Talin sharing his $5000 birthday experiment

Photo by Barney Pell.

Last night I hosted a party for my good friend Talin, to celebrate his 50th birthday. Talin had notified people that he had a surprise theme for the party, which turned out to be a social experiment. Talin contributed a pile of $100 bills, one for each year of his life, and said that the only rule was that the group of attendees had to figure out how to spend it before midnight. They even had to figure out the process by which the decisions would be made.

In the end, after hours of partying mixed with negotiation and philosophizing, the money was allocated approximately as follows:

• $2000 to be spent on microfinance loans (each person would spend $100).
• $1000 on a program to stimulate Talin’s dating life in the short and long term.
• $1200 donation for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (to be matched by Google).
• $400 to buy Talin a Kindle reader, including an e-book version of The Game, by Neil Strauss, which is required reading for Talin’s dating life enhancement program.
• $400 to pay the caterers for who brought the yummy and nearly endless supply of dim sum.

Mike Arrington attended the party, his first time at Barney’s house, and was surprised to find how few of Talin’s friends read TechCrunch, but despite that he had a great time.
The whole photo set is here.

Founders Brunch is important for the same reason Silicon Valley is important: There are all of these subtle network effects,” said Peter Thiel, a 40-year-old former PayPal executive now bankrolling some of the hottest Internet companies. “Otherwise why wouldn’t you start a tech company in Fresno where everything is cheaper? The advantage to being in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco area is that so many other people are doing the same thing.”

Jessica noted that I had a new beard, and I explained my recent decision on growing it:

Barney Pell, the 39-year-old co-founder of Powerset, a natural-language search engine trying to challenge Google, sported a new beard he vowed not to shave until his San Francisco start-up launched its new product.

To be more accurate, I vowed not to shave off my beard until the launch, but I didn’t vow that I wouldn’t shave at all. I made that mistake during graduate school. I thought I was ready to submit my PhD thesis in about 3 months, and vowed not to shave or cut my hair until it was done. This was partly a way to motivate myself to finish, and partly a way to let my friends stop asking about my progress as they would clearly know when was done. As it turned out, my thesis advisor thought I had more work to do, and I wound up taking a full year before finishing. So by the time I was actually ready to submit my thesis, I had really long hair and a very full beard indeed. I’m not going to do risk that again…
Anyway, you might think I’m a maverick, but it turns out that most of Powerset is in on the gig. Almost all our employees are growing moustaches and/or beards in preparation for our upcoming launch. Even women who can’t grow nearly as nice moustaches as the men have painted them on from time to time. And our folks even registered a domain name and created a website, PowerStache.com, featuring photos taken over time as people grow their beards and moustaches.
It’s pretty silly and really wasn’t initially a coordinated effort, but it’s fun and reflects the excitement inside the company as we are nearing the time when the early version of our product will be available to the general public.

Crunchies 2007 After Party, originally uploaded by Zivity.

Yesterday I attended The Crunchies, an award ceremony to honor innovation in the tech community. The event was organized by TechCrunch, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, and VentureBeat.

My personal highlights from the award ceremony were:

• Live performance by The Richter Scales, singing “Here Comes Another Bubble“.
  
  In case you haven’t seen the video before, it is must viewing. It combines melody from Billy Joel with acapella (my favorite kind of music) with technology startup themes and humor. The video opens with a line from my friend and Powerset investor and board member Peter Thiel stating there is absolutely not a bubble in technology. The song later features lyrics such as “Babies blogging in the womb” and “I sold my twenties for a worthless pile of tech stock”. My friends in the group, Tom Shields and James Currier, invited me to come sing with them sometime, which could be a lot of fun.

• Fake Steve Jobs accepting the Crunchies award on behalf of Apple for the IPod.
  
  His speech is totally hilarious. The whole speech is like one big inside joke. I had previously read his book “Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody“, an autobiography of Steve Jobs as told by Fake Steve Jobs, and this video conveys the parody well.

• A video of my friend Nova Spivak (Founder of Radar Networks) answering the question about the most important technology innovation. Given the position he has taken in recent panels we have been on together, one might have thought he would talk about the Semantic Web, but instead Nova argued passionately about the virtues of Cool Whip!

  He illustrated many uses of the technology and had had the crowd rolling with laughter. This also inspired us to attempt to have a cool-whip afterparty, which fizzled out.

• Running video commentary by Sarah Meyers. Even without the platinum wig and corset she wore during her Party Crashers career (including crashing Powerset’s Series A Funding Party), she’s still adorable and very personable.
• Luke Nosek from The Founders Fund presenting the awards for “Best Business Model” and “Most Likely To Succeed”. While many of the candidates were Founders Fund portfolio companies, I appreciated that he was wearing a Powerset t-shirt (with the grunting pigeon) under his jacket.

