On Yuri Milner making a blanket investment (loan) offer to every Y Combinator startup:  very interesting and good headline fodder, but in many ways, not surprising.

The return distributions for Internet-flavored technology startups have gotten very, very skewed.  For example, instead of a bunch of big exits ($500m or more) per year, we’re going to have one gigantic $50b Facebook exit.  The expected value for investors and entrepreneurs may not have changed much, but the chances of any single project generating a return is much lower.  It’s becoming more like a lottery.

If you wanted to play in this market, what would you do?  Buying a little bit of a lot of lottery tickets is not a bad idea, especially if:

• You have a huge fund.
• You believe that Y Combinator is a reasonable filtering function for startup quality.
• You get visibility and an option (explicit or implicit) to invest more later in the winners.

Most blog posts are way too long.

A quick protocol note for entrepreneurs raising money from angel investors:   asking for referrals from one angel to another can be tricky.

If you ask angel investor A for a referral to investor B, the first question B is going to ask of A is:  “are you investing?”

If A’s answer is “no”, it is unlikely the referral is going to go anywhere.

Is it me, or does it feel like many entrepreneurial discussions today aren’t about new ideas, but are about the “meta” stuff (processes, methods, groups, etc.) around entrepreneurship?   Everyone seems to be talking about seed stage funds, how to get funding, how to start companies, the latest Y-combinator clone, organizing meetups, incubators/hatcheries, etc.

To use an analogy I saw fly by somewhere (and can’t fully credit, sorry):  it seems like the action has moved from making money on foreclosures, to infomercials and books about making money on foreclosures.

Are ideas so plentiful they’re not the focus anymore?

Am I hanging out with the wrong crowd?

With products, it’s always interesting to compare initial impressions with longer-term impressions.  Sometimes they match, sometimes not.  The story about New Coke and sip testing is a good reminder that initial and long-term impressions can diverge.

After a week of living with the iPad, here’s my usage:

• Book reading (using Amazon’s Kindle app)
• Videos (The Blind Side via iTunes, kids videos from Netflix)
• Light email (reading only, or one sentence replies)
• Reference lookup (general Web surfing, Wikipanion)
• Games (Flight Control HD)

So far, it’s pretty consistent with my initial impressions.

I seem to have two types of friends:  those that like Facebook and those that hate it.  The haters have a range of explanations, but the common theme seems to be:  “I don’t need a tool to manage my friendships!”

I like Facebook quite a bit, and I think I’ve finally figured out the core of why it works so well.  (Maybe I’m just slow).

It’s about “soft sharing”:   I can share things about myself, my life, my work, and my family without being intrusive to my friends.  For example, I’ve recently been hacking around on a small CNC machine in my shop.  I’d never email out project updates and pictures to ~300 friends, but I did post things about it on Facebook.   Facebook provides tools for my friends to sort through what they do and don’t want to see.

The result has been really interesting:  I’ve met a few new people (friends of friends), and ended up with some meetings that never would have happened otherwise.

So, to my Facebook hater friends:  relax, and sign up.

I just posted a long note/essay on how to run a startup board meeting.

I’m taking a lead from Bijan and Fred and am starting to trim my Facebook friend list to “real friends”:  people I know pretty well, old friends from school, etc.  I’m starting with the folks I’ve never met, or only met once.

(If you’re on the “cut list”, sorry!)

A few days ago, I wrote about the problems with metered/capped broadband in the US.

Then I read this article, which said:

Basically, the cable internet usage quotas have nothing to do with the internet, they are all about protecting the cable companies TV business. With any quotas in place, it is basically impossible to watch TV in an ‘average’ way over the internet. You can’t even get half of average at barely acceptable quality.

The article goes on to point out that the cap/metering issue is mostly coming from providers with a large, established proprietary TV cable network to protect (e.g. Time-Warner, Comcast) vs phone companies without any substantial TV network (e.g. Verizon).

This is the heart of it.