Found this article, MySpace: Is ‘ghetto’ a design choice?, surfing around the net. It all started with a simple question:

From a design perspective we have to look at it as a failure, but obviously it’s not. Why is that? Why hype ugliness?

And further snowballed to 40+ comments. I have to say this is one of most interesting post + threads I’ve come across in a long time. The whole thread raises a lot of very intriguing questions in a very stream of conscious, conversational way. . .

1. The correlation of success (adoption? revenue?) with usability as well as “production value”
2. Inside peek at a startup from an employee’s view point
3. Disgruntled employee in a startup
4. Employees leaving a previously successful startup to take on the employer
5. Founder as a micro manager (reminicent of Steve Jobs)
6. How startup succeeds despite of bad processes/decision making infrastructure
7. How startup succeeds despite not listening to customers
8. How startup succeeds despite of itself in general
9. Relevance of standards to the end users
10. How challengers can overtake incumbents by taking advantage of situational and tactical mistakes of its competitor
11. Customization and personalization as a key competitive advantage in the web 2.0 world of “personal web”
12. User trust and its correlation with brand and look-and-feel
13. The hidden cost of “change” -> learning curve

Each one of the issues raised could be a post in of itself. . . maybe one day when I run out things to write about I’ll come back to this post.

Personally relevant to me is that as an eBay employee and somewhat responsible for its functional design and look & feel, eBay is held up both as what not to do, as well as what to do. More from Jason Kottke here and Vincent Lombardi here. The truth is that we struggle with these issues all the time but everything we do is of conscious choice. We are fully capable of adhering to any spectrum of design standards but one thing that we try to do is to take “user centric” design to its ultimate literal interpretation . . . ie listen, survey, and talk to our community constantly and always.

Eventually some consulting firm will be founded based on the idea that people want to know what Google will do next and is willing to pay to find out. Actually the idea is not that far fetched since Microsoft has just one such firm tracking its every single move called Directions On Microsoft. I’ve read some of their stuff and its actually pretty good. The most useful and insightful are their indepth knowlege of the Microsoft org chart and how strategies relates to the people issues in the company - and vice versa.

Until then, we’ll have to settle on Nivi and me playing casandra to the masses. While Nivi takes a “inferential” approach to his predictive model:

Take any piece of software you use all day: e.g. address book, calendar, web browser, iTunes, MS Office, stock charts.

Ask yourself: “What do I really really really wish this product could do?”

Wait for Google to make your dream come true. Or develop the dream product yourself so you can sell it to AOL/Yahoo/IAC/MS when Google launches their version.

I will take the bottom up HR driven approach. . . (althought the predictions are the same). . . Basically this is what we lay man knows about Google.

1. The famous spend 20% of your time working on whatever project you want directive
2. Engineers/PHD’s runs the company
3. Its a bottoms up culture where ideas are bubbled up to marketing, PM rarely dictate product direction w/o engineering buyin
4. Kinda like the premodial goo, chaos breeds creativity and eventually something great will happen

So what does this have to do with WWGD? Well, since most products/ideas are initiated by engineers who spends most of their time at Google coding away or playing with colleagues this is what I say Google is generally up to.

1. Innovation that is driven by coders as end-users (dont expect Google Supply Chain Optimizer anytime soon)
2. Products that is widely used (Skype) by Google community of engineers
3. Common products they think they can do one better (sometime naively - ie opening up AIM)
4. BHAG, costly, ambitious, ideas (scanning books? wifi net?) that can only be pushed through in a company not using NPV analysis
5. Consumer applications or services (+ maybe Engineering related products)

Now, I just have to sit and wait maybe someone more qualified will chime in

Hate to pile on Technorati as I still find it a very useful service. . . but since Jason Kottke and friends (check out the 25 trackbacks) are on the topic I cant help but also put in my 2 cents.

While most people are focused on uptime and recall . . . I’m having problem with Technorati’s search precision. Mainly that I’m getting a ton of press release spam in its results like a regular search engine or feedster. One of the main reasons using services like Factiva and Lexis Nexis can be really annoying is the fact that press releases can sometimes overwhelm insightful articles written by objective third parties. Now imagin how bad it could get when a service is openly crawling the web like Technorati.

