When Talking About Business Models, Remember That Profits Equal Revenues Minus Costs
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/when-talking-about-business-models-remember-that-profits-equal-revenues-minus-costs.html

More excellent insight from Fred Wilson about Internet startups, online business models, and revenue vs. cash. Important insight for anyone in business that needs to understand how next-generation economics are not what Wall Street was doing, but what the Web is doing today.

o a business is worth the sum of all of its future profits, discounted back to a net present value (buffet thinks this is the intrinsic value). its a lot easier to decrease costs than increase revenues. forget that ROE is so high for companies like craigslist. have a 1B company on 30 employees. any need to get big and grow.

Good article on Web based business profits, costs and revenues

So with that caveat, here is my list of ten traits I see in great companies. This is aimed at web/tech companies but I believe it can and should be applicable to all companies.

Interesting take on what makes a great company

Yesterday I got to do one of my favorite things. Our portfolio company Etsy invited me out to their new offices in Dumbo to talk to the entire team. Since they didn't ask me to talk about anything in specific,...

It is hard to moderate a conversation of 40 people and there are times when several people want to make a point but one gets the opportunity. I started to notice that the others would simply post their thought to twitter instead which allowed the rest of the room to see what they wanted to say in parallel with the point that was being made live.

If You Are Doing An Event, Bring Twitter Into The Room

I tend not to write too much about Twitter these days. God knows enough gets written about it elsewhere. But we had such a great experience with Twitter at Hacking Education on Friday that I feel compelled to share it with everyone.

Hacking Education was what we call a "Union Square Sessions" event. We've done a number of sessions events now and we use the same format for all of them. We find a nice venue here in NYC, we put together a big table where everyone faces each other, and we talk for five or six hours about a single topic. There are no presentations, no panels, just discussion that is lightly moderated by the Union Square Ventures team. We record, transcribe, and photograph the event so its easily bloggable. And there have been some terrific blog posts that have come out of these events in prior years. This year we added Twitter to the mix.