One of my first posts was about trust in the digital world. Check out this video about image manipulation. My wife’s reaction (she’s a high school teacher) was that every teenage girl should see this video. My reaction is that everyone should see this video. We are all inclined to believe too much of what we read. Aren’t we instinctively wired to believe what we see? Are we already living in the Matrix?
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Is there a Twitter feature available that allows readers to provide feedback on a Tweet’s uniqueness? I like following somewhat obscure folks but also some of the ‘rockstar’ users.
I would think it would be valuable feedback to know how the audience rates the uniqueness of your tweets. Knowing that could result in more unique tweets and not just tweets linking to a WSJ article I already read.
Won’t uniqueness drive long-term brands on Twitter?
While retweeting is a proxy for this, I might genuinely appreciate some tweet without wanting to retweet and further pollute my followers?
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Many of our investments at Chrysalis focus on information, how it is accumulated and how it can be used. We value businesses that organize information and create personalized, interactive and connected information products and services that are valuable to businesses or individuals.
The information value chain has been a historically rich vein for venture investing and is one in which Chrysalis has a strong 17-year track record of monetizing information. Expressions of this approach have included investments in the following companies:
To complement our investment team, we have assembled a deeply experienced team of venture partners and entrepreneurs-in-residence (EIRs) to provide Chrysalis unique insight into how data is and can be used to better understand, target and sell potential customers.
Chrysalis co-founder Doug Cobb, who recently returned to Chrysalis as an EIR, became CEO of Appriss , a Chrysalis portfolio company, in 2000. Appriss aggregates arrest record information from county jails across the country and uses that information to provide innovative software-based services that help local, state and federal criminal justice agencies serve and protect their citizens. Assembling valuable information and efficiently targeting a customer base will continue to be core to many of Chrysalis’ technology investments.
Doug started his first company, the Cobb Group, at the dawn of the personal computer age to provide consumer guidance about how to use first-generation consumer software. The Cobb Group aggregated and edited inexpensive content which was packaged in a newsletter and sold via a subscription to consumers for both personal and professional use. Doug’s three decades of experience with different customer acquisition and data aggregation models make him a unique and invaluable resource.
As our new Venture Partner based in Houston, Alan Ying has brought tremendous expertise to Chrysalis since joining the team in May 2010. Having successfully built and sold a healthcare IT company to Thomson Reuters, where he stayed as CTO for several years, Alan understands how the personalization of data is transforming medicine and the strategies of large information services providers.
Janesse (Jan) Thaw Bruce , who joined Chrysalis as a Boston-based EIR in March 2010, helps Chrysalis understand the opportunities created as established media companies wrestle with the digital transition of their business. Most recently Jan was Managing Director at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, where she ran body+soul magazine, the category leader in wellness and sustainability, and was responsible for the launch of WholeLiving.com, a site leveraging mind, body, spirit, wellness and “green” subject matter.
Based in Atlanta, Greg Foster joined Chrysalis as an EIR in May 2010, bringing a diverse entrepreneurial and executive background in media and technology. Greg was founder and CEO of Southern Direct, an e-commerce platform provider for cable networks, which he sold to Turner Broadcasting. At Turner, he oversaw M&A and investment opportunities for all of Turner’s brands including CNN, TNT, TBS, TCM, Cartoon Network, TruTV and Adult Swim. Greg has a deep understanding of how large media companies are using technology solutions to better organize and monetize content through a variety of marketing strategies.
Collectively, this assemblage of talent provides Chrysalis with experience based insight into how to “connect the dots” and help our entrepreneurs and their customers make better decisions in a world awash in information.
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News today on Google and Verizon’s net neutrality proposal which in Verizon’s case is best interpreted as “do as I say, not as I do.”
Net Neutrality is good for all participants, even the network owners. The network owners are in the network business. As content demands increase, consumer demands for better networks will increase. Despite infatuations with content, the network owners don’t make that much money from content delivery, particularly any network owners outside the top 5 largest companies. Network owners are positioned to make enormous profit from delivering consumers better network services. (I imagine if video content delivery were such a great business, Comcast would not have purchased NBC. Good content will demand a premium across all networks. That drove the purchase.)
Positioned creatively and wisely, the same network services like bandwidth management, which network operators are employing today without much consumer awareness, can be sold like applications to consumers at an application like 90% gross margin.
As the pipes fill with video content, consumers are going to want the network “managed” so that voice traffic is prioritized and the video streams managed around that voice traffic with buffering. Especially if the government mandates the network owner cannot manage the traffic, the owner will have no choice but to offer it to the consumer as a service. Once the consumer demands it, the network owner will have to manage that content throughout the network.
The network owner will pretty much end up in the same place from a network management framework, will deliver a high margin business the consumers wants, and avoid the monopolistic bullying which is the first and sometimes last instinct in the industry.
In Verizon’s case, they own a great network. The only way to invite other companies to duplicate their network build is to try to restrict consumer choice. Verizon should learn from the cable operators whose miserliness about network build created the market opportunity in which Dish and DirecTV jumped with both feet.
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Here is a link to the Netflix business plan. http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/03/netflix-business/
For entrepreneurs, a pretty good pitch deck model. The deck clearly communicates a big opportunity in clear, easily understood language.
In my home, I have a bunch of different gaming systems which give me Netflix. I still find the streaming library limited and the search interface clunky. My better half, who is the main user, still prefers to get the DVD’s via mail.
For better search, Chrysalis has a portfolio company, Digitalsmiths, that can help. Improved search is all about better information and the utility of that information to improve the user experience.
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I like to meet entrepreneurs who understand, even if loaded with unproven assumptions in their business plan, customer acquisition costs.
In a business environment with
1. no/low distribution costs
2. scaleable variable costs due to offshoring, virtualization, cloud computing and
3. mushrooming possibilities for connecting with potential customers (telesales, e-mail, SEO, lead generation, social, etc.)
isn’t the success of business models driven by costs of content or product creation, costs of customer acquisition, and the cost of any services that often need to be packaged with the content or product?
I see a lot of business plans that focus on investment dollars needed to create content/product/technology, that are hopeful that services don’t need to be wrapped around them and thus have high gross margins, and ignore the economics of how customers are acquired.
A lot of businesses that eventually get funded get stuck because even though the product works, the cost of selling and marketing it is an order of magnitude greater than originally anticipated.
Raising this capital dilutes Founders and raises the bar the investment must clear to be “successful” from a venture perspective.
We are in an era where super capital efficient businesses can and will be created because they are built from the beginning to test and ultimately arrive at the highest ratio of customer profit to customer acquisition cost. I like entrepreneurs who are passionate about the company they are building but cognizant that the value created is dependent on this relationship.
More on this subject in future posts…
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