This morning Fred Wilson dropped a post about personal branding that, I think, inadvertently raised a bigger question about the NYC Tech community. In the post Fred extends just how critical it is to have a personal brand online, your blog is your resume, and he went as far to say that he hired all his Jr. investors on the basis of their blogs. There is nothing controversial about this advice but a question comes up, something that has been troubling me for a while, about the broader implications of this many sources mastering their ability to go direct.
How much NYC tech news do we want to get from personal blogs?
I can say that personally, I learn about NYC tech news almost purely from a collection of blogs I find through Twitter. There is Silicon Alley and Tech Crunch articles about NYC startups but most of the time, I’m leaning about NYC Tech from prominent investors like Fred Wilson and Chris Dixon. Despite how much I devour their work, it comes from a particular POV. If I’m anything like others in NYC who are looking for local tech news, I’m starting to think that too much of this POV is holding us back. The issues with personal blogs break down like this:
Mission
It’s clear why Fred Wilson blogs, he does it because it’s good for him and it’s good for Union Square Ventures. Fred has reason to care about the larger NYC tech scene, but the interests of USV will always come first.
Transparency
A personal blogger gets to decide, with every post, how transparent they want to be. Any VC blogger worth anything will disclose companies they have investments in when they blog but transparency is much deeper than financial disclosure. Political and personal calculus all come in to play. This is evident anytime a founder/investor talks about existing technologies or companies. When Jason calacanis dropped his rant against ComScore, it could be because he’s genuinely intellectually curious or because he is going to announce his own metrics system in 4 months.
Restraint
A personal blogger isn’t responsible for talking about what conversations they are avoiding. This is where it gets really hairy and I think most detrimental to the community. Imagine a situation like this, a prominent NYC founder/investor invites his friend, another prominent NYC founder/investor to an event he is hosting that will be attended by many in the field. The friend arrives and quickly notices the event is an utter disaster. The projector broke, the moderator is horrendous, and everyone is 15 minutes late because the directions to the location were wrong. If the friend were to honestly describe the event it would not be favorable. What’s your bet? Is this friend going to blog about this event the next day? Probably not.
I love the work of many personal bloggers and value what they add to the NYC startup community, but a seemingly essential part of the ecosystem is missing.
NYC Needs a Startup Blog. It needs brutal, unnerving, critique from an entity without a mesh of financial interest conflicts.
I’ve founded a blog before that is now self sustaining, it’s a long arduous process that can go wrong in about a million different ways. I have enough experience to say that, at least in the future, I’m not the person to run this organization. I am working on my own startup, Kommons, but I am more than happy to help someone who does want to make this their thing, in anyway I can.
So, If I’m not alone on this, and it’s something that other founders/investors are searching for, lets get the conversation going.
What are you looking for? What should be covered? What’s the real value add?
Think big, I don’t think we want Tech Crunch East, I think we want something that really changes the game. I’ll be adding my ideas and curating others throughout the week.
My email is codyvbrown@gmail.com if anyone wants to talk offline.
Why not NYC 3.0? They came by Dogpatch Labs and interviewed me (in person! with a microphone!), which is more than most bloggers can say.
