Brian Grey Blog

Wow, quite a dry spell from my last post – more than a week. Pretty lame I know, but hey, I’ve been on the road and let’s face it, booting up a laptop while you’re running around to meetings is such a hassle. I really live off my iPhone while on the road, and have come to love posting to this blog via the WordPress iPhone app.

Here’s a quick synopsis of the last week – to at least convince you all that I wasn’t at the beach or on the slopes:

Monday 3/2

Made my way to Boston via LA since the massive NE snowstorm kept me from taking the redeye Sunday. I flew Virgin America for the first time – I describe VA as flying in the lobby of a W Hotel. In fact, I knew my first leg was going through LAX when I noticed that the guys across the aisle were wearing white Ferragamos and thumb rings.

Tuesday 3/3

Spent the day out at Polaris HQ in Waltham. Was like minus 10 degrees with the wind chill. Not sure how people back East handle those winters – guess they’re just tougher than us soy latte drinking Californians. Of course I had to race back to Boston late in the day to buy a shirt and tie for the LP dinner that night. I was actually surprised I remembered how to tie a tie – it had been awhile!

Wednesday 3/4

Most of the day was dedicated to the Polaris annual partnership meeting. This was my first such meeting, and as a guy who has been on the operating side for most of my working years, I found it to be quite interesting. It felt a little like budget season in a company, but there was an impressive amount of financial rigor and analysis behind how the Limited Partners were updated on the status of their investments.

Thursday 3/5

A quick day trip down to NYC – the leg down was by air. First meeting was with Avner, the founder and CEO of Boxee.tv. He had just returned from meetings on the west coast with some content partners you can probably guess. I spent the rest of my day in NY catching up with a few friends and colleagues from various walks of professional life, including my good friend Hal who I worked closely with at Yahoo!, and who is now at AOL. The return leg was on the Acela train – have to say Penn Station is a little shabby these days.

Friday 3/6

Back in Boston and out at PVP for the day. That evening I had dinner in Cambridge with a couple friends and Dr. John Ratey, a Harvard professor and author of the book “Spark”.

A quick comment here about Boston/Cambridge and driving: easily the most difficult city to drive around. I must have circled the restaurant for 45 minutes before I could figure out how to get on the actual road that went by it.

Now, back to Dr. Ratey. If you are at all intrigued about the brain and how it can be influenced by exercise, you should read “Spark”. It’s relevant for understanding how exercise helps the brain learn at all ages, deal with ADHD and addiction, and slow down the aging process.

Saturday 3/7

Last day in Boston. Spent most of the day over at the Sports Analytics Conference at MIT with my friend Rudy and his wife Trish. The conference takes an interesting angle on some of the major topics in sports, but also delves in to less mass market areas like talent evaluation and analytics for specific sports like basketball and baseball. Overall they had pretty solid panels – I even ran in to NBA Deputy Commissioner Adam Silver, one of my favorite guys in the sports business.

So that was my week. Saturday night I climbed back on the “W Hotel” in the air and got back to my house in SF around 10:30 pm.

And now here it is Monday night the 9th and I’m writing this post from my flight to LAX as I head down to the Montgomery & Co. conference. Should have some interesting updates from there.

Just about ready to head back to SF from Jackson Hole, Wyoming after spending three days with a bunch of smart, funny and “the kind of people that are fun to hang out with” at the Polaris digital media summit.

A lot of salient topics were covered over two days – along with some late night conversations with cocktails mysteriously involved.

Highlights of the conversation:

- Leading off was Toni from Automattic, the company that operates WordPress. Automattic is a unique company – virtual in the truest sense of the word and continuing to grow through the power of open source development. As they continue to grow their audience it will be fun to see the business opportunities evolve as well.

- Next up I helped steer a conversation around partnerships between big and small digital media companies. A few of our companies (WeatherBug, Sprout, Hangout and JibJab) talked about partnerships that have worked for them — and the key variables that make these relationships work for both sides. Revenue growth, cost benefits head the list for what the big guys are looking for, while audience growth and revenue are vital for smaller guys.

- A great discussion took place after presentations by Amit Kapur from Myspace and Tim Kendall from Facebook around the monetization strategies of the two biggest social networks. What’s clear here is both companies recognize the value of their respective social graphs and how they can create mutually beneficial relationships with third parties to enable business opportunities via both direct to consumer and various flavors of advertising revenue streams.

- Bill Day from ScanScout walked the group through their approach to performance based advertising in video, which was then followed by a discussion around “engagement”. As you might imagine in a room that included Google and ad agencies, along with publishers, the discussion spun around whether brand advertising will become completely trapped by performance based metrics that have evolved through paid search advertiaing or if the metrics for measuring brand delivery in digital campaigns will improve sufficiently to allow for sponsorship and display campaigns that don’t get measured by the click?

- Sean Ryan (Meez.com) and Ron Goldman (formerly of Shopping.com) gave the group really valuable insights into how to think about virtual goods economies and commerce/lead gen opportunities respectively.

Lastly, the two personal highlights for me were 1) getting smacked around on the slopes Monday in my snowboarding lesson (see the description of that debacle below) and 2) getting a new tagline for this blog compliments of Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg:

“Don’t live life black and white…bgrey!”

Thanks Matt!

Well, all good things must come to an end they say — and for my family that means the end of a very enjoyable 3 years living in Pacific Palisades.

My wife and I decided now was the time to move back to SF — to be closer to more family (notably hers) and to raise our kids in the City (ok, for you NY’ers I know SF isn’t really “the City”, but that’s what we call it in these parts).

As part of my move back to the Bay Area, I’m turning the page as well on a new chapter professionally. After a pretty long haul in various business and operating roles in digital media, I’m fortunate to be joining Polaris Venture Partners as an Executive-In-Residence (EIR) based in SF where I can help them increase their Silicon Valley presence. Check out PaidContent.org’s post of the release.

So we’re back in SF, connecting with old friends, and in my case reconnecting with many friends from the Valley. Hope to see you soon!