A few quick links today that you may find interesting:
MediaPost’s take on some recent news in the search engine space. Obviously Bing is getting some serious press; the demo video looks pretty cool. I personally don’t get the use case for WolframAlpha, but maybe I just haven’t played with it enough. I can’t imagine it is healthy for a single company to dominate the search market. I realize that data is very powerful in the search space, so there are to a certain extent some natural barriers to entry at scale, but can’t there be some alternative algorithms that also kick butt and return the best results quickly? If the average searcher is searching 4 times per search, then I can’t imagine that the war is won quite yet.
A former colleague of mine from Atlas Venture has joined a new venture capital fund here in the Boston area. Eric Hjerpe has joined Jo Tango at Kepha Partners, a $100 million fund. Eric is a great technology company executive and I really enjoyed working with him at Atlas. (In fact, by working with him I really realized my major shortcoming as a VC, my lack of operating experience. And I say that in a very positive way, I just realized from being around him that I had a long ways to go if I wanted to grow up to be a real VC.) If you can take his money and get him on your startups board you should!
Fred Destin, another partner I worked with at Atlas Venture, has just put up a great post on his blog on the subject of “ignorant founders do it better.” I love the tone of Fred’s post and the premise - the best founders to not assume that their understanding of their startup’s end market and customers are prefect. Only by questioning and testing everything, and by being hyper-responsive to market feedback, can a startup be successful. Great post; check it out.
Finally, this one is tweeted everywhere but I think it’s very well written. Brad Feld lists 8 tips for interacting with venture capitalists in Entrepreneur Magazine.
