This is an admin post, please feel free to ignore if you might not be interested.
We started venturewoods two years back, and largely on an organic basis, it has acquired traction in the community. There are a few thousand members who read venturewoods, few hundred who comment, and more than 50 who write on venturewoods. Personally, it has been a great platform for me to learn and share with the broader community, and maintain the mental connect that could have been lost so easily as I moved from an entrepreneurial role to a venture investor role.
Multiple people have spoken to me in the past to extend venturewoods beyond just blogs. Suggestions vary towards becoming an entrepreneur-network, to offline events, and so on. Some such suggestions had given rise to venturejobs and venturetalent sections, which I believe have enabled a few people to find each other. This is a call for action – I would like the following to help us take the next step, and am looking for volunteers to help us achieve this:
– Suggestions on what direction you would like venturewoods to take
– Specific site functionality that you would like to add or organize better
– Product+Project manager who can take ownership to get this done
– Technical folks who can help us implement this on a suitable content management system (dont worry, whatever we do, we will not make this a white elephant :))
I hope this thread generates as much participation as some of the previous ones have – it will shape what this service looks like a few months from now!
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Alok
I’ve been a regular reader of VW and have posted comments sometimes.
my suggestion would be to have a section like a diary where entreprenuers could create a webpage for their venture under a codename and post significant events and learning on a periodic basis….something like sanjay is doing with eko.
this could be done on a no-name basis and without disclosing what the company is really upto.
what this would do is offer significant learnings to other entrepreneurs and sharing of some ground-level stuff.
also, the entreprenuer could ask questions on 1 biggest unresolved question he has during that week/month. it becomes very lonely if u’re a one-man-army and sometimes u do not have the luxury of a sounding board.
third, sharing your dream’s progress with a larger audience would give you enough kick to continue even in adversity and we might have a far higher success ratio on new ventures. of course, not requiring to disclose too much on the exact business or revenue model would help in a free discussion in these venture diaries.
carry on the good work Alok
regards
bb
Hi,
I have been an old reader of Venturewoods. It started off and is one of the most read and respected Indian blogs. I however share the same feelings as a lot of readers which is – Venturewoods has been very shallow of late. Lots of articles have no analysis and are pure personal outpourings. I dont think the “broad range of topics” is a valid argument. When an invitation is sent to the blogger, a certain level of quality is taken for granted (which is fair). I think that quality level has fallen.
I have cherished posts by Sanjay and Alok for a long time. Alok, its a great idea to take a step back and try building a better Venturewoods.
I also think that most comments (including this one) here have discussed the decision than give fruitful suggestions for improvement (which I guess was ALok’s idea in the first place).
Please use a wordpress plugin to split large number of comments into pages.
for e.g. http://www.keyvan.net/code/paged-comments/
Your Venturetalent page frequently times out now (because of the number of comments)
-Sandeep
Agree with self regulating community part. VW does have a real community here, mix of VC, entrepreneurs, students, managers, etc. You’re bound to get a broad range of posts, which I think is healthy. Whats nice is that most posts have healthy debate, whether its people rubbishing the post, giving a counter view, endorsing it, adding to it, etc.
Not entirely sure if VW was meant to focus on a specific subject when started and maybe a bit off course from that, but that happens once the community grows. No worries there.
I think it’s not so much of an issue of outreach as driving posting from existing community. Someone has to lead that. Personally I’d rather see VW become a slashdot style community, rather than a techcrunch type news site.
Well..I have been following http://www.pluggd.in for quite some time and have seen more relevant comments/posts than any other blog.
Atleast those guys are doing an awesome job with bringing in insights/industry stats..and interviewing indian startups.
anyways, what VW needs is building relevance and not 1000s of posts and comments.Quality vs. Quantity? You decide!
@ Rehan – honestly, if you havent found any issue with quailty here, then cant say much (since I strongly see a major quality drop here in VW)