Technorati used to have the aggregate “voice” of the bloggers but recently companies seems to gotten smart to ways to sneak into its search results via zombie blogs or blogs consisting only of company press releases. The worst offender seems to be PrintRelease. I hope Technorati figure out some way of automatically black listing “braindead blogs” from its result set. Now I’m off to checking out PubSub. . .

Almost 3 month ago, on a trip out to Korea, Joi Ito wondered why the blogosphere in Korea is so different from the ones out in the US. In the post, he noted how “closed” their blogosphere was compared to the US. He mentioned that RSS and Trackback were non-existent. And that blogs only link to each other (and back) using the tools and functionalities that the blog aggregators provided, essentially creating a “walled garden” around its own community. Furthermore, the idea that people only blogged for the immediate circle of friends rather than a general “readership” was odd to Joi too.

Of course, the ensuing conversation in the comments section attributed the cause to cultural tendencies, industry concentration, ease of use etc. (more here and here) Or even worse, that the Koreans “simply don’t get it” . . . ie that in the web 2.0 world they should be using an open architecture because …. because its “better” and its “the right thing to do.”

Well in the last few weeks with all the buzz around blogging, RSS and their respective popularity, diffusion, adoption, awareness etc etc. . . I think we can say that we have a definite sampling issue on our hands. In effect, those in the “technorati” circle (me included) have yet to venture out to and truly experience the “other side of the blogosphere” as experienced by the general public.

NetRatings released a report that finally had people questioning the pervasiveness of RSS (and openness) of blog. Whether it is awareness, availability, or usage, the blogosphere is not as “open” as Joi had initially thought in the US. Brad Burnham talks about this sampling problem from the perspective of VC’s in his RSS Geeks Only Please post with a few more follow-ups here, here and here.

Without any number its hard to draw much conclusion as most are simply anecdotal or expressed (surveyed) evidence. . . .so I set out to surf the web to get some #’s. Here is what I came up with . . . and its quite shocking to me in fact.

The RSS-less blog world mainly includes Xanga, LiveJournal, and MySpace. (Myspace is more blogs than social networking, just go check it out)

The RSS-enabled world consists of TypePad, Blogger, Blogspot. (actually more like a % the total since not all RSS feeds are enabled, but for this lets be conservative and assume all these blog are RSS enabled.)

Now the shocking part. . . I found pageview data for July for these sites. . .

Xanga+LiveJournal = 1.6M Pageviews
Xanga+LiveJournal+Myspace = 8.9M Pageviews

Typepad+Blogger+Blogspot = 265K Pageviews

Including Myspace, the RSS-less camp has over 33X the pageviews of the RSS-enabled camp. And around 6X without Myspace.

Now even if there are an equal number of RSS blogs are not hosted by typepad, blogger, and blogspot, the RSS-less world still overwhelms RSS-enabled.

I guess our blogosphere is not so different from that of Korea after all. Look around Xanga or LiveJournal. . . people are simply blogging about their lives to friends and family . . . no annoying meme’s or debates . . . no one trying to get anyone fired . . .

So what does this say about RSS? Well, its hard to use and not as popular as people thought. Lots of work needs to be done to help it “cross-the-chasm.” I have no doubt that it will one day be a fundamental technology of web 2.0; but for now, some one need to work on RSS user friendliness for the Joe Q Public. Oh and we need to get some data (with big enough sample) before drawing random conclusions.

Found this article playing around on Bloglines (I finally upgraded from myYahoo because Bloglines has better search function - “search my subscriptions”) from Joel On Software on spec writing. The nugget was I finally found out the exact origin and story behind how “program managers” came to be

The idea of master/slave programming was discredited, but Microsoft still had these people called program managers bouncing around. A smart man named Jabe Blumenthal basically reinvented the position of program manager. Henceforth, the program manager would own the design and the spec for products.

Since then, program managers at Microsoft gather requirements, figure out what the code is supposed to do, and write the specs. There are usually about 5 programmers for every program manager; these programmers are responsible for implementing in code what the program manager has implemented in the form of a spec. A program manager also needs to coordinate marketing, documentation, testing, localization, and all the other annoying details that programmers shouldn’t spend time on. Finally, program managers at Microsoft are supposed to have the “big picture” of the company in mind, while programmers are free to concentrate on getting their bits of code exactly right.