The After Party took place in the famous Green Room. My group had to wait a little while to get into the party, which exceeded the capacity of the room. The wait itself was fun because we were joined in line by MC Hammer. The party was enlivened by a photo activity sponsored by Zivity. In his award introduction Luke Nosek had described Zivity as “Myspace for Grownups.” People took photos with props, costumes, and attitudes, accompanied by several Zivity models. I included a photo of me (in cowboy hat) with Pearl and Cyan in this post. The rest of the collection is fun.
Overall, while the event had its ups and downs, there was really a nice sense of community and cameraderie in both the presentations and in the audience. The award recipients made really brief and generally humble speeches (with the exception of Fake Steve Jobs, of course), most of them thanking their engineers and their moms. The videos shown during the ceremony were mostly sent in by nominated companies. Altogether it felt more like a summer camp show than the Oscars and it is good to see our community not taking itself too seriously. On that note, it was great to see Om Malik on stage at the event shortly after recovering from a heart attack that had left him hospitalized and the subject of much concern among his friends. When people saw him at the event there much applause and support.
I took some photos of the event myself and plan to post them here soon.

The conference came at a busy time for me so, I had to keep my trip to Korea very short (less than 4 days on the ground!). This was sad for me because I have heard about Korea for such a long time, having grown up with Korean family (my step-father was Korean). I did manage to make a visit to two interesting Korean companies.

First was NHN, the parent company of Naver, Korea’s dominant web portal / search engine. Naver pioneered human powered search, as now seen in Yahoo Answers, among others. It turns out that the technical folks at NHN are already collaborating with the tech folks at Powerset on Hbase, the Powerset-initiated open source project for big distributed tables, ala Google’s BigTable. They are also working with a local university to apply Hbase to distributed storage of large RDF databases, a perfect tie in to the activity at the Semantic Web conference. NHN is a pretty amazing company, especially for one that most people in the USA have never heard of.

Second, I visited KT, formerly Korea Telecom. I met with there with SanKu Jo, Vice Present of New Business Group, and Dongmyun Lee, Vice President of BcN business Unit, who are also quite visionary in semantic technology.

While there was not much time for fun, my hosts at NHN (Paul Sung and Ed Yoon) picked me up at the airport and took me out to a meal at a traditional Korean restaurant. We sat on the floor which was heated from below. I was told this is traditional for Korea and it makes for a comfortable bed, without needing a mattress. It also helps relieve the fatigue of sitting cross legged on the floor while eating from the low table. The next day, during an hour between my company visits and catching the next flight, we went to a high-up mountain fortress in the clouds, from which we could see all of Seoul.

My only other time out in Korea was at a dinner in Busan with the conference organizers and other invited speakers. We went out to a Korean seafood restaurant. The highlight of this for me was eating some other-worldly sea creature that responded to prodding as though it didn’t realize it was no longer alive.

Although I only got a taste of Korea this time, I look forward to visiting again soon and hopefully to have more time to see this amazing country.

Party supported by our sponsors and investors

While the event was lavish and brought back memories of the heady dotcom boom days, when some companies spent a significant portion of their funding on their launch parties, we actually were fortunate to have the cost subsidized by our investors and partners. I want to thank them here.

Thanks to Peter Thiel, from The Founders Fund, for personally covering a large portion of the party costs and for reserving Frisson for us on a busy Saturday night.
Thanks to Foundation Capital for covering some party costs and the costs for all the t-shirts, which Charles Moldow, our board member from Foundation, had said they would cover but only on condition that they were “really nice” shirts (more on the shirts in a moment).
Thanks also to Amidzad Ventures, another Powerset investor, and to our partners Amazon and Rackable, who also contributed to the party.

Grunting Pigeon t-shirts

I’ll hope to put up some photos of the t-shirt soon, but they featured the names of our investors/sponsors Foundation and Founders Fund on the sleeves, and the Powerset logo and Series A event information on the back. On the front, it featured a graphic of a pigeon saying “grunt, grunt”.
We didn’t explain the significance of this at the party, but for Powerset insiders it was a really funny joke, which I will attempt to explain here.
In my early post about Powerset and natural language search, I explained that “keywordese” is the language that people use today to interact with search engines. It is not a natural language of the kind people use, which has rich and flexible structure for specifying relationships, constraints, and meaning of the words and their combinations. Instead, it is like the languages invented by people who speak different human languages but need a way to talk to each other. They use a limited number of shared words, with no order or structure, and supplement this with gestures and grunts. These languages are called “pidgin” languages. So “keywordese” is like a grunting pidgin language.
When Matt Marshall interviewed us for the first time, he misunderstood me to say it was a “grunting pigeon language.” My friend and Powerset advisor Matt Hurst picked up the theme and defined a new acronym, GPL, for Grunting Pigeon Language. So the shirt illustrates the current state of keyword search by showing the obvious mascot, a grunting pigeon.

