Post-Americanism

This week, I traded alot of emails with a great hacker in Barcelona, had a skype call with a CEO in London, and had lunch on Friday with a South African and a half British/half French guy (at a Filipino restaurant, natch).

I personally feel provincial, what with a simple NY pedigree. At betaworks we're trying to create a different seed stage business model (John wrote about this a little more here), at least a bit, and though we might be "obscure even among Web insiders," by nature of being located here in New York we tend (and are right now designed) to have more activities here. And though as part of our network we do cover San Francisco to New York to London, I can't help but wonder about the implications right now of having too much of a geographical focus.

For example, Fareed Zakaria writes that "the world has shifted from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism," to wit:

Look around. The world's tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai. Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing. Its biggest refinery is being constructed in India. Its largest passenger airplane is built in Europe. The largest investment fund on the planet is in Abu Dhabi; the biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Once quintessentially American icons have been usurped by the natives. The largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. The largest casino is in Macao, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues last year. America no longer dominates even its favorite sport, shopping. The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted that it was the largest shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn't make the top ten. In the most recent rankings, only two of the world's ten richest people are American. These lists are arbitrary and a bit silly, but consider that only ten years ago, the United States would have serenely topped almost every one of these categories.

Or, as Adam Gopnik put it last September:

Now, for the first time, it’s possible to imagine modernization as something independent of Americanization: when people in Paris talk about ambitious kids going to study abroad, they talk about London. (Americans have little idea of the damage done by the ordeal that a routine run through immigration at J.F.K. has become for Europeans, or by the suspicion and hostility that greet the most anodyne foreigners who come to study or teach at our scientific and educational institutions.) When people in Paris talk about manufacturing might, they talk about China; when they talk about tall buildings, they talk about Dubai; when they talk about troubling foreign takeovers, they talk about Gazprom. The Sarkozy-Gordon Brown-Merkel generation is not unsympathetic to America, but America is not so much the primary issue for them, as it was for Blair and Chirac, in the nineties, when America was powerful beyond words. To a new leadership class, it sometimes seems that America is no longer the human bomb you have to defuse but the nut you walk away from.

Then again, good business models are flexible, and are made to be molded and shaped and even broken and reassembled. We'll see how much of that is needed in a post-American era.

betaworks, vc

Paul Graham:

The exciting thing about market economies is that stupidity equals opportunity. And so it is in this case. There is a huge, unexploited opportunity in startup investing. Y Combinator funds startups at the very beginning. VCs will fund them once they're already starting to succeed. But between the two there is a substantial gap.

John Borthwick, re betaworks:

Mid 2007 we flipped our approach — and went bottoms up. We stayed small, under the radar, focussed on our theme, seeking not to be distracted by opportunism. We started identifying standards and methodologies to scale our work and stopped trying to over think the design. By the fall of 2007 we had assembled our learning and formally started to build out the platform. Six months later we have four things that we have built and we have fourteen seed investments. . . .

Someone said to me last week that we are a reverse incubator. Incubators share the peripheral services things that I believe entrepreneurs can and should get from the market (legal, hr, accounting, office space) — betaworks is designed to share core capabilities - software / IP, knowledge, data, standards, analytics, leadership, tools etc… Someone a year ago called it a funcubator — maybe outcubator? — a little less George Clintoneque.

Scott Rafer:

VCs are money managers rather that bold desperados? must be a very slow news day.

Design

Seth Godin writes today about Charles and EJ's latest designs at I'm in like with you:

"Given the choice, that teenager you're trying to market to is ignoring you and she's on this site instead. Take it or leave it."

Design, functionality, sensibility, and new ways of creating engagement matter.

Smart venture investing quote

Jeff Nolan writes something very insightful about the potential changed nature of venture investing (which is near and dear to my betaworks heart):

"[I]n many ways I recoil at the notion that true invention and innovation matters less today, but it does appear to be the case. The fact remains that most acquisitions are in the $30-60 million range so if you want to generate a return across an entire portfolio of deals you simply have to adjust the economics of the deals and the process by which you engage them. Jeff Clavier is the epitome of this new model."

betaworks

Peter wrote about betaworks today.

Fichey - better presentation layer?

Design and presentation matter.

Billy Chasen is a friend and a highly creative developer we've (betaworks) been working with the past few months. Billy's created a number of great apps, and perhaps I'm biased but I find myself using each of them heavily. One is downfly, another is fichey. I like them because they all seem to solve specific problems, at least ones that are particular to me.

I'm using fichey now on a daily basis. The problem Billy set out to solve is that the web is awash in wonderful, interesting, but unstructured content (data). As a result, applications and algorithms have been developed to structure this content, machine based, human based, or often combinations of the two.

These apps/algorithms do an amazing job of providing context and delivering the content. Digg, delicious, reddit -- perfect examples of high value content structuring applications. But while the content sorting has advanced, consuming the results is still stuck in the same old point - click - hit-browser-back button - repeat method of discovery. It's clunky and slow. It's boring.

There's something appealing about leafing through the pages of a magazine. It's casual, fast, fun and allows one to quickly scan a high volume of content to get to something that is even more relevant.

That's fichey, in a nutshell -- it's a presentation tool. A visually appealing, more efficient way to view (leaf through) large groups of content. It saves a user time -- you can page through a given days top Digg stories in seconds, stopping where you want, paging on as you please.

Brady Forrest at O'Reilly recently described a note he got that said "wouldn't it be cool to see Google search results displayed Cover Flow-style in the Safari web browser."

Fichey is a small step towards getting at this idea. It's early and Billy is already working on building more into it. But for now, at a minimum, it works.