I have spent the better part of this afternoon and evening trying to do anything other than think about the passing of my good friend Rajeev Motwani. But I have failed. The thought that Rajeev has left us is hard to fathom. Rajeev was part of the fabric of Silicon Valley. He was part of the fabric of Stanford. And he was part of the fabric of August Capital.

For a number of years now, Rajeev has attended our partners meetings every Monday afternoon. As a tenured professor, Rajeev could not join us as a partner of August Capital. But he enjoyed participating in the back and forth of the partnership discussions. He enjoyed debating the merits of every new innovation. And he was quick to share his point of view on each technology or company or entrepreneur. But he particularly enjoyed that when partner meeting talk turned to the mundane or administrative, he could give us a sly smile and quietly slip out the door.

Rajeev didn't have time for the mundane. He was too busy talking with everyone about everything. You would be hard pressed to find a more connected or more informed professor, technologist or investor than Rajeev Motwani. He worked tirelessly, meeting anyone and everyone who requested an audience with him. Students sought his advice on grad school. Entrepreneurs sought his advice on financing strategy. Investors sought his advice on technology trends. We all just wanted a little bit of Rajeev's time. And he always seemed to have that little more to give us.

For those of you who didn't know Rajeev, you might get the impression that he was your typical Silicon Valley insider -- loud, brash, full of bravado. He was anything but. Rajeev was soft spoken and gentle. He was self-confident but didn't feel the need to prove anything. He didn't speak to hear his own voice. And he didn't need to be the center of attention. Rajeev just wanted to be helpful. And he was. To so many of us.

Perhaps that is why so many of us thought of Rajeev as a friend. It is one thing to be friendly with someone in the business world. It is another thing altogether to consider them a friend. Rajeev genuinely liked people and people genuinely liked him. So it is no surprise to me that testimonials about people's friendships with Rajeev Motwani are popping up all over the Web (here are the words of friendship and admiration from Sergey Brin, Om Malik and Dave Morin, to point to just a few). I am sure that the testimonials will keep on coming in for days and weeks to come.

While I could certainly go on about Rajeev's intellect, his curiosity, his business acumen, let me just say one more thing about him and his character. Rajeev was a wonderful family man. I say that as the very highest form of praise. Rajeev loved his wife Asha (as do all of us who know her) and he adored his children. Rajeev's face lit up when he talked about his family. And he prioritized them above all else. No one will miss Rajeev more than his wife and kids and, while I can only feel some small piece of their pain, my love and support goes out to them during this tough time.

Rajeev Motwani, you are missed already. And you will be missed for years and years to come. You have left us far too soon.

Today TechCrunch posted a list of the "Top VC Blogs (According to Google Reader)." I was very pleased to find out that I came in at number three, sandwiched between Fred Wilson and Brad Feld. But I have to admit, the ranking makes me feel a little guilty. Not because I don't think there's good content on VentureBlog (after six years of blogging, there must be some good stuff in there somewhere). But because I really don't blog enough. Every couple of weeks or so, something jumps out at me that demands a blog post. In stark contrast, Fred and Brad post all the time. I have huge respect for them for that. And not just because of the quantity, but because they post great quality stuff day in and day out. So my hat is off Fred and Brad, who are the rightful owners of the top two VC blog spots without any questions.

The challenges posed by trying to maintain an active blog are only further exacerbated by the incredible proliferation of "media channels" these days. I don't mean professional media channels. I mean user-controlled media channels. Blogs. Podcasts. Twitter updates. Facebook and LinkedIn status messages. YouTube channels. Etc. The list is daunting. Yet anyone who takes seriously the idea of communicating directly with his or her "customers" really can't ignore the opportunities posed by each and every one of these channels.

What's more, each of these media channels serves a different purpose. Podcasting can not replace blogging, which can not replace tweeting. A jogger isn't going to read my blog while taking a morning run, but may well listen to VentureCast. An entrepreneur trying to quickly get up to speed on the state of Venture Capital is not likely to listen through 30 hours of VentureCast, but could easily browse through VentureBlog for relevant content. And anyone foolish enough to care what I'm doing on a day to day basis will not likely find that out on VentureBlog or VentureCast, but could certainly subscribe to my Twitter feed and get the latest and "greatest."

