Jason Calacanis has a thoughtful post up about knowing when to let go of a company you have created. This quote particularly struck me:

You have to always be confident that you are able to create another hit, you’re not a one-hit wonder, and that your future is always brighter than your past. You can’t live with this fear of losing this monster you created. And sometimes you gotta kill it…

I think this is sound advice not just for starting and selling companies, but for life. Whether a poem, a job, or a relationship, we often get so attached to the idea of what we created that we hold on for dear life long after it has lost its value.

I have always known that some of my classmates from college and law school would own businesses, have powerful positions in government, and otherwise become notable. But I didn’t expect to see a 25 year old classmate of mine from law school start so quickly.

While the rest of his classmates are summering at firms or working for financial institutions this summer, Jared Kushner, who will graduate with a JD/MBA from NYU in 2007, decided to buy a company.

According to the New York Times, Kushner ponied up $10 million dollars to buy the New York Observer. This after a deal with Robert DeNiro and his team fell through.

Bessemer Venture Partners has a hilarious “anti-portfolio” on their site celebrating the investment opportunities that they turned down that turned out to be huge winners. It’s a great read.

Interesting article in today’s NYTimes about Netflix and how they are succeeding despite the fact that the technology exists for digital delivery of movies. Interesting fact from the article: Netflix carries roughly 60,000 movies. How many of them are rented by users everday?

35,000 to 45,000.

Shocking.

Fred Wilson nails it with his post about how NYTimes Select has killed the influence (online at least) of the top op-ed writers at the Old Grey Lady. Back in the day, the first thing I did in the morning was go to NYTimes and read the latest from Dowd, Friedman, Rich, Tierney, etc. Their opinions mattered. We discussed their ideas on blogs, they were thought leaders. They are no longer - due entirelyt to the NYTimes decision to hide them behind the “Select” vail.

An even sadder side effect of the walled garden that is the Times Select is the fact that their “most interesting articles” feature has been watered down. That list used to be a first class shortcut for finding the articles that I had to read. Now, I rarely find an article on the list that really captures my interest. It has become a B-list of sorts - what would have been the #25 - #50 most forwarded articles by users.

I’d love to see the data for the months following the implementation of Times Select. Did readership dip online? Have they actually increased revenue by getting more pulp subscriptions? I suppose that if they have increased revenue or if their readership online hasn’t decreased, then is their value to having their key writers widely circulated on line? And I wonder if there will be a larger, more noticeable difference further on down the road?

If someone told me a few years ago that I would pay $20.00 a month so that I could get up to 3 movies at a time - in the mail - I would have laughed. I would have been laughing at the “in the mail” part of the statement. How, in an era of digital delivery is a traditional mail service laying the lumber to Blockbuster? I laugh thinking about the Blockbuster execs that spent all of their time (hopefully) worrying about how they were going to compete with the On Demand services from cable providers only to have Netflix come out of nowhere and steal their cookies with a mailbox.

How did that happen? And what made the folks at Netflix think that they could even do it? If I was the one that had the Netflix brainstorm, I would have stopped the moment the two way necessity of the United States Postal Service came into the picture. It just doesn’t make sense.

Netflix beat Blockbuster despite the need for mail for 3 reasons:

1. Browsing and searching and cross referencing movies, actors, directors and key grips is easier, faster, and more effective when done online. Going to a physical store before deciding what movie you want to watch is the stuff that ends relationships. Who really thinks in terms of Drama, Action, and Comedy when they get to the store? I don’t. I want to see another film by David Fincher. I want to see something kinda like Cidade De Deus. I want to see anything that my friend Luke recommends. Blockbuster doesn’t make this possible. Netflix does.

2. The Netflix Queue has changed my life. It isn’t perfect yet, but it has transformed the way that I consume movies. I have 350 movies in my queue at anytime - movies my friends recommend, movies that star actors who’s work I enjoy, movies that are recommended by Netflix after seeing my rating activity of movies that I have seen. No more walking into the store, a tabula rasa. No more trying to remember the name of the movie that Luke recommended to me 2 years ago. Forget browsing the suspense shelves, hunched over like Quasimodo, only to realize, after looking at every title, that Panic Room is actually filed under thriller.

