A Short Big Data Story

kent — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 15:09:22 +0000

A quick story to share. Some time back, the First Round team was having some difficulty getting our email delivered. Our messages weren’t winding up in Junk folders, they weren’t showing up at all. So, I reached out to former colleagues who were now with the major webmail brands. I wanted to know whether or not we had somehow been blacklisted. I also connected with our service provider and ran through our set-up with them. On all fronts, things seemed to check out. Except our messages were hitting the floor. No fail notifications. Nothing. Was this some sort of VC email karma? For the better part of a week, we had no idea whether or not our messages were being received. We turned into those guys, who send emails and immediately follow-up with a phone call, “Did you get my message?”

Luckily, this was right around the time I met with Patrick Peterson. Pat has a long history in email. He was one of the earliest people at IronPort and later, after the company was acquired, became one of 13 Cisco Fellows. Before Pat could even begin his pitch, I had begun pleading with him for some free advice about our email predicament. It turned out, that was all the pitch he needed.

Email is an opportunity for big data. Think of the information each message contains. To, From, Subject, Time, IP address, DKIM, SPF, server data, the message itself. And now multiply that by the volume of messages sent every second. Pat recognized that this data could be used to protect not just consumers, but brands too.With Pat’s help, and the help of billions of email messages, we were able to identify and shut down a spammer who had hijacked our domain.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that after that, First Round went back to business as usual and along with Alloy Ventures, Battery Ventures and Greylock Partners, invested in Pat and his company, Agari.

Filed under: internet, start-ups, technology, venture capital Tagged: #frc, first round capital

Who Owns the Future?

kent — Sat, 31 May 2008 20:46:15 +0000

It turns out that Clay Shirky has made quite a bit of impact on me the past few months. It was his post on the television habits that jump started my renewed commitment to reading books. And of course, as part of that syllabus, I included his new work, Here Comes Everybody on the nexus of technology and sociology. I just finished it. What a terrific read. It may be best described as Malcom Gladwell meets the Internet. Read it.

My favorite line, “[T]he future belongs to those who take the present for granted.” This will be running through my head for weeks to come.

The Cornice » internet

A Short Big Data Story

Who Owns the Future?