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I just love me them trees — the launch of PandoDaily

Earlier today, long-time friend Sarah Lacy launched her new site PandoDaily. As was covered in many places, I am one of the angel investors in the round Sarah raised to help start her company. In addition, I am going to join the board of parent company PandoMedia along with Michael Arrington and will be pretty actively involved in helping Sarah build her company. It is an exciting time in the web media space and Sarah is one of the most talented journalists I have known. The strength of the team she was able to bring together before even launching a site is a testament to her abilities and reputation. Her completely unsustainable output on day 1 a testament to her drive to make the site wonderful.

Thinking back to my earliest involvement with Wired magazine and then launching HotWired (amazingly, almost 20 and 18 years ago respectively), I am continually impressed with how much fun the business of media can be. Media sites make for inherently cyclical, constantly transforming businesses where you’re only as good as the last story you pushed out. The people who contribute are the ultimate product — the media are just the messages. If I’ve learned anything in my few decades of experience in media, the hard part is hitching yourself to the right star. Sarah is taking very seriously her goal of building the site of record for Silicon Valley and has the network, smarts and focus to reach that goal.

In other words, those who can launch web sites. The rest of us are happy to be involved. I’m very happy to be involved with Pando.

 

More mountain lion shots!

I set up more cameras on our property in the woods a few months ago and over Christmas weekend caught more shots of our local mountain lions. Unfortunately they walked a bit too close to the camera so I didn’t get the best shots (I’ve since moved this particular camera to a better vantage point) but still these are by far the best mountain lion shots we’ve gotten yet.

Best we can tell, this is a mother with two one-year or so old cubs. I’ve included a few shots from the series. 

Your company is a TV show

I’ve been watching and buying a lot of video on the Apple TV over the holidays and musing on the convergence of web company creation infrastructure with video production. An app on my iPhone and a video program on my AppleTV are increasingly looking like two sides of the same coin to me and as I worked my way upstream from that thought, incubators like Y Combinator quickly become the Endemols or Bad Robots of our web world. I’m just not sure that building a consumer internet company is too different from launching a video franchise anymore.

I don’t have any numerical proof of this but I will bet the total gross of an average video franchise over its lifetime is still significantly better than the total revenue of the average Silicon Valley start-up over its life. We can take out the statistical anomolies in both industries — Harry Potter and Google don’t count — but I think we could do worse as an industry than to aspire to building a similar scale of company building infrastructure as exists in video production. And vice versa I might add, I’m not sure video producers are iterating through business models as fast or creatively as internet incubators. We each have a lot to learn.

I realize the convergence of Silicon Valley and Hollywood isn’t even close to a new idea and am not professing to any huge novelty here. Plus, I can torture a metaphor with the best of them and won’t take this one any further. But I do think the two industries are learning from the other as technology, video distribution and platform wars change the dynamics of launching a consumer facing web company or a video franchise. And of course, increasingly Apple and Google are in the middle of both.

Lots of interesting reading on the subject recently, it’s a nascent subject for me that I’m just digging into (mostly trying to better understand the television production side of things). A few suggested links:

• PBS Takes On The Premium Channels - The success of shows like Downton Abbey along with the cuts in federal funding is causing PBS to increasingly fight against the premium networks for dollars. Needless to say, this is a good thing. And Downton Abbey is a wonderful show, watch it if you haven’t already.
• In Speaking for TLC, the Least Said Is Best - A fun look at the day-to-day grind of reality TV. We’ve known for awhile that editors have replaced writers as the creators of the story arc but I hadn’t realized to what extent you’re only as good as your PR person. Influence is the name of the game whether on the web or TV. And if your social media outreach folks have it hard, ask them to watch Sarah Palin’s kids while she camps with Kate Gosselin.
• Why the Winter TV Hiatus Makes No Sense - Jeff Alexander writes about the missed opportunity that continues to be the network television production schedule. Renée and I spent New Year’s Eve downloading and watching season 1 of Portlandia, which rocked a whole lot more than anything Dick Clark has done in decades. Yesterday we started watching Breaking Bad. I’m happy for the hiatus from my other television shows but my Apple TV has been seing a lot more use as a result.
• I am done with the Freemium Business Model - Yet another web developer realizing that free costs money. Free is just another cost of customer acquisition model that doesn’t make sense for everyone. I read this story through the eyes of a video content creator and wonder when we’ll hit a point that pay revenue can completely fund video programming. Would I pay more to see a less censored version of Breaking Bad? Easily, but there’s probably not enough of me yet to finance something like that. But I hope we’re not far off either.

