Martin Gordon's Blog

I was studying (read: Twittering) at Huntsman tonight when I overheard some guys talking about their up-and-coming social network (here's some advice: don't do it in public). After some quick searching, I discovered two blogs run by fellow Whartonites. Here's some link love (by the way, thanks to Kent Newsome for his!):

curiousgirl's playground
3000 Miles of Virtual Insanity
(and another one) Cool New Web

If you've been wondering what's been going on with this blog in the past few weeks, Hugh Macleod made a comic about it (it wasn't for me, but it may as well have been):

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Wharton, UPenn, University of Pennsylvania, blogs, link love, gapingvoid, Hugh Macleod, comic

As I continue discovering new ways to put off studying for my Venture Capital final that's tomorrow at 3, Wharton grad, Half.com founder, and venture capitalist, Josh Kopelman, has posted a link to the Blueprint Ventures' 2006 holiday card. It is available on YouTube as well. So while it won't help me learn how to value Participating Convertible Preferred Stock, the break-even valuation for a Series F investment, or what a real option really is, it does show me what I can look forward to if I do learn those things ;)

Technorati Tags: Venture Capital, FNCE 250, finance, VCFI, Andrew Metrick, Josh Kopelman, video, funny, VC, YouTube, holiday, school, Wharton, Penn, University of Pennsylvania, UPenn

We briefly discussed the Google/YouTube deal in two of my classes (MGMT 230: Entrepreneurship and FNCE 250: Venture Capital and the Finance of Innovation) this past week. In both classes, either I overheard or someone asked the professor, "What's YouTube?"

Now, I don't necessarily expect the average person walking down the street to know what YouTube is, but the people in my classes aren't particular average. For one, we're at the best undergrad business school in the country. Second of all, these are classes focused on entrepreneurship and VC, so I hope that the people in these classes have an interest in the subject. Yet there are some people in this very specific group who had no idea what YouTube is.

I'm still not sure if I've lost faith in my fellow classmates or gained faith in the power of the echo chamber.

Technorati Tags: Google, YouTube, GooTube, acquisition, M&A, entrepreneurship, venture capital, VC, Wharton, Penn, UPenn, University of Pennsylvania, echo chamber, blogosphere

Rumors has it that Facebook is on the block and looking to get $2B.

I just heard a Knowledge@Wharton podcast by my former professor and Supernova founder, Kevin Werbach, entitled, "What Makes An Online Community Tick?" featuring Craig Newmark of Craig's List, Julie Herendeen of Yahoo, and Bill Flitter of Pheedo.

Scoble and others are raving about Second Life. They're going as far as claiming its an OS.

Social networks are on everyone's minds these days. Can they last? I'm not too sure.

Amazon believes it had a sound business model. They make money by selling stuff. If people can find things more easily they are more likely to make a purchase. So Amazon released an API. Take the load off the company's shoulders and let others make Amazon better.

Google: same thing. AdWords is a solid business model. It helps everyone make money! Advertisers don't waste ads on people they can't reach; Google takes a bit off the top. All this is funded by people buying things from the ads they see. AdWords has an API. It's in advertisers' best interests for AdWords to be as good as possible. "Fine, do it yourself", says Google. Google provides an excellent service, and advertisers make it even better for themselves. Most of the products Google puts out has an API. They say, "we don't need you to come to our site to make money, we do just fine on other people's sites."

MMORPGs are a different kind of social network. They have some bonus activity attached that only makes the network stronger. Blizzard/Linden can and do charge for this value-added. They also allow scripting of the game. They let others make their software better, driving more people to pay for the service.

What about Facebook and MySpace? They have no APIs. The "software" is closed off to tinkerers for fear that an API could do away with the need to visit the site and feast our eyes upon lovely banner and click-thru ads. Pretty much anything I could imagine wanting from a Facebook API would bring me alternate ways of getting information available on the site, ways that are far away from ads. Tom Carden's brainstorm of uses for a MySpace API mostly deal with getting data off of the network in a different way. He wants podcasts, RSS feeds, etc, just like I do. And I'm sure many others do also.

So will a lack of an API drive Facebook and MySpace into the ground? Probably not. MySpace is already owned by News Corp and Facebook will get bought out any day now. But the lack of an API does signal that these networks are scared and that their revenue models may be a bit flimsy.

Technorati Tags: MySpace, Facebook, social network, Wharton, Knowledge@Wharton, Kevin Werbach, Supernova, podcast, Craig's List, Yahoo, Pheedo, WoW, World of Warcraft, Second Life, API, programming, development, web services, Amazon, Google

I recorded most of Venture Capitalist Ted Schlein's talk last Thursday here at Wharton. Mr. Schlein has been with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers since 1996, when he joined to manage their Java Fund. He spoke about his experiences in working for Symantec and his earlier experiences at various startups. He also talked about VC in Asia and the challenges VCs face in going over there.

The audio quality is markedly better than the Kevin Smith talk, partly because of better acoustics and because I was sitting a lot closer to him.

Direct link to file.

Technorati Tags: Wharton, UPenn, University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School, Ted Schlein, KPCB, Kleiner Perkins, business, business school, Penn, finance, venture capital, vc, speech, talk, audio

One of my biggest problems with my Wharton education is that a lot fo the stuff we're being taught is outdated. Our Marketing 101 and Management 101 classes are being taught based on models and frameworks developed 30+ years ago.

In either class, I have yet to hear the word "blog", yet blogging has been around for at least five years and doesn't show any signs of slowing down. Blogging has changed the way businesses should be run, yet the leaders of my generation will be running businesses the way we learned to in school and the way its been done for the past few years. You know that boss that'll fire you in 10 years for blogging? They're sitting next to me taking pages and pages of notes on the Nadler-Tushman Congruence Model and learning how to do "business as usual."

So do we get it or not? Dean Harker does, but its not apparent from the "front lines". As the leading undergraduate business school (and one of the top graduate B-schools), I'd have hoped we could do something a bit more cutting-edge than the usual research/paper/presentation deal we have been required to do in many of the core classes. For example, in Management 101, we are to research a company "with a problem", analyze it in the context of the frameworks of the class, and offer our recommendations. Imagine instead, we assembled a class-wide World of Warcraft guild (or for the less war-mongering among us, perhaps set up a Second Life business) and built our characters over the course of the semester. Over the course of the semester, we would have to do small writeups defending the contributions we made to our guild. Which one would teach us more about being leaders and managers in the real world? I can tell you that the former probably won't and Joi Ito can tell you that the latter probably is.

Technorati Tags: Wharton, Penn, UPenn, MMOGs, World of Warcraft, Joi Ito, Dean Harker, Management, Marketing, Web 2.0, leadership, gaming, Second Life, business school, MBA