Home Sweet Home

This blog can now be accessed from AndrewKoch.com, and we're totally back in business. Next steps for this blog are now:

1. Set up Disqus for comments, as I've wanted to do for about 12 months.
2. Improve look/feel, or at least explore other designs.
3. Customize functionality/widgets around the perimeter of the main content.
4. Start writing.


UPDATED:
5. Figure out traffic tracking options.

Recognition for the Boss

Marc Cenedella, CEO of TheLadders, was named #21 in the Silicon Alley 100. Kudos, Marc!

CSFBL - In Limbo

Astonishingly few people even know about CSFBL - Computer Simulated Fantasy Baseball League - but those of us that do know love it. The basic idea is that you create or adopt a fictional baseball franchise and manage it season after season - leagues vary from 2 games/day to 8 games/day.

You have control over your 25-man major league roster, a roster in the high-minors and a third roster of up-and-comers in the low-minors. You can adjust your lineup, your pitching rotation, your managerial style, your spending on scouts, training, development and you draft new players each year. After each game, you can check the box scores, and check the compiled stats for the year, of for all time. It's not quite as polished as whatifsports.com and the feature set isn't as rich - but it's free. For someone like me that can only check it for a few minutes a week, it's the perfect baseball fix for the offseason. You only need to invest as much or as little time as you'd like...

Nerdy? Or course.
Fun? Absolutely.

So, why is it in limbo? The site has been down since 1/22, the server has moved from an ISP to the proprieter's basement and there's really no telling when things will be back up and running. Their outage blog suggests that they'll be up by Monday, but this is a hobby, rather than a business. There's no guarantee there.

So, what's next? If CSFBL is going to survive, they need to make a business out of this. Much like whatifsports has done with simulated baseball, like Match.com has done with personals and like we've done with executive job search over at TheLadders.com, they need to offer a simple basic version that gives people a taste of the product and encourages people to upgrade to a paid version for full access, features, etc.

Whatifsports has proven that the business model can work for sports, and it's really not that different from the fantasy sports behemoths - CBS Sportsline, ESPN and Yahoo. The revenue from the run-of-network ads on CSFBL wasn't enough to make the site anything more than a hobby, and the donations through Amazon.com's Honor System haven't done the trick either. As sad as it will be for us freeloaders, it's time for CSFBL to get serious and try to make some money off the quality engine they've built.

They've hinted at the idea a bit in a blog post, suggesting (in a FAQ format) that the level of donations by a particular league might determine whether or not they get migrated to the new, improved version of the site. But it's not going to be enough. I guess I just don't understand why they're so reluctant to turn their baby into even a small business. It's a no-brainer.

UPDATE: In the few brief hours since I posted this, the CSFBL site has been revived!

Motherload Victory!

Well, I destroyed my previous high score and bested Marc. That's 73.8 million in motherload. And with that, I'm announcing my permanent retirement from the game.

Damn You Marc!

Yesterday, Marc emailed me a link for Motherload. It's a fun little game that you can really sink some time into.

I played for a while last night, staying up well past the witching hour. I took a little screenshot of my progress before I called it quits:



I thought my score of 1.2mm was respectable, until marc emailed me his high score: 53 million! Good lord, that's dedication.

Holy Smokes

My mom has a website! Check out RuthKoch.com - she's got all her watercolor paintings up there for the viewing. I think Silver Breeze is my favorite, but the low-res image here doesn't do it justice. I recommend you buy a print!

Congrats Mom, and welcome to the internet.

(note - this post was originally authored, posted and taken down on 3/28/06)

Nerd Heaven

Web 2.0 or Star Wars Quiz

(I got 32 out of 43 correct)

Entrepreneurial Vision

OnlyOnce: Memory Lane or Dark Alley?

At the same time, it was pretty painful to look at some of our original projections for market size and of course business size -- not to mention some of the marketing efforts, Powerpoint templates, logos, and names that fell by the wayside.

That's Matt Blumberg, CEO of ReturnPath, talking about the unpredictable evolution of a start-up. As I approach my two-year anniversary as a full-timer here at TheLadders, Matt's post is particularly interesting, in part because our experience at TheLadders, the definitive source for executive jobs, has been different. We've had our fair share of silly ideas and bad designs, but we've gotten the big stuff right. Marc's original powerpoint from July of 2003 is shockingly similar to our current business.

(Thanks to fellow upper-westsider Fred for the link to Matt)

Good Tidings

Please stop by and offer a hearty welcome to blogging newcomer, friend and coworker mrshafrir. Here's his first post.

And reminiscing, my first post from November 2003. "Is this thing on?" is a strangely popular first post in these parts.

Anyway, I look forward to many mrshafrir postings popping up in my bloglines feeds. Happy internetting!

