Uncrunched

Luxury vacation home startup Inspirato (affiliate link, see below) has closed another round of financing – $20 million from Institutional Venture Partners, at a rumored valuation that’s significantly higher than the last round of funding closed last October.

This is a significant up round for one of our portfolio companies, and we’re proud to be part of the team.

Our investment last year wasn’t typical for CrunchFund. Most of our investments are in very early stage, often pre-launch, startups. But we’ve earmarked 20% or so of our fund for later stage investments that we see as extremely opportunistic. Inspirato, a company I’ve been tracking since it launched in February 2011, is exactly the kind of company we like to back. We appreciate Kleiner Perkins’ willingness to allow our relatively small investment in the round that they led.

It’s amazing to think of Inspirato as “later stage” when it’s less than a year old, but the company has been absolutely killing it. They take out long term leases on luxury vacation properties and then rent those properties to users at prices that are significantly lower than they can get elsewhere. You can often get a 4-5 bedroom house for about the same price as you pay for a normal room at a Four Seasons. If you’re traveling with a family or friends, it is far less expensive to use Inspirato than even more moderately priced hotels.

This model – “luxury for less” – clearly resonates with customers.

There is a membership fee for Inspirato, and a yearly fee. The company looks to those fees to provide the bulk of operating margins, which allows them to continue to offer rentals at a significantly discounted rate. Cofounder Brad Handler has referred to this as the “Costco model,” where Costco makes money off membership fees while keeping margins on retail goods extremely low.

Now about that affiliate link. As I explained in my blog post when CrunchFund first invested, Inspirato offers its members a $1,000 credit for convincing new users to join. If you sign up with my affiliate link I’ll simply transfer that credit to you. A lot of my friends have already signed up, and I’m happy to give away the credit. We’ll make it up, after all, as investors.

SOPA/PIPA is on the ropes. Senator Reid postponed a vote on the Senate’s version of the bill next Tuesday, and MPAA CEO Chris Dodd is backtracking and humbled.

Yay. We did it, or nearly have.

But Hollywood still has dozens of laws on the books criminalizing file sharing (read this post by attorney Andrew Bridges pointing out how ridiculous the laws are compared to things like jumping the turnstile on the subway.

Congress is the real winner here. They showed that they can and will pass bills that will cause irreparable harm to the tech industry just because Hollywood is willing to pay them off with huge lobbying dollars. And while SOPA/PIPA may be stalled for now, a big part of the reason is that tech companies got into the lobbying game, too.

From that NY Times article:

Data shows that copyright holders and supporters of the bills outspent opponents substantially in the early stages of the debate. But by many accounts the tech industry has stepped up its lobbying efforts in recent weeks. New spending reports expected shortly indicate whether the balance has shifted.

That’s right, slowly but surely, Congress is sucking the tech industry into their world, making us play by their rules. We have to pay them off, literally with cash, or we get slaughtered.

I wrote about how slippery a slope this is, and hoped that we could put it off for as long as possible – see If We Play By Big Government Rules, We’ve Lost.

Well, we’re now playing by big government rules. Congress can set up a fight pit with Hollywood in one corner and Silicon Valley in the other. Who cares what happens. The money will just roll right in.

This is how criminal organizations run protection rackets. Congress is doing just that, only it’s completely legal.

Delta Airlines. DELTA. Just that word raises my blood pressure. After a decade of below average flying experiences on that airline, the fan really hit the poop in 2010 on flight 1843 from JFK to Hell.

A joyless staff told me I couldn’t bring a very reasonably sized carry on to the plane, citing FAA regulations (that they made up on the spot) (it fit very nicely in the overhead). When I said I was in first class they relented, which is when I understood how bad the service was. What class you’re in has no official bearing on the size of your carry on. That’s all FAA rules, supposedly.

Anyhow, on that flight back they just lost my checked bag (lost everyone in first’s checked bags) and refused to deliver the bags to my home once they figured out where they were. I had to pay them a (large) fee to fedex it a few days later.

All of that, combined with a really low budget, cramped and dirty internal layout that had seen its best days in the late 80s. And the cherry on top – the absolute glee I observed from attendantes and gate crew in making what should have been a pleasant experience a hellish one instead.

I vowed never to fly Delta again, no matter what.

I flew Delta again today.

