Eric Wiesen's Ideas

"Republican lawmakers have become reflexive in rejecting every extended hand from the administration,..."

Mon, 13 May 2013 13:51:39 -0400

“Republican lawmakers have become reflexive in rejecting every extended hand from the administration, even if the ideas were ones that they themselves once welcomed. Under the circumstances, Mr. Obama would be best advised to stop making peace offerings. Only when the Republican Party feels public pressure to become a serious partner can the real work of governing begin.”

- Who Can Take Republicans Seriously on the Budget? - NYTimes.com

"These are the employees who could never keep a job in the private sector. I wouldn’t trust them to..."

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 09:56:38 -0400

“These are the employees who could never keep a job in the private sector. I wouldn’t trust them to walk my dog.”

- EXCLUSIVE: Former Newark TSA screener dishes on lax security at what may be America’s most unsafe airport - NYPOST.com

Snow Poem

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 09:36:03 -0500

Snow, Aldo

by Kate DiCamillo

Once, I was in New York,
in Central Park, and I saw
an old man in a black overcoat walking
a black dog. This was springtime
and the trees were still
bare and the sky was
gray and low and it began, suddenly,
to snow:
big fat flakes
that twirled and landed on the
black of the man’s overcoat and
the black dog’s fur. The dog
lifted his face and stared
up at the sky. The man looked
up, too. “Snow, Aldo,” he said to the dog,
“snow.” And he laughed.
The dog looked
at him and wagged his tail.

If I was in charge of making
snow globes, this is what I would put inside:
the old man in the black overcoat,
the black dog,
two friends with their faces turned up to the sky
as if they were receiving a blessing,
as if they were being blessed together
by something
as simple as snow
in March.

"Ryan’s claims weren’t even arguably true. You simply can’t say the president hasn’t released a..."

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 12:05:26 -0400

“Ryan’s claims weren’t even arguably true. You simply can’t say the president hasn’t released a deficit reduction plan. The plan is right here. You simply can’t say the president broke his promise to keep your GM plant open. The decision to close the plant was made before he entered office — and, by the way, the guy at the top of your ticket opposed the auto bailout. You simply can’t argue that the Affordable Care Act was a government takeover of the health-care system. My doctor still works for Kaiser Permanente, a private company that the government does not own. You simply can’t say that Obama, who was willing to follow historical precedent and sign a clean debt ceiling increase, caused the S&P downgrade, when S&P clearly said it was due to congressional gridlock and even wrote that it was partly due to the GOP’s dogmatic position on taxes.”

- A not-very-truthful speech in a not-very-truthful campaign

"On the other hand, to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an..."

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 11:32:58 -0400

“

On the other hand, to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech. On this measure, while it was Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold.

The good news is that the Romney-Ryan campaign has likely created dozens of new jobs among the legions of additional fact checkers that media outlets are rushing to hire to sift through the mountain of cow dung that flowed from Ryan’s mouth. Said fact checkers have already condemned certain arguments that Ryan still irresponsibly repeated.

Fact: While Ryan tried to pin the downgrade of the United States’ credit rating on spending under President Obama, the credit rating was actually downgraded because Republicans threatened not to raise the debt ceiling.

Fact: While Ryan blamed President Obama for the shut down of a GM plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, the plant was actually closed under President George W. Bush. Ryan actually asked for federal spending to save the plant, while Romney has criticized the auto industry bailout that President Obama ultimately enacted to prevent other plants from closing.

Fact: Though Ryan insisted that President Obama wants to give all the credit for private sector success to government, that isn’t what the president said. Period. Fact: Though Paul Ryan accused President Obama of taking $716 billion out of Medicare, the fact is that that amount was savings in Medicare reimbursement rates (which, incidentally, save Medicare recipients out-of-pocket costs, too) and Ryan himself embraced these savings in his budget plan.

