My Privacy

Great video from Reputation.com... (i particularly like the Pear noteboooks at the end)

Putting My Mouth Where My Money Is

Sorry I’ve been gone so long, but Twitter has raised the bar for bloggers. Who has time for This when you can follow @davidcowan on Twitter? Ideas that would have once qualified as worthy posts can too often be summed up in 140 characters, so it has been nearly two years since I’ve updated this blog on my new investments.

So here's a recap. During the last couple years I looked for startups that (i) protect and promote online reputations, (ii) deliver social network value to enterprises, (iii) migrate enterprise data to the cloud, and (iv) bring Silicon Valley tech capabilities to the federal government. And of course I am always open to learning about exciting startups beyond these themes.

I found what I believe to be the world's Six Most Exciting Startups (excluding a few obvious high flyers whose valuations I couldn’t stomach). I have listed them below in the order in which I funded them. Just to clearly disclose my bias: when I find a great startup I invest, so I now have a material stake in all these companies!

So what does Google say about you -- too much (like your home address or an embarrassing photo)? Too little? Something unkind? Or maybe good things, but you're eclipsed by people with the same name?

As personal information about us migrates online, our prospects for school admission, employment, credit, dates, and professional success increasingly depend upon our online reputations. Reputation.com helps you take control, and the company’s monthly revenue has grown nearly tenfold since I invested (along with Floodgate and Kleiner).

Yesterday CBS Sunday Morning interviewed Reputation.com’s Founder/CEO Michael Fertik about a public school techer who lost her job over a private Facebook photo in which there happened to be a bottle of beer.



Reputation.com has kindly extended a huge promotion for my readers: Click here to visit the site and prices you'll see for the My Privacy Annual Plan or the My Reputation Starter Plan will be half the normal rates.

CrowdFlower is the first business process crowdsourcer. Crowdsourcing means tasking individuals on the web with untrained jobs like content moderation, local business listing verification, or transcription. CrowdFlower farms these tasks out to workers across dozens of networks, such as Amazon’s Mechanial Turk.

Compared to internal employees or business process outsourcers, crowdsouring is faster, cheaper and instantly scalable up or down as you need it. Contrary to intuition, CrowdFlower produces higher quality data than in-house or outsourced workers, since Crowdflower can provision the same job to multiple workers, and calibrate each worker’s quality. CrowdFlower promises to transform the nature of employment, unlocking the labor potential of a billion unemployed workers. Since my investment (alongside Trinity), the Company has beaten plan every quarter.

Zoosk is the fastest growing dating service on the web, with more singles’ profiles than any other site (check out the numbers). Zoosk makes dating fun with daily matches and a cool iPhone app. Unfortunately, their latest TV commercial was too much fun for Europe, where it was banned.




I’m going out on a limb here, and predicting that social gaming will be big. So I followed NEA into the last round of the creator of Mobsters and Tiki Resort. My kids were delighted to have a back channel to the designers of Wild Ones (thanks for all those laser cannons!), but the gravy train stopped when Disney picked up the company.


This Stanford team of aerospace jocks is applying the Lean Startup methodology and web APIs to commercial space projects, disrupting an industry characterized by bloated, government-funded projects (as reported by Slate). I can’t disclose exactly what Skybox is building, but here’s how two other entrepreneurs have already forged a cheap path to space…

Twilio provides a web services API for business to build scalabale, reliable, communications apps utilizing voice. With Twilio you can easily embed voice and SMS features into your web site (e.g. for notification, or connecting users by phone). Twilio provides the tools, platform and service. The technology is free to use, and you pay only for the actual voice minutes that your users end up consuming. On this deal I supported my partner Byron Deeter, who joined Twilio’s board.


Meanwhile, fate has mostly ruled on my prior generation of startups. GoodMail and Flock developed the technology they promised, but both their dreams were dashed by the waves of chaos that engulfed their primary business partner Yahoo. Meanwhile others, like Tripwire, Nominum, LinkedIn, GetInsured, Perimeter and Lifelock, forge ahead profitably.

So how do you think the markets will decide the fate of my 6 new picks?

Artemis Fowl's C-Cube: The Ultimate Hacking Machine

The books kids read today strike me as a lot more interesting than most of what I read in school. Furthermore, the boring old book report has been supplanted by more engaging formats. For example, my son recently recruited me to perform in his trailer for The Eternity Code, a project he produced for his 6th grade English teacher. This book is the third in Eoin Colfer's gripping Artemis Fowl series about an Irish boy criminal mastermind who discovers and befriends secret, subterranean, high-tech fairies.