Here in the Valley, we call Program Managers, Product Managers although the lines are not so clear cut. Anyways, good to know who is responsible for my daily travails

Not sure how this whole Business 2.0 VC contest has to do with the “Thesis Investing” meme that was so popular a few months back. Idea based investing? Better or worst? not sure, but I do know that whatever this is, it has been around for a long time. A lot of times entrepreneurs mistakenly think that a VC stole their business plan when all along the VC has been hunting for a startup to fit into their own idea. Of course VC’s will incorporate ideas/data from various entrepreneurs and re-position/improve their own ideas and thats not exactly kosher. Anyways, thats not a topic for this post. Mainly I wanted to talk about the upsell engine Greg Martin of Red Point mentioned in the article. Here is the excerpt:

$5M-THE ULTIMATE ONLINE UPSELL
WHO: Greg Martin, Redpoint Ventures, Los Angeles
WHO HE IS: Martin handles communications and digital media investments for the venture firm, which has recently scored with portfolio companies like MySpace and Topspin.
WHAT HE WANTS: Software that makes better product recommendations to online shoppers.
WHY IT’S SMART: Amazon may have been the pioneer in so-called collaborative filtering — matching online customers with products they’d be likely to buy — but by no means has it mastered the discipline. The percentage of buyers who make recommended purchases online is abysmal. “It’s about 3 percent for major Web retailers, and for most other merchants it’s lower than that,” Martin says. Software that can better sort and sift customer data and increase the conversion rates by just a percentage point or two, he says, would generate a healthy business. Beyond Amazon, after all, thousands of online merchants still don’t have access to such tools. “There’s a lot of information out there that’s being ignored,” Martin says.
WHAT HE WANTS FROM YOU: A group of no more than 10 people to tinker with and refine the algorithms to make online purchase suggestions more efficient. Says Martin, “I’d want to see the technology working, with a few customers onboard.” The next phase if all goes well? Developing algorithms for websites to serve up more relevant ads.
SEND YOUR PLAN TO: gmartin@redpoint.com

The reason that Amazon has built a somewhat successful recommendation engine is because they have a database of purchasing data that is both CROSS-CATEGORY and LONGITUDINALLY significant (statistically) to run collaborative filtering algorithms (either association rules or clustering algorithms) which mines the data to discover bundling opportunities. Most e-tailers are vertically focused and does not have big enough sample of customers (not mentioning technical & knowlege limitations) to be able to build this engine. (BTW the urban legend in the KDD circles is that beer & diapers is the most commonly bundled super market product . . thus the need for cross-category data) The basic algorithms are not complicated, see here, the Amazon implementation is actually even simpler and technically not considered clustering from a data mining perspective. Given those limitations, and the explosion of SEM/SEO driven e-tailers, lots of money can be made in creating not just an upsell engine but an “upsell network.”

Now, I think Amazon should create a “product recommendation” based webservice (thus still keeping their data proprietary). But I’m not sure if its going to happen given that they rather sell the complete bundle of merchant/website services. The bigger question then is how Greg can find a suitable “replacement” for that database of purchasing history.

This is where the blogosphere comes in. Remembering Tom Foremski’s post that created a storm on monetization of of the blogospher? This is a another method for monetization the blogosphere focusing on product based blogs (gizmodo,engadget, apple secrets, etc etc).

The idea to use linquistic frame structures to mine texts and infer relationships between products actually came from Alan Abraham. I met Alan at Wharton and we spent some time just kicking around this particular idea as a basis/case study for me to learn more about text mining algorithms. Alan is one of the leaders in the field and has created an application which uses this technology to infer contractual relationships between users and “electronic communities.” The software , called CAMpace, “incorporates coverage-checking components for contract monitoring and contract/policy conflict detection.” The paper can be downloaded here. Instead of writing my typically convoluted explanations, I’m just going to quote Alan from one of our email threads.

The paper that I mentioned to you concentrates on interpreting natural language business contracts, but the tools are very generalizable to the applications you’re interested in (inferring up-sell and cross-sell opportunities). In particular, the paper mentions some linguistic databases (See Section 3 on page 2), which can be used to identify words/tokens (like the word “prefer”) that function as comparatives in English and the linguistic slot frames that these words possess. You can then pull down web-pages (e.g. from magazines, newspapers, and other web-pages), parse sentences (Like “I prefer the Compaq US252 to the IBM ThinkPad T60″) looking for the above-mentioned comparatives (e.g. “prefer … to …”), and then pull out role-players (to populate the above-mentioned slots) from those sentences to dynamically populate the list of individual complementary and competitive products. e.g. the slots/linguistic-frame structure for “prefer”is as follows: “[person] prefers [productA] to [productB]” (where the items in square brackets [] are the slots/frames). You can, with some accuracy (e.g. 60%), pull out productA and productB from this, and associate them as competitor prodcuts.