3. Late fees. Nuff said. Actually. No. This one is huge. Even Blockbuster tried to do away with late fees but they couldn’t. They couldn’t because if they let me keep the Broadway and 8th copy of Raging Bull for 2 months, then no one else could watch it. Their model of physical locations prohibits them from allowing me to keep a movie for a lengthy (and it is lengthy) period of time.

While not an exhaustive list, Netflix’s queue, their open and cross-referenceable database, and their open ended rental periods are what allowed them to beat Blockbuster. But interestingly, On Demand and other digital delivery mechanisms have the same advantage over Blockbuster and they have obvious advantages over Netflix. When the cable companies or the content providers learn the Netflix lessons, they might very well make Netflix obsolete.

Cable needs to immediately implement the following Netflix lessons:

1. Give me the option of paying a monthly fee. This would eliminate the cable version of a late fee whereby after 24 hours I can no longer view the movie that I purchased. I paid for it, let me watch it when I want to watch it. Hell, let me watch it twice.

2. Let me see any movie ever made (or at least the 50,000 that Netflix offers). When I had cable, nothing was worse than going to OnDemand only to realize that I had seen all of the movies that they were currently offering for the month (50 or so).

3. Offer me the queue function as a service. When I turn on my T.V. I should see a channel - my channel - that has a browseable list of the movies that I have said that I want to remember to watch.

4. Add good search functionality. Make it easy for people to find good movies. This need not be on my television. As evidence by Netflix, users are willing to go online to search and choose movies and then have them delivered in another medium. If they are satisfied to keep a queue online and then wait for movies in the mail, they will be thrilled to choose movies online and then walk into their living room, turn on the television, and watch it.

Once cable companies have implemented the features above, then their natural advantages should knock Netflix out of the box. Digital delivery has several natural advantages. Digital delivery is instant. The one problem I have with Netflix is that my “movie mood” sometimes shifts (drastically) while the movies are in USPS transit. If I add a movie to my queue and it is instantly available on my television, my movie mood is synched to my available movies. Digital delivery is inconsumable. Blockbuster has late fees because they need that damn disk back so they can sell it again. While Netflix has a better distribution structure, they still are still hampered by physical assets that can only be in one place at a given time.

In the end, it is weird that we had to go to a middle step between physical stores and digital delivery - and even weirder still that the middle step involved the mails, but if cable learns the Netflix lessons, then consumers will get an amazing service, one that has been in the wings for a long time now.

Tim Boucher points to an article in USA Today about the return of late fees at Blockbuster. Apparently, they are blaming their customers for not returning movies, thus causing a shortage of titles. As Cosby’s Noah would say:

Riiiiiight….

Anyway, as I said before:

I stopped going to Blockbuster and Hollywood video when I tried to rent Casablanca and the clerk told me they didn’t carry that title. It was Hollywood video, but I banned Blockbuster by association.

I am interested to hear mroe about this deal. Yahoo’s MyWeb2.0 seemed to have most of the functionality that del.icio.us had and it had the added benefit of saving a cached copy of the web page - a feature that del.icio.us was sorely lacking.

I wonder if they bought it for the brand or if del.icio.us has something on the inside that the average user is not aware of (besides a ton of data). I do hope that they consolidate the two services.

I am becoming a bigger and bigger fan of Yahoo as they acquire some of the web’s most useful services - del.icio.us, flickr, upcoming.

Update:

I just realized that almost no one is using Yahoo’s MyWeb2.0 (what an awful name). As of today, the entire service only has 459,842 pages and 110,620 tags. I just misplaced the stats for del.icio.us but they tower over that. So, Yahoo wasn’t only buying data, they were buying users.

I think business could learn a lot from sports. We should wear jersey’s with our name and number on them at work (I would be number 4). We should celebrate, throw high fives and do a little dance after a particularly well executed presentation. We should keep stats and make them public. At the end of your career you could get your number retired if you were really good. I think it would raise moral, increase effectiveness and accountability and increase organizational memory.

What were Johnson’s stats last year?

He had an EPR (effective presentation ratio) of .875?

Impressive.

Via Cnn: Martha Stewart was just convicted on four counts.

Update: Wow. Stewart is still in the court house and her website is already updated with a post verdict message.