They were the only carrier with a direct flight to New York out of Seattle that left mid day. It was take that, or fly Virgin with a stop in San Francisco, or wait until the next morning for one of the other airlines. I nearly went with Virgin, but didn’t. I bought a ticket on Delta.

On arrival at the ticket counter I had one employee giving me the “why are you so stupid” routine because I was in the wrong line, but after that things were nice. Easy through security. An efficient boarding procedure and there was my seat, 1B, right at the front of a very nice 767. Unbeknownst to me Delta has ripped the guts out of some of their 767’s and turned them into really nice layouts.

If you’re flying Delta, get on one of these planes. Huge bathrooms I can stand my 6’4 frame up in, and I swear they’re piping perfume or something into them to keep them smelling reasonable. The sitting pod is extremely comfortable and I made good use of the massage feature. Watched two goodish movies. And best of all…gasp…my flight attendant smiled at me and asked if he could get me anything.

I have never seen a Delta employee smile before today. It was a very nice feeling. I bet he would have given me champagne, had I asked, without diverting the airplane to Tampa for an emergency landing.

We were stuck on the tarmac for ages – hitting the three hour limit and then three people asked to deplane, causing a further delay. But we still landed in JFK within about 30 minutes of our original schedule, and everyone seemed to be making their connecting flights. I was all ready to sit down and write a glowing report on my flight since I went so hard on them last time.

Then….baggage claim.

The flight landed at 11:18 pm. The first bags came out 40 minutes later. Mine came out just after midnight, so about 48 minutes after landing. People were pissed off, wondering (correctly) if anyone at all was dealing with the baggage. At one point a small purple bag came out and drifted around unclaimed and disappeared. Nothing else came for at least ten minutes after that.

“They’re totally just fucking with us,” the guy next to me said to my face. “They don’t care at all.”

“Well, it’s Delta,” I said. I mean, my grandpa always told me not to go asking for a beating and then act surprised when it’s promptly delivered.

And that’s how the trip ended. A very nice flight, delayed but not because of Delta, and lovely service in the sky. Then they just crapped on us by making us wait an hour for our bags.

Flight from Hell? Hardly. They were a solid C+ today. And it would have been an A, reserved only for Virgin America flights these days, but for the who gives a heck they’ll get their bags when we’re good and ready at the end.

Thankfully I had Twitter to read while I was waiting for that bag. And Michael Hill sort of said it best. “Delta airlines: “We’re not happy until you’re not happy””

Me and the red faced guy next to me got quite a kick out of that tweet.

In November I wrote about a New York Times article trashing Zynga that appeared to have been spoon fed to them by rival Electronic Arts.

I particularly remember the quotes by EA’s head of human resources Gabrielle Toledano, including this one: “I expect a lot of game and tech companies will begin recruiting Zynga’s talent after their equity becomes liquid.” And that ridiculous quote by venture capitalist Roger McNamee saying that Zynga would end up a cautionary tale, without any mention that McNamee is friends and a former business partner with the EA CEO.

Well, Zynga’s public now, and their equity is pretty liquid. But so far I haven’t seen too many departures. Or any. But I did notice Zynga picked up yet another EA executive today. Barry Cottle, formerly EVP of EA Interactive and now EVP Business and Corporate Development at Zynga.

Perusing the Zynga executive team page, the company now appears to have six former EA execs on board. In addition to Cottle, there’s Colleen McCreary, Jeff Karp, John Schappert, Mike Verdu and Steve Chiang. Counting Cottle, six of the eleven members of the Zynga executive team were former EA execs.

This isn’t to pile on EA – they’re still a strong company and a little competition is always good for the soul. But the New York Times shouldn’t be so quick, next time, to believe everything that’s thrown at them. Particularly when it’s a competitor doing the throwing.

Has anyone on the EA executive team not sent their resume to Zynga at this point? That’s a question I’d love to know the answer to.

Image Credit: NY Times artist rendering of Mark Pincus in what sources from EA tell them is his true form. It definitely wasn’t something I just drew.

My CrunchFund partner and long time colleague MG Siegler is having what appears to be a multi-day seizure over Google’s unsurprising move to integrate Google+ social results into Google search. Says Siegler: “Google is almost asking for an inquiry into potentially anti-competitive practices (and it’s coming). Which is insane.”

No, not insane.

