Thinking About Thinking

Thanks to TechCrunch’s support of the VC Blog Directory.  Erick Schonfeld highlighted the Sept 2009 update yesterday and Leena Rao wrote about the original May 2009 version.  I thought Erick’s post yesterday was particularly interesting as it highlighted the movers and shakers among VC bloggers – by the change of their ranking in the directory over the last 3+ months. 

When I looked at both versions of the directory side-by-side, the thing that stands out to me the most is the growth of Fred Wilson’s blog (Fred is with Union Square Ventures).  As Erick points out, Fred Wilson was ranked #2 in May, and still remains #2 in Sept.  But, that belies an amazing trend underneath the surface.

Here’s the data for the entire VC blog directory (effectively a proxy for the entire VC industry):

• Aggregate subscribers to the VC Blog Directory in May 2009: 80,532.
• Aggregate subscribers to those same blogs in Sept 2009: 120,562.
• The growth in the last 3+ months has been 40,030 subscribers or 50.1% across all the blogs in the May directory.

Here’s the data for Fred Wilson’s blog over the same period:

• Subscribers to Fred Wilson’s blog in May 2009: 11,821.
• Subscribers to Fred Wilson’s blog in Sept 2009: 21,881.
• The growth for his blog has been 10,060 subscribers or 85.1% growth in 3+ months.   

But here’s the implication of when you put these two stats together: Fred Wilson’s blog subscriber growth represented 25% of the blog subscriber growth of the entire VC industry (=10,060/40,030).   

I would call that clear competitive separation.  As other bloggers grow their subscribers by 100, 500, or even 1,000 subscribers over the same time period, Fred grew his blog 10x, 50x, even 100x those numbers.  And, I’m sure it doesn’t take Fred any longer to write a blog post for 10,000 subscribers as it does 20,000 subscribers – so it’s the best kind of competitive seperation – it has embedded leverage.  Since I’m a runner, the best track analogy I can think of is imagine running around the track once, and having the other guy lap you 20 times in the process.  Arguably, that’s what Fred is doing – lapping the VC industry many times over through his blog.

Now, you could argue whether or not Google Reader subscribers the best statistic (as Rob Go at Spark Capital has asked me).  And I think there’s a reasonable question there.  Though I would say it’s still a fair statistic of relative reach.  And, you could even more strongly argue that blogging isn’t a subscriber competition – which I would certainly agree with.  As Jeff Bussgang at Flybridge Capital once told me, the reason to blog is because you like writing and it’s fun.  I couldn’t agree more. 

Nonetheless, you have to give kudos where kudos is due.  I admire great execution in any context.  So, kudos to Fred Wilson.  Clearly, he is doing something right.