Tuesday, June 30, 2009
When technology bites - Terminal 5 baggage system
On vacation - trying to take a break from work and the general pressures of running a company. But clearly there is no rest for the wicked.
I left London on Sunday from Heathrow Terminal 5. For the first time in many, many years I checked my bag. I was tired. My bag, although carry on, was heavy. Probably because I had a mobile office in there. I didn't want to have to lift it. Silly me.
I arrived in Rome - not the most organized airport at the best of times - to find 2 hours later that half the bags had not made it onto the flight, mine included. Turns out there had been another major breakdown in the new Terminal 5 baggage handling system. Not only were many bags lost but many flights were delayed and passengers stranded because the whole check in system was suspended.
I'm on day 3, no suitcase, no power, enough pigeon Italian to buy toiletries but it's getting grim. So I did some research on the T5 system so I'd know who to be mad at.
Any guesses? IBM of course. The British Airways site touts the "state-of-the-art baggage system at Terminal 5 was designed by IBM and leading baggage handling experts, Vanderlande. Every effort to has been made to make sure your baggage arrives just where you want it, when you want it."
The opening of T5 was a "national embarrassment" last year - IT and poor training and testing is blamed for the problems plaguing the baggage handling system.
48 hours later and counting. The only phone number I have is in Italy so of course the hours they are open are short and they know nothing - they have to wait for London to tell them anything.
Lesson to self. Technology is a dangerous toy and needs to be tested. A major state-of-the-art new system that can take things away from you is to be avoided until it's been hardened for many years. And never, ever check bags again.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Michael Jackson's death presents commercial challenge
The sad news of the death of Michael Jackson last night not only challenged the emotions of aging forty something pop fans everywhere, but also challenged the ability of the social networks to keep up with the volume, and will lose at least one concert promoter money.
Twitter had already grown faster than any other site in May but even so was not prepared for Michael's death and is straining under the volume plus the King of Pop brought AOL AIM down for 40 minutes and halted Wikipedia.
It is important to one company though - I was using the new, sizzling hot beta version of FirstRain today to research his death (yeah I know - weird thing to be doing on my vacation - but I never claimed to be normal) and since we are a business research engine found myself reading about all the money that will be lost as a result of his death - not least of which is the exposure AEG Live has to the $85M worth of tickets they have already sold for his 50 concerts here at the O2 arena.
The meltdown of the social networking sites does make me wonder though - What would happen to these services if something really important happened?
I did eventually switch across to read people.com. Billy Jean is, after all, still my favorite song to dance to. RIP Michael.
Intermitent vacation postings
I am on a 2 week vacation (Oxford, Roma and Milano) and had already fallen behind on posting before I left so, gentle reader, please forgive sparsity, or maybe even a lack of business relevance, over the next two weeks.
Friday, June 19, 2009
The analyst and his time challenge
Guest post: Michael Prospero, Director of Research at FirstRain
As an analyst, one of the things I struggled with was the vast amount of information coming at me each day. A large part of my job was to read anything from or about my companies, competitor companies, industry bellwethers, thought leaders and of course the overall economy.
I set up Google alerts, but depending on the companies/stocks I entered I got a lot of junk both old and irrelevant. Also, there still isn’t a way to set up the types of sources you would like to read (e.g., no press releases or wire news) -- the number of sources alerts covered is relatively small. The stated information from Google is that it watches more than 4,500 English-language news sites. and the number of alerts can become annoying if you have large portfolios of companies you’re tracking.
Additionally, I would have my stock ticker service up on my screen with the stock prices of my portfolios and this would provide an icon if there was news on a stock I had set up on the screen. A large part of my day was spent reading financial publications, checking news from the alerts on my companies, talking to customers and companies. When I had time in between those tasks, I spent my time working investment ideas.
As you read, you come up with ideas (idea generation), which leads you to search for other stories to either support or invalidate your theory. To find those stories, you would of course use Google search. Obviously, Google is very good at finding content, but because it’s most every source on the internet, you have to really hunt for something interesting and timely.
Oftentimes, you will find an article that is exactly what you were looking for in your search only to realize that it’s from 2006. Google search is comprehensive, but it’s tedious and extremely time consuming to dig through the clutter of totally irrelevant as well as non-business relevant content.
It’s been nearly three years since I was an analyst now and the one thing that has drastically changed is the number of blogs (and overall number sources on the internet) and their authoritativeness. In the beginning, the number of blogs was sparse and at best the authors of them were questionable. Now, we have blogs from extremely knowledgeable, connected, intelligent people and micro-blogging (e.g., Twitter) is yet the next step in the evolution of news.
So this leads to why I am at FirstRain: I believe if a system could have gathered all of the news that was business relevant, categorize it by company and topically, and allow me to personalize its delivery along with other preferences, it would have helped my process enormously. I could have spent more time on the phone and more time working on idea generation. Time spent on new ideas rather than time spent covering your butt is the way to create alpha.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
The rapidly changing (reducing) role of the traditional sell-side analyst
I sat on a panel today at NIRI (conference for IR) today in Fort Lauderdale and the topic was the changing role of the sell-side analyst. My fellow panelists represented the differing viewpoints of independent research - and a client - but the consensus was the same. The sell-side is going through radical change.
The problem started 30 years ago with commission deregulation - the day when how much a broker was paid to trade a share of stock was no longer regulated. As you can see from Rick Hanley's chart here -- the price of a trade has dropped continuously. Trading volume and investment banking were the two sources of funding for sell-side research -- for the first the price per trade has plummeted, for the second Elliot Spitzer put up a wall between IB and research -- and so the business model of traditional sell-side research within the big broker dealers is broken.
