The 100 most influential VCs and angels
– Mark Boslet is a contributor to PE Hub, a Thomson Reuters publication. This article originally appeared here. –
Any list of the 100 most influential venture capitalists and angels should include the likes of John Doerr, Ron Conway and Michael Moritz, right?
Not necessarily. And not if the list you’re referring to is the “100 Most Influential VCs, Angels and Investors” compiled by Lucy Marcus, the Huffington Post columnist and the non-executive board chair of the Mobius Life Science Fund.
Call this list one for the new, social decade. Marcus, who also is founder of the Marcus Venture Consulting, posted her list this week on PeerIndex, a site that ranks people based on their digital footprints.
Some of its influencers will come as no surprise. Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson is number 3 and blogger investor Paul Kedrosky, number 4.
But what about Kevin Rose, Digg founder, at the top of the chart (he does have 1.2 million Twitter followers)? And how about Twitter investor Chris Sacca number 2? (He also has 1.3 million followers on Twitter.)
Other notables: 500 Startups’ Dave McClure, 9, Foundry Group’s Brad Feld, 11, and cleantech investor Vinod Khosla, 14.
Ex-Googlers seek traffic for how-to video startup
The Web is full of user-generated video, but for Sanjay Raman’s tastes most of it is too bland and poorly produced to actually watch.
That’s why Raman launched Howcast (http://www.howcast.com) – a high-quality, how-to video-sharing website – last year with former Google colleagues Jason Liebman and Dan Blackman.
While at Google the three Howcast co-founders noticed how popular do-it-yourself content was, but how little of it was in video format.
“How-to content is something that is really popular in terms of user search queries,” said Raman, who left his job as product manager for Google Apps to launch their startup nearly 18 months ago. “As video was really exploding online we saw the opportunity to marry those two concepts together.”
Unlike other DIY sites that predominate search engines, such as About, eHow, Expert Village, Videojug and 5min, Howcast utilizes a more entertaining and humorous approach. Some of its most-popular videos are less practical and more tongue-in-cheek in nature, such as “How to find out a girl’s name after you’ve slept with her” and “How to grow grass in someone’s keyboard.”
“We try to take the format of a how-to and make it more exciting and engaging than it would normally be,” said Raman.
In order to boost its video content, Howcast pays filmmakers, mostly students, between $50-100 to produce videos for them.
Assuming to begin with that the hunger for how-to videos is sufficient to be monetizable, I think its safe to say that the market will have to weed out a few of the players here. Thus success over the other video sites that can do the same thing seems to rest with their differentiation. It seems like this differentiation is the quality of videos and entertainment value of the videos–so they have to be able to establish some sort of loyalty from the most creative and talented video producers. Given the immense competition in this area, it seems like this is an exceptionally difficult goal. Furthermore, this seems like a differentiation that is more aligned with some sort of entertainment video site–say one focused exclusively on comedy or drama–than one that ostensibly has a practical “how-to” purpose. Perhaps a focus on making it easy to learn and teach through the site would be more strategically aligned than making the videos funny and in claymation.
