Yesterday, BBC’s Nastaran Tavakoli-Far wrote an article talking about New York’s startup scene in comparison to Silicon Valley.  The article missed a key difference between New York and Silicon Valley: investor maturity.  Investors in Silicon Valley have been investing in technology far longer than most New York investors.  They’ve learned that they need very large exits (acquisitions and IPOs) to offset failed investments.  So they typically only invest in companies that might have a very large exit.  This is why smaller, niche businesses are more often funded in New York than in Silicon Valley.

The article claims that New York startups solve specific problems for everyday life, whereas Silicon Valley startups have a “broader game-shifting approach.”  Tavakoli-Far talks about New York’s industrial diversity as being the source of this, claiming a more diverse investor population will invest in more industries than a typical Silicon Valley investor.  This is wrong.  Good investors don’t necessarily invest in industries they understand.  They make investments that will get them a return.  And they rely on good entrepreneurs to understand and manipulate the industry.

Silicon Valley investors have the risk-reward equation figured out — they look for potentially huge businesses because it’s one way to manage a profitable fund.  Whereas New York investors might still be figuring out the risk-reward equation — the scene is too young to know how well New York investors have done, at least with New York tech companies.  The most well known New York tech company is Foursquare, which was last valued at $760M before ad-based consumer internet companies started losing valuation due to Facebook’s bad IPO.

All that said, I wish more Silicon Valley investors weren’t so set on huge exits.  There are a lot of great companies out there that have cashflow issues in the early stages and could benefit from a small investment, even though they won’t have a huge exit.  Yet I understand that investors have a job and their job is to make their funds profitable.  And probably the easiest way to do that is to fund businesses that might have a huge exit.

Disqus, a popular blog comment management system, recently published some interesting research talking about the popularity of using one’s real name vs. a username or online handle (or pseudonym) when making comments to blogs. Here’s their conclusion:

The most important contributors to online communities are those using pseudonyms. In our data, they accounted for 61% of total comments! These contributors also comment more frequently — 6.5 times more frequently than anonymous commentors and 4.7 times more frequently than commentors using a real name (via Facebook).

I find it odd that Disqus, a comment platform, published this research without an ability to comment on it. Here’s my comment:

I’d like to know the demographic of blogs using Disqus. I expect that most Disqus-enabled blogs are tech-related, which makes for a very skewed demographic when it comes to comparing real names vs. handles on the internet.

My belief is that forcing real names creates a much more powerful online experience. Facebook is as popular as it is because I’m interacting with my real friends, with their real names. Online handles cheapen our identity because they let us be someone we aren’t. Speaking as an online persona isn’t the same as speaking as yourself — your accountability changes and the way you express yourself isn’t authentic.

Fewer people would comment on blogs if they had to provide their real name. But in general, for online conversation, real names are better for the reasons I’ve listed above. I value quality of discussion over quantity.

Today is a sad day.  Today marks the end of an era for me, an era of rack-mount computers, data centers, nerdom, and fantisticism.  Nearly 18 months ago, some friends and I installed a 1U rack-mount in a Seattle data center.  I had purchased the machine thinking my social network startup, Cellarspot, would create enough traffic to require a monster machine.

After 18 month of spending $97 each month, not to mention an up-front cost of $2,800, my machine has been unracked and is now waiting to be picked up and sold off, never to be in my life ever again.  The pinnacle of my nerdom was installing that baby, and today I feel slightly empty.  However, I’m quite excited to be chipping away at my credit card bill.  And to be totally honest, purchasing a server, power, and a fire hose was insane overkill and an entirely uneconomic hosting decision.

I tried to sell services such as game server hosting, web hosting, etc, but I didn’t get any bites.  I will step foot in more data centers as time goes on, and I will have another rack mount at some point.  Goodbye, Dell PowerEdge 1950.  I will see you, or at least your sisters, brothers, and cousins, again.

With love,

Alex

I’ve been referred to some really, really awesome datasets.  I wish I had known about these while taking data-analysis classes in college.

• theinfo.org
• infochimps.org
• PoliParse

My personal favorite is the Enron emails of 150 employees, mostly executives.  Included are their names, their sent items, inboxes, notes, etc.  WOW would I have a blast hacking away at this for hours.

I have to restart Firefox 3 at least a few times a day to avoid having it eat most of my resources.  Take a look:

We need Google Chrome on Mac!  Why not Safari you ask?  I don’t like Safari’s interface all that much.  Perhaps it’s because I’ve been using Firefox so much?  I don’t know; there’s just something about it that turns me away.  Give me some Chrome!