Tim Oren's Due Diligence

The Armed Liberal Doffs the Mask

Winds of Change has long been one of the most thoughtful and useful blogs on the net, with a diverse and hard-working cast collecting useful news and opinions from around the world, and one of the most civilized, troll-free, and provocative set of commenters out there. One of the leaders of the band at WOC has been the pseudonymous Armed Liberal aka A.L., a persistent voice of civility and reason between the partisans of both sides.

Now, A.L. has decided to drop the pseud, and come forward in his real persona, Marc Danziger. And not just on the blog, but in a feature column by Dan Gillmor in the San Jose Merc. I'll talk about why in a moment, but first I want to tip the hat to Marc and a heretofore unacknowledged friendship:

A.L. and I started out trading comments on WOC. That led to me asking him for some advice in one of his areas of expertise. That's right, the 'Armed' part. Thanks to Marc (and John, and Marciano), I'm now an Armed VC. But that's a topic for another day.

That exchange in turn led to a very enjoyable f2f on Marc's next visit to the Bay Area. Along with a lot of random jabber, we discovered that a centrist liberal and an ex-libertarian (though agreeing to disagree on some things) had very much the same view of what's at stake in the War on Terror in general and the democratization of Iraq in specific, the potential costs of failure, and the conviction that ordinary citizens can and should take a role in winning the peace.

Marc was already on the way to acting on that conviction. Shortly after our meet, he joined up with Jim Hake of Spirit of America to help the Marines at Camp Pendleton pack up donated medical and toys and school supplies to give to civilians in Iraq.

Then Spirit of America started a project to donate television studio equipment so that Iraqis could have their own stations to counter the propaganda of Al Jazeera. The Wall Street Journal took notice of this good cause. My wife and I were hosting Marc, his son, and TG on a return visit to the Valley when he took a call saying that the appeal for $100k in funding had raised over $1m in one day. The final total was over $1.5m - obviously a lot of people see the same thing and want to contribute.

If you didn't follow the links, the reason that Marc has dropped the mask is that he has now officially put his consulting career on hold and accepted a position of COO at Spirit of America, which is getting ready to kick into high gear. I'll have a lot more to say about that tomorrow, but for now I just want to wish Marc (and TG) all the best of success and survival in (non-profit) startup mode.

Impressions of SID

As mentioned below, I took a short trip to check out the Society for Information Display conference up in Seattle. While I don't really qualify as an analyst for that industry, here are some notables picked up in a few hours walking the floor:

Samsung made a determined (and largely successful) effort to steal the show from such older stalwarts as Sharp and Philips. Their large and crowded booth showed such as goodies as:

• An 80" plasma panel HDTV
  
• A 47" LCD HDTV
  
• A 17" active matrix OLED panel. I wasn't too fond of the color balance, but the ability to build this size of panel is impressive.
  
• Multi-primary TVs in both DLP and LCD technology.
  
• A 2.03" VGA (400 ppi) equivalent display for mobile phones, built on amorphous silicon, incorporating technology from our portfolio company Clairvoyante.

While I know the last item will be sampling in a few months, it's never too clear whether items like this are headed for real products, or are 'bragging rights one-offs' produced specially for this show. While I have a vested interest in the mobile panel, the big screens were material for a real consumerist drool-fest. The ones next door from Brillian were also quite tasty.

LED backlights are moving to larger form-factor displays. Lumileds and NEC-Mitsubishi jointly announced and showed a 21.3" LED backed display.

After all the noise about OLEDs, they seem to be turning into a nascent industry. Two years ago there were tiny lab protos and samples in the corners of larger booths. Now there are whole booths devoted to OLED fabrication, testing, and materials. The actually available product is still a small minority of what's to be seen, but the momentum is noticeable.

Flexible displays now seem to occupy the early stage slot formerly held by OLED. At least Kodak and Philips were showing working (monochrome) flexible displays.

There were a number of 'electronic paper' products, including the well-known E Ink. I was not impressed. The technology is clever, but the visual appearence really suffers when juxtaposed to LCD and PDP in the same exhibit hall. I wonder if this approach will be able to get enough momentum to compete with the LCD juggernaut.

A lot of the display industry, particularly the commodity portion, is on the way to Taiwan and thence to mainland China. Nan Ya and VDS were among the Taiwanese with large booths. (And there are other established players such as Chi Mei and AU Optronics that did not exhibit had representatives on the floor. The Korean vendors had better watch out - while they're overtaking the Japanese, the Chinese are coming right up their tail pipes!

Off topic, but fun

You're just going to have to go see for yourself. Auf Deutsch, but it doesn't make much difference.

Thanks to Xopher.

Heading for SEA-TAC

I'm on my way for a one day flying visit to the Society for Information Display show in Seattle, where one of our portfolio companies will have a booth and be making some interesting announcements. This conference tends to favor the technical end of the display industry, but the trade show floor is often interesting. The digicam is coming along; we'll see if I spot anything (else) interesting.