The more I think about the relevance of each of these media channels, the more I realize that it is important for me to engage on each and every one of them. To that end, I have recently revived VentureCast -- now with my partner Howard Hartenbaum. We intend to record a new show about twice a month. The first two we've recorded are already available on iTunes, so check it out. It also means that I need to share more thoughts on entrepreneurship and Venture Capital on Twitter, which I will surely continue to do. And, of course, it means that I need to blog about the world of Venture Capital more frequently. If nothing else, this post is a good start.

Just yesterday I had breakfast with Rene Lacerte, the founder of PayCycle, and we discussed the power of great customer service. When Rene first pitched me on the idea of PayCycle, the service was not yet built. Nonetheless, he was already discussing how he would integrate the customer support experience into the overall service offering. He rightfully pointed out that every change you make to an online service will have implications for the customer support team -- whether it is training, navigation, speed to resolution, etc. So from its inception, PayCycle's product management and customer support went hand in hand. Rene is now building his second customer-focused service called Bill.com and it too has been built from the bottom up with customer support in mind.

As we ate breakfast yesterday, Rene and I had a long discussion about the fact that despite being called Software as a Service, very few SaaS organizations put any emphasis on the "service" piece. Sure, you could argue that the "service" in SaaS is all about delivery and not about customer support. But that would be a mistake. Service businesses live and die based upon the satisfaction of their customers. While it is conceivable that your software could be sufficiently foolproof that customer support is limited to receiving "thank you"s from your happy customers, so far no one has quite found that Holy Grail. Customer support remains a significant piece of all SaaS organizations and the more a company recognizes that going into building their service, the more likely they will succeed.

So what does that have to do with the Rosewood Hotel? I was reminded of the importance of customer service this morning as I experienced the Rosewood Hotel's stunning disregard for their customers. For those of you who have not yet been to the Rosewood Hotel (and I would not recommend that you go), it is the new "high-end" hotel that was just built on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. For those of us parked in VC-land here on Sand Hill Road, it was a welcomed new place for breakfasts and lunches and, in fact, I have eaten breakfast there 12 times in the little over a month that it has been open. But never again. (Warning: herein begins a rant -- a well-deserved rant, but a rant nonetheless.)

Three weeks ago, when parking for breakfast, I was surprised to see broken glass in one of the parking spaces. As I left breakfast, I pointed the glass out to a maintenance person driving his golf cart by. I assumed it would be cleaned up. Two weeks later, the glass had still not been picked up, so when the manager of the Madera restaurant came by to say hello to me (after all, I was there every other day), I pointed out to him that there was broken glass in the parking lot that had not been picked up despite the fact that I had pointed it out two weeks earlier. The restaurant manager apologized and assured me that it would be picked up. To my shock, it was not. Undaunted, I figured I'd give it a third try. Two days ago, on my way to an event in a conference room in the hotel, I asked to speak to the hotel manager. A nice young man named Daniel came to talk with me and I recounted my tale of woes. I explained to him that while the glass hadn't particularly inconvenience me, that I thought it didn't reflect well on his hotel and that he might want to take care of it. He assured me that it would be cleaned up by the next time I visited, which I told him would be two days later.

I must say I was surprised to see the glass still there two hours later when I got out of my meeting, but I figured I'd give him the benefit of the doubt and assumed that it would be picked up by my breakfast on Friday (today). I was wrong. To my horror, as I drove up to breakfast this morning, the glass was still there. Was I cut by the glass? No. Did I get a flat tire from the glass? No. So why do I care? Because I think that customer service matters. I think that if you care about your customers, you should do more than pretend to listen to them. So rather than park, I drove up to the front of the hotel and explained to them (amidst a fair amount of swearing) why it was that I would not be eating breakfast there any more. The same manager, Daniel, was there and fell on his sword, taking full responsibility for the incident. But as far as I am concerned, it is too little too late. Such blatant disregard for your customers maybe deserves a second chance. And, if you are feeing extremely generous, a third change (particularly when the restaurant is so convenient). But not a fourth chance. So I guess I'm heading back to Il Fornaio for breakfast.