Anyone with a passing interest in U.S. antitrust law knows that the government is theoretically good at punishing companies that engage in anti-competitive behavior, such as leveraging market control in one product to help another product compete. But the government is terrible at preventing these actions from happening, unless you think the threat of eventual punishment is enough to deter it. It isn’t.

In the 90’s Microsoft went from dismissing the Internet entirely to putting Netscape out of business. By the time settlements were reached in 2001 and later, Netscape was just a nice memory for most of us. Everyone, and that means everyone, was using Internet Explorer. See my long video interview with the antitrust attorney, Gary Reback, the man who spearheaded the push to break up Microsoft in the nineties, here.

Microsoft survived. Netscape didn’t. And the government couldn’t do anything at all to stop that.

Today, Google search is Microsoft Windows and Office. And Facebook is as much of a threat to Google as Netscape was to Microsoft.

Of course Google is going to do anything it can to survive. Facebook data is already integrated into Bing, and Twitter’s using the “don’t give the milk for free when you can make them buy the cow” strategy by withholding its own data from Google (look for my upcoming post on why Google will eventually realize that they must acquire Twitter at any cost). That’s a dark place for Google to be.

On a much smaller scale Google has been up to this for ages (see my April Fools post last year about Google Places). Now they’re trying to put off the Age of Facebook. The only chance they have is to use their commanding lead in search to do that.

Will the government come along and knock some heads together in a few years? Maybe. But this is a much more nuanced situation that Microsoft’s execution of Netscape. That could take years and years, and the government may question Facebook’s willingness to throw data to their shareholder Microsoft while withholding it from Google (see John Battelle’s post for some color on that).

But what the government does or doesn’t do years down the road is of little concern for a company fighting to stay at the top. It’s so much less important as to not even be part of the decision making process. So get used to Google+ in your search stream, it’s here to stay.

Last month Fusion Garage, a Singapore startup that has defrauded just about everyone and everything it has come in contact with, had a huge flameout when they were publicly fired by both their law firm and PR firm.

Since then, not a word. Except for a “gosh, everything’s just fine” “interview” by Engadget, which failed to grasp the seriousness of the situation. (Engadget has a history of loving everything Fusion Garage – my favorite quotes are from this 2009 interview where they said “Seriously, we were quite impressed [with the device]”). For the record, documents obtained via our lawsuit with the company showed that a total of 93 of those impressive little devices were ever sold.

Anyhow, Business Insider reports that the jig is up, and nothing Engadget or the Verge can do can save the company any longer from creditors. Did you buy a device and are still waiting for it to be shipped? Line up with $40 million in other creditors to get your refund.

CEO Chandresekar Rathakrishnan isn’t done yet, though. Here’s an interesting tweet from someone who worked for the company, noting that a new company is being formed: “I’m amazed about how badly a company can screw up, I can’t imagine that many people will be left once the new company is formed.”

In case it isn’t crystal clear, it looks like Fusion Garage is trying to get out of all that pesky debt, take as many employees as possible, and start a new company. This is what lawyers call fraud, which is exactly what I’ve been screaming for two years now.

It is the responsibility of the press to point out evil when they see it. Not just sweep it under the rug because one of their competitors (in this case, TechCrunch) were the ones being attacked. Some readers (thankfully very few) bought these devices based on these absurd reviews. There’s no excuse for that.

In the end, the press got played badly by Rathakrishnan. In litigation discovery it became clear that he, working with his PR firm, timed the fraud in anticipation of us screaming murder, hoping that other press would love the drama and immediately make him the hero. The only thing they got wrong was that they thought we wouldn’t sue. We did. And it’s over.

I got up early today to watch the debut of the new Charlie Rose CBS morning show. The first thing I do every morning is drink a cup of coffee, but I really needed it this morning when I crawled out of bed at 6:30.

When I’m in San Francisco I usually get coffee at Philz because it’s the closest thing to perfect coffee that I’ve ever had, and it’s near where I stay when I’m there. But when I’m at home in Seattle I do it myself.

I tend to get a bit manic about certain things (like blogging, and making coffee). The last few years I’ve experimented with a dozen or so different ways to brew a perfect cup. A standard Mr. Coffee (which makes a surprisingly good cup of coffee if you do it right). The French Press (near perfect but too easy to create a bitter brew). I’ve even tried the crazier stuff out there like the AeroPress, which does make great coffee but ends up being too complicated and time consuming for me.