The net result is, unlike in the internet bubble when sell-side analysts were rock stars, now many of them have left and either gone into the buy-side or have set up their own research firms (or retired). Howard Penney from Research Edge talked about their new independent research model - clients just subscribe to research - no trading. Rick Hanley talked about his new service for management access (and how they partner with us) and Tom Digenan from UBS was the sole representative of the customer side. I was the lone techy (in a service intensive group) but rounded out the picture with the rapidly changing toolsets that are available.
In the end after much discussion and many questions from the IR professionals on how to use the sell-side it became clear that sell-side research is here to stay - but - and this is the but of change - it's only one piece of the puzzle and is no longer the exclusive way to get to management - so IR has to learn to work with the other independent research and technology providers.
It was also clear the sell-side is not being careful enough of their company relationships. One of the IROs in the audience (who is IRO for a major cosmetics company) told me she is so frustrated with the sell-side she is ready to cut them out. Her complaint is that she can't get the meetings she wants, with the investors she wants, through the sell-side because, at the 11th hour, they will swap out the institutions she wants her CEO and CFO to meet with and swap in their highest trading clients: the hedge funds.
There is clearly a role for unbiased management access now.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Bing for travel - not ready for prime time
I have been intrigued by Bing and used it yesterday to research my blog post - definitely better than Google but still not very useful for research. So today I thought I'd try it for travel.
Normally I use Kayak or Expedia - and today's early morning task was finding a hotel in the Duomo district of Milano for 3 nights in July (I'm going for the U2 concert - yes I know I'm crazy).
Bing just didn't cut it. Kayak gave me 9 hotels to chose from (when filtered by internet being available) and Expedia gave me 34. Expedia was not able to let me chose the distance from the Duomo itself but it has very clear presentation of the basics about each hotel in the summary.
Bing gave me 1 hotel.
Enough said. It's not ready for real usage.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
The Death of Venture Capital as we know it?
A massive shakeout of venture capital firms has been predicted for years but it is finally going to happen over the next year because of a perfect storm of timing.
There are countless books, a few movies and mountains of silicon valley gossip about the good times of venture capital. Huge returns from the internet bubble bred too many people who thought they were smart because they were rich and it seemed as if new funds were popping up all the time, staffed by VC wannabes from investment bankers to millionaires from companies like Netscape, eBay, and Cisco. As one of my investors said at the time "everyone wants to be a venture capitalist, even the landlord".
But that era came to an end 9 years ago now, and 10 years is the critical period for the venture capital industry because funds are 10 years in length so I predict the decimation will start by the end of this year (although some like Venture Beat are already counting the corpses).
The perfect storm will create an inability for all but the best firms to raise money - and funds need to keep raising money to stay alive - but they face a tempest:
- the 10 year look back will not look good for all but a very few by the end of this year. With the exception of a handful of funds, the great returns came off funds that started before the tech bubble burst. It burst in 2000 so by 2010 the lookback will not include liquidity events in 1998 and 1999. Even some of the best firms don't have great returns over the last 10 years.
- major LPs (limited partners like pension funds and endowments) are having to balance their portfolios away from alternative investments. Imagine you manage an endowment or pension fund that has a restriction on what percentage can be invested in alternative investments (like venture capital) . But the equities portion of your portfolio has dropped by 40% so now your venture capital portion is over your limit. You can't invest more in venture capital even if you want to participate in a new fund.
- for years now about $2B a year in new money was flowing into the venture capital world from new LPs. This was new family money diversifying, or countries bringing a portion of their sovereign wealth fund into venture - but now if you are a newly wealthy South American land owner and have a $100M that you are being advised to invest in higher risk/higher growth you'd look back at the 10 year returns of venture capital and say "no thank you".
- the IPO market is broken so smart investors know that the rates of return for venture capital will continue to be depressed. Being acquired just doesn't carry the same multiples as an IPO - especially now when buyers are taking advantage of the difficulties small companies have raising money in a recession.
Even the best funds are working harder than they have every worked before to raise their new funds. NEA has closed on over $2B of their $2.5B raise, Oak Investments has attracted some negative press but they'll succeed in raising their $1B+ fund because the same small group of partners has been repeatedly successful over more than 20 years - as will the best of the best like Sequoia, Benchmark, Sutter Hill, Kleiner-Perkins et al when their time comes.
But we're seeing a flight to quality as the funding so far in 2009 is down almost 40%. LPs will be ruthlessly selective and this will weed out the new, the small and the weak.
The coming contraction will cause the startup industry to return to fundamentals. Good ideas into vibrant new markets that take 6-8 years to bloom not 2-3. Some in the valley think this will lead to less innovation but I disagree. I think we'll get a higher quality of company because great new companies don't come from the spray-and-pray approach - they come from creative, hard working entrepreneurs working hand in glove with nurturing investors and customers over a considerable period of time.
There are about 700 venture capital firms in the US according to the National Venture Capital Association. I readily admit I'm opinionated and think that probably less than 10% of these are really valuable to entrepreneurs (my friends who are partners in the best firms listed above would say the quality list is less than that!). As I've posted before - all venture money is not equal - pick your investors very carefully.
I predict decimation - but I realize as I conclude that I am not using the word correctly because it comes from the Latin for the destruction of one tenth - but I wonder if one in ten will be left standing? Will there be as many as 70 US venture capital firms two years from now?
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Sales-Client relations in the 2009 recession
Here's a classic for sales people - how many of you are living this in 2009?
