather.

[00:21:12]
I mean, things that no human should be able to maintain in their brain for 40 years. And yet she has this capacity. And so the researchers at UC Irvine are trying to figure out what is unique about her brain that allows her to do that. So, really interesting stuff. Fascinating to think about.

[00:21:32]
Where else could I blog that? Not on Venture Blog, probably not on Sesame. Wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense on my personal blog. But on the TED blog, it’s just a smorgasbord of really fun, interesting information. I’ve got another post I’m going to put up there shortly, sort of talking about technology and pixelization and this idea of pointillism, because there’s a really interesting group of designers who have used ASCII text to create shading, to produce moving images, just using letters and numbers and ampersands and that sort of thing.

[00:22:08]
So keep your eyes open for that. On the TED blog. Tedblog.typepad.com Just a fun conversation and exactly why I go to the TED Conference every year. The O’Reilly e Tech conference was another.

[00:22:24]
Another conference that I’ve gone to. I try to go to every year. It’s a very different group of people, an incredibly important group of people. These are the folks who by and large are going to be creating the technologies that really influence the future of what we’re seeing. And so even though the conversation for simple venture capitalists like me is often far more technical than I can fully comprehend, it’s very interesting to see presentations where people talk about, I don’t know, programming issues that wouldn’t otherwise be considered or thought about at another conference, never mind for a vc, as I ponder the broader implications of what are the trends in distribution and computation and all of those things.

[00:23:17]
And again, I’m not suggesting for a moment that I’m a deep thinker who sits down and plots out the future of the web. I actually hope that all of you listening do that and come and tell me what you think the future of the web is so that I can say, oh, yeah, that sounds right, let’s go with that. But the more points of perspective you get, the more likely you’ll be able to say that makes sense or it doesn’t make sense in the context of the interesting technology that are being built. And so the E Tech Conference is fantastic because it’s a starting point for that, right? It is further down the chain than I usually see things.

[00:23:59]
Things usually have bubbled up. They become Ruby on Rails and you see applications that are being built on it. You see how Ajax has evolved, whereas the early conversations were taking place at ETEC. A great example of that is how BitTorrent has evolved. Certainly the earliest conversations about BitTorrent at any conference were at the O’Reilly e Tech conference, for sure.

[00:24:26]
And now there are lots of conversations at mainstream conferences, mainstream in the sense of less geeky, less in the plumbing conferences like demo and like Ted, where people are talking about the implementation implications of BitTorrent and of the use of tornado codes in delivering content and those sorts of things. So it’s great to see those things. Early. I had the fun of presenting for a few minutes at the E Tech conference during a session called the Data Dump, which was sort of take a bunch of data, describe and then show how it demonstrates some interesting broader point. And the data that I analyzed was my email data, which was fun to sort of cull through all of my.

[00:25:20]
Emails, see precisely how much email I. Send or don’t send that in any given year, it looks like I receive, I don’t know, 35,000 emails or so, which I still haven’t decided if that’s actually a lot or a little. But look at the raw data and see what deductions you can make based on that data, et cetera. So I basically used it as an opportunity to make fun of venture capital because we deserve it. So that was, needless to say, well received around the O’Reilly ETEC crowd.

[00:25:57]
So E Tech again, one thing I will say about E Tech and Rael Dornfest, who runs E Tech, is this incredibly warm, smart, charming guy who I very much enjoy. And Rael does a great job of bringing together this community of people. Obviously, Tim O’Reilly is the sort of guru of bringing this group of people together in a way that’s collaborative and productive and not destructive. You could certainly see an E Tech type conference becoming more of a fight than a conversation. And yet this is the most collaborative and sort of productive gathering of the early folks that I can imagine.

[00:26:46]
And you know, Rael himself sort of acknowledged in an email that went out after the conference that at 1200 people, it’s getting pretty large. And the infrastructure stuff matters. Where the conference happens and the space made available for networking and conversations matters. And I think that they found a good space down in San Diego. It really was a big space that was well accommodating of this sort of crowd.

[00:27:08]
But with all of these conferences, they evolve and they get larger. We do have to think about how do you contain them in a way that they maintain their productivity.

[00:27:20]
So I think that that was, but all in all, incredibly successful. O’Reilly E Tech I’d say that the people who participated had a great time. I think that the organizers were pleased with how it went and I’ll look forward to seeing how it evolves, if at all, by next year. But we’ll always go to the O’Reilly Etech conference and look forward to the. Things that I learned there.

