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The Web world is shell shocked: Yahoo’s ranks are shrinking.
Who says the two Silicons aren’t one big happy family, though? Fred Wilson. BUT, that was last week’s “news”!
The New York City-based Union Square Ventures blogger screwed up his Silicon Valley headline rant–wrongly calling out a fellow Silion Alley chap for West coast arrogance–and STILL believes he nailed a bi-coastal tech angst problem.
SEE: Why Silicon Alley VCs Should Do Blogging Due Diligence, Too
Today’s mutual outpouring of tech love from both sides of the Web aisle for Yahoos, however, must surely warm even a grisled venture capitalist’s heart, as not so cold hearted entrepreneurs in both Silicons embrace the poor, displaced huddled masses of Jerry Yang refugees.
From sea to shining sea–and even from Canada–the feeding freenzy over the still warm Yahoos’ blood is fevered: “Wanted: Yahoo Product Managers” and “Why canned Yahoo employees should come talk to me,” and “Memo to YHOO Staffers: Looking for a Few Good People.”
While the reaching out is touching, offers from fledging, bootstrap ventures may very well NOT be compelling to the once coddled Yahoos!
Yahoos may take comfort though that there is someone looking out for them, a woman so determined that she is staking her very future on making sure all can continue to live the American dream, even laid off Yahoos!
Who says President Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, is old school? Is the American dream EVER outdated?
In what may be hailed as HER comeback (old) kid speech, Ms. Clinton rallied the El Paso troops last evening with a Texas sized cry to keep the dream alive and well, in America, under her watch:
What I think this election is about…It is about what kind of country and world we’re going to pass on…Are we going to give the same shot at the American dream that many of us were given? Well, if we make the right decision in this election, we sure are. We’re going to give not only confidence and optimism, but real results, 21st-century solutions for what we need to do to fix our problems, meet our challenges, and seize our opportunities.
Hillary may even have been thinking of the soon to be left out in the cold Yahoos when she hailed:
There isn’t anything America can’t do if we make up our minds to do it. Every once of us, every single one of us knows that tomorrow can be better than today, but it doesn’t happen just by wishing it or hoping for it. It happens by working really, really hard to make it a reality to give everybody a better chance.
I see an America where everyone willing to work hard has a job with a rising income.
SO, Yahoos: The sun will come out tomorrow, and there may be another Clinton in the White House next year!
Above all, remember, there isn’t anything ex-Yahoos can’t do if they make up their minds to do it.
ONE (not so) REFUGEE’S STORY: Antisocial Google: Googler Bradley Horowitz Mum
MORE: How Web 2.0 Meetups Displaced the New York Software Industry and Is Union Square Ventures Changing Exit Strategies? and Henry Blodget Tech Ticker Puts Yahoo Finance at SEC Risk and Silicon Alley Web 2.0 Startups: Bootstrap For Success
Jason Calacanis warned about Fred Wilson’s blogging half-life, but an adoring “A VC” fan apparently threw email caution to the wind when he or she had the chutzpah to pat Wilson on his VC back, in private.
In his signature succinct, but very attention grabbing, headline style, the celebrity New York City based blogging venture capitalist cries West Coast arrogance, following the apparent receipt of a personal, non-public, flattering missive, which is nevertheless deemed by Wilson to be rage enducing. The supposedly for Wilson’s eyes only email is now public, thanks to Wilson’s reposting of it at his Union Square Ventures/A VC blog.
Calacanis advised in September about Wilson’s propensity to over “share” publicly, at his blog:
the great debate about the important of an API/platform continues thanks to a post from Fred (which is based on an email exchange I had with Fred last night). As a note to friends new and old of Fred Wilson–and a number of us FOFs have talked about this recently–if you talk to Fred about something *do* expect it to be on his blog within 24-48 hours. The half-life between a conversation with Fred’s blackberry and his blog is perhaps the shortest in the industry–so know that when you’re chatting with Fred. [ Just busting on you Fred, but you are getting a reputation of firing off on your blog really quickly after email/conversations with folks.. only bringing it up because it feel a little more pronounced with you than the normal blogger.
