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.

There are few multi-billion dollar industries that have yet to harness the power of the Internet. At First Round, we thought car services was one of them and we were lucky enough to seed Uber. We later saw that the hospitality industry was ready to embrace the mobile web and we were thrilled to invest in HotelTonight. We think the ski industry will be the next massive market to embrace the Internet. We’re thrilled to be investing in Liftopia along with Chris Sacca, Dave Morin, and Erik Blachford,.

Even as a lifelong skier, I’ve taken the business of skiing for granted. It wasn’t until I met with Liftopia’s Founders, Evan Reece and Ron Schneidermann, that I wrapped my head around the scale of the industry. It’s massive. In the US alone, lift ticket sales are $2.6B annually. Lessons and rentals are another $1B. Ancillary on mountain spend is yet another $1.6B. In the US alone, that’s $5.2B before lodging, transportation, soft goods or hard goods. The Japanese market is roughly the same size. Europe is larger still.

And yet, ask a skier about the last time they used the Internet to plan a ski trip and they’ll most likely give you a quizzical stare. They’ll probably tell you that they were able to book their airfare and lodging online but purchased their lift tickets in person. Think about it. You pick a resort you want to visit. You book your flight online. You book your lodging online. But the the core elements of your trip - your lift tickets, lessons and rentals – you wait in line to purchase these after you arrive. Or, maybe if you’re savvy, you buy discounted tickets at a convenience store near the mountain. This is insane.

Step back and wonder what the world would be like if the other aspects of your vacation were handled in the same way. A walk-up airfare? Walk-up lodging? Airlines and hotels provide customers with better rates in exchange for a commitment from consumers that they will spend. This results in better demand forecasting for the service providers and better pricing for consumers. Liftopia lets ski resorts do the same and the results are powerful. Liftopia customers ski more days, spend more money on mountain, and explore more resorts. So if you’re daydreaming of a trip to a place like Mammoth, Sun Valley, Park City, Deer Valley, The Canyons, Kirkwood, Alpine Meadows, Killington, Stowe, Mount Snow, Keystone, Snowbird or just about any mountain in the US, check out Liftopia. You’ll save time, money and have more fun.

Every chairlift should be heard, profitable and generating smiles.

That’s also the sound a registered user makes when booking a hotel with HotelTonight. All the sound a user makes. Four taps and done. Try doing the same with Orbitz. 60+ taps. Priceline? 70+ taps. Travelocity? 80+ taps. Hotels.com? 100+ taps.

The reason that HotelTonight could create such an improved user experience is that unlike the other online travel companies, Founder & CEO Sam Shank, built it from the ground up for a mobile world. Mobile products work best when they are designed “mobile first.” Compare an iPhone with your computer. The screen is smaller. The keyboard is worse. The Internet connection is slower. For mobile experiences, this means that each pixel matters more, every inputs needs to simpler and anything which slows the experience needs to be eliminated. Every step, every delay has the potential to become a user offramp.

When these design needs are combined with a big market, the stakes become enormous. $50B worth of hotels booked online annually. A significant portion of this amount is rapidly shifting from desktop browsers to mobile browsers / apps. Every extra tap, every extra input, every extra second, creates a window for a user to walk through and away from a booking. HotelTonight solves this in brilliant, award-winning fashion.

So, it’s not surprising that as soon as the First Round team met with Sam and saw HotelTonight, we immediately wanted to invest. Today, along with Battery Ventures and Accel Partners, we’re thrilled to be part of a the company’s $3.25 Series A financing. First Round has had some good luck with some of our other “mobile first” investments, like Uber and Path. We’re excited to help HotelTonight continue the trend.

For the first 550 years after Gutenberg invented the printing press, it remained pretty difficult for individuals to publish and share their ideas. Writing and editorial remained in the province of broadcasting corporations, family newspaper dynasties and book publishers. Of course, the Internet changed that. Blogging services like WordPress, SixApart and Tumblr made it simple and free for anyone to share their ideas with the world and to build a personal brand.

