June 2, 2005

The Rise and Fall of Names

My wife Katherine recently pointed me to a very cool website that produces a historical graph showing the popularity of a name through time. The interactive graphing feature, the NameVoyager, is really well done and fun to play with. “What should we name our child?” is a common conversation today among our peers, many of whom are now firmly enagaged in the procreation phase of life.

When I was born in the 70’s, my name was on the rise in popularity, peaked around 1980, and has been falling steadily ever since, though it is still more common today than when I was born.

Since Katherine had already ruled out my suggestions that we name our son Agamemnon or Klaxtor5, we named him Quinn, aiming for a name that was relatively uncommon, yet not so rare as to be strange or difficult to spell or pronounce. Being word nerds, we also wanted a name with a high Scrabble score. (Never mind the fact that proper nouns don’t count, please.)

Update: Hunter Walk, the AdSense Partner Manager at Google, pointed out to me that another consideration when naming your child should be how easily discoverable they will be when using a search engine. I’m embarrassed I didn’t think of that myself, though I did reserve quinnmcintyre.com on his behalf.

Technorati Tags: Baby Name

Join the Conversation

March 22, 2005

WAG Chronicles, Part 2

As I mentioned in my previous post about WAG, after our Saturday night feast up in Napa, we felt we had turned out a meal that would stand up well next to the efforts of the kitchen on Sunday evening at The French Laundry. Allow me to state for the record that upon tasting the first bite of Thomas Keller’s signature dish Oysters and Pearls, we all immediately agreed that “we’re not worthy” and that our efforts in the kitchen the night before, while impressive, were part of a different (and lower) culinary plane of existence. Keller truly deserves his place in the pantheon of the world’s greatest chefs.

I’ve also posted an image of the menu from the evening, which includes the wine pairings. One item that does not appear on the menu is a chestnut agnolotti with celery root cream sauce. My wife Katherine had requested a menu without red meat or poultry, and they served this dish for her in place of the beef course on our menu. We all took a taste of her chestnut-filled pasta and declared it one of the best courses of the evening. Overhearing this, our waiter had the kitchen prepare an extra course and served each of us a plate of the agnolotti. Nice touch.

Join the Conversation

March 19, 2005

WAG Chronicles, Part 1

A few weeks ago, Katherine and I spent the weekend up in Napa Valley at our friends Dan and Stephanie’s place along with four other couples for a long weekend to enjoy our quarterly gathering of our wine and gourmet club, known fondly as WAG. WAG has been gathering since we all met while Katherine was getting her MBA at Stanford in 1998. Initially the event started out as a relatively low-key potluck where each couple brought a dish and a bottle of wine. Over the years, the event has snowballed into an over-the-top feast propelled to new heights by epicurean one-upmanship that sometimes borders on gluttony. As William Blake observed, “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”

This weekend was no exception. We had our feast on Saturday night and then on Sunday we went to dine at the French Laundry. We typically choose a theme for each meal. Since we were in Napa we decided to serve Napa-influenced dishes using local ingredients and recipes from nearby restaurants, or, in some cases, each couple simply created a dish they felt was inspired by wine country. Here’s our menu from Saturday night:

Food Courses

Dungeness crab salad with avocado mousse, beets and ruby grapefruit (from the excellent Terra Restaurant Cookbook)

Sonoma Foie Gras and Roasted Chestnut Soup surrounding an island of seared Petaluma rabbit on a bed of green lentils in a crispy bacon cup

Ravioli stuffed with braised Napa Valley lamb shank, Cowgirl Creamery crème fraiche, and wild Napa Valley black trumpet mushroom duxelles with a slaw of green apples and Napa Valley mustard vinaigrette

Sonoma rabbit (from Polarica) two ways: seared loin wrapped in spinach and prosciutto on a carrot puree and braised rabbit paw stew with carrot gelee and roasted red carrots. Accompanied by steamed broccoli with chili garlic oil, solid broccoli jus, and roasted Romanescu broccoli

Crème Brulee of foie gras (from Polarica), Straus Family Creamery unpasteurized cream and Tahitian vanilla, served with butter-poached Peking duck hash and walnut fig compote