It's hard being the CEO

Jeff Jarvis links to a wandering, but valuable, post from fellow VC Jerry Colonna, on the tribulations of the venture CEO. In between everything from quotes of Henry V to a paean to JetBlue, are many insights on the inherent difficulties, which will ring true to both venture board members and past and current CEOs. If you have ambitions to sit in either chair, read the whole thing.

A few bits of enlargement and emphasis from here:

The trust relationship between CEO and board is paramount. The best way for the CEO to undermine it is to pitch the team's wins, while sweeping problems under the rug. (As Jerry points out, this isn't always a conscious act - see below). It will always come out. The chance that a business plan survives contact with the market is zero.

Even in the best run company, reality differs from plan. The investors and board know there are going to be deviations. Get them on the table as fast as possible so they can be handled quickly - that's the competitive advantage of a startup. Let them fester, and reality will continue to drift from plan. When the truth comes out, the CEO's credibility is gone, and the required course correction will be major. Recovery is almost impossible for the CEO, and difficult and costly for the investors.

Some amount of this occurs without malice. None of us starts our career as a CEO, or board member for that matter. We begin as engineers, sales people, marketers, finance professionals. Under intense pressure, we will often fall back into our 'native style'. Like the drunk looking for his keys under the lightpost, we search for solutions and good news in the domain where we started and feel at home. It takes a very tough and self-conscious CEO to avoid this at all times. It's the job of the board to note and correct such a tendency, and it's a reason that a CEO is wise to have a close personal advisor to monitor and adjust his behavior as well.

This is also a very good reason for a diverse board. A CEO and board all of the same background will have a tendency to search together for solutions under the same lamppost, and feel they are making progress because they communicate so well. Meanwhile, disfunctions in other areas of the venture pile up. It may be a pain having to summarize down the technical issues to where the ex-CFOs can understand them, or beat the basics of marcom into the heads of retreaded engineers, but it's part of the necessary process.

The results of the blog readers' survey...

are in. Very interesting. I think the demographics and behavioral characteristics speak for themselves. Now... how big is this population?

A New Literacy of Cooperation

Today I'll be at a private Institute for the Future conference, focusing on the role of cooperation (as versus pure competition) in economic and social activities. There's a private conference wiki put up by Ross Mayfield of Socialtext. We've also been told that the session is bloggable, though without attribution unless we have the speaker's permission. In addition to myself and Ross, the attendees include bloggers Howard Rheingold, Jerry Michalski, Alex Pang, and Mike Liebhold (and maybe some I don't know), so they may be some reporting from those sources.

We're starting with Peter Kollock introducing the topic of Social Dilemmas.

Lions invade Silicon Valley!

No, really, trust me! Yesterday, a 108 pound mountain lion (aka cougar) was treed by a dog and shot by a police sniper in a Palo Alto residential neighborhood less than two miles from my office. For those who know the territory, this was well east of El Camino, and a long way from the green belt parks.

The lion population has been slowly growing in the Bay Area hills, responding to an over-population of deer. With a dry late spring, the deer have come down from the hills to feast on irrigated gardens earlier than usual. As the deer move into the suburban fringes, the lions follow. There's been a small one sighted at Edgewood Park, less than a mile from my home. Still, having a cat make it miles down into Palo Alto is unprecedented - it might have been following a stream drainage corridor. Too bad they had to take it out, but the judgement call that a half-tranked lion loose in a residential neighborhood was a poor risk was likely the right one.

This concludes our tape-delayed presentation

We hope you have enjoyed the show. We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming, such as it is.

The Flight of Enola Gay

Our last stop in the East was the new Smithsonian Air & Space display just south of Dulles airport. It's a magnificent facility: spacious, well-lit, still squeaky-clean, and with room to grow in both exhibits and crowds. The exhibits are well organized and broadly representative: from hang gliders to a Concorde, WWI fighters to an F-35 prototype, a Boeing 707, and the Enterprise shuttle mockup - still missing the wing edges destructively tested in analyzing the loss of Columbia.

Among these remarkable machines, only one will make your neck hairs stand up just viewing it. There was controversy when Enola Gay was readied for display. In the end, its exhibit bears the same one paragraph service record as all the other aircraft, noting its singular mission. It's all the more effective for its understatement. The others are there as representatives of their type, but only one plane was first to destroy a city, and it is before you. This is the aluminum and steel memorial to the time when the deeds of the Empire of Japan convinced America that its citizens should be destroyed without compunction.

9/11 bears witness that there are those in the Arab and Islamic worlds who would destroy Americans without compunction. In the week of our vacation, the disclosures of Abu Ghraib may well have moved more to that belief. The beheading of Nick Berg last week likely increased the number of American who believe it is time to retaliate without compunction.

The curators of the Smithsonian believe that Enola Gay has been so well restored that it would fly again, were its tanks refueled.