Customer service matters. And it matters more than ever in this age of blogs, and Facebook and Twitter. If you search for PayCycle, you'll find a whole lot of happy customers. And if you search for Rosewood Hotel, I'm guessing you'll see a whole lot of dissatisfied customers. You'll certainly find me there.

Update: Shortly after I posted this rant about the Rosewood Hotel, I got a call from Managing Director of the hotel. Through the power of blogging, twitter and facebook, the Rosewood's MD had read my complaint moments after I had posted it and promptly called a staff meeting to address the situation. He then came over to my office to offer up his apologies for what had happened and his commitment to make customer service a priority of the hotel. While I wish it had not escalated to the point of needing such attention, I certainly appreciate that the hotel's MD took it seriously enough to come to my office and have the discussion.

A short time ago I wrote about my investment in Aardvark. As I said in that post, I believe that in many ways search is broken and getting worse. Not only are there voracious efforts at Search Engine Optimization (SEO) throughout the Web, but the scale of the Internet is monumental today and getting larger by leaps and bounds virtually every minute.

The massive scale of the Web not only creates huge challenges for search, it also cripples discovery. Gone are the good old days in which fortuity would lead to the unearthing of interesting new Websites. Remember when Web directors would lead you to great sites on the topic of your choice (you may not recall but, in the early days, "Yahoo" stood for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" and Srinija Srinivasan, Yahoo's chief of ontology, was one of the most powerful people on the Web). Better yet, remember the good old days of browsing libraries -- the Dewey Decimal System created the propensity for discovering new and interesting books as a result of their being shelved next to related categories -- while looking at one book, other books in its general vicinity would likely pique your interest.

That sort of accidental discovery was driven out of the Web a long time ago. The only sorts of chance Internet encounters most of us have these days are a result of mistyped URLs -- not exactly a recipe for exciting new discoveries. Thankfully, one company has made it their mission to bring back discovery to the Web. StumbleUpon delivers nearly half a billion recommendations per month. Those recommendations can be across broad categories (e.g., photography, video, etc.) or in very focused niches (e.g., electric violins, VC blogs, Alice in Wonderland, etc.). The StumbleUpon experience brings the unforeseen and unexpected back to your browser. I like to think of StumbleUpon as a discovery engine bringing fortuity back to the Web.

Enthralled by what StumbleUpon was doing, a couple years ago I began chatting with the founders about their business. The more I learned, the more excited I got about the prospects for assisted discovery at StumbleUpon. But before I had an opportunity to propose financing the company, it was purchased by Ebay.

Nonetheless, I've stayed in touch with Garrett and Geoff and continued to talk with them about the power of StumbleUpon. So when they began discussing the possibility of spinning StumbleUpon out of Ebay, I was grateful to have the conversation. The need for discovery on the web has not gone away since Ebay bought StumbleUpon. To the contrary, the problem has continued to grow more acute. And StumbleUpon continues to be the best solution to the problem. Over 7.5 Million registered members discover, categorize and review Web pages, making StumbleUpon the Internet's most powerful recommendation engine.

I am thrilled to join the original StumbleUpon team in spinning the company out of Ebay. Along with Garrett and Geoff, Ram Shriram is reinvesting in the company and going back on the board. The primary financial backers of the spinout will be August Capital and Accel Partners and Sameer Gandhi and I will go on the board as well. I look forward to working with Garrett, Geoff, Ram and Sameer to continuing to build StumbleUpon into a large and important piece of the Web's infrastructure.

As one of the leading analysts and Web Strategists in the social computing space, Jeremiah Owyang meets with a lot of companies. He has the luxury of talking with big companies and small companies, public companies and private companies, venture-backed startups and bootstrapped companies. He is constantly looking at what makes one company successful and another one less so. Not only is Jeremiah a really smart guy, but he has a ton of data to support the conclusions he draws both in his day job with Forrester and in his role as confidant and advisor to numerous startups.