My rambling stream of conscious response back is here

I thought about this all night. . . and came up with something I think we can commercialize. . .are you familiar with the UCCnet initiative? its a database of UPC codes, product descriptions, manufactuers etc. . . its an retail industry initiative. Anyways, if we marry UCCnet database + a web crawler + natural language database + some language processing engine and use it to create a database of “relationships” we can essentially map out all the relationships between all retail products (replacement, upgrade, complementary, accessory, upsell, crossell etc) we can than create a webservice that allows large e-tailers to dynamically do recommendations (ala Amazon) . . . PLUS. . . even cooler. . .we can use a google Adwords business model .. . .smaller e-tailers (yahoo stores) can participate in the “platform/marketplace” and cross link their products with each other . . . using ad serving contextual technology , we can actually serve products rather than text ads based on products viewed on the page . . .. (we also make this totally selfserve like adwords) example.. .Zappos.com sells shoes. . . if they join, they can cross sell products from eBags. . . . and vice versa. . . we take a cut of any successfull cross sell and share it with either eBags or Zappos. . .tell me if I’m nuts. . . do you think the technology exists to do this?

Anyways, the thread goes on for much much longer. So why am I sharing this? Well, call it pitch to Greg if you well (but I’m not naive enough to believe Greg will openly share his best ideas ). But more so, I think this is an social experiment in changing the VC-entreprenuer dynamics (ala Matt Marshalls’ thoughts on transformation in VC-land). If a VC can openly solicit ideas, why cant entrepeneur respond openly as well. If open source can free society from the shackles of “intellectual property,” why cant an “open business” do the same? If the spirit of co-production and peer-participation can create softwares, communities, websites, why cant companies be built without delineations on foundership, employeeship, customership, or even ownership. Who knows? . . . its getting late and I’m talking as if I’m high, I better stop before I hurt myself.

As many of of you guys know I’m entirely obsessed with Ajax as well as entirely not qualified to talk much about it. . .so I’m going to rely on linking to other people’s posts on this one. . .

Moving Beyond the Basics: Scott Isaacs on AJAX Design Patterns

Whats interesting in the above post is Microsoft’s attempt to take the “J” out of Ajax by actively participating in the dialog and contributing to design pattern creation process. Certainly somewhat self-motivated but not at all evil. (BTW what happen to MSFT people calling it ATLAS instead of Ajax? . . . is that dead now?)

Slow postings last week mainly because I was on a business trip in Phoenix as part of the US Postal Service and eBay small business tour. Spent most of my time teaching “the web” in general and eBay in particular to whoever happened to come to the seminars. Whether it was because the location (Phoenix) or the time (weekdays) most of the people that came to the seminar was of the over 50 retired crowd.

I should not have been surprised, however, given that most of the analyst reports I’ve come across forecast that the fastest growing segment of the internet population is the “over 50″ population given the aging of the baby boomer crowd and the stage of the internet diffusion curve we are on. Looking at the increasing complexity of the web 2.0 experience (think RSS), I am certainly becoming concerned that as we chase after the latest and the greatest features and services for the early adoptor crowd a huge segment of the overall population might be left behind.

Some of the very basic Internet functionalities that we take for granted are not very intuitive nor very useful for the novice users. I can certainly see this as a variation of the Innovator’s Dilemma creating opportunities for companies that are willing to focus their energy on usability rather than “innovation for innovation sake.” In many ways, isnt this the Apple formula? There were plenty of MP3 players that came along before iPod, but Apple is now dominating the industry not in a small part because instead of focusing on OPENESS (a key part of the web 2.0 meme) it chose to focus on usability foremost.

Certainly openness is a noble goal but many times usability requires companies to sacrifice openess to create an integrated solution (itunes + ipod), at least initially. As technology improves and integration standardizes, openess can and will become an key lever for increasing usability of a product or service. But in the early part of the technology life cycle, too much complexity exists in implementating an open solution. (certainly the recent brohaha over RSS is an example, see Bill Burnham, Fred Wilson) As much as Microsoft is getting flak (see here and here) for its RSS strategy, I understand where it is coming from.

