Scott Kirsner asks in the Boston Globe yesterday whether
venture capitalists should blog. The general feeling is that the ones who
do blog can’t imagine not blogging: it’s a great way of finding ideas,
and ideas of course are the lifeblood of the VC industry.
The VCs who don’t blog, by contrast, seem to be stuck in a zero-sum world where
information is more valuable if it isn’t shared. But there’s one other interesting
comment:
Charley Lax, managing general partner of Grand Banks Capital in Newton Centre,
says the limited partners who put their money into venture capital funds think
blogging is "stupid. They want you to be working on your portfolio companies
and looking for the next great deal."
This is something which is going to change only veeerrry slowly. I am an avid
consumer of blogs, and there are many blogs which I trust and admire on certain
subjects much more than any major media outlet. In fact, I think it’s fair to
say that for pretty much any subject, if you look hard enough, you’ll
be able to find a blog which covers it with more informed intelligence than
any newspaper. But among people who don’t read blogs for a living, the reputation
of blog is still pretty dreadful: they’re often known primarily as partisan
players at the dirty edges of political campaigns, or else as simple gossip
merchants.
Venture capitalists, of course, are paid to be ahead of the curve, so it’s
maybe not surprising that its among their ranks that we find the first individuals
who are making real money from blogging – not by investing in blogs, not
by selling advertising on blogs, but simply by blogging themselves and using
that information flow as a source of profit.
It’ll be very interesting to me to see which executive will rise above the
popular prejudice and be the next person to proudly blog. Most corporate blogs
are bland to the point of unreadability, especially if they emanate from a public
company, so I suspect that the next person to consider his or her blog a major
contributor to corporate profitability will be an entrepeneur or the CEO of
a privately-owned company. But I can’t wait for that kind of blog to become
much more commonplace, especially outside the technology industry, where it’s
most needed.
In fact, there is a good example of exactly such a blog in my blogroll to the
right: The Big Picture, by Barry
Ritholtz. Barry is a very busy hedge-fund manager, and I suspect that he uses
his blog as an opportunity to think through and discover potentially profitable
investment ideas. Barry? Would you say that your fund is more profitable as
a result of your blogging?
(Via Fred
Wilson, of course.)