WELL, here he goes again. Below is Wilson’s less than thoughtful post, in its entirety, headlined “Silicon Valley Arrogance”:
I opened an email this morning that started like this:
I read your blog and believe that you have a firm grasp on web trends - especially for someone on the east coast.
That’s as far as I got. I replied with incredulity and moved on. I am the first to admit that Silicon Valley has the largest concentration of web entrepreneurs, web developers, and web financiers of anywhere in the world. It is mecca when it comes to all things web. But please do not assume that the rest of the world, including the east coast, has a shortage of people who understand exactly where the web is going and what to do with it.
My immediate reactions to the Wilson post: 1) The citation is an anonymous one which prevents readers from gauging its authenticity, 2) The private email is reposted publicly which disrespects the writer’s expectations of privacy in ambush style 3) How or why is the writer deemed to represent Silicon Valley?
An “A VC” propensity for “firing off on his blog really quickly after emails,” is indeed of concern, seemingly acknowledged even now by Wilson himself. A read of the comments following Wilson’s post indicates that the writer of the infamous flattering email is not from Silicon Valley. The entire Wilson post indicting “Silicon Valley arrogance” then has no apparent basis. The “A VC” fan that risked privately conveying respect for Wilson is a New York City neighbor of Wilson, it seems.
WILSON: Well this is embarassing. It turns out the person who wrote the email is from nyc! I stick by the point I was making even though the anchor has no weight!
COMMENTER DAN: Oh dear - perhaps it’s also a little arrogant to fire off a reply without reading the whole message…Hold on then, now we’re removing the ‘evidence’ behind your view, but sticking with the point? So you’re complaining that west coast people have invented a certain stereotype of an east coaster - based on, er, err… a west-coast stereotype that you’ve just made up! I’m willing to believe you’ve seen that attitude before, however.
WILSON: To be clear, I did go back and read the entire email before I wrote my post There was nothing in it to indicate where he was from When I got a reply from him later this morning with that info, I posted my reply explaining the truth.
SO, is the anonymous male, New Yorker “A VC” fan STILL a fan, after such an unseemingly public venture capitalist fiasco emmanating from the inappropriate, unverified and inaccurate, reposting of a private email communication?
It is not surprising that while claiming ”embarrassment,” Wilson remains steadfast behind the unprofessional public baiting, even asserting “truth” has emerged.
Readers ought to have sceptical expectations for “truth,” however, at the Union Square Ventures/A VC blog, on any day of the week, as I analyzed in depth earlier this week underscoring the Union Square Ventures/A VC inconsistencies between its public facing commentary and private investing activity SEE: Is Union Square Ventures Changing Exit Strategies?
“A VC” commenters are perplexed by West Coast baiting by an East Coast professional.
SEAN MURPHY: I would think in your business it would be useful to be clear eyed and avoid the Valley centric astigmatism for technology analysis. I really don’t understand your complaint. If you wanted to be a well respected pundit I can appreciate how this lack of respect would be grating, but if it’s about spotting opportunities for investment that other firms are overlooking, this bias would seem to accrue a number of advantages to your firm.
PAUL: Doesn’t anyone see the irony in having a post about an East Coast stereotype lead to 50 or so comments spouting Valley generalizations? Since Fred now knows that the original email was from a fellow New Yorker (can you correct the main post please?!) perhaps that should be the real story. How we quick we seize evidence to re-enforce our world views…
YES, that is the real story, and hence this post, at Insider Chatter. READ MORE: Is Union Square Ventures Changing Exit Strategies?
PLUS: How Web 2.0 Meetups Displaced the New York Software Industry
ALSO: LinkedIn To Mine User Data For Corporate Espionage and Google Apps Meets Les Miserables: Enterprise IT Team DREAMS Big and Cuill? Google Vet Startups Pose NO Threat: FriendFeed, Howcast, Zillow
Is Union Square Venture backed Twitter at risk of bringing down the entire Web with it as a titters on its own unprofessional brink? NO! Twitter mania in the tech blogoshpere warns of such a grave outcome though.