Elections should be about competing based on your record in the past and your vision for the future, not competing to see who can get away with the most lies and distortions without voters noticing or bother to care. Both parties should hold themselves to that standard. Republicans should be ashamed that there was even one misrepresentation in Ryan’s speech but sadly, there were many.

”

- Paul Ryan’s speech in 3 words | !!!Fox News!!!

"The startups that really get hosed are going to be the ones that have easy money built into the..."

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 07:55:21 -0400

“The startups that really get hosed are going to be the ones that have easy money built into the structure of their company: the ones that raise a lot on easy terms, and are then led thereby to spend a lot, and to pay little attention to profitability. That kind of startup gets destroyed when markets tighten up. So don’t be that startup. If you’ve raised a lot, don’t spend it; not merely for the obvious reason that you’ll run out faster, but because it will turn you into the wrong sort of company to thrive in bad times.”

- Paul Graham’s Letter to YC Companies | Hacker News

"in 2006, for example, the 25 highest-paid hedge fund managers in America earned $14bn, three times..."

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 06:48:05 -0400

“in 2006, for example, the 25 highest-paid hedge fund managers in America earned $14bn, three times the combined salaries of New York City’s 80,000 school teachers.”

- Paul Krugman: ‘I’m sick of being Cassandra. I’d like to win for once’ | Business | The Guardian

"How awesome is this treasure trove of emails, documents, files et. al placed online by the NY Fed?..."

Wed, 02 May 2012 07:48:00 -0400

“How awesome is this treasure trove of emails, documents, files et. al placed online by the NY Fed? Some of the emails between Lehman execs are laughable — naive, silly, hubristic, childish. But my favorite piece simply has to be the Morgan Stanley research report from June 30 2008 “Overweight Rating” on Lehman Brothers — “Bruised, Not Broken, Poised for Profitability“. 60 days later, Lehman Brothers filed what was thent he largest bankruptcy in the United States. This is (literally) what the category “Really Really Bad Call” was invented for. Who was the author of this steaming piece of shit, and where is he today? Why, he is Patrick Pinschmidt, and he is a Senior Policy Advisor at U.S. Treasury Department! (You could not make up stuff this un-fucking-believable even if you tried). Total awesomeness!”

- The Lehman Bankruptcy Docs (Buy LEH!) | The Big Picture

"More than 1 million Americans who have taken out mortgages in the past two years now owe more on..."

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 07:52:23 -0400

“More than 1 million Americans who have taken out mortgages in the past two years now owe more on their loans than their homes are worth, and Federal Housing Administration loans that require only a tiny down payment are partly to blame.”

- U.S. house price declines dragging more homeowners under water | Mortgages | Personal Finance | Financial Post

Don’t try to catch a falling knife.

"to make his numbers work Mr. Ryan would, by 2022, have to close enough loopholes to yield an extra..."

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 06:26:02 -0400

“to make his numbers work Mr. Ryan would, by 2022, have to close enough loopholes to yield an extra $700 billion in revenue every year. That’s a lot of money, even in an economy as big as ours. So which specific loopholes has Mr. Ryan, who issued a 98-page manifesto on behalf of his budget, said he would close? None. Not one. He has, however, categorically ruled out any move to close the major loophole that benefits the rich, namely the ultra-low tax rates on income from capital. (That’s the loophole that lets Mitt Romney pay only 14 percent of his income in taxes, a lower tax rate than that faced by many middle-class families.)”

- Pink Slime Economics - NYTimes.com

I Should Write More Often

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 20:40:00 -0400

I should write more often. I like doing it. It helps me crystalize my thoughts both about the venture and startup industry and the subject matter that permeates each work day. When I first started at RRE one of the insights I had (now pretty obvious) was that effective communication with a readership was actually a critically important bits of connective tissue that have been developed in connection with the opening up of the venture capital industry. Long before I invested for a living I was reading David Hornik’s blog and Bill Gurley’s, eventually I added Fred’s and Brad’s. When I was an entrepreneur and later while I was in business school these guys taught me the venture industry even though I’d never met most of them.

