Fred Wilson is very good at this, and one of a very small number of people I follow religiously. Here’s what he has to say about the subject:

1) Have a long form blog on a domain that you own and that is permanent. Like Anil Dash says in the comments to Tom’s post, this is about compiling a set of work that is substantial. Anil says:

Based on the past dozen years that I’ve been writing it, I expect that my blog will in some ways be one of the most significant things I create in my life.

I’m 100% with Anil on this. People ask me when I am going to write a book and I laugh at that suggestion. AVC is more than a book will ever be. It is live, it is deep (in terms of total posts), it keeps going, evolving, and ends when I end.

2) Have a short form blog an a different domain that you own and is permanent. Mine is at fredwilson.vc and hosted on Tumblr. This is where I put the things that fill out the story but don’t belong on a long form blog.

3) Participate actively in the social distribution platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. Build profiles, followers, and credibility in these communities. I use Twitter for broadcast to a wide group, I use Facebook for friends and family, and I’m still trying to figure out how to use Google+. These distribution platforms are great for getting your work out there but I don’t personally want to use them as the place where my work is hosted.

4) Build community on your domains. In the case of my longform blog, Disqus is the tool I chose and after that decision, our firm invested in the company. I’ve seen and used all the various community tools out there and I believe Disqus is the best at building community on long form blogs. In terms of community on short form blogging, I think Tumblr has done the best job and that is why it is growing like a weed right now.

5) Engage everywhere. That means on Hacker News, other blog communities/comments, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. This takes a lot of time. Too much time. But I get so much value back from doing it that I make the time.

The most important part is to engage. The second most important part is own your online presence. Marco Arment has a great post on this point. He says:

If you care about your online presence, you must own it.

So if there is a “Fred Wilson School Of Blogging” this is it. It works for me and it can work for you if you are willing to invest the time and energy.

1) Move or backup the app to your SD card.

There are numerous ways of doing this, but the first thing I tried worked, was simple, and goes as follows: Install the “Astro” app. Run Astro, click “menu”, select “tools”, select “Application / Manager Backup”, select the app(s) you want and click “backup”. Your app(s) are now on the SD card at /backups/apps/

2) Mount your phone, and copy any apps to your computer.

On a Mac it’s a simple as plugging in the USB and opening the mount that appears on the desktop. Got to backups/apps/ and copy the apps you want to your local machine.

3) Use dex2jar

Download dex2jar. It converts .dex files to Java .class files.

Run something like “dex2jar someAndroidApp.apk” and a file called “someAndroidApp.apk.dex2jar.jar” will be generated.

4) Decompile the .jar

I used jd-gui and it worked for me with no problems. Download, run and open the jar to get the decompiled code. You can also save all the decompiled code (it saves as a .zip file).

5) Take a look at the Manifest (and all the resource and assets)

Unzip the original Android app. That’s right, just run something like “unzip someAndroidApp.apk” and you’ll get to all the resources and assets.

To take a look at the AndroidManifest.xml, first get a copy of AXMLPrinter2.jar. Then run something like “java -jar AXMLPrinter2.jar AndroidManifest.xml >> Readable.AndroidManifest.xml”

And that’s the easy way to decompile any Android app.

What I know about angel investing I learned from Ron Conway. Once you
have access to capital (which is hard), it isn’t that complicated.
It’s basically about building up karma points by helping people out.
When you invest in companies, always return calls and emails and help
them out. Help out companies you didn’t get to invest in. Help out
VCs who might invest in your investments later. Meet with promising
people who are trying to raise money and try to help them even if you
don’t want to invest. Help out big company people who might do deals
with or acquire companies you invest in. Have meet ups and do other
things to help the startup community. Blog about stuff you learn. (If
you happen to also be running a startup like I am, this stuff also
helps your own company.) As you get more karma points you level up.
As you level up, helping out gets easier and your time scales better
and you get karma points faster. Entrepreneurs talk constantly. It’s
a small community. If you have karma points they’ll let you invest -
often on good terms. If you aren’t they won’t. That’s about it.
There aren’t any shortcuts or tricks.

game mechanics applied to angel investing

Users who make a purchase versus those that do not, are still very low. According to Vikas Gupta, the co-founder of Jambool, it’s only a couple of percent:

Purchasing rates are still low, with often times  only couple percent of players making a purchase at all, but a growing number of people that make an initial purchase will buy more.