Homemade organic Straus Family Creamery ice cream sandwiches: Scharffenberger and Schokinag dark chocolate cookies with peanut butter ice cream complemented by peanut butter cookies with Scharffenberger and Schokinag dark chocolate ice cream

Wine Courses

One mangnum 1997 Viader

Two bottles 1998 La Gomerie from St. Emilion

Two bottles 2001 Viviani Cabernet Sauvignon “2003 Copa de Napa Napa Valley Wine Auction Selection”

Two bottles 1997 Neyers Syrah Hudson Vineyard

Two bottles (one corked, alas) 2002 Echezeaux from Domaine de la Perdix

One bottle 2002 Martinelli Gewurztraminer

One bottle 2001 Bryant Family Cabernet Sauvignon

One bottle 1998 Kongsgaard Chardonnay

One bottle 2002 La Crema Chardonnay

Two bottles 2003 Bella Vineyards Lily Hill Estate late harvest Zinfandel

After this meal, we were feeling pretty proud of ourselves, and decided that Thomas Keller at the French Laundry had his work cut out for him if he wanted to impress us on Sunday evening…

Join the Conversation

March 18, 2005

Blogospheric Infoporn

Dave Sifry of Technorati has done a great three-part (1, 2, 3) series of posts on the size and shape of the blogosphere where he provides some fun charts and graphs on the development of the world of weblogs over the past several months since he last posted on this topic after his presentation at last October’s Web2.0 conference. Since October, the number of blogs indexed and links tracked by Technorati has doubled to nearly eight million blogs and nearly one billion links. I’m happy to say that I am one of the new bloggers contributing the the growth, though sometimes that just makes me feel like a statistic. 🙂

My kudos go to the team at Technorati for scaling up to meet the torrid growth of the blogosphere thus far, all the while adding many new features along the way. And I wish them the best of luck to them as they rise to meet the challenge of another doubling of their universe over the next five months and contemplate a quadrupling of it by year’s end.

Join the Conversation

March 3, 2005

Mr. Moore in the Datacenter

Yahoo is celebrating its tenth anniversary, which led me to reflect on the fact that a decade is a very long time in Silicon Valley, particularly when viewed through the lens of Moore’s Law. As Ray Kurzweil and others have observed, when humans contemplate exponential progress, we tend to overestimate what can be accomplished in the short term (where the curve is relatively flat), but we tend to underestimate progress in the long term (when the curve gets very steep, goes up and to the right, does a hockey stick, etc.). People tend to think more easily in powers of ten (as opposed to the powers of two prevalent in the technology industry), so a decade is a good duration to look back and consider what Mr. Moore has done for us lately, after we’ve had six or seven doublings of memory density, computing speed and bandwidth. The datacenter is a great place to look to see these trends converge.

Given my background, it is perhaps not surprising that I’m a big fan of consumer-oriented web services such as Google and Yahoo, as well as recent Mobius VC investments Technorati and NewsGator. I’m equally enamored with enterprise-focused software-as-a-service businesses such as RightNow, Salesforce.com and Mobius VC portfolio companies Postini, Quova and Rally Software Development. Another cool software-as-a-service startup offers a hosted application wiki and is called JotSpot, which was founded by Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, two of the guys with whom I co-founded Excite back in 1993. Though these enterprise and consumer oriented companies have different revenue models, their delivery model and back-end architectures for serving their customers are fundamentally similar.

Each of the companies I have mentioned above have benefited greatly from the drastic increase in the amount of storage, computing power, bandwidth and datacenter rack space that a dollar buys in 2005 versus what a dollar bought for the same thing in 1995, back when Yahoo and Excite launched their sites. I spent some time poking around the web trying to find 1995 prices for CPUs, RAM, storage, bandwidth and colo space, but it turns out that this kind of pricing archaeology is difficult to practice online, as all searches for these things turned up advertising and commerce sites focused on selling me these commodities today, not ten years ago.

I related my problem to my colleague Jocelyn Ding, who is the SVP Business and Technical Operations at Postini, and she was able to track down some old price lists from a variety of vendors from 1995, 1998 and 2000 for bandwidth, cage rental, one and four CPU servers and storage systems. Thanks go to Jocelyn for helping me put some real numbers behind my somewhat obvious assertion that a dollar goes much further in today’s datacenter than it did a decade ago. I also dug up a good whitepaper detailing costs of enterprise storage since 1992 which includes projections to 2010, which can be found here. For some items, the prices didn’t go back to 1995, so in those cases, I have extrapolated the price trend to estimate 1995 costs based on 1998 or 2000 costs relative to today’s costs:

Bandwidth: $1100/megabit/month in 1995 vs. $128/megabit/month in 2005

Cage Space: $175/sqft/month in 1995 vs. $25/sqft/month in 2005

Disk Storage: $1,300,000/TB in 1995 vs. $3,300/TB in 2005 (SCSI RAID)

1-CPU Server: $25,000 in 1995 vs. $1,000 in 2005 (web server class machine)

4-CPU Server: $360,000 in 1995 vs. $38,000 in 2005 (with 16GB RAM)

In addition to the price reductions, we also have to look at the compute performance of a web server class machine in 1995 vs. today. Given five or six performance doublings since 1995 courtesy of improvements in clock speed, bus speed, architecture changes from 32 to 64 bit, additional cache memory and faster RAM, a conservative estimate would be that today’s single CPU 1-U “pizza box” web server is roughly fifty times faster than last decade’s model. Couple that with the 25x price difference for this pizza box, and your 2005 dollar buys you more than one-thousand times as much compute power as it did in 1995. Bandwidth is at least ten times cheaper than it was in 1995, floor space in the data center is seven times cheaper and enterprise-class storage is at least four hundred times cheaper than it was only a decade ago. With some smart software and network engineering, the cost per gigabyte of storage can be brought down an order of magnitude further still using a distributed filesystem based on low-end IDE drives. Finally, with the rise of Linux, Apache, MySQL and open source in general, software license costs can also vanish from the equation when running a large-scale web service.

What does this mean for a web-services company? The cost to deliver an application to an end-user has dropped dramatically for these companies and the cost to operate their data centers therefore has much less of an impact on their costs of operations and capex budget than it used to, which means their gross margins for delivering their product have improved significantly since 1995. For companies like Yahoo, Google and more recently, Technorati, this means the cost to deliver a page view or search results page has gone down dramatically, while the average size of a search-results page is perhaps only marginally larger since 1995. Even considering the size of a search index (Google’s 8B pages today vs. Excite’s 10M in 1995) has grown nearly one thousand-fold, the costs of computing power and storage have accommodated this expansion while bandwidth costs and rack space have fallen nearly tenfold.

For enterprise-focused companies like Salesforce.com, Postini, Quova and Rally, the story is similar. Add in a subscription-based recurring revenue stream and you have a business model that has all the benefits of a dependable revenue stream and profit margins that can approach those of a traditional software company. Thanks to the low cost and high performance of today’s hardware coupled with an elegant service architecture, Postini is able to process several hundred million email messages per day for its customers with an extraordinarily light hardware footprint and does so quite profitably as a result.

The fun thing about doing a retrospective like this is to realize that when I write about this again in 2015, the increases in CPU speed, memory density and bandwidth will make today’s costs and capabilities look as quaint as 1995’s do today. Thus the environment will continue to become more hospitable to the software-as-a-service model, more entrepreneurs will create meaningful businesses based on this model, VCs will continue to invest in these ideas (myself included), and we’ll all be able to enjoy some mind-blowing applications a decade from now that are simply not possible today.

Join the Conversation

February 12, 2005

The Cabo Wabo

Last weekend, Rex and Jason and I went down to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Rex was the instigator of the trip and wanted to have a “boy’s weekend” to blow off some steam. The three of us play in a cover band together called Full Ratchet (bad VC humor, if you get the joke). Unbeknownst to Rex, Jason had spent weeks sending emails and making phone calls to the Cabo Wabo, one of the premier live-music venues down in Cabo, owned by Sammy Hagar. Through sheer persistence, Jason arranged for us to play a set down at the Cabo Wabo, and Jason and I managed to check our guitars at the airport without Rex noticing. When we arrived at the airport in Cabo, Jason let Rex in on the secret as our guitars came into the baggage claim area. Rex had told Jason once upon a time that he would love to play a show at the Cabo Wabo, so Rex was in a happy state of shock when we told him we had a gig to play in a few short hours.

We played a great set and had an enthusiastic (and very drunk) audience, including a bunch of Jason’s friends who happened to be in town for a wedding that weekend and got the crowd up and dancing. The three of us spent the whole set grinning at each other while we played. The club, stage, sound system and sound man were all top shelf, which is to be expected given that Sammy Hagar bought the club to have a fun place to go for his musician friends (including Van Halen) to play. It was definitely one of the most “legit” gigs I’ve played in terms of audience size and production quality — the only other one that comes close was a gig I played with my old band Where’s Julio? at the Fillmore in 1998 for an EFF benefit along with The Flying Other Brothers.

Our set list:

Jenny (867-5309) – Tommy Tutone

Hard to Handle – Black Crows

Honky Tonk Woman – Rolling Stones

Hungry Like the Wolf – Duran Duran

Cumbersome – Seven Mary Three

Superstition – Stevie Wonder

Play that Funky Music – Wild Cherry

Superstition – Stevie Wonder

Thanks to Rex and Jason for one of the most memorable weekends I’ve had!

Join the Conversation

January 30, 2005

Chocolate Chip Trumps Oatmeal Raisin Every Time…

Time for another pet peeve: the feedback loop in the last mile of the cookie supply chain is fundamentally broken. As a VC, I attend numerous conferences, catered board meetings, company gatherings and such. I don’t understand why the food service industry has never figured out that people enjoy chocolate chip cookies a hell of a lot more than oatmeal raisin cookies, or any other cookie for that matter. Time after time, at these events, someone chooses to put out equal amounts of several varieties of cookies. Invariably, the chocolate chip cookies run out early, while every other species remains unfinished and presumably goes into the dumpster at the end of the day, leaving glaring evidence of the superiority of the chocolate chip cookie (see photo above). So why has the cookie serving ratio never been adjusted? As a chocolate chip cookie fanatic (and as someone who believes the world would be much better off if I ran it), this drives me crazy.

The humble chocolate cookie may be the perfect baked good, and I consider myself something of an expert. Four of the best examples of chocolate chip cookies I’ve tasted can be had at Robert’s Market in Woodside (made by Selma’s), The Peninsula Creamery in Palo Alto, Specialty’s Bakery and The Grove Fillmore in San Francisco.

But my wife Katherine made the best chocolate chip cookies I’ve ever tasted one year for a Fourth of July party we hosted at our place up in San Francisco, using her top-secret modification of a Cook’s Illustrated recipe and several types of chocolate, including our local favorite Scharffen Berger. One of our guests even covertly stuffed his pockets with several extra cookies for the road, though he was busted by his wife on their way out the door when she put her hands in his jacket pocket. Katherine took the theft as high praise.

Join the Conversation

January 14, 2005

Technorati Tags

Today Technorati launched a very cool new feature, Technorati Tags. Inspired by the communal categorization features of flikr and del.icio.us, Technorati now indexes tags embedded in blog posts (you get this for free when you choose to categorize your blog post on most popular publishing tools), and now they are first-class entities within Technorati that you can search and explore, which should help drive more folksonomy in the blogosphere. Technorati’s tag-search results include photos from the fine folks at Flikr and links from del.icio.us, which makes tag exploration on Technorati a compelling multimedia experience. Some of my favorites: Mac, Iraq, iPod. Kudos to the team for another great release!

Join the Conversation

January 9, 2005

Turbulence

In general I’m pretty comfortable with flying, though the pre-flight queues and security rituals now sometimes elevate my blood pressure. However, I flew from Vegas to San Jose mid-day yesterday on America West and had one of the more nerve-wracking flights I can remember. About halfway through the flight, we sustained some of the most intense turbulence I’ve experienced, not only violent but also long-lasting. Acute and chronic. I turned on some mellow music on my iPod and practiced some deep-breathing relaxation exercises, both to calm my heart and to fight the nausea (and I am not prone to motion sickness).