Nothing says "HR" like "Get Laid, Stay Paid"

As I understand it, the business model over at SimplyHired is to attract job seekers to the site (mostly by scraping jobs off the internet and surrounding them with "web 2.0" tools) and then essentially re-sell that traffic to corporate HR types. Today, most of the ads are from Google, but the long term play is to get recruiters bidding on keywords like "software engineer" directly on SimplyHired's own system.

So, if your plan is to reach out to corporate HR people, wouldn't it make sense to have a site that shows you understand them?

Then why in the world are you promoting "GET LAID, STAY PAID" on the
Simply Fired blog? I just visited the site and was greeted with the following: "FIRED for eating out with the boss' daughter" and "I walked in on my boss while he was having sex with one of my co-workers. He fired me..."

This kind of stuff might entertain the job seeker, but I suspect corporate HR folks are not going to identify with this. This disconnect between business model and brand smells like trouble for SimplyHired.

Another Timesink

jay is games: Cubefield

"simple but highly addictive"

Absolutely. My high score after a few minutes is 217,005. Scanning through the comments on jayisgames, I'm merely a novice.

More Planarity

Semi-mindless fun with Planarity this evening. Made it through Level 15 without skipping any levels and piled up 5,641 points.

The last couple levels have taken about 15 minutes each. I think I better stop before my addiction goes to far...

Conundrum

I'm in quite a pickle over here. What do you do when your CEO calls you out for not playing addictive internet games enough?

On Stone, Marc compels me to "Beat that, Kocher!" - referring to his 2,646 score on gridgame.

What to do... what to do...?

UPDATE 11:10 am -- 2934!! Right back at you Marc!

Google Maps, but Better?

Yahoo released their answer to Google maps today: the new Yahoo Maps Beta. Doesn't have the satellite imagery that Google Maps has, but otherwise seems as good if not better. Perhaps the best part is the integration to my Yahoo profile. It knows my saved locations and recently used locations to make my life easier.

Only downside right now is that it seems a little sluggish. Hopefully that'll improve as it comes out of Beta.

AP story here.

Grid Game - Surprising Time Sink

This game is super-simple, yet surprisingly addictive: Grid Game

My high score is 1437. UPDATE: 1755

FINAL UPDATE: 2420

(Thanks to GMSV for the link in yesterday's newsletter.)

Update: DAMN YOU GMSV. I can't stop!

Sanity

BeyondVC: Web 2.0 Bubble

Frankly I do not care if you are Web 2.0, Web 1.0, etc. All I care about is what your service or product does, why it is valuable to the end user, why it is uniquely different from the competition, what the barriers to entry are, and how you plan on reaching your customers and how you will ultimately make money.

Well said.

Cool Mappings

Radical Cartography has some pretty cool maps:

Place-Name Etymology

Area Codes, over time

Interesting stuff...

Founders, a Perspective from a VC

A VC: Founders

Founders contribute something to companies that is very special. It's the core DNA of most companies. Many founders step aside at some point from the CEO role. Many times that happens at the urging of the VCs. Many times they do it on their own, recognizing that they don't enjoy actually running a company.

But the tricky part is keeping the founders engaged and involved once they'd stepped down from the CEO role.

...

But how do you get someone of the caliber of Jerry Yang or David Filo to stick around and keep working on moving the company forward.

I saw this at HotJobs (CEO/Founder Richard Johnson left the company and quickly disengaged) and I co-founded a start-up myself, so these questions feel particularly relevant. I agree wholeheartedly with Fred - the importance of the CEO/Founder's vision and enthusiasm cannot be underestimated. Marc is unlikely to toot his own horn on this one, so let me do so here: Toot! to the CEO of the worlds best $100k+ job search engine.

More on Omniture

More in-depth thoughts about the Omniture deal from Daniel Primack on Private Equity Week in his weekly update, It's A Big Deal.

Company CEO Josh James says that the issue is one of flexibility. An IPO, he argues, could stifle Omniture’s ability to invest in sales, marketing, R&D, etc. To James, public=profitability pressure, and he doesn’t believe that he can build a market leader while always being concerned about moving from red to black (the company was once profitable, but currently is not due to the aforementioned growth initiative).

(Thanks to Chris Selland for the link)

Search Rankings - Tricky Business

From MSN Search's WebLog - New Operators Explained:

"We shipped 1.0 with the Link: keyword, which allows you to find pages that link to a single page, ala link:search.msn.com."

When you actually perform that search to see who links to MSN Search, the very first listing is for Viagra (or is that an ad? I can't even tell). And down at seventh is search.microsoft.com. It's nice that they've introduced the "link" operator, but for now, Google and Yahoo are better at it.

The same search on Google actually returns a list of sites that make sense. Yahoo's search is pretty darn good too: "link:http://search.msn.com/".

Nice to see the competition on the search front, but it feels like MSN's got a ways to go.