Following the first purchase 56 percent will buy again, according to Jambool, while another 25 percent will make two or more purchases. The average amount purchased across all these groups is $60, while there’s a significant group of “whales” who spend over $1,000.

Inside Facebook

The key take away, is to motivate that first purchase in-game (and then keep the players playing).

I think that first purchase is one place where Zynga games really shine. While starting to play CityVille I was amazed at how quickly the goals became an option of either grinding, purchasing, or inviting friends to the game.

Targeting the Whales is another key. Watch what they do in-game and what they buy and consider building out game mechanics and virtual goods inventory to follow that behavior. Bring them over into other games. They like your game enough to spend money on it, listen to them, and give them more options for enjoyment.

Money or prestige can be cool secondary prizes, but it’s the sense of accomplishment and experience that is truly rewarding.

Starting a new company is full of chaos and uncertainty. There are plenty of very reasonable things to worry about, like, will we make any money? Do we have the right product? How do we find any customers? But these are often not the things starters choose to worry about.

Instead, they worry about things they should be so lucky to encounter. Will my software platform scale if I get 10,000 customers per day? Do we have the right strategic plan for the next three years? What should our stock option plan look like so it’ll cope with 100+ people?

To make something of yourself, you can only worry about so much. There’s a certain set of worry slots available and if you fill them with all these possibly-maybe concerns, there won’t be any left for things that’ll matter tomorrow.

That is all.

In the meantime the tech IPO market has been superseded by the acquisition market. And the Social Gaming and Virtual Goods acquisition market is on fire. It seems that every week there’s another acquisition occurring. Google just bought up a number of companies in the space, signaling their entry into the space.

So why has acquisition become the preferred route of exit? For the acquirer, it’s an offset of the expenses and risks of R&D, product development risk, and a guaranteed time to market. For the equity holder, it’s simply an option for a meaningful exit.

And the driver for the frenzy in the Virtual Goods / Social Gaming space? Zynga is at the heart of it, but I’ll leave that for another post.

For the investor (ie. equity holder), IPOs just aren’t what they used to be. Fred Wilson sums it up rather nicely:

First, it is way too expensive to go public. And if you don’t get your offering done, which is not an unusual occurrence, you are left with a huge bill to pay (and no cash to pay it with). And if you get your offering done, your company will likely be valued lower than it would be valued in a late stage private financing.

I used to think that the IPO was the ultimate exit for a venture backed company. Then in the late 90s, I was involved about a dozen IPOs, sat on some public boards, got sued by ambulance chasers, and saw the vast majority of our IPOs underperform and get abandoned by wall street. Since that experience, I’ve become very wary of the IPO exit.

I believe that the IPO exit is appropriate for only the very best companies, maybe one or two companies per fund, which would be the top 5 or 10 percent of our portfolio. For every other company, I think liquidity offerings followed by an eventual sale transaction is the best outcome. The cost is just too high and the benefits are just too low for most companies these days.

The Acquiring Side has the most to gain from this setup. Time to market being the key factor – especially in the lucrative and new world of Social Games and Virtual Goods. Any technology can be built, but being a  year or more behind the curve will no doubt truncate potential revenue well into the future. R&D is expensive and risky, so why not leave it up to the entrepreneur to take the initial risk? Product development may be somewhat less risky, but only maybe… acquiring a company that has done the R&D and encompasses the needed product fit is a good option, even if it comes with a slight premium.

At Doubloon we think a lot about how to maximize in-game revenue. How to store and aggregate relevant statistics. How to display in-game trends in a user friendly and actionable way. And most interestingly, to me, how to automate those suggested actions for revenue growth.

I think this video gives a good, high level overview of some of the technics we flow into easy to digest analytics and push-button actions for optimizations.

To know how good you are at something requires the exact same skills you need to be good at that. Which means that if you are absolutely hopeless at something, you lack exactly the skills that you need to know that you are absolutely hopeless at it. And this is a profound discovery, that most people who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing have absolutely no idea that they have no idea what they are doing.

It explains a great deal of life…. It explains why so many people in charge of so many organizations have no idea what they’re doing. they have a terrible blind spot…