Server 1 came from Sand Hill Road, Server 2 from Sunnyvale and Server 3 from Sacramento. Our archaeologist suspects server 1 was found on the premises of a venture capitalist, server 2 came from a startup and server 3 from the offices of a large pension fund for state workers.

The VCs would have pitched the pension funds for funding, sent missives calling in commitments for funds and provided progress reports as funds matured. The startups would have pitched the VCs, sent email and progress reports.

You would be able to reconstruct 3 streams of 'work product' that interconnected at various points, sort of like DNA strands (but a 'triple helix' in this case). Which gets me back to yesterday's musings about constructing valuable RSS streams from free feeds.

I picked VC/limited partners/startups only because it's a process I'm familiar with that would exhibit the behavior I'm interested in. I scribbled down some behaviors on the VC/startup side of the equation, and highlighted the bits and pieces that might be found on the future relic servers.

Those pieces are what could represent an RSS stream - email, PowerPoints, spreadsheets, etc. I then highlighted the pieces that you might be able to find by searching widely enough on the web. You would be unlikely to find a spreadsheet charting the sales results for xyz.com in Q3 '03, but you might very well find a preso outlining the market opportunities for such-and-such kind of software. Indeed, when CEOs, VCs and others are putting together high-level strategic presos, they often go to Google to find the data points and ideas they need on the web.

It turns out that you wouldn't likely find the nuts-and-bolts stuff, like the sales spreadsheet, but you might very well find the high-level strategic stuff. Which is interesting, because corporations typically pay a lot more for the high-level strategic thinkers than they do for guys in the trenches who generate the spreadsheets.

Agreed, a lot is missing from the full equation. All the human interaction, eyeball assessments of the people and circumstances, etc. But, in my experience, a lot of that stuff is already 2nd-tier. One of my startups had backing from a venture fund so large that there was only rare one-to-one contact. Normally, communication was by broadcast email, a web site or in very large, conference-like settings.

So, I come back around to thinking that given the right mix of feeds and judgment, one could generate a product, a 'blog and its RSS feed, that would represent a high-value, high-level strategic resource to an entity like a corporation, where jobs tend to be divided up into narrow disciplines. So... what corporation, what feeds, what mix...? Details...

Comments 3:55:07 PM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures