Interview with Mike Mann on SimplyGeo.com
Mike Mann was interviewed by Steve at SimplyGeo.com about WashingtonVC and Domain Market, as well as the Geographically-specific domain names, called Geo Domains, that Mike has invested in. These include Angola.com, VaticanCity.com, and many others. To learn more about these domain names, visit www.domainmarket.com. Enjoy!
http://simplygeo.com/2008/05/12/the-geoview-with-mike-mann-of-washingtonvccom/
Check out this great video from Phone.com!
Ari Rabban of Phone.com just sent us their new promotional video. Check it out on YouTube and let them know what you think!
WashingtonVC Selected as a New Web Giant by Conceptualist.com
We are thrilled to be included in Sahar Sarid’s list of New Web Giants on Conceptualist.com. 
Sahar is a very respected voice in the domaining community and we thank him for his kind words and support.
Reactions to the Microsoft / Yahoo! Merger Breakdown
Yahoo!’s stock is down 15% today following the news that Microsoft has withdrawn its bid for the company, while Microsoft’s stock remains relatively unchanged. What does this mean for each of the two companies, as one recovers from an unprompted acquisition attempt while the other regroups for a new strategy to find distribution for its next generation of consumer and business software?
Joseph Weisenthal at paidContent gathers analysts’ reactions, which point to the likelihood of the pending Google ad deal for Yahoo! and not much else. Jerry Yang, on Yahoo!’s official blog says that the company is focused on new initiatives and that while the breakdown was unfortunate that it doesn’t sway them from their competitive mission. Henry Blodgett thinks Yahoo! blew the deal and Ballmer simply became frustrated with the process.
Earlier today, Erika Morphy at E-Commerce News asked me for my thoughts:
“Microsoft’s business is still firmly rooted in its installed software base, but as we’ve seen with Vista, the long-term viability of this model for the company is in question,” Eric Litman, managing director of WashingtonVC, an early stage fund and incubator in Washington, told the E-Commerce Times.
[…]
“The strategic appeal of the Yahoo acquisition was to provide a global distribution and monetization platform for the company’s ongoing transformation to a [Sofware as a Service] model,” Litman commented.
While Yahoo! has been struggling to find its footing since Yang retook control of the company, Microsoft needed this deal more than they did. Vista sales are flagging, Google’s moving into the desktop software market, Mac OS and Linux are both gaining desktop operating system market share and enterprise customers are increasingly willing to evaluate Web-based software alternatives to traditional desktop applications. The question now is whether or not either Yahoo! or Microsoft can catalyze their teams or shareholders around this event and find a way to benefit it. Not surprisingly, it may turn out that GOOG, rather than either MSFT or YHOO, is the company to see the most significant upside from the uncertainty.
Welcoming Adam Goozh to the team
I’m excited to announce today that we’ve added a new managing director, Adam Goozh, to our team at WashingtonVC. Adam joins us from his previous role as the founder and CEO of CreateHope, Inc., a company that provides corporate social responsibility and business outsourcing solutions to Fortune-class corporations, not-for-profit organizations and governmental entities. See more of his bio on our leadership page.
Be sure to connect to Adam on his LinkedIn profile.
Rethinking Domain Tasting
First off I have never done domain tasting, nor did BuyDomains.com when I managed it, and our new domain trading and building platform, DomainMarket.com, doesn’t either. When we and others first began thinking about it around 5 years ago it was bad protocol at best, and really considered a Denial of Service (DoS) attack against the Netsol/Verisign registry system since robots slam the systems to buy thousands of name at once; so it was against NSI/VRSN rules and possibly illegal too.
However once Verisign realized how many domains would ultimately be registered to their benefit (even though I imagine 99% of the inventory is never paid for and is re-deleted back to the unregistered pool of potential new domains) they decided domain tasting for 5 days to measure the PPC traffic and value and buy the statistical gems was OK.
However domain tasting is indiscriminate and buyers end up having their robots purchase other peoples’ clear trademarks, as well as a lot of lewdly suggestive names, or names that once resolved to questionable content. So again its nothing Id want my team to take part in.