Men shop in bulk

People who know me know that I have — at best — a casual relationship with fashion. I find something I like and tend to wear it until it’s about five years out of fashion. Turns out, the general hoarder behavior is not unique. Who knew?

At the risk of perpetuating sex stereotypes, the archetype may have been Steve Jobs. When Mr. Jobs died in October, he left behind not only a peerless legacy, but a closet full of identical black cotton turtlenecks by Issey Miyake. “If he loved a shirt, he’d order 10 or 100 of them,” his sister, the author Mona Simpson, said in her eulogy.

It was an obsession that many men could relate to.

I built spy satellites for a living

One of the nice things about being older is that you get to hear the story about things that used to be top secret in your time. I remember watching the 60 Minutes story about spy satellites in the 1980’s that referenced this particular spy satellite program.

It was dubbed “Big Bird” and it was considered the most successful space spy satellite program of the Cold War era. From 1971 to 1986 a total of 20 satellites were launched, each containing 60 miles of film and sophisticated cameras that orbited the earth snapping vast, panoramic photographs of the Soviet Union, China and other potential foes. The film was shot back through the earth’s atmosphere in buckets that parachuted over the Pacific Ocean, where C-130 Air Force planes snagged them with grappling hooks.

The scale, ambition and sheer ingenuity of Hexagon KH-9 was breathtaking. The fact that 19 out of 20 launches were successful (the final mission blew up because the booster rockets failed) is astonishing.

So too is the human tale of the 45-year-old secret that many took to their graves.

Hexagon was declassified in September. Finally Marra, Newton and others can tell the world what they worked on all those years at “the office.”

“My name is Al Gayhart and I built spy satellites for a living,” announced the 64-year-old retired engineer to the stunned bartender in his local tavern as soon as he learned of the declassification. He proudly repeats the line any chance he gets.

In praise of being old

“Endurance is not a young person’s game. I thought I might even be better at 60 than I was at 30. You have a body that’s almost as strong, but you have a much better mind.”

Diana Nyad, on picking up long distance swimming after a 30-year hiatus

Wow, AT&T must have some pretty old customers

Found while updating my profile info.

Whiskey doesn’t care

How can you not want to read this article in Food Republic?

“...[Y]ou literally chose the coolest liquor in the world to insult. And guess what? Whiskey doesn’t care. That’s what makes it cool. The only other liquor that’s anywhere near as cool is Tequila. But Tequila’s always been too crazy to really be cool. Tequila will cut you for looking at its woman, then laugh while the cops drag it off to jail, and spit at you during the trial. And trust me you don’t want to pick on Vodka either. Dude doesn’t have much of a personality, but I swear he goes to the gym twice a day. You want the nerd of the liquor crew? Try Gin. You can give Gin an atomic wedgie and the worst it’ll do is scream that his daddy will have you banned from the yacht club.”

A man can dream

A recently viewed advertisement on LinkedIn:

It feels so personal.

Hymn For Her

This video is wonderful, I had never heard of Hymn For Her but this video (a Led Zeppelin cover, needless to say) got me hooked on them and their albums even moreso. Can’t wait until they play the Bay Area, must see them live!

Yet another married couple duo to like. Via No Depression