Given all that, I was thrilled to read Jeremiah's post "Beyond the Money: Some VCs Provide Startups With A Competitive Edge." In his post, Jeremiah asserts that VCs (at least the better VCs) are good for more than just money. What are we good for? Jeremiah lists a number of categories: Thought Leadership, Strategic Guidance, Being Part of the Family (e.g., Keiretsu), Ancillary Services (marketing, recruiting, etc.), Umbrella Branding (e.g., "an August Capital company"), and Networking. I would probably add to this high level list Recruiting and Capital Raising, both of which VCs can be very helpful with. Jeremiah concludes that "What [VCs] do beyond the investment makes a different - I can see it."

Thank you, Jeremiah! While I recognize that my job as a Venture Capitalist is to invest other people's money and, if all goes well, turn it into more money, I have a hard time thinking of Venture Capital as a "financial services" job. It is certainly the case that the financial services aspect of the job isn't what gets VCs up in the morning. What gets us up in the morning is the prospect of working with really smart people to build new and exciting businesses. And Jeremiah does a great job of listing the fun parts of our job -- advising, connecting, recruiting, etc.

All too often I fear that VCs are thought of as fungible -- one VC's as good as the next. It is certainly true that our money is fungible -- a dollar from any other VC will buy as much as a dollar from August Capital. But the aggregate value of taking money from another VC will be vastly different from taking money from an August Capital. My partners and I work hard to deliver value to our entrepreneurs on all the fronts Jeremiah describes. And those efforts can have a big impact for a company. VCs don't build companies, entrepreneurs do. But good VCs can do a whole lot more than simply write a check.

It is a challenging fundraising environment out there for sure. And that is not just for startups. This economic crisis has far reaching-tentacles. As the public markets have declined, so too have the liquid portfolios of universities, endowments, foundations. And it is those institutions who are among the most significant investors in Venture Capital. As a result, VCs are finding it equally challenging to raise money of their own.

With that as a backdrop, we at August Capital went out to raise a new fund at the end of last year. And I believe that our experience mimicked that which startups are seeing in the market today. No matter how good your track record. No matter how good your progress to date. Fundraising is hard. Investors are swayed and distracted by external factors that may or may not have anything to do with your business or the likelihood of your success.

That said, just as the strongest startups today are managing to get funding (sometimes even in up rounds), so too are the strongest venture funds. The partners at August Capital have been in the venture business for as long as three decades and have consistently delivered positive returns to our investors in up markets and down. Just as we remain bullish about investing in great companies in these challenging times, our investors remain confident in our ability to make great investments in these challenging times.

As a result, my partners Dave Marquardt, John Johnston, Andy Rappaport, Vivek Mehra, Howard Hartenbaum and I have recently closed August Capital V, a $650 Million fund. We remain focused on early stage high tech startups throughout the technology landscape (software, hardware, chips, etc.). But we also believe that this economic environment will result in a number of larger opportunities -- spinouts, PIPEs, buyouts, etc. -- that will prove to be extremely attractive investments. Thus, we have the flexibility within our new fund to invest as much as several hundred million dollars in a single deal, should a sufficiently compelling opportunity become available. We look forward to investing on both ends of the company spectrum and now have significant resources to bet on the great companies we see, big and small alike.

We certainly consider ourselves very fortunate to have such steadfast support from our investors. And lucky to have the flexibility in our new fund to take full advantage of the opportunities that will arise out of these challenging times. As we said repeatedly during the fundraising process, we believe that an investment in August Capital is a bet on the future of human innovation, and we are very long on human innovation. We have already made four investments out of our new fund and look forward to continuing to invest in the great entrepreneurs we meet every day. We are certain that important new companies will be born during this economic downturn and we look forward to providing the funding they need to grow and prosper.

When Google was out pitching their business to VCs, the reaction of many was "search? isn't that problem already solved?" And, in many ways, it was. Yahoo was well established. AltaVista and HotBot had all the geek cred. And there were plenty of other search options out there. So why in the world would you fund another search engine? (answer: to get really really rich.)

