Another Texas VC

For those of you who know me personally, you are probably aware that religion plays an important, albeit understated, role in my life. My Muslim faith is the reason why I don’t drink, nor eat pork, and spend the month of Ramadan in a dazed caffeine free stupor.

I would be lying if I said that I enjoyed the dawn to dusk fasts during Ramadan. They are terribly inconvenient, severely impact my productivity, and wreak havoc on my metabolism. My sister sniffs coffee beans to try to survive the fasts without falling asleep at her desk, while my wife takes frequent naps. Ramadan is hard.

But that is the point. Ramadan teaches me that I can do anything I put my mind to. After a month of starving, the rest of life seems awfully easy. I usually walk out of Ramadan with a series of new-year style resolutions, many of which I actually stick to.

This year I am resolving to straighten out my diet in conjunction with the fasts. That means eating in a lot more often, eating a lot more vegetables, and cutting down on meat. About halfway through this Ramadan I feel like the diet changes are making a difference, with many of my old pants actually fitting!

Sakina was born in 1923 in the Principality of Bahawalpur as the 3^rd of 6 sisters. One of her sisters remarked that “We didn’t have a brother but we did have Sakina”. Sakina earned an Associates Degree in Mathematics and Economics from Islamia College in Lahore. Sakina became Aziz Ahmed Gilani’s second wife in 1945. Aziz and Sakina moved to Minchinabad where they had their son Naeem in 1946. After spending partition hiding in a cotton field, she moved back to Bahawalpur where she had her daughters Nuzhat in 1948 and Nighat in 1950. Her husband Aziz then died when his jeep was run over by a train in 1951.

She remarried in 1954 as the second wife to Noor Muhammad Mehmoodi under the condition that she change her first name to Qamar. She completed Hajj with her new husband in 1958. In 1964, after 5 consecutive miscarriages, she had her second son Akbar.  In 1980 she first came to the US to join her first son Naeem, and gave permission for him to name his first son after her deceased husband. She spent the next several years shuttling back and forth staying with Nuzhat, Naeem, and Akbar while periodically working as a substitute teacher in the US and managing a beauty salon in Bahawalpur. In 1987 Noor Muhammad Mehmoodi died and she permanently resettled in the US.

She became a US citizen in 1994. With her health deteriorating, she moved back to Pakistan in 2008 to stay with her daughter Nighat. She died on August 9, 2009. She is survived by 4 children, 14 grandchildren, and 11 great grandchildren.

Fellow Northwestern alum Ben Parr asked if News Corp should be charging for online news content on Mashable. The answer is a very obvious yes.

Rupert didn’t start in the “charge for news” camp, but was persuaded after he bought the Wall Street Journal. The folks at the WSJ have stubbornly refused to give away their content, and think they would need to quadruple their site traffic to get the same revenue they currently earn from online subscriptions. Management at the New York Times, which lost $62 million last quarter, loves to point out that they have tried to charge for content twice in the past few years, but both attempts were half hearted. The first attempt only charged international subscribers while the second attempt focused on columns and archives. WSJ on the other hand shamelessly charges for practically everything, and openly encourages their brethren to do the same.

Outside of the disappearance of classified revenue which used to contribute 1/3^rd of revenue, the underlying issue behind charging for content is the paltry CPM rate environment. Advertisers don’t pay the same rate online as for print newspapers. This is a little perplexing as the online ad units should have the ability to be tailored by customer segment by login information, although a somewhat compelling explanation can be found here based on reading duration and the newspaper to person ratio (although I think the ‘page read’ metric is pretty exaggerated).

Regardless, there is an even bigger problem with newspaper readership volumes which trumps the CPM environment. The New York Times constantly boasts about being the most read ‘newspaper’ on the web with 20 million online readers. Unfortunately that isn’t their segment anymore. Their real segment is ‘online information content’ where they are getting dominated by CNN.com (45 million). If you broaden the category to include folks like CNET (120 million) you suddenly understand that NY Times isn’t really all that dominant, but just a two-bit player in the web information game. You need to ramp to over 100 million uniques or charge for content in this world until CPM’s get higher.

Earlier today my good friend Marc Nathan put up a blog post pointing out that Houston has a vibrant research scene. The post was a response to my post about Houston’s dearth of research universities. The folks at UH strongly agree with my line of thinking in the form of their Tier One Initiative with some great numbers on Houston’s need for a research institution and the ROI from research dollars.

Marc’s diagnosis for Houston is a need for more show-runners, those mid-level managers who can make a startup tick. His prescription is mentorship through incubators, angels, and even VCs.

Of course Marc is right. But does that contradict my concerns about Houston lack of research? I don’t think so.

The conversation between Marc and me is just another version of the Horse versus Jockey debate that has raged for years. Academics like Steve Kaplan at the University of Chicago have “proven” that it is great ideas that make great startups (the idea is the horse). Steve Rogers at Northwestern-Kellogg has “proven” the exact opposite. That a great management team can make a mediocre idea viable (the jockey is the management team). Different VCs argue different sides of the debate, but everyone agrees that it is best to have both, a great idea with a great management team.

I wrote about this dual need last year. I call it the Ben and Jerry issue. Just like how Ben needed Jerry to sell ice cream, a great technical leader needs a great show runner to bring an idea to market.

So would the startup community benefit from more mentorship to help our budding entrepreneurs? Of course they would. Would our entrepreneurs benefit from more high quality ideas budding from world class research? You betcha.

But then who is right?  We both are.

Dallas that is. I haven’t been up to the Metroplex in years and look forward to seeing what the startup scene is like. Current stops include TechFortWorth, Infomart, CoHabitat, NTAN, and NTEC. I look forward to seeing y’all there!