For many companies in the latter part of the adoption curve (such as Microsoft, Apple, and eBay), creating solutions suitable for the “main street” out of the latest and the coolest technologies is not only good customer centric business practices its actually a defensible strategy for building barriers to entry. Not every company is Google (or a startup), and not every company should compete on “pure innovation.” Its about picking the right activity systems and making sure those activities (user centric design?) are what your target segment desires.

For those who grew up on the Internet, like me, the “other side of the web” is ironically our brave new world.

In many ways, reading between the lines of venture investment termsheets allow us a tiny window into the life cycle of a startup. In these termsheets, VC’s tried to anticipate all that could happen (financially) to a start up from down rounds, mergers, IPO’s, asset sales, founder complications, to future conflicts of interests. Its as if the term sheet was borne of thousands of man hours of scenerio planning to account for all things that could happen and to protect the VC’s from negative outcomes (read losing money). Of course, by just reading them, it is hard to extrapolate the various scenerios which VC’s are thinking of.

In the past year though, no one has done more to shed light into these issues than the blog conversations between Tom Evslin, Fred Wilson, and Brad Feld . The latest between Brad and Tom on founder vesting should strike a nerve for all entrepenuer, especially the younger ones without the track record or leverage when negotiating.

The title of this post is certainly a little facetious . Most entrepeneurs do not lose blood and not too often tears (the drama involved is rarely for the weak of stomach and sensitive type). But certainly a few grey hairs, dark circles, and ulcers later, I’ve come to conclusion that money does trump the many things entrepeneurs bring to the table. We get common they get preferred. They get participating we get non. They get liquidation preferrences, we get nice hand shakes. (more from me here on liquidation preferences)The list goes on and on. (BTW I just thought of another inequity, why is the employee pool allocated pre-investment rather than post? hmm . . this deserves another post maybe by Mr. Daley who is an expert on this topic )

When it comes to founder vesting, this is where the line must be drawn and the MBA take out their notes from negotiations class and get some ROI from their education. The “standard” terms Brad talks about is not standard. . .

Under the standard terms which Brad describes, founders’ stock and options vest over a period of four years. So, if a founder leaves before two years are up, only one-quarter of her stock and/or options are vested. The value of the remaining three-quarters is essentially reallocated among all the remaining stockholders.

Its not standard not because its not common but that its not standard because WE as sellers of equity cant let it become a standard. Once it does, the value of founder equity has no where else to go but down. At the very least founders vesting should be pro-rata based on time. 2 year service time with 4 year vesting schedule should equate 1/2 of share vested. There is no other morally justifiable way to talk about this. Otherwise, this makes the whole concept of “pre-money” valuation even more of a farce than it is now. With all the financial instruments VC’s embeds into a termsheet, the pre-money valuation is much much much lower than the face value. (dont get charmed by a high pre-money valuation)

I understand the concept of founder vesting and is not against it in many circumstances. Many times its for the entrepreneur’s own protection. For example, a group of 3 founder starts a company. If one decides to leave 6 month into the venture to start something else, he/she obviously does not deserve to have the same equity share as the rest and some mechanism needs to be set during incorporation to put a vesting schedule to all founders to prevent the above situation. Even more common, 3 founders works partime after work to start a company. 2 decides to quit their job to commit fulltime. The 3rd stays at his old job. The 3rd does not deserves the same amount of equity than the 2 who are taking much bigger risks. A vesting schedule solves/attempts to solve these issues somewhat and create a fair mutual understanding BEFORE the issue surfaces. . . this not only prevents conflict but might also save a startup.

That said, I’m pretty dead against “cliffs” for founders, especially for companies over 1 year old that have started hiring employees. Think of it this way. If series C VC’s asks series B VC’s to vest and/or cliff their equity stake when round C is raised, all hell will break lose. So why as someone who “bought” their series “pre-A” shares through “blood, sweat, tears” should agree to the same terms VC’s themselves would not agree to? Well, its cause Money is Worth More Than Sweat, Blood & Tears. Cliffing is just adding injury to insult.