Today, more than a decade after Google got started, one once again could reasonably make the assumption that search is a solved problem. Why would a VC invest in search when Google has virtually cornered the market? The short answer is that many VCs are deeply afraid of missing the next Google (and who can blame them -- Google was the best venture investment EVER). But that's a crappy reason to invest in search. (In fact, it is a crappy reason to invest in anything.) There are plenty of other reasons to look for yet another paradigm shift in search.

I believe that the best reason to continue to invest in search is that search engines are getting worse by the day. Why is that? For one, the amount of content on the Web continues to grow at a staggering rate. While there may once have been a mere handful of definitive sources for any given search, there are now thousands of relevant results for virtually any topic. That problem is exacerbated by the explosion of user generated content.

Far more problematic for search, however, are the economic incentives around the whole search eco-system. There is huge money to be made in search and all savvy online businesses are acutely aware of that fact. Because so much money is at stake, herculean efforts are put into gaming the system. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become an economic imperative for all businesses. And the object of SEO is not to get people the most relevant search results to their queries. The object of SEO is to drive the greatest amount of traffic possible to the optimized websites. In other words, the economic incentives of the search business assure that huge efforts are put into making search results less relevant, not more so.

Given those realities, it has been clear to me for some time that important new search technologies would have to emerge to help solve the "decreasing quality of search results" problem. Enter Aardvark. The Aardvark founders -- a group of entrepreneurs hailing largely from none other than the Google mother ship -- pitched me on the power of injecting human knowledge and relationships into the search process. By drawing upon the knowledge of your friends and their friends, the Aardvark founders surmised that you would be able to get more accurate, more relevant, better tailored answers to a huge range of subjective questions (e.g., "Where's the best place to eat sushi in Palo Alto?" "How can I best convert my VHS tapes to a digital format?" "I love The Decemberists -- any other bands out there that I should be listening to?" etc. etc.) Thus, the Aardvark team went about building the necessary technology to solve that problem, and I had the good fortune to fund them in that quest.

This week the Aardvark team is launching the fruits of that labor at South By Southwest (SXSW). They have built a "social search engine" that lives inside your IM and email. It allows you to ask questions of Aardvark, which then goes about determining who among your friends and friends of friends is most qualified to answer those questions. As the Aardvark team point out in their blog, Social Search is particularly well suited to answer subjective questions where "context" is important. Aardvark allows you to gather that context, both implicitly through the relationships you have with the answerers, and explicitly through the conversations between questioners and answerers. The resulting answers prove stunningly well-tailored to the person asking the question. And they avoid the pitfalls of the current search engines -- they are not subject to the vagaries of the proliferating user generated content, nor of the economic manipulation of search results.

I'm certain that there will be ongoing innovation in and around search. Getting the best possible answer to any question -- objective or subjective -- that can be arbitrarily posed, is a monumentally challenging problem. Aardvark goes a long way to addressing the shortcomings of search today and I am excited to see it roll out to a larger group of people.

I had the good fortune of participating in the first (hopefully of many) AngelConf today. AngleConf was the brainchild of Paul Graham of YCombinator fame (although, you never know, it may well have been the brainchild of Jessica Livingston, so my apologies if that's the case Jessica). Not only is Paul a prolific angel investor, but he is also a thought leader and a mentor by nature. His AngelConf was an attempt to share the collective wisdom of the angel investor community with would-be angel investors.

The speakers at AngelConf were a veritable who's who of the angel world. Among those speaking were Ron Conway (Angel Investors, Baseline Ventures), Dave McClure (500Hats, Founders Fund), Paul Buchheit (Google, FriendFeed), Andrea Zurek (Google, XG Ventures), Naval Ravikant (The Hit Forge), Michael Dearing (Ebay, Stanford Design School), Mike Maples (Maples Investments), Ariel Poler (Textmarks, numerous startups), Aydin Senkut (Google, Felicis Ventures), Jeff Clavier (SoftechVC), and Jim Young (HotOrNot). Like YCombinator's rapid-fire demo days in which companies are given only a few minutes to present, each angel investor was given seven minutes to share his or her wisdom with the crowd. And this impressive group did not disappoint.

