We took off for the summer from Venture Voice. E-mails like these from loyal fans made it a painful experence:

Great show, have you taken the summer of? I hope to hear you back on the pods soon.

Cheers!

pb
Penticton, BC

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I talked with Joel Spolsky recently and he said that you are no longer doing Venture Voice! I have learned so much from your podcasts and was disheartened to hear this news. I do hope that you continue VV. I wish you the best in what you are now doing. Diwant

I can explain!

I was busy launching a new business called News Groper, a network of parody first-person blogs. For example, if you want your fix of business news, you can read blogs “by” Tom Perkins, Ben Bernanke, Stephen Schwarzman and Jeff Skilling.

But fall’s upon us. Venture capitalists are back from vacation, customers are ready to do deals again and entrepreneurs are more than ready to pounce. As such, we’re ready to give you the content you need.

I’m very excited to announce that Eddie LeBreton has joined the Venture Voice team to help take things to the next level.

Now we need your help: What can we do better? Who should we interview? Any other great ideas for us? Want to sponsor Venture Voice? Please post in the comments or contact us.

I’ve recently been involved in the closing of a transaction that used an escrow service and I’m once again amazed at how transactional intermediaries hold both the buyer and seller captive. Depending on whether the business climate is frothy or frigid, intermediaries clearly have the upper hand in transactional businesses. It’s a great business to be in. In my opinion one that is fraught with monopolistic traits.

Typically a buyer and a seller duel with each other in negotiations. I am not going to belabor and rehash basic negotiation 101, but suffice it to say that typically one party is more eager than the other. Obviously, this is the weaker party. What the weaker party usually lacks, the stronger one uses to his advantage. Time is of the essence to the eager beaver transactor who will likely yield to get the deal done.

However, even when an agreement is struck, it is the escrow company or people involved in facilitating the transaction who have the true upper hand. There are fees, lots of paperwork, and little details that only appear immediately before a sale goes through. Failure to pay these fees and the deal does not go through.

To bring this down a notch to the reality of an average person, take the example of the sale of a home. The buyer and seller have agreed on a price. They have both spent a lot of time and good faith energy to get the deal done. Then the final closing statement appears with a ton of fees. Either they are paid or the deal does not go through. It’s your typical last minute grinding but its actually from your middleman or escrow company.

Don’t get me wrong, the escrow company is not the only one who does this. The lender or financing company does the same thing. You agree to general terms and prior to closure you sign the final loan documents with some extra fees added. By this time it is too late to secure other funding. Your lender has thus grinded you while you were held captive in a deal.

I’m sure one of these days the regulators will come along and make this business more transparent. From the perspective of a negotiation, it’s really the best business to be in as long as transactions are taking place.

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague yesterday. She made the statement that "Entrepreneurs Are Selfish." I didn’t think about it much when she said it but later had some time to brood on that thought.

The context of the statement was a discussion about the importance of capital in the formation and launching of a startup. Essentially, we disagreed on the concept that it is possible to start up a company without capital. The main point of disagreement was her belief that it is difficult to find people who are willing to work for equity without immediate compensation. Those individuals who are willing to work for equity are entrepreneurial and will probably not join your enterprise because they want to own more of the enterprise. They want don’t want to share. They are selfish. They want to run the show. Thus in order to start a company and bring people along, you must have capital in order to pay them. That is the function of capital in the startup process.

While I don’t think anybody likes to be called selfish, in some ways, entrepreneurs are selfish. The concept of wanting to run the show and own a piece of the pie does resonate with me and does resonate with most entrepreneurs I know. The preference of equity over cash payment also resonates.

I’ve said previously that the strongest currency in a startup should be its equity. Everybody should be aligned to make the equity as valuable as possible. Thus individuals who value cash payment over equity in some sense are not well aligned and may detract from the true value mission of the startup. Those who are more entrepreneurial and want to share in the founder’s journey will seek stock ownership as a form of compensation.

I can’t argue that capital is necessary to bring people on board. I will submit that there are people out there such as myself and many in our network who will work and advise for equity. The entrepreneurial spirit may be somewhat selfish but it wishes to be free and wishes to take risks for ultimate reward. That reward may be financial, emotional, or intellectual. It clearly is unpredictable whether the reward will come, but the journey towards it is what excites the entrepreneurial individual.

While some may call it selfish, entrepreneurial spirit is necessary and essential to push the economic cycle and to reward those who take risk.

I recently added Lijit’s widget to this blog and I’ve just started receiving the first few weekly emails showing stats for the site. I must admit, I’m impressed. I guess I didn’t understand the real power behind search until now, particularly as it applies to content. Brad Feld has written a bunch about Lijit’s service as I think it is a portfolio company of his.

What is cool about the service is the analytics that they provide by email which show the number of searches per day, the top 25 searches on your site by number, the top searches by users that came up with zero results, and the top incoming links. This is the type of data that search engines like Google and Yahoo see all the time and use to their advantage. From content perspective, this is tremendous because it tells me what readers are looking for when they come to this blog.

For instance, the top search last week that came up with zero results were the words "Investment Thesis". Because I want to satisfy those who spend time reading this blog, I’m going to post on this topic. If you are one of my readers and are too shy to drop me a note, feel free to use the Lijit search tool to find what you want. I’ll see the results on a weekly basis and try to fill in content gaps.