In the past I thought nobody should do it. Today I think it should actually be done by others carefully for one simple reason: It’s good for the economy. People are typing in and clicking on legacy domain links for expired domains, and if they get a 404 error it’s a waste of time, energy and bandwidth - and nobody gets paid, however if it lands on a tasting speculators PPC page or monetizable site then someone is getting paid, and they can pay their employees, taxes, and tips at the local restaurant, etc. So domain tasting while lame in most respects is still good for the economy.
I’ve rethought this subject and I think it’s good for others as long as they don’t buy trademarks or domains that they deem offensive. Outside of moral considerations they need to be concerned about being sued or harassed somehow, which could have negative financial consequences, balanced by the value of the trickle down economics accidentally applied to attorneys and their caddies.
That’s all, LMK what you think. Cheers
Don’t Lose Your Assets by Failing to Properly Monetize Your Domains
Domains worth over $100,000 are essentially unique, branded small businesses. You can choose to ignore them and leave them idle, or place an enormous amount of resources on each, or somewhere in between. In any case, they are ongoing business concerns, which should be respected and managed accordingly.
The fluctuating market for domain brands is thinly traded. The risk inherent in owning them, the Internet advertising market, the stock market, and the economy overall are constantly in flux. So if you own a digital asset of this value, then its valuation is fluctuating whether you like it or not. If you have a domain worth $1M, then throughout its lifecycle, the domain may have been worth $70, $1,000, $50,000, $1M, $5M, $1M, $500,000, $1M, $250,000, etc. while being left to its own devices.
But our assertion is that if you are actively working on design, ecommerce conversion, SEO, SEM, arbitrage, application building, partner building, staff development, etc., or some combination of those opportunities, then you are optimizing your asset or small business the right way. If it has a significant value, as proven by its 100K plus valuation (which is constantly in flux), then you would be harming yourself by not building the asset or at least trying your best. And by proactively adding value and traffic into a business with ideas, code, customers, etc., instead of lame basic PPC parking, you keep the valuations moving up during what would ordinarily be stressful cycles of asset fluctuations.
Under this improved model, the domain valuation that you had been mistakenly banking on merely serves as a downside hedge. Your killer, evolving business, using a world-class domain brand, may not grow the way you had planned. Yet you are still covered by owning a great domain and any value that you added to it in the same risky fluctuating market where you started, hopefully at a higher natural baseline due to an evolving market (similar to a convertible bond).
If you really own some of the world’s best, unused domain brands, you are being negligent every day that you aren’t working on improving them. You are losing opportunity, which is extremely expensive for you. Look around, and you will find that Phone.com, SEO.com, Software.com, HappyBirthday.com and thousands of others are MUCH better off as companies being built, not domains being parked and neglected.
From my book:
“Every time you fail to assertively take advantage of all opportunities and employ all Best Practices, you are essentially throwing cash right in the garbage (or even worse, into the hands of your competitors). This money is called Opportunity Cost.
Controlling opportunities requires a careful setting of priorities. An example would be if you spend 100 hours to make $100K when you could have chosen a better business option and spent 100 hours to make $200K, then the Opportunity Cost is $100K. You lost $100K–the cost of making the wrong decision. The opportunity to improve in all areas of business is always at hand if you pay attention.”
In this case, the opportunity cost of not developing the world’s best domains is too high, so they should all be proactively developed like any other ongoing business.
LinkedIn: How to Build Your Own Powerful, Profitable Custom Network
The following isn’t the way LinkedIn is “supposed” to be used, but I wouldn’t let that bother you. Your job is to get paid.
1. Decide how you want your long-term network to look and how you want it to work. The beauty here is that it can look like anything you want because LinkedIn has practically an unlimited number of people in each industry and sub-industry niche that you can attempt to associate with forever. Today would be a good day to start building your network, so you don’t get any further behind.
2. Keep in mind that just as you should “dress for the career you want to have,” you should associate with those on LinkedIn that you perpetually want others to believe you are “like.”
3. Whoever you try to add can see the others in your network before they approve you as part of their club. Over time, new people will believe you are one of the same with those in your own network, as if you are at a country club. Mind you, this may be considered pretentious (just like a country club). Again, the job is to get paid, which is what I would think is the best goal of joining a private, fancy club.
4. So if you were a graphic designer and you wanted to expand your practice, you could identify your future, target market and the best future makeup of your company; with those ideas, start building a network full of people who will help you create your world. There is an unlimited amount of choices, but it’s not easy, it’s competitive and time consuming—as making money should be.