Exclusive Episode of The Office

My friend Christine Crawford is moving to Wisconsin this week, as she and her husband begin an exciting new chapter in their lives. But her gain is Bessemer's loss, as Christine has been our California office manager, and my assistant, for 13 years. Anyone who has worked with me knows that Christine is a star, and she will be missed.

To say goodbye to Christine, my kids have performed this souvenir for her:

I was a Drunken Mohel

Magic By Numbers

I have such high expectations from the NY Times that I always feel betrayed when they print garbage.

In today's Sunday issue, Harvard psychology professor and TV personality Daniel Gilbert penned an editorial titled “Magic by Numbers: Why a Roman Emperor is responsible for the 7-day antibiotic course.” Gilbert asserts that because human beings are irrationally drawn to use certain numbers relating to our 10 fingers and 7x24 calendars, medical therapies are now polluted with these numbers rather than numbers with scientific merit.

He bases his findings on a compelling plethora of evidence: 1) his own ruminations; 2) a flawed understanding of history;  3) a handful of anecdotes; and 4) completely uninformed speculation of how prescriptions are formulated.

The whole idea came to him because a doctor had prescribed a 7 day course of anti-biotics.

“Why not six, eight, or nine-and-a-half? Did the number seven correspond to some biological fact about the human digestive tract or the life cycle of bacteria?

My doctor seemed smart. She probably went to one of the nation’s finest medical schools, and regardless of where she trained, she certainly knew more about medicine than I did. And yet, as I walked out of the ER that night with my prescription in hand, I couldn’t help but suspect that I’d just been treated with magic.”

Gilbert goes on to assert that people tend to use the number 7 because a Roman emperor coined the 7 day week. (My 11 year old recently taught me that the Neo-Babylonians invented the 7 day week in the 6^th century BC – which simply points to Gilbert’s allergy to research.) Therefore that must be why antibiotics are prescribed for exactly 7 days.

He backs up his evidence for "magic numbers" with anecdotes of how people sometimes round off numbers to the nearest ten or five. But is that really such an amazing discovery of the human psyche -- that we choose to call someone back in 20 minutes rather than 17? Rounding numbers is a practical technique for remembering and tracking quantities. In no way does it imply that doctors must be plagiarizing from their calendars.

In fact, if Gilbert had simply asked his very smart, educated doctor, she could have explained that Yes, seven days does correspond to biological facts! Clinical studies clearly show that for this particular drug, six days is not always enough, and eight days is almost never needed. Why not 6.8, or 7.2? That’s easy – rounding off numbers when it comes to prescriptions improves patient compliance, a health benefit that far outweighs the fine tuning of a decimal place.

Further, Gilbert could have learned through a simple Google query that in fact there are just as many meds prescribed for 5, 6 or 8 days. Fortunately, Gilbert ignored these irrelevant facts by declining to ever collect them. 

This ability to infer patterns from incomplete anecdotes must somewhere violate a business process patent owned by Malcom Gladwell. Indeed I had to check the byline to see if this was another brilliant Gladwell phenomenon. And then I saw the web site for Gilbert's book touting him as the next Gladwell! (Coincidentally, just yesterday I read about Gilbert's book on finding happiness-- it's a target of this month's Skeptic Magazine cover story debunking the happiness craze.)

But 7 isn’t the only magic number, writes Gilbert. He speculates that his antibiotics are prescribed 3 times per day because 3 implies a beginning, middle and end. (Really.) Again, a doctor could have explained to him about the timing of chemical breakdowns, and the compliance benefits of prescribing meds every morning, every morning/night, or at every meal.

But not just 7 and 3. According to Gilbert, nine is also a magic number as evidenced by all the prices that end in 99 cents.

But not just 3, 7 and 9. Four and six are magic, too, because they have soft-sounding syllables. (Really.)

And of course 5 and 10 are magic because they correspond to the fingers on our hands.

But that’s it. Those are the only “magic numbers” that everyone likes. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9 and 10. (He might be discouraged to learn that no one read his editorial because it appeared on page 8.)

Oh, and also 12, because it “corresponds to a half turn of our planet.” But that’s all. 

The good news here is that Gilbert has just provided us forever with the canonical example of Pop Psychology. But that's just my 2 cents.