NewGround’s web site, including this blog, is created within a web-based application developed and hosted by a company named Squarespace. This service, in my mind, would best be described as a Web 2.0 Content Management System (CMS). From a business perspective, I believe the Squarespace service offering represents a great value proposition. For $20/month, we get a web development and hosting platform that allows us (non-HTML proficient people) to create, store update/refresh, manage and publish our website, including this blog, I mention this because today I noticed this post on their customer service blog describing the recent launch on the same Squarespace service (and servers) of a much larger and much more heavily trafficked website (of former US House Majority Leader Tom Delay). The contents of that post not only raised my esteem for the Squarespace platform capabilities, but also underscore what a great value proposition it is – for Delay a great website/managed traffic service for $100/month versus several thousand to create the same capability for yourself.
Archive for the ‘Venture Capital’ Category
Squarespace
Thursday, December 14th, 2006Easy Money?
Wednesday, March 30th, 2005Fred Wilson comments on a journalist’s observation that we are about to enter "the most furious investing cycle in history" due to the vast amounts of cash raised by VC funds in 1999-2000 that their partnership agreements require them to soon use (invest) or lose (return to limited partners along with management fees that pay their salaries and expenses).
It is true that there is a huge "overhang" of venture money left over from the 1999/2000 fundraising binge. But that money can’t go into early stage deals because those deals take 5-6 years to turn into realizations. So this "overhang" is going into later stage deals. Look at $75 million going into Fastclick or $108 million going into Webroot. That’s where the overhang money is going to go. The early stage market may also be entering a "furious investing cycle" but that’s not being driven by the overhang from 1999/2000, its being driven by Web 2.0 and the realization that we have entered another wave of innovation around the Internet that will result in a lot of interesting companies being created, built, and sold over the next several years.