As much as commerce has evolved in the past few years, it hasn’t kept pace with the forces which shaped modern publishing. Twenty years ago, if you wanted to open a store, it meant you had to rent a physical space and apply for business permits down at city hall. There was a significant expense and to seeing whether or not a retail idea would be welcomed into the world. The experience was daunting. In the mid-1990′s, Amazon launched and opened the world to e-commerce. In the early part of this millenium, platforms like Magento have made building an online retail presence easier, but my no means easy. Ebay and Etsy have been available as lower cost alternatives, but the experience was still analogous to taking out a classifieds ad. The UX didn’t belong to the person doing the selling. The retailer had as much control over their brand as they did over the font in their newspaper ads.

Storenvy changes this. It brings the blogging revolution to retail. FREE branded online stores for everyone. A sense of community for the buyers and the sellers. An easy way for merchants to sell on Facebook. Much the way GigaOm and TechCrunch operate on wordpress.com, Storenvy will have it’s share of larger merchants like indie record lable, Lil’ Chief Records. But, what gets me most excited is that now anyone can be a retail entrepreneur. In fact, the t-shirt to appearing on the left of this post, well, it hasn’t been produced yet. Amore Apparel, the Storenvy merchant behind the design can test some designs and see which ones generate the most interest. Even the smallest retailer can test the appeal of their product before committing to inventory. Retail has never been more democratized.

We’re thrilled to be working with founders Jon & Janette Crawford, Spark Capital, Kleiner Perkins and Charles River Ventures. We know with terrific advisers like Jeffrey, David and Willo, there will be lots of gorgeous (and funnel effective) stores blooming.

BTW, if you’re as excited by this as we are, you should know that Storenvy is looking for a few good hires.

Why have new jobs been so hard to come by? One view blames cyclical economic factors: at times when everyone is cautious about spending, companies are slow to expand capacity and take on more workers. But another, more skeptical account has emerged, which argues that a big part of the problem is a mismatch between the jobs that are available and the skills that people have. According to this view, many of the jobs that existed before the recession (in home building, for example) are gone for good, and the people who held those jobs don’t have the skills needed to work in other fields. A big chunk of current unemployment, the argument goes, is therefore structural, not cyclical: resurgent demand won’t make it go away.

Hook, line and sinker. Whether in the Bay Area, New York, Philly or anywhere else First Round has investments, 2010 was more challenging than 2009 when it became more challenging to recruit candidates to new roles within our portfolio. Contrary to the broader economy, in the seed capital world there were too few people chasing too many jobs. My favorite anecdotal Bay Area economic indicator (rising commute times on 101), seemed to represent this as well.

Surowicki goes on to make a strong case that we’re probably not seeing structural employment loss. He points to a number of times in history when this argument has been made (the Great Depression, the early 80′s) and it turned out not to be the case. Proponents of the structural job loss paradigm may simply be looking at job data in a far too localized (sector, geography, time period) manner. I can buy this argument, or at least, I can buy this argument until we have significantly more data to review in a few years. But what I can’t stomach is Surowicki’s closing argument (emphasis mine):

Structural issues aren’t irrelevant, of course; there are certainly plenty of construction workers who are going to have start plying a new trade. But what defined the recent recession was the biggest decline in consumption and investment since the Depression. Dealing with that is the place to start if we want to do something about unemployment. The structural argument makes government action seem irrelevant. But if we don’t do more to get the economy back up to speed, it won’t be because stimulating demand won’t work. It will be because we’ve chosen not to do it. If we can’t find the way, it’s because we don’t have the will.

Presumably, he’s making the case against structuralist doom & gloom by arguing for greater fiscal stimulus in lieu of structural investment. The implication is that those making the structural argument don’t have the fortitude to spend what is required to jump start the economy. I take issue with this. The structural argument makes government action seem MORE relevant. It is precisely the job of government to provide the infrastructure required to educate and train it’s citizenry. Government action, whether investment in our schools or financial support for students is highly relevant. We certainly have the will to spend and the want for government stimulus. Do we have the will to really invest in education and jobs training? If Surowicki’s right, we’ll find out once everyone has gone back to doing what they did before they recently stopped doing it.