Last Friday my partner Brad attended a company offsite for our portfolio company Meetup.com. On monday of this week during our regular weekly meeting, he gave our firm (all five of us) a report on the day which he said was excellent. One thing that stuck in my mind all week was his description of the lunch talk by one of the leaders of the "slow movement" (whose name escapes me now).

I'm familiar with the slow food movement and I would say that our family, led by the Gotham Gal, are active participants in it. I'm less familiar with the broader slow movement. This quote from Guttorm Fløistad via Wikipedia explains:

I was reading Technorati's State Of The Blogosphere report yesterday. It has a lot of data on bloggers but not so much on readers. And I'm more curious about readers than bloggers.

I believe that blog reading has gone completely mainstream based largely on discussions I've had with friends who are not in the tech business (one advantage of living and working in NYC) and based on talking to my kids and their friends. I really don't know anyone who doesn't read blogs these days.

When I use the word "mobile web", I am not referring to the web running in mobile browsers, although I understand that is what the words have come to mean. I believe that mobile devices are bringing web services into our pockets and purses, onto restaurant tables and bars, and into schools and stadiums.

I am not particularly concerned about whether these web services are deployed in a browser or in an app running on a mobile device. I realize that these are big issues for developers and that the mobile web suffers from too many browsers, too many operating systems, and too many device configurations and screen sizes.

Over the past few months, I've heard countless VCs utter the words 'we need to own' followed by some number. Often it is 20pcnt, but it is frequently 30pcnt. I heard someone tell me about a VC yesterday who said they needed to own 44pcnt. I was tempted to ask them to give me the number to four digits.

This behavior by VCs is not productive. I've said this before and I will say it again. We are putting our needs before the needs of our portfolio companies and the entrepreneurs who form them.

Jason Calacanis has taken on a new cause, outing angel groups that charge entrepreneurs to pitch. I agree with Jason that any angel group that charges an entrepreneur to pitch should be avoided. It suggests to me that the group is more about making money on pitch fees than investing.

I've also seen "startup agents" out there that charge entrepreneurs upfront cash to make intros to potential investors. They should also be avoided. A basic rule of thumb for fundraising agents is that they must work on a success fee basis or you should not use them. Otherwise, they have no incentive to see you actually get funded.

I've said this before on this blog and I'll say it again. Traditional local media companies; radio stations, TV stations, local newspapers, and the like, are in a tough situation. Each of those businesses had a monopoly or near monopoly on their audiences a decade ago. Now none of them do.

The owners and operators of these businesses have been trained to think their strengths are local and relevant content, their monopolies or near monopolies on distribution (spectrum in the case of radio and TV), and their brands. All of these assets are waning quickly.

There's a post on the 37 Signals blog by Jason Fried saying that the Mint sale to Intuit (INTU) was a bad move for a host of reasons and suggesting that the VCs behind Mint had forced it. It reminds me of similar discussions about the sale of Zappos to Amazon (AMZN) a while back.

I left a comment on that post to the effect that while I have no inside information, I highly doubt that the VCs forced the sale.

I've found myself saying "events overtake companies" a lot this week. I'm not sure exactly why it was the phrase of the past week, but I did spend a lot of time talking to entrepreneurs running businesses that are growing rapidly, causing the founders to rethink their strategic plans.

I think less than 20% of the companies we back end up doing what they started out planning on doing. They build something, get it into the market, and then things happen. Often it turns out the market wants something a bit different than they are offering. Or that the users adopt one part of the product and don't use another part very much at all. Or developers start building things on top of the API that opens their eyes to a much bigger opportunity. Or it could simply be that the market loves what they built and they have to spend all their time on scaling and infrastructure and all the things they planned on building go to the back burner.

Seth Godin has a short but sweet post (the best kind) up on the need to flip the way you think about free, abundance, and scarcity.

Seth was one of the first people to experiment with free and digital media and he has been a longstanding inspiration to me in this way of thinking. During the late 90s, he gave away a number of his books for free in soft copy before the book was published. In doing so, he built up a word of mouth phenomenon that drove the sales of the hard cover when it came out.

Barack Obama said this in his "back to school speech":

you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time

The NY Times Magazine has a short piece this weekend called The Facebook Exodus. In it the author, Virginia Heffernan, cites a number of anecdotes about people quitting Facebook. I am sure there are people quitting Facebook.

But the most recent comScore numbers tell another story (click to enlarge).

In the month of July 2009, almost 370 million people worldwide visited Facebook, up 155% from July 2008. Facebook is a global juggernaut. It is the fourth most popular website in the world after Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), and Yahoo! (YHOO).

Early stage venture capital is by definition milestone based investing. The entrepreneur raises enough capital to get to a significantly different place with his or her business and both the entrepreneur and the investor hope that the next round will be done at a significantly higher price that reflects the progress made.

This is one of the main reasons why I think early stage venture capital is a much less risky form of investing than many outsiders think. Most experienced venture capital investors scale the dollars invested in a startup such that they don't have much capital at risk when the investment is the most speculative and they increase the capital invested as the risk is mitigated.

My partner Brad Burnham, with whom I started Union Square Ventures, thinks as much about the markets we invest in as anyone I know, but he doesn't share his thoughts as frequently as I do. But when he does, it's always worth reading.

Yesterday Brad posted his thoughts on the freeconomics debate that Chris Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell had a while back. Brad thinks they are both wrong.

I wrote a post recently called "Double Down, But Only On The Right Hand" that was about Yahoo!'s (YHOO) decision to bail on search and Microsoft's (MSFT) decision to double down on it. It was also about new forms of search, like real time search, that are worth investing in.

Since writing that post, I've been thinking a lot about "doubling down." Conventional investing wisdom is when an investment goes against you, the thing to do is get out and move on to the next one. Most of the great traders I know practice that approach and it works well for them.

I checked out my twitter replies this morning and there was one from farhanlaji:

wondering what @chr1sa @umairh and @fredwilson think about the whole News Corp, Rupert Murdoch charging for content thing