After landing and finding myself unusually happy to be in the San Jose Airport Terminal, I overheard other passengers commenting with surprise at the extreme bumpiness of the flight, so I concluded I wasn’t just in a particularly skittish mood for some reason. Perhaps post-traumatic stress from the packed halls of CES?

But why did I feel compelled to blog this? As if the other passengers’ post-flight comments weren’t enough to confirm that the turbulence had been extreme, one other event stood out. A woman sitting several rows in front of me reported shortness of breath and chest-pains following the roller-coaster portion of the flight and had to be given oxygen immediately upon landing. Paramedics were waiting for her with a wheelchair once the plane reached the gate. I later encountered the paramedics elsewhere in the terminal relating to some of their colleagues that the woman was fine but had suffered a severe panic attack as a result of the turbulence.

I sincerely hope this flight goes into my record book as the most turbulent flight I will ever take.

Join the Conversation

January 7, 2005

Live from CES

This was my first CES, and it was quite an experience. It also seemed like it was Las Vegas’ first CES given the mass confusion that existed at the airport, the monorail, and all around the conference center. I thought Vegas was supposed to know how to handle conventions! Ah well, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt for now and assume that CES is just so big that all infrastructure is stretched so far beyond capacity that the whole event can’t help but be a clown show.

Given the consumer-electronics industry’s affinity for acronyms, I’ll create a few of my own to describe what I saw on the hectares of floor space at the convention center: the floor was replete with HEFTs, YADMPs, HORPTs, YACPs and TFBVCs (sorry, but I couldn’t find a vowel for that one). Now I’ll decode the acronyms: Huge Enormous Flatscreen Televisions, Yet Another Digital Music Player, Hundreds Of Rear Projection Televisions, Yet Another Cellular Phone and Tiny Flash-Based Video Cameras.

Samsung’s 102 inch plasma TV was quite impressive, though it was actually four 50 inch panels fused together — I could not see the seams between each panel. The picture was beautiful and this TV was the talk of the show. However, given that it must weigh at least 400 pounds, an eight and a half foot piece of glass begs the question of whether one should opt for a projector and a screen instead. I’ve got a 50 inch plasma at home and that thing is a space heater when it is running, so this thing could transform you living room into that sauna you’ve always wanted.

Overall, the scale of the show is overwhelming and one becomes numb after seeing hundreds of MP3 players, cellphones, video cameras, USB flash drives, televisions projectors, and so on. I didn’t see much that I would describe as disruptive technology. For the most part it was incremental, more storage capacity, bigger screens, smaller form-factors, etc. Once a new device category is created and becomes established, one can witness the Cambrian explosion in action at CES with established companies (and dozens you’ve never heard of) creating hundreds of variations on the same basic concept. It has been going on for years with MP3 players, and if I had to choose a recent example of a newish category, I suppose it would be personal media players, though there’s not enough data to say these are a success yet.

I ended my Friday with the keynote from Texas Instrument’s CEO Rich Templeton, which featured Howie Long, Jeffrey Katzenberg, several movie trailers (including the new Star Wars Episode III) and a live demo of Sling Media’s SlingBox Personal Broadcaster from Sling’s CEO/co-founder Blake Krikorian. Blake introduced the audience to the concept of place-shifting: using a SlingBox attached to his cable TV at his home in San Mateo, he was able to watch his own television over the internet on his laptop and on a new EVDO cellphone. Pretty cool. Of course, being a demo, it was not without glitches, and no matter how hard he tried, he wasn’t able to show the SlingBox connected to his TiVo. Blame the demo demons for that one. Nonetheless, it was a great show for Sling, and the company had heavy foot traffic at their booth and got some nice mentions in the press, including a nice mention in Thursday’s WSJ.

Finally, the last of the nine photos I posted in this entry made me laugh and illustrates nicely why CES is no place for babies (to say nothing of the AVN Awards show that goes on at the same time as CES).

Join the Conversation