Yet Another (ex-)VC Blog

Decided to try Zipcar one more time as I had a bunch of meetings today in the Valley.  The car was there and the only minor hiccups were a)it was not on the expected floor of the parking complex and b) it had less than 3/4 of a tank of gas (you’re supposed to leave it at least 3/4 full when returning the car).

So, Zipcar is now batting .333 in my book :)

I’m in San Francisco this week for a board meeting and am also spending time meeting with various VCs and startups.  Rather than renting a car and dealing with gas, parking, etc I decided to use my Zipcar subscription and try the service for the first time.  Frankly, I have been very unimpressed with my experience in using the service over the past two days.

Day 1: I am notified via SMS and email that the car I reserved won’t be available. However, there is a BMW available in the same garage that is free during my reservation time (good), and they assign it to me.  I arrive at the garage and find that the BMW is not there (bad).  I call Zipcar’s hotline and after about 10 minutes am directed to a garage that’s about a 15 minute walk where there would be yet another car that I could take.  The Zipcar person could not guarantee that the car in this garage was there but told me this was my best bet.  Thankfully, the car was there, although at that point it had been about 40 minutes after I was supposed to be in the car I had originally reserved.  

Day 2: I rent another Zipcar, this time at a different lot.  I get in the car and find that the gas card is missing and the gas tank is virtually empty.  There were also a couple of cigarette burns and what looked like animal scratches on the interior but I was more concerned with the lack of gas :)  I called into the Zipcar hotline and was quickly put into another car in the same lot.  And off I went…albeit about 20 minutes after my initial reservation time.

I think I am (maybe against my better judgement) going to use Zipcar tomorrow as well.  What else can go wrong? :)

Today I received an email from a friend from my business school class who is on the job hunt for his first post-MBA gig.  After I saw his email, I sent out an email to a contact in my network who might have some leads given that my friend’s career interests overlap with this interests.

This happens pretty frequently: I know someone in my personal network is looking for a job, and if I happen to see a job that might be a good fit within the last 1-2 weeks of seeing them, I’ll forward it to them.  Also, if it happens to be a job where I know someone at the hiring company, usually I will offer to make an introduction.  After all, why use the front door when you can sneak in the back?

There are probably many people who operate in that fashion when it comes to making job referrals around their network.  I saw this in action when I was searching for a venture capital job.  I would periodically talk to people in my network (say, once a month or so) and check in with them to see if they had heard of any opportunities.  Oftentimes they would say something to the effect of “I spoke to Recruiter XYZ last week and let me introduce you to him.”

So, here’s what I’m thinking.  It would be great to automate that process, and build some memory into it so that I can quickly save jobs that I see online that would be a good fit for someone (anyone) that I know.

Then, I could publish those jobs as a feed or make them searchable.  My initial thought is to use a specific delicious tag and then share a feed based on that tag.  I could also create a drop.io drop similar to the one I set up for my VC Careers page for jobs that come in via email.   This method would allow my social network to view jobs that I’ve seen where I have a contact at the hiring company, or some other sort of inside connection.   And it would probably be more efficient than what I do today – which is send out emails on a one-off basis when I see jobs of interest.

Then, the next time someone asked me about a job, I could point them at this feed/drop/whatever and be confident that if the person saw something they liked, I could leverage my personal network to try to connect them with that job.

So, what would make this little experiment a success?  Well, here are a few things that come to mind:

- I regularly forward or tag jobs that I think might be a good fit for someone in my network.

- When asked about job opportunities, I send them a link to the feed (by the way, I’ll probably add this feed to my FriendFeed so that its more easily accessible to my network).

- When recruiters ask me if I know someone who would be a good fit for a specific position, I will tag/forward it to my little system as well.

- People actually visit the page or feed that I’m building (minor point!)

- People I know get interviews, and more importantly, people I know get jobs!
Make sense?  I would love to get some feedback on this topic.  Basically, I’m looking for a way to easily share jobs within my network and do so in a way that does not require much of a change in user behavior.

By the way, is anyone doing something like this today (either manually or as a company)?

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I’ll be out in the Bay Area Wednesday through Friday of this coming week (Dec 10-12).  If you work at a company you think I should meet with while I’m out there, please let me know.  It would be great to meet some readers of the blog and meet some new folks.

Image by via CrunchBase

As an entry level VC, I find myself relying heavily on social networking technologies to get my job done.  I have spent the better part of the last couple of years building my LinkedIn network, and leverage it on a daily basis to gather information about companies or to reach individuals within those companies.  Generally, I have found people are very open to chatting about their work and industry, and are also generous with their time.

If LinkedIn or Facebook did not exist, I would have a much harder time doing my job.  In fact, I am very curious how entry level VC’s in the pre-social networking boom world would get access to the kinds of experts they’d need to conduct good due diligence.  My guess is that they’d need to rely more heavily on the partners’ networks and on analyst firms such as Forrester, Gartner, GLG, and Corporate Executive Board.

We may never get to a point where the analyst firms are completely disintermediated by social networking technologies, but slowly, as the tools to mine data and expertise from social networks grows, I have to think the analyst firms and proprietary database providers like Dow Jones or Thompson will start to see profits decline.  I haven’t seen or heard of any partnerships between folks like LinkedIn and the analyst firms or the Thomson’s of the world.  However, it would strongly benefit the research and analyst shops to modify their business models to be more accepting of an increasingly ‘crowdsourced’ world.

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How do you make money as a datacenter-focused cloud computing company?

Aside from the sale of compute capacity (a la Amazon or Rackspace), what are the other revenue opportunities available?  Here are some thoughts…

Management tools: The cloud hosters like Amazon are providing basic management tools, but we can already see there is a proven market for higher-order management and automation provided by companies like Rightscale and 3Tera.  There are also a variety of companies and products who have figured out IT automation in the traditional datacenter (Bladelogic, Opsware, etc).  I’m waiting to see when they’ll start moving towards new product development (or rebranding of existing solutions) that will be focused on management of outsourced cloud environments.  As their customers move to the cloud, those customers will demand that their traditional set of vendors move with them.  However, I think (in the long term) that the management tool space will end up open source, with revenue generated through other means…

Virtual appliances: Virtual appliances are a method of distributing pre-packaged applications that run on top of a specialized (usually Linux-based) operating system.  Perhaps the management tool vendors could sell virtual appliances to their userbase through an ‘iTunes‘-like interface.  I also see value in virtual appliance solution stacks, where multiple virtual appliances are sold together and pre-configured to be integrated with one another.  This would be particularly compelling for SMBs who don’t have the time or money to spend on heavy integrations between disparate software packages.

Cloud intelligence: There is going to be a tremendous amount of usage data generated as more computation and data is moved to the cloud.  Cloud management tools that are working across multiple customers and multiple clouds will have a birdseye view of how companies are operating their cloud-based applications.  That data could be monetized (if done in a privacy-friendly way) to help customers benchmark their usage of the cloud vs industry peers or to help vendors operating within the cloud  learn more about how customers are using their products.

Services: Companies that have products or services that help customers determine how to best leverage cloud computing should be able to create healthy businesses.  We saw a very broad services ecosystem develop around VMware technology and I think we’ll see the same thing occur in the cloud computing world.  Because this sector is so hot and there are so many new products and services coming to market, there are few “experts,” and those experts will be able to demand a price premium.

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