Chris Pirillo » venture-capital

Meet a Geek With Money to Give You

Chris Pirillo — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 08:15:58 +0000

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I ran into my old friend Dave McClure down in Hawaii recently, when we both attended the [re]Think Hawaii conference. Dave and I go way back – all the way to Gnomedex 2 in Iowa! Back then, he was working for PayPal in the Marketing department. These days, he has money that he’s just waiting to give to you! He’s a Venture Capitalist in the Silicon Valley.

Dave started doing angel investing a little when he left PayPal. He was working with some small companies, but started last year doing nothing more than investing money for others into companies and startups. This is what he does full time now, for places like Founder’s Fund.

When looking for someone to invest in, Dave says that he doesn’t invest much in ideas. There’s so many people who have already built websites. You don’t need to look at an idea… you can see what they’re already doing. He looks for people with good marketing and design skills – people who have a vision. He also looks for people who are doing something that are on the straight-and-narrow, such as productivity and home things. He likes to know that his investments are going to be things that are going to sell.

Dave chose to visit [re]Think Hawaii for the same reason the rest of us did – the food! Seriously, though, Dave wanted to be able to hang out and get ideas from people who hail from all walks of life. This conference merges people from every aspect of social media and technology that you can think of, and it’s an amazing way to get new perspectives on things.

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Meet a Geek With Money to Give You

How not to Pitch Venture Capitalists

Chris Pirillo — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 05:48:50 +0000

How not to Pitch Venture Capitalists

As more social bookmarking and tagging sites (like Technorati or del.icio.us) come online, it will become increasingly important to unveil results from all of them on a single page. TagJag has been doing this from day one, and more search providers are added on a regular basis. Steve Rubel, in his blog post titled ‘Search the Universe, Not Just the Galaxies,’ says: “There’s gold to be had for the provider that can scale to include every major social network. I would bank on folks like TagJag.”

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How do you know who’s really talking about you on the Internet? Who’s linking to your blog? Relying on one or two services for that information will never give you the full picture. For a comprehensive set of results, TagJag can’t be beat. Google doesn’t list everything. Moreover, having to search multiple sites with the same keyword is tiresome and repetitive. TagJag gives the user everything in one shot – and instantly allows them to access the various RSS feeds for those searches.

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How not to Pitch Venture Capitalists

Happy TagJag’ed Publishers

Chris Pirillo — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 02:22:09 +0000

Happy TagJag’ed Publishers

Until a few more legal loopholes get closed, I won’t be able to expand much further upon the whole “I’m offering you a stake in TagJag” concept; I’d rather underpromise and overdeliver on this idea. I’m on the lookout for some kind of hip lawyer who can help us get it wrapped up. It’s a community-building effort, so I’m hoping to find someone who understands what that means. I should probably talk to Buzz and/or Denise, eh? No matter, I have to show you a couple of emails before I explain why I did what I did with Brad, Jeff, and Rick (the VCs) at Gnomedex.

Today I launched the second version of Omgili, an innovative, advanced search engine for discussions. The new release presents many new features and technology innovations that make Omgili the leading search engine for information rich discussion forums. I have been using Gada.be (now TagJag) for a while (mainly for research) and really enjoyed it. It’s simple, smart, effective and does the job! That’s why I think Omgili’s results will be a great addition to TagJag. Omgili covers tens of thousands forums and millions of discussions (including Google and Yahoo Answers), adding it to TagJag will contribute to the richness of the fantastic TagJag service.

I know it’s still too geeky, but that’s one publisher who understands that we’re helping him get his set of unique results out there. The filtering and sorting are coming – and after Shayne read Matt’s post on the matter, he believes he knows how to make “it” work better. The audience feedback wasn’t challenging, it was enlightening and reassuring (as I had been thinking along the very same lines, but lacked more than a single developer to execute upon them). Here’s the second email, from Brian Dear:

I’m sitting here watching your TagJag presentation at Gnomedex… I noticed that there are “EVDB” results under “Entertainment” – cool! Could you rename the “EVDB” to be “Eventful”? That’s the name we’re using these days as the main brand (EVDB is the underlying business-to-business brand).

They’re not the only “smaller” publishers who understand the concept of leveling the search playing field while still retaining their original identity, results, and feed link. Again, sorting and filtering are coming – but it all starts with the growing list of publishers. A few weeks ago, Brian Carrozzi emailed me asking… “With whom can I speak in regards to getting our videos indexed from http://videos.gabcity.com ?” They know they’re not a “YouTube,” so they have to use every means necessary to spread their brand.

Ponzi has some fantastic ideas for the next iteration, and I’ve gotta get a few more things organized before impending efforts can roll forward. What you see is not what you’re going to get – and the question asked at Gnomedex was clearly answered. Should TagJag get funded? As I learned by sticking my neck out: NO. Does it need more resources? I already knew the answer to that question: YES.

Happy TagJag’ed Publishers