The anti-portfolio

Everybody has a portfolio nowadays. With the surge in liquidity over the past 5 years from ultra-low interest rates, equity markets have been doing very very well, worldwide. And the common man with his 200% appreciated portfolio feels like a BSD.

As Mark Cuban said so endearingly -
"I swear people are more protective of their stocks than they are of family members. You can call a guy's wife fat, but if you tell him that TASR is overvalued, watch out. Every ounce of venom comes out."

So, it is a refreshing change to see a well-known venture capital firm come up with an "anti-portfolio" - the startups which they refused to invest in, and which became stupendously successful. As Bessemer Venture Partners explains -
"Whatever the reason, we would like to honor these companies -- our "anti-portfolio" -- whose phenomenal success inspires us in our ongoing endeavors to build growing businesses. Or, to put it another way: if we had invested in any of these companies, we might not still be working."

Overall, a gentle and humble way to remind us that we are human, imperfect and each of us have our own failings. So please keep those feet planted firmly on the ground...

Check out Bessemer's anti-portfolio here.

The problem with Geni

Geni is a social networking application for genealogy. (From Wikipedia) Genealogy "is the study and tracing of family pedigrees. This involves the collection of the names of relatives, both living and deceased, and establishing the relationships among them based on primary, secondary and/or circumstantial evidence or documentation, thus building up a cohesive family tree".

Specifically, Geni allows you to start filling in your family tree. You can add relatives with their email ID's, and emails are fired off to ask them to join Geni. Once they join, they add more info about themselves, start filling in their relations, and so on, and in some time you have a map of your extended family with all the information that the family members have chosen to disclose.

Charles River Ventures has invested US$ 10 million in Geni, valuing the company at US$100 mill. But I have my doubts about the viability of this application. These views are also posted as comments in a VentureWoods discussion on Geni.

On the positive side, Geni is a very slick application. You can easily draw up a family tree, and makes it very easy to invite other family members to share their info and start adding relations they know.

But the service has 2 major shortcomings -
The "Getting Laid" feature is not there
The single most important feature that a social networking app should have is that it should help the user to get laid. Even if that doesn't happen, the user should think that it will increase the chances of him/her getting laid.

Thats it. This is the "critical path" feature. If directly (Orkut, Facebook, Myspace) or indirectly (LinkedIn: Better job --> more money --> better potential) this feature is not there, then users won't stick around 1-2 hours a day writing scrap entries, exploring photos and seeing profiles of friends of your friends, and adding more and more unique stuff about themselves to their profiles.

Geni cannot help users get laid. If that happens, it would probably be illegal :-).

Relevance of the application in markets outside the US
Geni applications will be relevant for India only 10-15 years down the line. It makes sense in the US where you completely grow up in nuclear families with very little contact with your grandparents, cousins etc. However, in India, even though many of us would have grown up in a nuclear family in a city, we had very close relationships with grandparents, cousins and other members of the extended family. So the usefulness of “discovering” your relations is not there. Even considering only the US market, I would think a typical user would use his application obsessively for a week or two. After that you start getting irritated with requests from your relatives and stop hanging around.

The courage to startup at 41, and musings about the Singapore VC scene

I have been following a blog called "ADroolingStory" for the past few months. Actually came upon the blog from a comment at one of the innumerable India-VC discussion sites.

"ADroolingStory" is a very (very) short startup chronicle by Vaasu Gavarasana who is in the process of doing his own pure-play dotcom. What is interesting about this is that Vaasu holds a very senior position in a (major) firm. And he is 41. I salute the guts of somebody willing to drop all he has achieved so far, take a risk and go all out for it. And that too in Singapore!

The funny thing about Singapore is that it is very easy to setup a company. But very very very difficult to get any venture funding. The venture investors are very conservative, and would typically want a company to show positive cashflows before investing. Aree babba, why do I need you people then if I have positive cash flow?... It is mostly due to the profile of the venture investing community in here. Most VC funds here are corporate arms of companies like Singapore Technologies, or divisions of government entities like the EDB (Economic Devpt. Board). These VC divisions are run by people who are climbing a career ladder in the firm who do not want to create ANY loss by taking risks.

But the good thing for pure-internet startups is that you can bootstrap the venture a great deal without any funding. Open source software has wiped away the software costs, and hardware for running a 99% uptime operation is very cheap (Costs go up exponentially for more uptime and storage stability). You will typically need venture funding only if you are growing too fast and need to ramp up your hardware pretty massively. But then the VC's will be beating a path to your door.

So here's wishing all the best to Vaasu and his partners. Hope they keep everybody updated on their success.