World on Fire

This posting is part philanthropy, part tech. I came across a wonderful music video the other day on Veoh from Sarah McLachlan about her top 10 song, World on Fire. In it, she shows the impact that relatively small amounts of money have on the hundreds of millions of people in poor countries in the third world (books, medicine, wells, etc). We saw this first hand this year when our family donated a well to a village our church had adopted.  Dick Kiphardt, of William Blair fame, led the charge personally, flying out there with his wife to help build a school as well as the wells. Many of these villages suffer from disease, poor crop yields and other issues because they do not have potable water. Dick tells me that one of the biggest impacts wells have on villages is that it frees up many of the girls to go to school, who spend much of the day walking down the road for water pre-well. What is the price for reduced disease, more food, better educated girls (who are more likely to post-pone early child birth, etc)? Less than $5,000. Amazing (and no, I promise this is not a solicitation). You should take a look at the video and pass it on.

This gets me to the “tech” part of this blog. I came across this video originally at Veoh by happen stance. By some estimates, this video has been viewed/downloaded on different sites over 1,000,000 times. I don’t think that any of us fully appreciate the impact and disruption that this user generated content revolution will result in. In the example of the World on Fire video, I looked at it and shared it with my wife and kids. The kids decided we should increase our support beyond the well in Africa. I showed it to a couple of other people and several have also decided to give. We are just 2 or 3 views of the half million. I don’t know what the conversion rate or impact is, but if we are any indication of the power of viral user-generated content, Sarah’s video will deliver big dividends well beyond her $150,000 in donations.

Fred Wilson has a great piece on this regarding the most popular Time articles emailed (http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/03/times_select_an.html) None of the top 10 are written by their top columnists. More and more sites are enabling ordinary people to create, post and search for content/media while bypassing traditional media channels. It struck me hardest when Katrina rolled through Louisiana and the first wave of photos, stories and video were all produced my Joe on the Street and posted. Even mainstream news organizations were leveraging this content.

Let the revolution begin…

I owe my journey into the world of blogging to the Dick, Steve, Eric, Brent, Rick and Eric and the rest of the Feedburner team. After two years watching the company take the Web 2.0 world by storm, I thought I would grudgingly embrace the future and launch a blog of my own (and run the feed through Feedburner of course). I hope that I can make up with insight what I lack in agility and speed. This is a big step for me since I barely mastered my mother tongue in college, hiding behind the comfort of numbers, formulas and computers. So, I apologize in advance for grammatical errors, misspelled words, missing verbs and blatantly erroneous facts.

Dick suggested that I call this blog “Behind the Curtain” which I thought was a brilliant title. Unfortunately, my immediate family thought I was going to pen about unsavory topics, so I pushed this to the sub-title. I often hear entrepreneurs comment about how little they understand about the “wizard” behind the curtain. I have seen how beneficial and valuable well-written blogs (like those from Fred Wilson (http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/) and Brad Feld (http://www.feld.com/blog/)) can be in shedding light on the “dark side”.  I think the Midwest tech community needs more dialogue, debate and interaction between its various members and constituencies.

What to write about? In general, I’d like to take my cue from what  members of the entrepreneurial and technology community find of interest or need. Initially, I think this content will fall into five areas:

1) Venture 101: topics about venture capitalists including examples of how we think about different investment issues, as well as things entrepreneurs should know about when dealing with VC’s.
2) Go to the Light: various observations and musings about the entrepreneurial community including things that seem to work and those that don’t.
3) Glory Road: profiles and success stories  about interesting entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.
4) Next Gen: comments about various trends, technologies and developments in the industry.
5) Say What? random topics that don’t fit into the other areas like great philanthropic stories, humour or inspiring tales about knitting or beading.

I will try to keep things relevant, timely and ego-free. In return, I hope that readers engage, respond and even consider launching efforts of their own. Here goes…