My Buddy Danny Cohen read my Rock Band post and gave me a big compliment by battling back. In his post, Danny highlights an interesting similarity in the area of naming. On the other hand he dismisses the more fundamental point I was trying to make, saying that Rock bands don’t live in the world of “Barriers to Entry” or “Unfair advantage”, and most of them don’t “Fulfill a need”.

This is probably my own subjective point of view, but I argue that rock bands face these exact issues!

Let’s start with barriers to entry. I’ve heard more stories about the long, painful and ugly journeys of rock stars than I have of startupists. Artists, unlike high tech professionals, do not have a decent fallback. Many, Most(!) go through waiting tables and living in misery for long years before they get discovered. If they ever get discovered. After all, do we realize how difficult it is to make a national radio play list? MTV? Billboard  Charts? The journey from a local basement in Cleveland to Madison Square Garden is definitely not shorter or easier than the one from seed investment to millions of daily page views.

Moving on to unfair advantage. If you’re a new-be singer with your own unique style, for example, Britney Spears, Byonce and Madonna can copy you in a split second and use their well oiled machine to produce and distribute. All it takes is a decision. As a matter of fact I would argue that Madonna made a career out of “scout and copy” techniques, but that would be a different discussion. When environments are so educated and so competitive, every trick is easily copied and the incumbents have a huge advantage. In that respect a Google / YouTube and Sequoia are not different than Guns n’ Roses and Geffen. 

Finally, we get to fulfilling a need. I always considered this term to be slightly abused. Unfortunately it’s very hard to rationalize the exact solution to an exact need because needs have powerful intangible ingredients. Take a look at YouTube for example. What need does it answer exactly? Is it something rational, like free storage or free bandwidth? Or perhaps something much more emotional, such as discovery, creativity or personal recognition?

All these factors didn’t deter Gemini from investing in an interesting company like eSnips and for the right reason. I’m sure there are always rational reasons, but there is one force that is much stronger than everything - the need to regenerate. We love new rock bands and we love new start ups. VCs, like Record labels share a common target - finding the new stars and helping them materialize. That requires predictive judgment and gambling on the right, that’s right, superstars.