Dave Winer–who believes Twitter is “mission-critical” to his communications–calls for a tech-wide sit down with investor Fred Wilson’s management team on par with global peace keeping talks: “The same way the President briefs Congress when there’s some kind of international crisis.”
Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson–the unofficial Twitter blogger ombudsman–empathizes with Winer and rallies for “the father of blogging and RSS,” bonding with tales of respect for “children screwing up”:
Dave expresses the love he has for Twitter. Like the love that I have for my children. When they screw up, it bums me out and I help avoid making that mistake again.
Sweet? Wilson’s signature Web 2.0 analysis schtick relies on his teenage children for fodder. As usual though, his adolescent comparison falls flat.
After all, Twitter mistakes have been piling up, hence Winer’s love-hate affair.
Venture Beat on the dire situation, for the Web at large: “Twitter’s struggles harm nore than just the users”:
Twitter’s service have become a valuable part of many other start-ups and serves a complimentary role to some large services. Tweetmeme and Politweets are two start-ups that rely completely on Twitter for their services to work. FriendFeed meanwhile imports all users’ tweets into its activity streams. Likewise, Yahoo’s MyBlogLog also has Twitter integration as a main component of users’ profiles. Then of course there is Facebook where many users tie their status updates directly to their Twitter updates.
Poor Twitter piggy backers then? NO! If a business makes a decision to rely on a new, unproven free service for the delivery of its own services to its own customers, that business only has itself to blame.
Likewise for Twitter users. If Twitter was a fee-based service its “consumers” would have been long gone, demanding refunds for non-performance, and a rational market would drive Twitter to reliability or extinction..
The Web 2.0 free market, however, has an irrational decision making process of its own, along with its Web 2.0 non-paying users.
ALSO: Google Execs Silent On NYC Print, Radio, TV Promises and Yahoo Shareholder on Microsoft Bid: AOL, Time Warner All Over Again? and Is Union Square Ventures Changing Exit Strategies?
Why is ’screwed’ Henry Blodget’s favorite headline at his Kevin Ryan co-production, “Silicon Alley Insider” (SAI)? Perhaps it is because he made his (bad) mark by screwing investors, just ask the SEC!
Recent not-so-elegant Blodget prognostications:
“Newspapers Are Screwed”
“Cable Screwed”
“Hulu Is Screwed”
NEWS FLASH: Henry, unwittingly, just screwed himself, and coconspirator Ryan: “US Economy Screwed,” the SAI weekend dispatch declares, piggybacking (in typical NOT SO INSIDER Blodget fashion) off of original reporting done by the New York Times.
The Blodget SAI value add? ”Digital business executives” will be facing a screwing themselves. So much for the big plans of the digital advertising supported Blodget-Ryan SAI, then!:
We expect advertising spending to start slowing (or even dropping) within a couple of months. We think all the major Internet and media companies will get hit. We expect the downturn will dampen VC and angel financings, which, in turn, will dampen entrepreneurial activity. So we continue to suggest that digital business executives brace for harder times.
Blodget is apparently aware that his signature headline grabbing (phony) stock boosting from his first Internet go around will not sell during his latest attempt to rehabilitate himself, so he is trying another extreme: How about giddy short selling “analysis,” ad nauseum.
Insider Chatter is NOT fooled. SEE: Henry Blodget Slams eBay’s Whitman: Yahoo’s Yang Next? and Blodget & Ryan: Cool, or Suck? WHAT Silicon Alley ‘Insider’! and Henry Blodget Has Internet Boom Lessons For NBC
The New York Times is on the Blodget hypocrisy case as well. Harry Hurt “trashed” “That Henry Blodget”’s book, “Most, if not all, of the promotional value is based on his career in white-collar deception”:
He is legally prohibited from offering investment advice to specific individuals, and yet he markets advice to mass audiences about the very industry that barred him for life.
During his three years at Merrill, he earned upwards of $18 million in salary. The fine he paid was $4 million. That leaves him a whopping $14 million ahead of the game, not counting taxes and the legal fees attendant to his settlement agreement. As luck and some high-priced lawyers would have it, Mr. Blodget wound up negotiating a settlement in which he neither admitted nor denied any wrongdoing.