Yet as important as the conveyance of information is (not to assert that I have a ton of information that can’t be easily accessed through other sources, including the individuals listed above), I think there’s an even more important reason to keep writing and letting people know what one is thinking. Ours has become a rapid-paced and ultra-competitive business. It wasn’t always so. In some prior eras the basic modality of startup finance involved lengthy courtship periods between startups and investors and often by the time a financing is consummated there’d be a strong relationship in place. In today’s world of “looks neat, here’s a check”, a method that is widely lauded in some corners of the ecosystem, this simply isn’t happening.

Writing and sharing thoughts is more than just information – it’s a durable and long-standing expression of values that can be quickly accessed and assessed. If I meet a company and the process is moving swiftly, it’s of enormous help if both the founder(s) and I maintain a creative, substantive and active written presence on the web. Being able to see how someone thinks about events, trends, new products and ideas – all of that enables a richer and more nuanced view than what you can get in a few pitch-oriented meetings. If a founder is pitching me I know I’m getting very particular facet of that person. Similarly if a financing is competitive the founder knows he’s getting a facet of me. There are a lot of reasons for founders and investors to choose one another – I know that shared values and vision and core personality grain are all important reasons why I choose to back the founders I work with and why they chose me.

Over the past 30 days I’ve watched my wife go through a 30-day “challenge” of writing something public every day (here). Now – she’s a much better writer than I am, but it has inspired me to recommit to sharing such thoughts as I have with those who may choose to read them and hopefully share their thoughts back. There’s so much amazing stuff going on right now. The whole ecosystem (startups, the internet, NYC, down to my little family of three) is in the crucible. There is no shortage of things for us to talk about.

(via The most detailed map of the Game of Thrones world yet)

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 09:28:54 -0400

(via The most detailed map of the Game of Thrones world yet)

"Anyone who wants to know what the Occupy Wall Street protests are all about need only look at the..."

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 07:12:51 -0400

“Anyone who wants to know what the Occupy Wall Street protests are all about need only look at the way Bank of America does business. It comes down to this: These guys are some of the very biggest assholes on Earth. They lie, cheat and steal as reflexively as addicts, they laugh at people who are suffering and don’t have money, they pay themselves huge salaries with money stolen from old people and taxpayers – and on top of it all, they completely suck at banking. And yet the state won’t let them go out of business, no matter how much they deserve it, and it won’t slap them in jail, no matter what crimes they commit. That makes them not bankers or capitalists, but a class of person that was never supposed to exist in America: royalty.”

- Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail | Politics News | Rolling Stone

"The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was formed to ensure America’s freedom to travel...."

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 07:11:44 -0400

“The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was formed to ensure America’s freedom to travel. Instead, they have made air travel the most difficult means of mass transit in the United States, at the same time failing to make air travel any more secure.”

- gmancasefile: TSA: Fail

Good and worth reading the whole thing.

The iPad is the First Screen

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 07:06:24 -0500

Yesterday a couple of my colleagues and I met with a senior executive at one of the world’s biggest media companies to talk about what we’re seeing in the world and a few of our companies. As part of the general level setting she asked how we were seeing the development of the “second screen” as a media consumption device. And after pausing for a beat to make sure the answer wasn’t going to be obnoxious, I responded that of course we think it’s a hugely important media consumption device – that television has been important for decades and will continue to be important.

The release of the new iPad yesterday is a good opportunity to pause and pull back and reconsider how media is making its way into the living room (and into other rooms of the house). If you polled the average household in 1952, 1962, 1972, 1982 or 1992 what you’d have found is essentially the same thing – people got their media on a box with a CRT in it. The delivery mechanism shifted over time from OTA to cable or a dish, the picture got colorful, but for the most part over a 40 year period things didn’t change much. In 2002 you’d have found a few people with DVR’s and a small handful with HDTVs tuning what they could find over the air in 1080i or 720p. There were researchers and engineers building plasma displays but they weren’t commercialized. In 2002 people were still basically just “watching TV”.