PARC/Powerset partnership

While the party was originally planned to celebrate just our Series A funding, it turned out that we were able to announce the Powerset PARC partnership the day before the party. So we had even more to celebrate. Mark Bernstein, the head of PARC, attended the party and gave a nice speech, and we had a large turnout of PARC people working with Powerset.

Party Crashers

We had several people crash the party to take photos and videos. One video blogger caught some Powerset folks being fairly tipsy and not fully coherent about our product strategy. This got publicized afterward as if to indicate that we might not be sure of what we’re doing. My response to this: if that’s the most embarrassing thing to come out of the party, then we need to party harder next time!

Peter Thiel’s speech and Charles Moldow’s Poem

The highlights of the party for me were the speeches by our VC investors. Peter Thiel said that Powerset was trying to address one of the most important problems possible and to do it for real. He communicated the passion we all feel for what we’re doing. After his speech, as we called up Charles Moldow, I commented that I didn’t see how anyone could top Peter’s speech. Charles smiled and pulled out a piece of paper with what looked like a prepared speech. It turned out to be a poem Charles composed just for this occasion.
Here is Charles Moldow’s poem, “Ode to Powerset:”

Early web was directory. We’d drill down to stuff,
For finding anything was truly quite tough.
Then search came along, Inktomi and Magellan
powered the Web, we were all in heaven.
Jerry and Dave created Yahoo and harnessed the power
They created a portal, from whence the Web flowered.
Infoseek, Lycos, Excite were the “Me too”
But although they tried, they could not come through.
Then along came a promise of a butler named Jeeves,
When asked a quick question, he promised to please.
But the answers were lame, quite random, bizarre
When asked “who shot Lincoln?” he replied: “It’s a car.”
So Yahoo had won, hand out Superbowl rings
Till Larry and Sergey reminded “the show’s not over until the fat lady sings
With better search using link graph analysis
Google gave the other search engines a sudden paralysis
We all got trained to speak keywordease
HBO, Sopranos, Bada bing, Strip tease
Once again pundits have proclaimed the search game is done
Then along comes Powerset with technology to stun
They’ve aimed their sights high, at the 800 pound giant
They are up to the challenge, Barney and team are defiant
The winner will be crowned when I ask Google a question
And it’s only reply is “Go ask Powerset, that’s my best suggestion.”

Jessica Guynn, at the SF Chronicle, was the first to publish this peom online, as Charles gave it to her at the event. Jessica’s blog entry is here.

We got a group of geeks together, had a great chef come in and teach us how to cook, handed out some wine, and kicked off an interesting conversation. Come on along for a San Francisco geek dinner.
Geeks involved are: Barney Pell, CEO, Powerset; Mary Hodder, CEO, Dabble; Henri Poole, founder/director, Civic Actions; Kathleen Lyman, CEO, LaunchMedia; Steve Gillmor. Our co-hosts were Robert Scoble [of Scobleizer fame] and Fred Davis, co-founder of Wired Magazine. Videographers are Eddie Codel and Glenn Gullmes. Chef is Rozana Ogneva of www.AreYouBeingServedCatering.com. Our host is Jeannine Barnard.

I knew some of these folks before, in particular Mary Hodder is a friend of mine. I didn’t know just how expert Mary was about food. The food itself was delicious and we all gave our compliments to the chef. In addition to food, we covered several interesting (to us) topics. Here are a few that I remember after a month (I haven’t watched the videos yet).

• I brought up the question of whether the MySpace generation would grow up to regret sharing all their personal information, and shared my view that more likely they would come into power and reshape the mainstream perspective on private/public information so that is is no big deal.
• We had an unexpectedly long discussion about Powerset (in Part 2) with several good perspectives shared by the other guests.
• Mary talked about trends in personal video creation, mixing, and sharing.
• Fred talked about the early history of Wired magazine, and his later startup companies.
• And we learned about the long history of publishing in the computer industry.

I enjoyed the event and look forward to doing this again.
For folks who don’t live in the Bay Area, I think this dinner gives a pretty typical glimpse into how folks here in the tech industry combine work and play in social contexts. It captures pretty well the way that everyone is passionate about ideas, technology, and startup companies.

Banksy painted elephant in living room

Originally uploaded by Barney Pell.

I attended Banksy’s Barely Legal exhibit in LA. Banksy is an underground graffit artist and prankster, based in the UK. He is so stealth that he didn’t even attend his exhibit and nobody knows what he looks like.

The highlight was clearly the painted elephant in the living room. In addition to looking quite fashionable (though blending in with the wallpaper), the elephant seemed happy, eating gummy bears and hay through the afternoon.
(Animal protesters were unhappy about this, so the security around the elephant was high).

Another highlight was Banksy’s practical joke where he replaced his own mock copies of Paris Hilton’s new album in the stores.

The exhibit was well attended by people in the know in Hollywood. We saw McCauley Caulken and Christina Aguilerra at the event. Apparently Angelina Jolie was there the night before.

Sean Bonner wrote a blog entry about the Banksy event, revealing the location which up until then was a secret.