VentureLab 1/17/06

I came across this great monthly event at Stanford called the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab. Basically it worked like this: The CEO of a new venture "demos" his new product, in this case Odeo CEO Evan Williams, to the audience and a panel of Venture Capital/industry analysts for a question/answer session. The panelists consisted of Gary Stein, Senior Analyst from Jupiter research, Jim Barton, CTO of Tivo and David Hornik, Partner at August Capital. The moderator was Randy Haykin, Founder and managing director of Outlook Ventures.

David Hornick is the author of the VentureBlog, which if you are not familiar with it, is one of the better blogs on VC that I have come across.

The topic of the evening: User-Generated Content and the Future of Media. Odeo was a great candidate to demonstrate the advances that "Web 2.0" has brought to users. I've been using Odeo for a couple of months at work, not so much for its podcasting abilities or its ability to generate audio files, but simply to listen to content using its built-in player. There happens to be a good amount of content related to security, VC and entrepreneurship that I find interesting and can stream straight from the page without having to toss it on the ipod or download first.

To some extent the dialogue focused on "the long tail" coined by Chris Anderson from a 2004 wired article - there are many opportunites to market unique or custom products catered to individuals, simply because the aggregate consumption of these singular products, albeit on an individually small scale, in total, equals quite a large volume. This can really only be accompolished when storage or unit costs are extremely small, as is the case with Odeo.

In summary, I was quite excited with this event and will look to do some volunteering for them in the future. If you happen to make it out to one of these look for me!