5. So for example, you can start adding the world’s best graphic designers to your own network, and the same great, marketing managers from the industry. They can all be found with simple, key word searches and/or using the LinkedIn advanced search menu system, which is very simple and straightforward.
6. Next, target your sales prospects. For example, you might find you have specialty design work for Venture Capitalists, so target all of them on LinkedIn. There are millions of options. True, you will only be able to add and close a small percentage of your attempts in the beginning. But as you adjust your messaging based on feedback, and as others see your growing, powerful network, you will get an ever-increasing portion of your attempted LinkedIn “Adds” to say “yes” and therefore become part of your network to leverage and for others to see. Keep in mind; it will be very rare for any executives to delete you from your mutual network once added, so this is great. And all of the people you link to will expand their own networks perpetually, which enhances your mutual one.
7. So the object is to add as many people that you want to associate with over time that will help your company. Don’t add anyone that would make you look correspondingly weak because that will reduce your high-end network building prospects.
8. If you made it this far, then you are ready for the hard part: asking huge numbers of great people to add you to their LinkedIn and probably get rejected a lot, less and less each day, but a lot nonetheless.
9. The time consuming part of building your network is to figure out email addresses to add folks. Once you find the people, then discover their email address and send them a standard LinkedIn form email, and then you just wait and collect a certain percentage of them in your network. Thank them and ask for a call, send them emails and newsletters, arrange meetings, all based on your long-term business agenda. Thank you very much LinkedIn for the megabucks this creates for proactive prospectors at no basic charge.
10. Here is how you find the email addresses:
You can try to find the common syntax used at their company with other employees by discovering their domain and typing into Google “@acmecorporation.com.” This might find the record for Mary Jones to be mjones@acmecorporation.com, and Tom Williams to be twilliams@acmecorporation.com. So if you know the president is John Smith, you can assume he utilizes the same syntax in his email and try to contact him through LinkedIn at jsmith@acmecorporation.com. If that “bounces” in their system, don’t give up; try john.smith@acmecorporation.com, john@acmecorporation.com, ceo@acmecorporation.com, etc., or call the secretary and pretend that you know something and ask for his email address. In any event, persistence truly pays.
Bingo—you just bypassed a bunch of bureaucracy, got to the boss, and permanently associated her with your network and vice versa. Even though you may ultimately be ignored or rejected, it’s another notch on your belt and having it over with means you will be one-step closer to the ones who won’t ignore you.
If you only add the execs that you want to work with, then those are the only ones that will ever be on your network, and it will keep giving you additional leverage to try to work with them and any others you seek.
11. Keep in mind this is free and easy, but it won’t do a thing if you don’t spend the time and energy to do it correctly—like anything else in this world
12. Thanks and LMK what you think. Cheers
- Mike
WashingtonVC National Rollout Strategy, Alpha
WVC intends to establish itself and promote its parts in 6 major US cities, DC, NY, BOS, SEA, SF, LA, and eventually expand accordingly.
Within each of those cities, we will partner with local business leaders to permanently infect their communities with our charitable works and business offerings. At minimum, we will offer the service suites of MilitantMarketing, Phone.com, SEO.com, Graphics.net, Dial-a-Geek, Information Architects, and maybe networked X3O gaming centers and services. Plus, we may offer services from BrowserMedia, StrongTech, Podcast.com, Software.com, Yield Software, or other emerging assets if it suits our mutual strategies at the time.
Office environments will be set up in strategically relevant neighborhoods in our key cities. The offices will be staffed with a regional manager and sales and support personnel who will work together on behalf of every participating WVC Company or project. Some personnel will be expected to specialize in one particular company or subject area that warrants exclusive attention. Settlements, commissions, and custom arrangements between entities will be frequently required to make sure each has fairly balanced operational economics within this model.
We will also establish a Grassroots.org presence in each office, and therefore community, and ensure local 501c executives can easily access our people and free technology services. Also, Make Change! Trust will make strategic charitable investments and long-term commitments in each of the communities utilizing the same executive infrastructure, social/business networks, supporting entities, personnel, and office space. Moreover, Grassroots.org will expand its mentoring program with local university business schools, like the MBA project we have with Dingman Center at UMD, and launch business plan competitions within that structure.