Given the reality of the situation, this is what I recommend entrepreneurs do. Start vesting the moment the “product” is being designed/scoped. The biz plan, biz model, powerpoint are all nice and great but its not a real business, its a project. But when the product is being realized, you’ve got something that the VC’s want and cant take away. So 9 month after product design/development you raised your seed, ask for vesting to start 9 month ago. Most VC’s are so high level, they can copy your biz model/plan but they cannot reproduce your PRD’s unless they find another entrepreneur, and by that time, they might as well invest in you. And fight off the cliff, its simply not fair.

Also remember this. When the VC’s wants to hire a more seasoned executive to run the company, they are looking for ways they dont have to pay this guy equity out of their own pocket (ie dilution). The quickest and most common way to not pay is to get rid of the founder, so in effect his or her equity goes to this new executive. Ths is a fact of life. VC’s are baking this into their plan the moment they invest in your venture - when they are thinking of all the senior executive they want/need to hire, in the back of their head they are already trying to figure out how many are going to be paid by kicking out the founders and how many are going to be paid through colletive dillution (and when too).

When ventures are not going well, VC makes money in 2 ways. 1) adding some value and help the company grow and 2) get more % of the company, ideally free. Every VC will try 1, and keep 2 as an option of last resort. (read about carveouts, a related topic, here). VC’s are financiers first and foremost. This is how financiers make money.

I spent part of last week trolling the SES (Search Engine Strategies) conference. Out of the few hundred companies in the convention floor, I would say 80% of the companies there are SEM and SEO related. About half way through the show, Joe Krause’ ultra popular post (which Ken Norton introduced me to) on It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur hit me. Specifically this passage.

SEM changes everything
Ten years ago to reach the market, we had to do expensive distribution deals. We advertised on television and radio and print. We spent a crap-load of money. There’s an old adage in television advertising “I know half my money is wasted. Trouble is, I don’t know what half”. That was us.

It’s an obvious statement to say that search engine marketing changes everything. But the real revolution is the ability to affordably reach small markets. You can know what works and what doesn’t. And, search not only allows niche marketing, it’s global popularity allows mass marketing as well (if you can buy enough keywords).

SEM not only changes the cost equation as Joe had mentioned, the bigger impact of SEM, I think, is that it changes the accessibility of entrepreneurship.

Before SEM came along, entrepreneurs were born rainmakers who wheels and deals their way to venture funding, partnership, and strategic investments. They spent their time in the Valley giving speeches, “evangelizing” their vision, and networking from dust till dawn. In many ways, those with the largest rolodexes were the most successful and most desired. It’s a rare combination of type-A’s and extreme extroverts that became entrepreneurs. Furthermore, if you don’t speak the “language” of the Valley, you are pretty much dead in the water as far as getting past the first meeting.

Given the constraints of the right type of personality, geographic location, cultural understanding and network; there were very few people who could fit that criteria and launch successful companies.

Well, SEM changed all that. Entrepreneurs from all over the world could build a website, cheaply acquire customers, and build a solid business without all that extraneous stuff. (given the right type of web business of-course) They could be anywhere, know almost no body and drive traffic to their business. All they have to learn is how to buy clicks, signup for or launch affiliate programs, and optimize their website for natural search – and all that information can be learned on the web.

In many ways, because business models have somewhat stabilized (PPC, PPA, PPI) in the internet world, marketing & business development has become standardized too - allowing partnership contracts that used to take weeks if not months of negotiation to complete into one click of a self-service “user agreement.”

After finally getting traction, receiving the attention of VC’s and structuring more complex partnerships becomes much easier. Given leverage and traction (ie money to pay for things & customers other people wants to get their hands on too), entrepreneurs can take their time up the learning curve of becoming that “uber” entrepreneur.

Today, from the chair of their desk, entrepreneur can not only launch businesses cheaply but do it in such as way as to circumvent some of the cultural biases of the “Valley” and elsewhere. It’s the ultimate democratizing of what used to be an exclusive profession. Ironically, the Internet, and the Internet entrepreneurs who built industry disrupting businesses, have finally turned on themselves after lowering the barrier of entry, increasing competition, and revolutionalizing many brick & mortar industries . . . .

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BTW, other interesting posts on similar topics include Jeff Clavier’s The Era of Disposable Startups, Entrepreneurs, angels, and the cost of launch(especially the comments section), Battelle’s story of SEM & Overture, and It’s a great time to be an investor.