The current Blodget “white collar deception” spurs an Internet downturn:
After blowing the last downturn, we’ve been on the right side of this one since last summer.
Really, Blodget and Ryan? Odd then, that you bankrolled the launch of SAI, an online, advertising supported digital media business, last summer!
Up or down, Blodget continues to be bad for Internet investors.
The “open” excitement yesterday was deafening. After all, a BOMBSHELL was unleashed into the blogosphere, as ex TechCruncher and now Read/Write Webber Marshall Kirkpatrick pre-announced, along with fellow pre-briefed TechCruncher Duncan Riley’s second, to eager, ready to regurgitate bloggers.
“Today changes everything,” TechCrunch advised, thanks to a carefully orchestrated, ”co-exclusive” organized by a five-person, Australian, venture financed startup keen on pushing its own Web agenda on the U.S. Internet market, Faraday Media.
Despite the suggestively neutral and seemingly non-profit.org URL of the “Data Portability Workgroup,” DataPortability.org is SPONSORED BY FARADAY MEDIA, corporate promoters of numerous Web products and services: particls, engagd, SyncStream…Faraday Media’s Website giddily features TechCruncher Kirkpatrick gushing over their products and its “Data Portability Workgroup” blog post yesterday, following TechCrunch and ReadWrite Web pre-announcements, bestows link love on the TechCrunch and ReadWrite Web high fives.
For a company that positions itself, its products and the industry consortium it seeks to spur, on a vaunted notion of transparency, Faraday Media’s “DataPortability.org” is non-transparent to the users it claims to be helping. Faraday Media is nevertheless crystal clear on its corporate agenda: To be the definitive “epicenter of the attention ecosystem.” BUT, how does Faraday Media’s creation and evangelizing of the “Data Portability Workgroup,” support its own product roadmap and corporate agenda?
Faraday Media’s sponsored DataPortability.org can now claim a Facebook staffer, a Google staffer and a Plaxo staffer as “Workgroup” members. YAHOO?
Hardly! Contrary to the image portrayed by the not-so-open and not-so-transparent, exclusively pre-briefing of ecasty-complying TechCrunch and ReadWrite Web, such announcements of prospective competitor sit downs are NOT so earth shattering.
Particularly troubling is the non-user friendly DataPortability.org Website and affiliated collateral. Despite tech geeks gone wild for an unconsumated prospective collaboration between Google, Facebook, Plaxo, Robert Scoble…the average user, for which the entire DataPortability.org effort is supposedly about, undoubtedly finds the Faraday Media sponsored Website and associated collateral a maze of geek speak and unabashed promotion of Faraday’s “Data Portability Project.”
What’s more, the average user is undoubtedly unaware that “the history of the Internet” is poised to be rewritten as of January 8, 2008, thanks to Faraday Media, ReadWrite Web and TechCrunch.
ReadWrite Web commenter Eran Hammer-Lahav deflates the Faraday Media fueled hot air ballon:
The Data Portability Workgroup has by far produced the least amount of progress in the open web space. It is a group of some of the best and dedicated thinkers in this space, but even after participating in the conversation for a little bit, I still don’t understand what they are really trying to do. What their deliverable are.
If I was Facebook, and I wanted to do some damage control or PR for being open and nice, the Data Portability Workgroup would be the perfect effort to join. After all, go try to figure out what Facebook has actually agreed to? And Facebook can already say they support data portability (its bidirectional portability they have an issue with).
By itself, this means nothing. If anything, it can make the Data Portability Workgroup weaker if after this big hoopla, nothing comes out of it. There is nothing worse than unattainable expectations.
ALSO: 2008 Social Media Warning: Beware Google AND Facebook and Facebook vs. Google: The Real Tech President Political Power Plays and Reach Local Advertising? How Google Squeezes SEMs and AdWords Buyers and Web 2.0 Social Power Grab: Will Faraday Media Open Up? and Henry Blodget Braces For ‘Harder Times’: Silicon Alley Insider ‘Screwed’?
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