We will also review the possibility of building Byte Back or similar technology training centers in each city. They have seven centers where they teach computer technologies and offer free help with job training in the inner city. I was the first Chairman of this organization ten years ago, and I remain a supporter of their work.
Moreover, we will set up an Internet expert speaker series once per year to go to each city surrounding the events and conferences that we help support. We can easily staff this with compelling speeches from WVC CEOs, CTOs, and marketers, as well as from our expanded community. And we will host an outstanding party during each conference period, which will be supported by sponsorships.
And we will heavily promote and recruit bands for RockConcerts.com in perpetuity at popular local rock shows and events and co-promote our charitable work, and possibly Podcast.com too.
We will also study and invest in select Internet companies in each community; we may establish community web sites in some of these communities using local domain names and our best of breed web technologies and ideas.
We will have our leaders join technology and venture capital networking and investing groups, entrepreneurs’ organizations, and chambers of commerce. The intention is for our leaders to establish themselves as long-term leaders in their communities and to establish WVC as a permanent and valuable fixture in the targeted region. We will make sure that we have all the leaders from each city receiving our newsletters, added to each of our LinkedIn accounts, and followed up within a structured professional sales system with extensive CRM and data mining support.
We will actively network with and recruit leading regional investors, so they can access our deals and projects. We will use MilitantMarketing to heavily promote all relevant activities for each of our entities in the press and business communities, in perpetuity, and in our target markets. We believe our best bet is to start by meeting and cooperating with the most established technology companies and investors in each region prior to expending significant additional resources on outbound sales campaigns. In each community, we expect to establish our position quickly and expand it steadily. I believe that each company and our overall strategy are unique and meaningful enough to garner considerable press attention, which makes the strategy even more likely to succeed.
There are many details to execute this strategy successfully over a long time, but this is the fundamental premise I intend to pursue sooner rather than later. I think it is a powerful and efficient way to build up our companies while simultaneously expanding our charitable work. I look forward to your feedback and participation in making our dreams a reality. Thanks for reading.
Apple Convergence
Until recently, I didn’t have much of an affinity for Apple, other than for Steve Jobs himself. I thought my coworkers spent too much on their boxes, I didn’t like the hype, and I thought the graphics on my PC were just fine. I have never used a Mac or studied much about it, just press releases and hype. But I am big on convergence, as you can see by WashingtonVC’s Internet vision.
Anyhow, I finally realize that Jobs positioned Apple to be the all round preferred hardware provider for the future of technology (a nice position). For me, “convergence” is the future of technology. Steve has it down regarding consumer electronics and PC related devices. Jobs’ strategy will disintermediate dozens of large wannabe leaders.
The exciting part is how it all subtly, but powerfully, comes together. First of all, the PC or Mac can download any multimedia, including anything made by consumers worldwide just minutes after production. Each piece of content is easily indexed on your own PC and online, given the appropriate tagging.
Next, Apple created the iPod, which is mostly a hard drive and display with full multimedia capacity and an easy, user-friendly interface. Obviously a popular invention. Now Apple has launched the iPhone. Given we bought Phone.com, even before they came up with iPhone, I am a big believer and promoter of NextGen and VoIP telecom, which is naturally convergent with many other Internet connected apps.
Apple then announced the iTV, an obvious product to go within their array. This is when I realized how it all came together and how advanced they are. The beauty of this strategy is that in the future, a TV, Phone, iPod and PC will be almost indistinguishable, besides the ala carte features chosen, the display size and placement.
The iTV can wirelessly beam the very same content to the iPhone with ease, which can also beam the same content to another enabled device like the iPod or PC, and back and forth with no loss of data integrity. They are interchangeable and therefore convergent–as it should be–and not coincidentally just like WashingtonVC’s service strategy.
Apple also opened up the content flow by creating iTunes, an easy way for publishers to deliver bits of licensed content and collect fees. Obviously a good idea. You should realize that they will try to open up licensed online television distribution too–another thing I’m a huge fan of. In other words, you will log in and download the shows you want easily and legally.
iTunes, iTV and others will continue to leverage the opportunity to fill technology applications with uploaded user controlled content like YouTube. Apple will also make all applications user-friendly, I’m sure, and allow most of the content pieces to be easily managed and altered, be they TV shows, phone calls, or rock concerts.
This is why I am suddenly a fan of Apple. Maybe it’s a good time to review the stock valuation again.
Peace.
Michael Mann
