March 31, 2008
Maroon Ventures launches blog ...
I guess it was inevitable. My partners and I have started a group blog over at MaroonVentures.com. While I use Movable Type for my Suffering the Benz blog, I decided to branch out and give Wordpress a shot for the MV blog. Very impressive. Easy to set up and tweak.
Anyway, stop over and check it out. There's a link where you can submit your URL for our blogroll. And we're still tweaking, so if you see anything that's not quite right, let me know.
Posted by Bob Benz at 3:37 PM | Comments (0)
March 20, 2008
Venture money drying up?
Given the nature of my new business, I slowed down a bit on the elliptical this morning when NPR launched into a report on the impact Bear Stearns is having on venture capital in Silicon Valley.
Toward the end, the reporter asks if the downturn will stifle innovation in Silicon Valley:
"Entrepreneurs who are inside large companies but their personality is more entrepreneurial and they see their company slowing down, that can spur them to say, 'It's time for me to go out and start something on my own, cause I'm bored,'" responded venture capitalist David Epstein.
Hmm.
(BTW: Just noticed NPR is using "preroll ads pimping their sponsors in the audio player on their site ... not sure if this is new or just new to me, but I found it interesting.)
Posted by Bob Benz at 10:56 AM | Comments (4)
February 12, 2008
Maroon Ventures decloaks ...
When I told people I was leaving Scripps, I fielded a lot of questions about what Maroon Ventures is. No, it's not a cult based in the mountains of Colorado. Here's the press release we issued today announcing that Wes Jackson, former head of Belo Interative, and I are joining Chris Tippie and Charity Huff in MV. This is going to be a blast ...
News Release
February 12, 2008
Maroon Ventures Announces Addition of New Partners from Across the
Local Media Industry
Crested Butte, Colorado - Maroon Ventures, a professional services firm that is playing a key role in helping 21 newspaper companies leverage their relationship with Yahoo! and HotJobs, announced Wednesday the addition of new partners with diverse local media backgrounds.
Wesley A. Jackson and Robert Benz will join existing partners Christopher W. Tippie and Charity J. Huff in Maroon Ventures. The new partners each will be responsible for strategic ventures focused on identifying and building new technology and businesses.
Jackson joins Maroon Ventures after having served as corporate senior vice president for Belo Corp. and president/general manager of Belo Interactive Media. He was responsible for P&L, operations, strategy, national sales and product development for more than 30 Web sites. In addition, Jackson has represented Belo in the newspaper consortium’s strategic partnership with Yahoo!
Benz previously served as vice president of interactive media for E.W. Scripps Company’s newspaper division. Key achievements in his role at Scripps included the installation of content management systems, implementing extensive financial benchmarking, establishing an innovation fund and managing an interactive staff of 40 that handles ad serving, sales, operations, product management, search engine marketing and programming.
“Maroon Ventures was founded in 2006 to take venture capital and new technology development
beyond the ideation phase to operational execution,” founding partner, Tippie said. “By bringing our deep, local media industry knowledge and operational expertise to bear on new opportunities, Maroon Ventures will create businesses that produce a high return for our partners and clients. Adding Wes and Bob to our team provides us with invaluable operational experience from corporate development to business execution.”
About Maroon Ventures
Maroon Ventures is a professional services firm that connects emerging business opportunities with media companies to help them execute in local markets. Its members draw on extensive operational and strategic experience to drive innovation throughout the business lifecycle.
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Posted by Bob Benz at 6:41 PM | Comments (2)
January 14, 2008
It's time for something completely different ...
“When it's time to change, you've got to rearrange,/
Who you are and what you're gonna be.”
-- The Brady Bunch
I remember the first time I saw the Internet. It was through The Electronic Trib, a BBS that featured Albuquerque Tribune content, chat rooms and a tenuous link out to the Internet via a text-only Lynx browser.
It blew my mind. I could access information from across the world. I could see the card catalog at the University of New Mexico. And I remember telling an Albuquerque entrepreneur this was going to change everything. He wasn’t convinced. But I was adamant.
I jumped into the Internet with both feet. When I moved from The Trib to the Denver Rocky Mountain News, I started agitating to launch a website at the paper. And when management decided to go for it, they turned to Paul Pershing and me, the two guys at the paper with ponytails and an HTML jones.
We had no idea what we were doing, but we managed to pull it off with considerable help from Jack McElroy, a senior editor who was the project’s guardian angel and who also was a catalyst behind the Electronic Trib a few years earlier.
It’s funny, though. As much as I embraced the Internet and all the change I thought it would bring, I’m generally averse to change. In fact, I’m terrified of it. I’m a creature of habit. I like to know what’s coming next and I take a deep comfort in the tried and true.
This ruthless consistency, this hobgoblin of ruts and familiarity, is my greatest nemesis. It was with considerable trepidation (and a swift kick in the ass from my wife, Lara) that I moved from Albuquerque to Denver. And moving from Denver to Austin in 1996 to work for a web startup called GoWest was even more daunting. But I did it, and each time I moved out of my comfort zone to the land of nightmares and churning stomach acid, it opened the door to fresh horizons, exciting opportunities and new friendships.
It’s time to shake things up again.
After 13 years in a series of corporate interactive roles at Scripps, I’m quitting to join a partnership that is a veritable league of Super Friends called Maroon Ventures. My partners in this endeavor are amazing. It took only one meeting to convince me this is the right move. I can’t describe the electricity in the room while we tossed ideas around and planned world domination. I haven’t been this energized since those early days in Denver when I was staying up all night to learn HTML and mine the mysteries of the Internet on a Mosaic browser.
Of all the changes I’ve embarked on, though, this one is the toughest. Probably because I’m leaving an incredible company and the best boss I’ve ever had. I hate to resort to the old breakup cliché that “It’s not you, it’s me.” But that’s the case here. I’m leaving Scripps because I need to do this. I can’t look back in 10 years and wonder “what if.” It’s a chance I have to take, a change I have to make ...
Posted by Bob Benz at 2:33 PM | Comments (23)