Venture Capitalists have a big impact on the software that hits the web and the rest of us have been fortunate to get a good look into many of their minds thanks to the recent rise of the blogging VC. Some VCs love to share how they think about various technology issues on their blogs – but what do they really love?
VC Larry Cheng posted his 4th annual Venture Capitalist Blog Index today, listing and ranking 155 blogs written by venture capitalists. I discovered it when a feed we have in our team RSS reader tracking comments posted around the web by VC Fred Wilson delivered the link. I put the list into ITA Software’s Needlebase, scraped a list of all the blogs, then put them in a Blekko custom search engine. I searched for the word “love” (as I always do in any new search opportunity) and found that these 155 blogging VCs have used the word love in exactly 15 blog posts so far this year. What do they love? Read on for an amusing survey of 15 things blogging VCs love in 2011.
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Mark Suster loves info graphics. He said so in a comment on his post How to Handle a VC Presentation with No Deck.
Chris Dixon says that people love horse races like NYC vs Silcon Valley, Facebook vs Twitter, IPO markets vs private exchanges, the valuation of some startup vs some other startup. But he says that “these questions are all footnotes that will be forgotten in a few years,” in his wide-eyed and awesome blog post PREDICTING THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET IS EASY: ANYTHING IT HASN’T YET DRAMATICALLY TRANSFORMED, IT WILL.
Brad Feld loves working with entrepreneurs and helping create new companies. It’s all about doing what you love, he writes in a reflection post titled Snow in Seattle.
Jeff Bussgang says that if you love running your business, that’s one of the factors that can make it wise to walk away from large sums of money. He’s sat with two portfolio companies that have made that decision recently and wrote about it in a post titled Walking Away From Liquidity.
Charlie O’Donnell is excited about the new API for Q&A site Quora he says he’d love a Quora column in Tweetdeck and a Quora Feedera email digest in his inbox. He’s looking for a way to “monitor the important conversations without having to sit in it all day.” Hey Charlie, this isn’t as cool as a Tweetdeck column, but did you know that Quora provides RSS feeds (ReadWriteWeb asked them to and they did!) including for Answers posted by username? And the URL structure is really simple. (My answers are at http://www.quora.com/Marshall-Kirkpatrick/answers/rss) If you’ve got a list of people you find compelling, it’s not hard to build an OPML file of all the questions they answer. (I put their names in a text file, find and replace to turn those into feed URLs, then use a plain-text-to-OPML web service, save the file locally and import into a reader of your choice.) Primo signal-to-noise there, too. Will an API propel Quora into the mainstream… and will that suck?
Rob Day loves the funny looking dogs that win the Westminster Kennel Dog Show. “Be polarizing,” he urges entrepreneurs raising money. “The winner always seems to be some funny-looking dog, often a variety of dog you’ve never heard of even if the general category is familiar, and probably a dog that some people roll their eyes at and some people love. That’s what you want your pitch to be.” How to raise venture capital for a cleantech startup in 2011
Brad Feld loves the web design firm Slice of Lime.
Albert Wenger loves being told that his idea for a namespace for people is completely crazy.
Mark Suster loved getting to see the White House. How Twitter Got Me into The White House & Saved My Son’s Birthday
Albert Wenger again, in a prior conversation about his namespace for people idea, said he’d “love to hear from folks whether they think these are real problems with the current de facto solution and how services should deal with them (ideally with examples of good or bad implementations).”
Charlie Daniels would love to do an experiment with the students in his college class to test his theory that socioeconomic background is a primary determinate of a person’s comfort meeting new people.
Brad Feld loves starting off the year with CES.
Fred Wilson hands his blog over to guest poster Charlie Crystal, who points out that startup founders love to take risks – including stupid ones when it’s with their own money. M&A Case Study: ChiliSoft
Jeff Bussgang loves five apps he found in 2010 (Flipboard, Instapaper, Disqus, Foursquare and Tweetdeck) He wonders if they will blow up as businesses in 2011.
Fred Wilson kicked off 2011 with the awesome statement that he loves “doing random stuff on the web which takes me to new places and new ideas.” Cheers to that, Fred! Globalization
Image from Hikingartist.com
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