Summer travel is over and I’m back on the airwaves with Amber.

ShareThis

Has anyone else ever seen a web company create an investor testimonial video like this before? Very interesting, I wonder what the goal was. Paging Mario Sundar

Update: Duh, they want to go public. I somehow missed that from the article I read. I wonder how startups could use these kinds of videos to raise interest as they move through angel and VC rounds…

Today I am happy to announce that LinkedIn has raised additional funding from our original investors and added another world-class investor to our team. Bain Capital Ventures joins our existing group of investors - Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Bessemer Ventures - and leads this round of investment at a total of $53 million.* (LinkedIn has previously raised $27 million).

Congrats to the LinkedIn team. You have executed really well and I can’t wait to see what you accomplish next.

ShareThis

The US State Department has set up a Digital Outreach Team. They engage with people online, answer questions and set the record straight - while always being honest about who they are. So far they seem to be a small team that focuses on Arabic, Persian and Urdu websites.

It’s a small but important step forward in governments learning how to be transparent and human online. Imagine if this program grew to have teams for every country and language. Imagine if every country had digital diplomats.

If the team reads this, kudos to you. I’ve been engaging people online in the technology industry for a few years now, it’s not an easy job. But you can change hearts and minds. I’d love to hear more about your experiences.

ShareThis

ShareThis

Today I’m extremely proud to publicly announce my new job as Community Manager at VenCorps. Be sure to head on over there to sign up for a beta invite

About VenCorps

VenCorps is an online platform for discovering, funding, and growing startup companies. Our community is made up of entrepreneurs, investors and other members of the startup ecosystem. We’re going to change the way startups get found, funded and grow. We’re counting on the wisdom of our community to find and pick the startups we will give seed funding to. Then, we’ll tap the participation of our community to help those startups grow.

VenCorps is the brainchild of Sean Wise, one of Canada’s experts in raising venture capital. He’s trained over 3500 entrepreneurs, who collectively raised more $2.1B. He’s also the author of The Globe and Mail’s Wise Words column & book by the same name, and an industry advisor to CBC’s Dragon’s Den startup pitch show. Sean has been a great boss and mentor already, I’m looking forward to learning even more from him over the long term.

A Spencer Trask Company

VenCorps is owned by Spencer Trask, an investment company with a mandate to change the world. Let me just say: wow, it’s amazing to work with such a firm. Mr. Spencer Trask himself funded Thomas Edison’s lightbulb, The New York Times, General Electric, and the first credit rating service Moody’s. Since then we’ve funded the first human genome company, the first stem cell company, the first optical integrated circuit company, and the first AIDS vaccine research, and crowdsourcing innovators like Innocentive.

The fund for startups that the VenCorps community chooses is managed by the Spencer Trask Collaborative Venture Partners. We have an amazing team and investors. Expect to hear more about STCVP later.

The Cambrian House Transition

Very soon we will begin a special alpha preview where we start to rolling out invites to the 65,000 members of the Cambrian House crowdsourcing community. Cambrian House is a world leader in crowdsourcing ideas, so crowdsourcing companies was a natural evolution. The Cambrian House team will now be focused on building out the companies they crowdsourced like Gwabs and Mob4Hire.

I’ve spent a lot of time working with the Cambrian House team over the last few months, and I’m humbled at the trust they have placed in me to manage the community they worked so hard to grow.

What’s Next

In the short term, we will be rolling out alpha invites to the Cambrian House community. Next up will be invites to people that signed up for the private beta (hint, hint). Once we feel like things are going smoothly we will open the site up to everyone for a public beta.

We will also be headed to conferences like Mesh and Under the Radar to make announcements, demo the site, spread the word and tape elevator pitches for startups.

I will be blogging more about startups, entrepreneurship and venture capital here and later on a forthcoming public VenCorps blog.

And finally, thanks to my colleagues that knew what I’ve been up to for the last few months and were kind enough not to blow my cover. I like to be transparent, but I dislike talking about things too long before I have something to show.

If you have any questions or comments, let me know.

ShareThis

powered by ODEO

Working on a wicked project right now, watching the pieces come together. More will be revealed on Monday, but for now this song expresses my excitement level pretty well.

ShareThis

Clay Shirky is talking about the idea of a social surplus. At the start of the industrial revolution people spent a generation drunk on gin because they didn’t know what to do with the massive changes in society, since the end of WWII we’ve been watching sitcoms.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation…And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today.

Clay calculated that the time spent to create Wikipedia was about 100 million hours of human thought. That’s about about as much time as people in the US alone spend watching just commercials each weekend. So a slight change in how we use our cognitive surplus can have tremendous results.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

I stopped watching TV (for the most part) and playing video games (entirely) a few months ago, and I feel like I’m undergoing a personal renaissance. I’m working harder than ever in my life on a project that just might change the startup industry. I’ve made leaps and bounds in the professional caliber of my work.

I’m actively studying Mideast geopolitics, Sinology, cultural anthropology, cognitive science, progressive hip hop, electoral mechanics, nanotechnology, startup business, dog psychology, alternative energy, biomimicry, mobile banking, quantum theory, third world economics, venture capital and transhumanism among other subjects. I’ve watched dozens of documentaries that have opened my world view and challenged my beliefs.

I’ve figured the first two books I want to write.

I’ve discovered a purpose and mission for that around the world trip I’ve always dreamed of taking.

Sounds crazy right? Well look at it in perspective.

Clay figured out that if the internet connected population of the US spent 1% less time watching TV, every year their collective cognitive surplus could create 100 projects the size of Wikipedia. Every year. Now your remote control is looking a little silly.

So what are you going to do with your piece of the social surplus?

ShareThis

Mikey and I take over the headlines!

ShareThis

The reason people use a social application is best expressed by how people use its name as a verb.

Examples:

• “I just sent you a text message with the code and if that doesn’t work, I’ll Facebook it to you.” - The email you actually check
• “YouTube that video” - Let’s be famous
• “MySpace me” - More friends makes me feel liked
• “Twitter that” - Group page is cool if it’s pull
• “Digg a story” - Let’s find cool stuff on the internet
• “Skype me” - My phone bill is too high already

Anyone have their own examples?

ShareThis

Just a little something to make you smile today.

ShareThis