The last six months or so I’ve settled on what I think is the perfect brewing process. It’s easy, has very little cleanup and it’s hard to screw up.

Step one: Coffee. I like Peet’s House Blend, but there are lots of great coffees out there. I often end up buying Starbucks Breakfast blend since it’s easier to find up here in Seattle. Some people like a darker roast, but I prefer the higher caffeine kick from a lighter roast coffee.

Step two: Grind that coffee. You need a proper burr grinder if you want to avoid a bitter cup of coffee. Trust me. The problem is you can spend an almost unlimited amount of money on a good burr grinder. I chose a relatively inexpensive Bodum grinder that I’ve been very happy with. For a single cup of coffee I grind it very coarse to avoid bitterness for about 8 seconds.

Step Three: Hot water. Seems simple but I don’t like spending time with a kettle or the microwave. Instead I bought a Zojirushi Hybrid Water Boiler (Jack Dorsey talked me into this a year ago). I have hot water on tap all the time at 195 degrees, although there are three temperature settings to choose from.

Step Four: Brew. Since you’re using a burr grinder it’s going to be hard to screw the coffee up at this point. A cheap drip coffee maker is going to be just fine. But I use a Chemex glass coffee carafe. No mechanical parts, it will last as long as you don’t drop it. Just put a filter in with the coffee and add water from the Zojirushi boiler. I fill the filter up twice, using a spoon to get the coffee back into the water the second time since it sticks to the side of the filter.

Step Five: This whole procedure has taken you about 1 minute, most of that is waiting for the coffee to drip. Pour, drink, be happy.

Hah. Although it’s Cliff, not Norm.

A year ago Steven Levy suggested that Facebook should give us each a single “friend-list do-over.”

A lot of commenters challenged him. “Grow some balls and just unfriend people,” said one of the more even tempered readers. Another – “These comments are too constructive. Someone should just call this guy an idiot.”

Steven probably didn’t see that criticism coming, because he probably assumed people understand how difficult it is to unfriend people on Facebook at any sort of scale. You have to find the person, hover over the friend button, select unfriend and then click a confirmation.

That’s a few seconds, and when you are trying to remove hundreds, or thousands, or people you don’t know as friends, that takes Too Long. And so the friends stay, for the same reason that every clock in my house is off by an hour for half the year.

So, no, most of us aren’t going to spend the time removing friends on Facebook. Instead many of us are using new social networks, like Path (we’re an investor) and the upcoming Just.Me (we’re also investors, guess how much we like this space) to start fresh. Facebook is for thousands of people you don’t know. The start fresh new services can be finely crafted from the start to include only your actual friends. And they’re made for mobile. Update: Check out Ourspot as well.

Path and others are giving us what we want – A nice, sophisticated and diverse conversation with friends, like sitting together at a table just laughing and talking and drinking a latte. Facebook is more like the top picture above. Chaos.

I don’t like sweater vests, but I’ll take them over hordes of strangers yelling at me any day. I can politely ask that guy to take off that stupid vest anyway. Then everything would be perfect, really.

Sure, lots of people say this is our own fault for showing zero restraint on adding friends over the years. But what seemed like a fun “sure why not, this is adventurous!” in 2006 and 2007 when Facebook allowed open registrations now feels like a bad hangover.

Anyhow, Facebook today is so crowded and messy that no one ever goes there anymore. Or at least that’s what I imagine Yogi Berra would say.

So Facebook, I ask you. Give us the Steven Levy do-over. Or give it a Jack Welch twist and auto suggest we unfriend the 10% of our Facebook friends that we interact with the least once a year. Or both.

I promise, cross my heart and pinky swear, I’ll be more restrained and focused this time. I’ll realize the long term consequences of my more hasty why the hell not click yes decisions, and I won’t repeat my past sin of not saying “no” more often.

Ok, I may repeat past sins. But you can just let me start fresh again next year, right? That wouldn’t be so bad. I could live with that.

Because if you don’t, eventually Facebookers may not wanna come over to the site since it’s so crowded, and no one can stop ’em. You can observe a lot just by watching. Facebook is 90% mental, but the other half is making me insane.

You’ve come to a fork in the road, Facebook, and you should take it.

Thanks Yogi.