3 Short Thoughts
A few random thoughts that aren’t full blogposts:
1) A while ago I wrote a post about the impact of the Occupy Wallstreet movement. I thought that although it might not end with specific legislation or immediate action to point to, Occupy’s impact might come in the form of a slight change in the collective conscious of our population…that perhaps everyone would shift 3 degrees left of where they were…After finishing the second book of the Hunger Games series this weekend, I began to wonder if the explosive penetration of this story through mainstream culture was not somehow attributable to this 3 degree shift…The paradigm of people vs. the capital certainly echoes the spirit of Occupy…why did a book that was written four years ago explode in the last 12 months…perhaps we as a population were just ready to absorb a story of the people’s rise against the establishment…(also didn’t hurt that big movie dollars got behind it…but I wouldn’t even be surprised if whoever was forecasting ROI on that production had an input in their model that said the population is empathetic to a left leaning story)
2) This morning I chilled out with one of the founders of General Catalyst who I’ve known for a long time. He was talking about the firms expansion west, the burgeoning ecosystem in NY, and the challenges with Boston’s startup ecosystem. None of this was news to me, having heard it many times before…but something happened a few minutes after leaving the office that crystallized a major difference btwn NY/SF and Boston…I was flipping through my Newsle and read of my friend Naimish’s whopping $8M financing to build his new company Gridco…I paused for a minute…wondering why such a mega-round hadn’t penetrated my twitter, etc…and then I realized where I was reading it…Boston Business Journal…and then I realized something else…that if you have news in Boston about your startup…the only real channels that I see stuff getting pushed to are Boston.com and the Boston Business Journal…Guess what…nobody outside of Boston reads those publications…One thing Boston is sorely missing is a strong relationship with national press channels…That’s a huge disadvantage at the consumer application layer. If you have news in NY or SF you can go to Techcrunch, AllthingsD, Business Insider, New York Times, etc. etc. etc…as a consumer facing company, building a brand and getting distribution are so closely tied to strong media relationships…and on that front, Boston seems to be hurting…If I were running a company in Boston, I’d be hanging out with journalists in NY and SF…too hard to build a brand through a platform like Boston.com. (no hate at all, I like what I read in both of those publications, it’s just not information that the rest of the market/country consumes).
3) Health is precious…I had dinner last night with a super thoughtful seed stage investor and the entire team of one of our shared portfolio companies in SF…Someone asked him if he’d ever return to operations as opposed to venture investing and his response was a very fast “no way”…when asked why, the first thing he cited was that it wasn’t healthy for him…I thought that was an interesting lens through which to look at career decisions…health is an input that doesn’t often weigh into professional planning (especially for younger folks)…I guess his was the type of insight you can only arrive at the hard way…with experience comes a more expansive outlook on professional planning I suppose…
Jordan Cooper's Blog: startups, venture capital, etc... 
Cool post. On point 1, dig into Votizen a little. On point 2, I have some funny stories about this…one was that I reached out to many in the Boston community to find a writer for this express purpose and to freelance for TC, but no leader in the space followed-up with me despite repeated attempts.
Semil Shah
April 18, 2012
it’s crazy re: boston thing…so strange
jordancooper
April 18, 2012