Consider the evolution of television viewing over this past decade. The notion of buying a CRT box, bringing it home, plugging into a set top box and then coming home from work and just flipping around and watching programming that’s being shown at the time is almost unthinkably quaint, and not just to we in the tech community but to mainstream users.

DVR is ubiquitous
Most TVs are flat and display HD (many display 1080P)
VOD is widely deployed

But really, those are the incremental changes, not the big ones. People now watch services like Hulu on their non-television devices and consider that “watching TV”. We download content to our phones and watch when we’re on the move.

And when we sit in front of the big screen 10-15 feet away, we do with another device on our laps. And that’s the thought that went through my head as I was asked about the “second screen”. My media diet today still includes movies and the occasional television show (the new season of Game of Thrones starts in a few weeks…) but it also includes web content, social media destinations and games. And if I’m home and not at my desk, chances are it’s the iPad that delivers the majority of this to me, even if The Daily Show is playing (via DRV of course) on our bigger screen in the living room.

We’re less than two years into this experiment – the first generation iPad was released in April 2010. Much of the content delivery and infrastructure that will enable the transition to first screen-ness isn’t built yet, but this is happening incredibly quickly. The future vision of the big screen isn’t the multi-paneled screen showing nine programs at a time depicted in Back to the Future II, it’s each family member watching the programming they like on a screen they control. And that’s the first screen. The big, linear shared experience is the second screen.

The "Inflected Right"

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:35:23 -0500

You know how, like, pretty much everyone, like makes fun of teenage girls for like, always talking like this?

Have you noticed that people in tech do almost the exact same thing, but with a different linguistic crutch? Consider the following made-up exchange:

A: So you know, right, there’s no way that Google can catch us. They just don’t get product, right?

B: Yep! Think about Google Wave, right?

Over the past year or so I’ve noticed an extraordinary amount of “inflected right” popping up in the discussions among entrepreneurs, VC’s and other people in and around tech. People pepper their dialog with the word right, typically at the beginning or end of phrases. I’ve been in meetings where, like “um” with a person who struggles with articulation, it’s astonishingly common once you start listening for it. Pay attention during your next two or three conversations with people in tech who you don’t really know – I’ll bet at least one of them uses this crutch a few times and probably much more than that.

What’s the purpose of this? It’s essentially an “um” for tech. Valley girls (do they still have those?) started saying “like” instead of “um” – I have no idea why, really. But I think in tech the inflected right is a way to use the pauses inside of sentences as a way to sound self-confident (arrogant if you prefer), as if one is semi-implicitly coopting the listener into one’s point of view.

“Those guys are killing it, right?” – I assert that a company is doing well, and I assume that you agree with me and self-confirm with my inflected right. Now it is kind of difficult for you to disagree without it being awkward.

It’s clearly a relatively trivial quibble, but I think it actually foreshadows some of what’s happening in our ecosystem. Words matter and speech matters, and the inflected right is subtle evidence of groupthink and conclusory thinking. Also, it’s annoying.

Lastly, I know that I sometimes do it. So if you catch me using the inflected right, bust my chops for it. Because it’s annoying when I do it too.

How to Make an Introduction

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 06:52:53 -0500

It wouldn’t have occurred to me to write about how to make introductions, but I’m surprised at how many people get it wrong. The most common error is making a connection between two people when at least one of them doesn’t actually want to be connected.

VC’s tend to receive a lot of introductions and we are often asked to make introductions on behalf of portfolio CEO’s, people looking for jobs or just folks trying to expand their networks. We spend much of our time seeing new companies and meeting people, so our willingness and ability to make these connections is an important part of the value we are able to deliver. And on the flip side, being someone to whom inbound introductions flow is part of our competitive positioning relative to others in our business.

When I’m asked to make an introduction to someone I usually ask one threshold question – am I sure this introduction is welcome and will it deliver value to the person I’m being asked to hit up. In the majority of cases I actually don’t know in advance.

