The suck-up effect

The Wag — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 11:03:39 EDT

In his latest guide to startups, Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen unwittingly offers a rational explanation for Silicon Valley's Facebook frenzy: Sucking up. First, venture capitalists, in their endless neophilia, started using the social networking site. Then entrepreneurs joined in, too, in hopes of impressing those VCs — brazen attempts, in short at brown-nosing their way to getting funded. The same dynamic applies to Twitter, which is an even better medium for elevator-pitching the Valley's short-attention-span financiers. After the jump, Andreessen's analysis.

... some VCs are aggressive early adopters of new forms of communication and interaction — current examples being Facebook and Twitter. Observationally, when a VC is exploring a new communiation medium like Facebook or Twitter, she can be more interested in interacting with various people over that new medium than she might otherwise be. So, when such a new thing comes out — like, hint hint, Facebook or Twitter — jump all over it, see which VCs are using it, and interact with them that way — sensibly, of course.

Michael, Do Better Next Time

Rick Abruzzo — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 21:39:31 EDT

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington posts about the company he co-founded Edgio's receiving $5 million in Series A funding.

Now Michael did give the disclaimer in the post:

I won't say much more here due to the conflict of interest (I remain on the board of directors of edgeio and am a stockholder).

Good but not great Michael, your other two writers Nick Gonzales and Marshall Kirkpatrick should have taken this one. Or were you just so giddy to announce your baby stopped breastfeeding and now is suckling the endless bottle of funding?

Gawker: vc

The suck-up effect

Michael, Do Better Next Time