Seatwave, the fan-to-fan ticket exchange started by Joe Cohen and seed-funded by Atlas Venture, is sponsoring the River Rat Pack Tour. From the 1st to 8th of June, a collection of nine of the hottest up and coming bands and artists take to the river sailing from Camden to Oxford and playing gigs along the way, both from the barge deck as well as in venue en-route.
The bands will live, sleep and eat on the barges (beats a tour bus!), and will play free shows at venues along the way. Yes, that’s “free as in beer, not freedom.” We also guarantee at least one new talented musician offspring resulting from packing all these young attractive creative people onto a boat in the summer nights’ heat.
The length, breadth and depth of the console cycle is increasing. The PS3/Xbox 360/Wii will stay longer in living rooms than any previous box. They do much more than any previous generation (7th gen if you measure from Atari!): things like net connectivity, multiplayer, real hard drive space, media storage and HD. And tie ratios are increasing: the games sold to recuperate the losses on the printer-cartridge model of consoles are approaching 3-5.
A gaming wallpaper from 4chan for your enjoyment. Click for fullsize. ^^
With each console cycle, gaming captures an ever larger share of the entertainment budget - in money as well as time. Demographics are becoming more mainstream - older and more female. In some online categories, women far oustrip men in willingness to pay.
It’s been way too long since I’ve blogged - regular programming will resume from now. The beginning of the year has been very busy with deals we’ve almost done, due diligence that is ongoing and many exciting things at our portfolio companies. And of course over 9000 hours of experiments in MS Paint. But more on that later.
Yesterday I was out with Fred Destin and besides talking business he complained about not having the time to find new music, not least because he has three (!) kids. And a lot of board seats. So here’s the email I sent him today. You may thus consider me back with a somewhat irrelevant post that exposes my current music listening behaviour to the world. Enjoy (or criticize!). But never again say VC’s are too mainstream (actually, the most widely read VC blogger is also one of the best music bloggers out there).
P.S. I know it should be DailyMotion - quality is better there.
P.P.S. The fact that I use YouTube for music should expose a certain market reality in on-demand music streaming platforms. Please consider going out and building the music site to end all music sites. I will blog more about how in the next 100 Ideas.
—
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2008 20:48:50 +0100
From: “Max Niederhofer”
Sender: max.niederhofer@gmail.com
To: Destin, Fred
Subject: Music
Finally, this industry gets its own t-shirts site. A hoax, of course, unless you have $100 to blow on some fine American Apparel cotton.
As a side note, it’s very weird working in a profession where you are both constantly courted as well as deeply reviled by some people, most often due to ignorance of what venture capital actually does. The whole industry has done a mediocre job of communicating to entrepreneurs, the public and government what the social value as well as the constraints of the venture capital business model are. I know folks like EVCA are working on it but I wonder how we could find a better way to communicate more directly to the public. There are plenty of entrepreneurs who sing VC’s praises, but they seldom rise above the clamor of those who have been turned down or have legitimate reasons for their prejudice.
Subaru, who make some of the finest 4WDs in the world, have produced some marketing gold: Subaru DC Mountain Lab 1.5. This is basically Will It Blend for cars.
The old revenue generation model was sell product, take out ads, sell more product and then rinse, repeat. But in a world cluttered with terrible advertising, the only thing that will get attention now is to make your product tell an exceptional story. One that people will repeat. And then engage in the conversation that results. Read Seth Godin and Cluetrain. And if you are just starting a company, think hard about what really makes you exceptional. If you come up with nothing, you might want to go back to the drawing board.
Subaru has certainly got the exceptional message right. That video, though I know it is staged and all, is worth talking about. And who thought I would ever blog about a car that I have no intention to buy unless I move to the mountains? Well done, Subaru.
Plugg is a great new one day conference focused on Web 2.0. Excellent speakers, including Lisa Sounio, Tom Raftery, Gerd Leonhard.
Yours truly will be doing a 30 minute pres on the future of gaming from a European, online and venture capital perspective. If you are an entrepreneur and want to start an online gaming co, I will guarantee you a slew of new ideas, business models, market insights and just general games geekdom. There will also be a 20 startups presenting their business to a participants that include investors from Advent, Partech, Seedcamp, Dexia, Ariadne and, of course, Atlas Venture.
Plugg is happening Wednesday the 19th of March 2008 in Brussels (yes, that is Belgian goodness, i.e. chocolate, beer, fries with mayonnaise and Jacques Brel). More info is here.
Seatwave, a company where I am a board observer together with the Atlas board member Sonali de Rycker, has just raised a $25M round led by Fidelity and joined by new investor Holtzbrinck. All other existing investors, including Mangrove, Oliver Jung and of course Atlas also joined the round.
Seatwave even likes kids drawing about crappy German bands. Check out the Tokyo Hotel blog.
Seatwave is an extraordinary company in many respects. Not only did Atlas actually seed Seatwave, bringing together star CEO Joe Cohen, the idea and the initial capital. But its development has been both lightning fast as well as surprisingly organic. With a large part of its ticket transactions going fan-to-fan, Seatwave is truly making a previously grey and intransparent market much more democratic. A cleaner, lighter place, really.
Having now entered Germany, not least with an exclusive StudiVZ deal brokered by Holtzbrinck, we are looking forward to repeating the UK success story many times over in Europe. The site is already live in the Netherlands, Spain and Italy.
From Alexisonfire to Verdi, you’ll find pretty much every event ticket on Seatwave.
Little venture capital insight of the day. Drumroll, plx. The fastest ways of burning cash in a startup are:
1. Buying traffic for a new dotcom (read Fred Wilson on usage traction as a prerequisite for investment)
2. Scaling the sales organization without having scaled the sales process (read Max Bleyleben and Andy Blackstone)
3. “Field of Dreams” infrastructure plays: build it and they will come - or not (this is really my own phrase for businesses where you need to put in a whole lot of money upfront to build revenues, which is really counter the whole idea of early stage investing).
So there you have it.
1. Build a viral internet play where the sales magic by the founders can easily be transferred to salespeople and the upfront capital requirement is low (or can be staged).
2. ???
3. PROFIT
I work on the technology investment team at Atlas Venture, a transatlantic venture capital firm. Feel free to email me to discuss your business and its funding requirements.
And here's some photo goodness in case you need to find me in a crowd: I look almost as tired in that as Jim Breyer in his. I must be doing something right :)
The views expressed on this site are my own and in no way represent the opinions of my employer, Atlas Venture. I sincerely hope this blog will not get me fired.
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License 2007 Max Niederhofer. Unauthorized copying, while often necessary, is never as good as the real thing.