This is why the key best practice in making introductions is to ask the person on the other end whether the introduction is welcome and of interest or not.

If your friend is starting a company and asks for an intro to RRE, the best practice is to ping me or one of my colleagues and ask if it’s ok to make the introduction. This isn’t because we’re so important – it’s because if you’re someone we respect and you introduce us to a company and cc the founder, we’re going to take the meeting largely to avoid being rude to you and to your friend even if we aren’t that interested. If the company is outside of our interest areas, tangentially competitive with an existing investment or obviously not a fit for other reasons, you’ll have wasted not just our time but your friend the entrepreneur’s time as well.

VC’s should follow this rule too. I know that one of the frustrations that sometimes accompanies having VC board members is the random (and often frequent) introductions that come in over the transom. The VC is trying to be helpful by connecting a company to a high level person in a big company, a strong-looking candidate seeking a new gig or a high-placed investment banker. But VC’s should heed this warning – if you aren’t sure your portfolio CEO wants to talk to someone, ask them first, otherwise you’re wasting their time. In an era of text messages, twitter DM’s or good old-fashioned IM, pinging them to check first is a much lighter touch than an email intro that obligates them to reply.

There are exceptions to this rule of course. If I know a company is actively recruiting people for a role, it’s not necessary to take this intermediate step. And there are people who I trust enough that if something clears their filter I’ll take the introduction no questions asked. But that understanding is pretty explicit.

Bottom line – for both founders and investors our most precious resource is our time. If you want to do someone a favor by connecting them with someone who has asked for an introduction, do both parties the courtesy of taking the time to ensure that it’s a welcome introduction.

"The Economists’ statement opposing the Bush tax cuts was a statement signed by roughly 450..."

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 12:28:41 -0500

“

The Economists’ statement opposing the Bush tax cuts was a statement signed by roughly 450 economists, including ten of the twenty-four American Nobel Prize laureates alive at the time, in February 2003 who urged the U.S. President George W. Bush not to enact the 2003 tax cuts; seeking and sought to gather public support for the position. The statement was printed as a full-page ad in The New York Times and released to the public through the Economic Policy Institute. According to the statement, the 450 plus economists who signed the statement believe that the 2003 Bush tax cuts will increase inequality and the budget deficit, decreasing the ability of the U.S. government to fund essential services, while failing to produce economic growth.

In rebuttal, 250 plus economists who supported the tax plan wrote that the new plan would “create more employment, economic growth, and opportunities for all Americans.”

”

- Economists’ statement opposing the Bush tax cuts - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Well, I guess we know who won that bet.

(via rickwebb)

Add this to the long list of data points that suggests that perhaps our national leadership should listen to people who, you know, know stuff.

"Gingrich, as he showed in a gasping effort in Thursday night’s debate in Florida, is a demagogue..."

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 08:22:32 -0500

“Gingrich, as he showed in a gasping effort in Thursday night’s debate in Florida, is a demagogue distilled, like a French sauce, to the purest essence of the word’s meaning. He has no shame. He thinks the rules do not apply to him. And he turns questions about his odious personal behavior into mock outrage over the audacity of the questioner. After inventing, and then perfecting, the modern politics of personal destruction, Gingrich has decided now to bank on the dark fears of the worst element of the Republican base to seize the nomination — using skills refined over four decades.”

- Deconstructing a Demagogue - NYTimes.com

"I’m dead serious,” the president continued, saying that any reasonable person would have..."

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 19:59:47 -0500

““I’m dead serious,” the president continued, saying that any reasonable person would have walked away the moment the Senate minority leader announced his main priority—above creating jobs and improving American health care—was to make Obama a one-term president. “I’m asking if anybody out there can come up with even one reason why I’d want to endure this unmitigated shit show for another minute, let alone through 2016. What’s in it for me, exactly? Can anyone answer that? Anyone at all?””

- Obama Openly Asks Nation Why On Earth He Would Want To Serve For Another Term | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source