[00:27:43]
And that I guess leaves in the tour PC forum, which PCforum is run by Esther Dyson, as this very smart, interesting group of people, tends to be more senior group of people and talking about broader big themes. I’ve missed it a few years in the past just because it falls at the end of March. And as much as I love going to conferences and that PC Forum is a great experience, the challenge of course is that by the end of March my wife is ready to kill me. So my apologies, Esther, I’d love to come to your conference and it was great to get there this year. It was great to get back and enjoy the PC Forum and the crowd of people and the high end conversation.

[00:28:39]
But so in the meantime I’ll try and do a better job of spreading out my conference going and have a broader set of set the expectations early that it’s going to be an ugly Q1 and see if I can make it as an annual matter to the PC Forum, which I thoroughly enjoyed and in fact had while I was down there. It turned out that it was Mike Arrington’s from TechCrunch’s birthday and and so through odd circumstances had been moved from sort of a normal room to this room with a big living room with bar and table and big screen tv. So we had sort of an impromptu birthday party for Mr. Arrington. And so that was great. It was incredibly fun to get Mike there and the crew.

[00:29:32]
There was a brief moment of tension when Dave Weiner, who had come gotten a little bit of a, one could call it a fight with Dick Costello from feedburner, little discussion about the future of rss. And that was sort of surprising to see. Needless to say, Mr. Weiner is a man of strong convictions and ultimately he got very hot, shall we say, over rss. But you know, you have to appreciate to a certain extent someone who is that driven by technology that he can nearly come to fisticuffs over really simple syndication. But in any event, that was sort of the highlight of PC Forum.

[00:30:25]
And actually there was one interesting occurrence while I was at PC Forum. I was sitting having lunch and the folks from Facebook came and sat down. It was Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Kohler. They came over and were sat down to have some lunch. And then Steve Levy from Newsweek came over and sort of conducted a big chunk of his interview that resulted in the COVID story of Newsweek that just went on Newsweek.

[00:30:52]
Some of you may have seen it, Stuart and Katarina from Flickr on the COVID which is just so great to see. So it was just interesting to go from a lunch that was just a conversation, a chat, to a lunch that became Steve Levy interviewing Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook and having a lot of contradiction about what the two thought was happening on the web. So that was fun. And I guess as a general matter, that’s sort of what I go to these conferences for, is to hear, to hear people talk about the things they’re passionate about, to learn new stuff, to get a sense of what’s happening as a general matter, what’s happening broadly in the technology market, in economic markets more generally speaking, in technology markets more generally speaking. And if you go to enough of these conferences over a more disparate set of, of people and topics, then you get a pretty good overview of the world and the ways in which hopefully the companies that I fund fit into that world, fit into that economy, fit into the Internet, fit into the technology landscape, consumer devices and consumer services and next generation networking protocols and the future of physics and the future of design, all of those things.

[00:32:18]
So I like to think that my, my Q1 is always spent with this sort of exploration of interesting stuff that hopefully informs the decisions I make over the period of the year. I will say I was disappointed that in that festival of conferences I didn’t manage to get to the south by Southwest conference this year. I have every intention of making it next year. It was clear from all of the conversations across the blog and blogsphere and all the, the people with whom I spoke that it was a great group of people and continues to be this robust community and conversation around. Blogging and.

[00:32:58]
Networking and communication generally. And so my apologies to the south by Southwest people and I will definitely do what I can to make it back to south by Southwest next year. So that’s sort of the roundup. I’m going to skip this, the Deal or no Deal conversation until the next podcast and leave it at conferences, the wonderful world of conferences, future conferences I’m looking forward to always on is having a Hollywood conference that’s coming up. I think that will be interesting to see how Hollywood and technology are starting to converge and think about that.

[00:33:35]
I am for sure going to Gnome Decks, which is kind of coming up. And Chris is, I’m sure. Busy planning. It was in a great space last year. Should be a great conference again.

[00:33:48]
People really got energized at last year’s gnomedex in a way that I hadn’t seen them energized recently from a conference conversation. So hopefully that will continue at gnomedex, the Wall Street Journal conference. Walt Mossberg and Kara Switcher have this fantastic conference conference right before summer starts down at the AVI area in San Diego and brings the senior executives from major technical from major technology companies in past years. Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have spoken at the conference this year. I know that Bill Gates is speaking.

[00:34:23]
I’m not sure that Steve Jobs has been confirmed. But it’s just an incredible lineup of speakers and a very senior crowd of technology company executives that come to the conference. And so that’s, that’s always a great conversation and then lots more after the summer. I’m sure there are conferences like Business 2.0 and PopTech and others that will continue to feed my brain. So there you have it.

[00:34:51]
Thanks for listening. If folks are at any of these conferences coming up in the future that they grab me and say hello because my conference going is all about catching up with folks like yourselves. So thanks very much. Catch you next time.