Video VC POVs

The quotes, and rollcall, are the best part of Constance Loizos’ somewhat meandering look at the online video (platform) market.

Looking for the next X, the MySpace of Y, and the del.icio.us of Z in two-dot-oh video sites harks back to the “Pets.com” (inter alia) debacles of Web One; there’s plenty of opportunity to create self sustaining businesses, but everything can’t win, and you can’t “YouTube” every concept.

Those groups creating entire environments, and rounded platforms, for digital audio-visual media including video are potentially being lost in the hype of revveryoutubenetscapebrightcove.

Some people are talking about the realities and the flipsides, such as Fred Wilson:

I have no idea if we are headed for another bust. I sure hope not. But having lived through the 2000 bust with a portfolio that was not “bust proof”, one of the things I think about all the time is how to build a “bust proof” portfolio.

Business 101 Assignment: Consider these VC/C-level-Exec viewpoints, via their notable-quotables, and design an investment portfolio that tracks, but bucks, the trends in order to avoid negative market confluence.

They still want to know that programs reflect the particular values of their product; you largely can’t get that right now at a YouTube.

[…]

Despite what everyone in Silicon Valley likes to think, it’s not in advertisers’ interest to abandon broadcast and cable networks. That’s still where the money is.

Todd Chanko, JupiterResearch

[seeing] a huge move toward higher-end content because cheaper bandwidth and tools are making it more affordable to produce and distribute quality programming online.

Jason Pressman, Shasta Ventures

I don’t think it would be accurate to say that there’s a shift strictly to more quality video. Rather, I think there’s plenty of room for top-of-the-pyramid programming online and YouTube and lots of stuff in between.

Josh Bernoff, VP Forrester Research

I now spend about 60 percent of my time looking at video-related start-ups.

I invested as soon as I was invited to [in Revision3]. I would have liked a bigger piece of Revision3. It costs nothing to create these shows. They can just roll out a new program, and if no one likes it, they can try another.
Mike Maples, USD$15m microfund manager

Two years ago, I spent 20 percent of my time on the space. Today, I’d say I spend at least a third to a half of my time.

Jim Breyer, Accel Partners

I don’t want to announce anything until we’ve locked up what we want to do. But we may create derivatives of our core (TV and movie) programming and we may do some original programming.

Ross Levinsohn, CEO Fox Interactive

FreshBooks’ Fresh Looks with Deft Hooks

To simplify invoicing, I had a few choices to pick from when I restructured Crixa some years ago:

  1. Outsource to an accountant
  2. Insource to MYOB
  3. Keep with the status-quo of using Illustrator and Photoshop to create PDFs. Yes, really.

While I aspired towards #2, Crixa ended up actually only doing #3.

2006 was to be different: I switched to FreshBooks (referral link) and haven’t looked back.

  • Crixa does get paid faster.
  • Clients do find it far easier to pay via PayPal, rather than direct debit, cheque or stone money.
  • And it works. It’s Really Quite Good For You, even.

They have also experienced a variant of unintended use cases in their discussion fora: the Structure Makes It Worse use-case.

“I’m all in. You diversify the categories too much and there is no center of mass for everyone to hang and talk about issues, they end up using their time jumping back and forth and leave without adding anything to the discussion. Let’s do it.”

This type of issue is what convinced me to make gkoya post categories on the fly, and reshape/reform them as usage changes.

(gkoya/Crixa has no affiliation to FreshBooks, except as a satisfied customer)

Project and Business defensibility

Using Guy Kawasaki’s primer, analysing a major project I’m associated with yields:

  1. “We know that there are no ‘magic bullets’ that provide defensibility.” We know that there is not a single shield that we can raise that can make our proposition impermeable.
  2. “We have filed for patents, but we know that we cannot depend on patents as a major component of defensibility.” We are re-commercialising intellectual property assets that have been developed in the marketplace over the last 6 years.
  3. “We have an x month head start […], and what we’re doing is hard. We know we have, at best, a temporary lead. It’s so hard that few established companies would defocus themselves by trying to do what we’re doing.” We have about a 9 to 12 month head start, on what is usually a difficult and expensive arena to break into. We are using our Laboratory results to generate tangible digital objects. It’s not so hard that it’s impossible for competitors to simulate, but it would significantly defocus our contemporaries’ stated business plans to do so.
  4. “We’ve built similar businesses before.” We have built two enterprises like this before, both of which are still viable market propositions.
  5. “We’ve amassed a ton of relevant domain expertise because our founders sold to these customers before.” We have been selling to the same type of customers for a number of years, and they are meta-customers at this stage of the development.
    Continue reading