(..... story continues.)

I was going to blame my blogging death on twitter. Score 1 - Microblogging. Once you go from multiple daily 500 word posts to bi-hourly 140 characters blackberry texts, your pen-ultimate stop is when you end up just clicking "share" on 5-12 posts from the 1200 feeds you read on google reader and think 'thats close enough to blogging'. But, the final nail in the coffin was the Moleskine Storyboard, which took most of my documented thoughts onto a 9 x 14cm pocketsize book. BenBarren.Blogspot.com didnt have a chance, till now.

There were a few other annoying complications, my landlord decided to make my lovely beachfront rental apartment in Aspendale a $1250 per week B+B, and the off Greville Street office, we were sharing is being moved out of today, with other bidders such as MTV attempting to takeover the digs. So I'm currently commuting 4 hours a day, boarding with 'fam, and within the month finding a new palace and daytime workshop. 3 years ago this would have scared me : "I need security". Now the cliff doesnt seem scary, it's just a cliff. It's there. It will go away. We'll end up with our own offices, and a place with a better view to go home to.

This is all while my Feedcorp day job grows its clients to a 7 figure annualised turnover business that requires systemisation, scalability, and other icky stuff like account management, business analysts, production managers, technical architects and a stream of designers/developers, and the other usual ensemble of folks. We've learnt alot about what works, and what mistakes we need to not make twice.

So to help make 2008 "The Year" (just as the US say "2004" was the vintage year - Australia is always an Olympics behind) I was lucky to land the best of blokes (and a track record to match), to run (ooh they bought in a CEO) and expand the business development side of Feedcorp - Mr Pete Burley. Which will hopefully allow me to have a shot at making gnoos what I intended it to be, and help commercialise some of the customers we have for it on the enterprise side which is very interesting in an inform.com meets newsgator.com sort of way.

Racking up a $400 Citilink bill since November when Pete came onboard, a similar amount of parking fines in the City and Prahran seeing clients/investors has also been a by-product of the maelstrom of activity since November 1, where there has been something like 40 new business and investor meetings and multiple 6 figures of new business. I'm behind on about 15 proposals. (we'll knock em off friday burls, promise!)

Not to mention getting our existing enterprise projects in travel, employment and automotive out of testing (where 2 of them are) and building (where another 2 are) onto the internet, and see how our clients' clients (the consumer that is) react to some of this local 2.0 stuff. We've certainly enjoyed playing with these tools as we build them, but you need to set the kids free at a point.

Growing a startup into a business, all the sexiness of Web 2.0 (oh i remember and love the 987 blog posts I did in 2005) can at times wear off. Business 101 topics like cashflow planning (who pays bills in January, when they're on holiday) and people management (clients, investors and staff are all different beasts with different famishing needs) also has become the central part of my day. Damn, Web 2.0 just became a day job. But that's good.

Thankfully, all the things keeping us up at night are good growth problems. Just like avocado is supposedly full of good fat. There are far too few local companies in the Web 2.0 space (if u want to call it that for ease) that have scale, hyper or solid growth, valuable technology - that are making money or have the chance to in the future; By which I mean companies that are or could be such valuable assets that they just must be owned by someone else at a premium, because replication would take too long, be too hard, and just too risky to take.

Knowing how hard it is to do (build a valuable company that creates more dividends individually than a job/freelancing etc or is acquired etc + being able to scale/keep your site up/pay bills/keep investors happy etc) I only feel empathy for the other Aussie startups trying to do it locally, but I wouldn't say I'm too optimistic on the likely 'home runs' with far too many consumer only/google ads/low cost plays, that are still pet projects not scaleable businesses.

Among the 40 meetings done in the last couple months, there has also been a decent amount of time spent with investors. It's definitely better to be raising money, when you are making it, and don't need it, but all the regular cliches about early stage investing in the Australian market are true. Don't expect local versions of Fred Wilson and Brad Feld to exist. They may visit the local wineries, but their equivalent peers or ex-googlers investing at seed stage just dont exist much here.

Outside of The Brighton Mafia (for those Melb based), who have had successes such as Hitwise and Seek, there are the high net worth new money investors, who were making bucketloads of money in uranium and resources, who logically you would think would want to change their asset allocation policy away from resources into technology. To reinvest. But no. "It's just too easy to make money in uranium" they'd say in 2007. Now the market has crashed, and Tricom margin loans called, people are "staying away from Private Equity" fullstop. "Spooked". "Wait three months they say." "Valuations will drop."

The other type of investor you encounter is the professional "VC" and General Partner of a fund. This isnt a First Round/Mobius/Union Square looking for Semantic Web opportunities. It's a back to basics explaining Web 1.5 and see if you have "globally scalable technology" which is unique. Or for other locally based investors it's about "owning" the Enterprise Web 2.0 market selling a range of acquired, invested or licensed properties. Some want to flip it around and do small cap IPO's of consumer web properties, although some of these plans have been flattened since their BlueFreeWay posterchild went from $2+ to 26 cents by trying to build out a consolidated Blu online marketing platforms. Aaagh "platforms" - Australia is certainly a world a way from the Facebook vs OpenSocial world in the finance world.

But, as always the interesting thing is the (social network) app developers beavering away around new API's, and the Skitch type dudez that are innovating on creating new types of products off their base technology. But taking it to the next level and making it a solid well run, rapidly growing business is another story. So 3 years in, I'm not blogging as much, because I remember how Web 1.0 ended and bubbles will always pop. Tweetrd echo chambers, hyperlinking bloggers, google adsense payments, speaking at conferences, the occasional newspaper business does not maketh a business. (geez ben sounds boring now... sellout)

But when your clients start asking why you dont blog anymore (i didnt even know u read my blog, given u never left a comment:), and that documenting stuff and thoughts as they happen is all part of "The Journey" my user generated content break must now end. I'm thinking of less sardonic hyperlinking and more blunt truthisms. Hopefully it will all help as I enter the fourth year of this Feedcorp journey in making the top and bottom lines continue to increase. And I'd also like to make just a little bit of art. Fo' myself. And see what happens from there...