Rapleaf is launching in a few days … so i have been taking some time away from blogging.   Luckily, i followed Reid Hoffman’s advice and created 30 blog posts last December.   so i have ammunition for the blog by just cutting and pasting:

There are a bunch of vertical search
engines … everyone talks about them. We
all know them. Simplyhired (jobs),
Indeed (jobs), Oodle (classifieds), Become.com (shooping), Trulia (real
estate), Feedster (blogs), etc … vertical search engines galore. These sites look to aggregate users in one
central location to help them find useful information. A few of these sites make some money now —
most are better they will become more popular in the future. Many will get bought or mimicked by Yahoo or
Google. 

Then there are vertical ad
networks. These companies, like
Adteractive, Quinstreet, NetBlue, etc. make a great deal of money today. Instead of creating one central location, they
specialize in finding people wherever they are on the web. 

We are seeing a huge proliferation
of both types … one is a central location, one is more distributed…

My hunch is
that we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg on these vertical ad networks. Today we see a huge lead business in
mortgages, higher education, and services like NetFlix. 

But lead
gen can be applied to a lot of verticals that it hasn’t yet been applied
to. 

For
instance, for the last six months I have been trying to convince the military
to develop a distributed leads gen model for its recruits (note: I’ve had
little luck. even though I have met with
most of the generals in charge of recruiting, they are the government and are
slow to adopt new practices). 

And also
any financial product to consumers could be great for lead gen. so can leads for customers of enterprise
software, hot candidates you might want to hire, new couples for wedding
planners, and clients for lawyers. And
we’ll see these businesses increasingly proliferate and the companies that will
make all the money won’t just be the ones that provide a great service but also
the ones that provide the hot leads to those firms. 

In our
Always-Be-Closing society, thee vertical ad networks are becoming increasingly
important. And while the vertical
search engines are cool and provide a great service, their total addressable
market 10-100 times smaller than the vertical ad networks.

Rapleaf is looking for someone to head up Community Marketing.
this is the new company I am running now.

About the company:

Rapleaf is a consumer Internet start-up. We are not yet public with
what we are doing but it is something to do with reputation. We are
very small — we are two people right now and currently hiring three
more.

Our goal: to make it more profitable to be ethical

The role:

– you will be doing community marketing

– working with blogs, forums, and online communities

– outward face of the company in many meetings

– doing a fair amount of customer interaction and customer service

Criteria:

– you should have a strong desire to build a more ethical society

– intensely driven and proactive person

– extremely hard working. This is a start-up. We work 80 hour weeks – you should too.

– understand blogs, online forums, and communities of people online — your job will be to interact with these communities

– understand the internet well. Early adopter. you are familiar
with sites like flickr, delicious, MySpace, SimplyHired, Yelp, Digg,
YouTube, and others.
– quick learner and real doer (and you err on execution over strategy)

– smart at marketing

– quick writer   

– you can deal with hundreds of emails a day.   you can maintain thousands of conversations at once.

– people like you and like working with you (we’ll require at least a dozen references)

– you are proactive and do not complain

– you thrive on chaos, risk, and uncertainty

– we’re willing to prioritize motivation over experience. And we’re
willing to take a risk on someone who does not have Community Marketing
experience or even consumer Internet experience.
– should be easy to get along with, nice, fun, smart, ethical, and low-maintenance

– did we mention that this person should be proactive?

Location:

– you should be located somewhere in the SF Bay Area. No office yet
but we will be opening one in San Francisco. Even willing to consider
people who want to live outside the bay area

Compensation:

– high cash comp or high equity — we are willing to pay for the best talent

We’re only looking for people that really want to change the world.

interested?
jobs@rapleaf.com

Rapleaf
is looking to hire two marketing interns. can be full-time or part-time. you must be familiar with blogs, eBay, craigslist, etc. ideally, you have a blog.

interns
receive a small stipend. also have the
potential to be hired full-time.  we are
looking for self starters that can work independently and be creative.

Silicon ValleyRapleaf is
launching on May 7 and is my new company.   

Interested?

jobs@rapleaf.com

Noah Kagan has a good post on "Craigslist Fraud, the New ebay" — worth a read.   

snip:

Now I see more emails that remind me of eBay
where they ask you to ship to international countries (which I got
scammed on once) and want to pay excessive of your asking price.

fraud is becoming more important as more person-to-person transactions are going off eBay and going to places like Craigslist and Edgeio. 

i’m working on something now to tackle this problem … more on that in a few weeks….

Instant Domain
Search is a great Ajax-enabled domain searching tool that helps you
find available domains instantly. 

Manish
Shah, CTO of karmaOne
referred this site to me.

Michael Carrier launches Stylehive this Thursday.   Stylehive is like Yelp + Digg for products.   catered to a shopping and style concious audience.  I got an inside look at the site today and was impressed.

www.Stylehive.com

like a lot of hot start-ups today, Meebo had trouble finding office space.

Meebo (www.meebo.com) just got funded by Sequoia and
went from three to six people and had to move out of the founders’ living room
and into an office.   They had a hard time finding an office so they posted a
"anyone know of any good office space in

palo alto

?" on their blog and the landlord of a
cool office saw the post and replied.   And Meebo just moved in last
week.

This
is a really cool anecdote and part of a larger trend in corp blogs.  Companies are using their blog as a
tool to help them accomplish more than just marketing — they are using it to find people, office, and more.   of course, that’s what Edgeio has tapped into.   

check out this simple but fun site forwarded to me by Tod Sacerdoti:

http://www.pimpyourgoogle.com/pimped.php?text=StoneBrick

Year 2050:

Backing up my brain takes a long time.   To do a full brain back-up can take 6 hours and it is hard to get an appointment.   A brain restoration could take 3-5 days … if you can find a body to put it in.

I’m waiting for a body right now … I’m living inside a computer.

Like many cautious executives, I go in for a regular brain back-up — especially when I fly long distances.   I went in for my last back-up a day before an especially hairy trip I was taking to Central Asia.   Luckily I did.   Our jet was shot down by pirates and I "died" in the crash.   Well at least my body died.   That was the second time it happened to me.   The first time was from the bioterror outbreak two years ago.   Last time I "died" I was lucky — was able to find a new body in a few days.   Now I am languishing … I yearn for some exercise.

The weird thing is that since my last brain back-up was about 29 hours before our jet crashed, I don’t remember anything about the crash.   I’ve tried to recreate some of the events as I want to have a fairly full memory.

It is weird being here … bodyless.   My friends can "visit" with me … and we can talk anywhere.   It is easy for me to go to them as I’m just bits right now running on a fault tolerant system with instances in mountain view, capetown, santiago, and moscow.   

One thing I found is how many people are like me … in limbo.   According to the US Congress, you cannot vote when you’re in limbo.   But I’m not sure how anyone will even know.   Most of my correspondence and communication is through my avatar anyway.

I remember not that long ago when death was something to be fear.   Today it is only rebirth …

(author’s note: Bank in 1990 (when i was 16), I wrote a short-story on this phenomena called The Bourgon File)

check out all the photos from the Connector Group’s Showcase at JP Morgan:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sallyconnector/

Emily Chang has a great write-up of the Showcase event at JP Morgan last night.   and her partner Max podcasted the event.   thanks emily and max.

Showcase at JP Morgan attracted 282 influencers and tastemakers including most of the top venture capitalists, bloggers, and entrepreneurs in SF.   10 companies presented (see emily’s blog for a terrific write-up).   

check out all the photos at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aurenh/sets/72057594056128918/