AngelConf was part training session, part confessional, part group therapy. Virtually all the speakers were in agreement that angel investing is not for the faint of heart. As one investor after the next stated, you have to be prepared to lose all your money. If losing your money is going to keep you up at night, perhaps angel investing isn't the thing for you to do. That said, there were plenty in the speakers lineup who have every intention of making money. Folks like Jeff Clavier and Mike Maples are investing other people's money. For them, the goal is assuredly to make money. For many of the others it was a fantastic mix of geeky pleasure at building great things, the need to stay engaged in the tech world, a desire to give back to the entrepreneurial community, etc. While for most of the speakers angel investing is essentially a full time job (even if they have another full time job), everyone in the room seemed to be there for the love of the game.

What was some of the most interesting advice imparted? Here are a few thoughts from the speakers:

* It's a small community -- if you screw one entrepreneur, you'll be out of the angel business because entrepreneurs talk (Conway)

* Angel investing is about learning on the job, which means that you can plan on screwing up your first 10 deals at least (McClure)

* If you assume that the money is gone once you've invested it -- that it is like a lottery ticket -- then you will have a better time angel investing (Buchheit)

* Work with other angel investors so that you can get the advantage of their expertise (Zurich)

* There is no rational way to arrive at valuation, so don't be overly concerned about getting it right (Graham)

* Don't worry if the idea seems crazy -- if it didn't seem crazy, it would be too late to invest as an angel (Graham)

* The lifeblood of angel investors is deal flow -- you need huge deal flow to find enough stuff that is worth investing in (Ravikant)

* The best deals come from other angels (Ravikant)

* Don't be afraid to throw a little dynamite into the status quo and see what comes out of it -- often times interesting stuff emerges (and sometimes nothing does) (Dearing)

* The Rule of 12 -- you need to invest in 12 companies to have statistical diversity -- invest in fewer than 12 deals and you run the risk of them all failing (Maples)

* Like in the movie "Oceans 11," you want to pull together the best team of angel specialists there are out there -- it increases the likelihood that the company will succeed (Maples)

* Help bring your entrepreneurs together so that they can learn from one another (Poler)

* By being a connector, you will see the most interesting stuff and work with the most interesting people (Senkut)

* Angel investing is all about the syndicate -- you can lead if you want to but it can be lonely until others join in the syndicate (Clavier)

* Angel investors need to distinguish themselves from others with money -- what do you bring to the table? Contacts. Experience. Advice. (Young)

* Only invest in stuff you actually know something about -- otherwise you're just buying a lottery ticket (Young)

All in all, a pretty jam packed few hours. The energy in the room was great. It felt very much like being in a room full of entrepreneurs. Because, in the end, like entrepreneurs, angel investors are company builders. They love technology. They love company creation. And, like me, they thrive on the fun and excitement of the startup world.

I hope that Paul will have another AngelConf some time in the future. It was a fantastic way to spend the afternoon.

I was deeply saddened to read Erick Schonfeld's post on TechCrunch entitled "DEMO Gets Desperate: Shipley Out, Marshall In." The feud between Mike Arrington and Chris Shipley has been well documented. Arrington has gone so far as to hope for the demise of the DEMO conference. He and Jason Calacanis have taken great pains to question the ethics of DEMO's business model.[1] They have lashed out at Chris Shipley repeatedly. And now Erick Schonfeld has jumped on the DEMO-bashing bandwagon.

I have known Chris Shipley for many years. She is fair and honest. She is smart and thoughtful. And she has worked long and hard to build the DEMO conference into a premier outlet for startups. Chris Shipley is a believer in the power of technology and the value of emerging companies. She has helped launch many hundreds of great companies and products. And she is a powerful advocate for those companies that she has showcased on the DEMO stage.

Today it was announced that Chris is handing over DEMO to Matt Marshall of VentureBeat. My congratulations to Matt. I wish him the best of luck in his new role with DEMO. I have long been a fan of the DEMO conference and hope that it will continue to prosper. As Marshall Kirkpatrick writes in ReadWriteWeb, "We'd like to see a bunch of successful conferences thrive and bring great technology into the public eye." I couldn't agree with him more.

I look forward to attending this year's DEMO conference a little over two weeks from now. I am sure that I will see some compelling demos, meet many great entrepreneurs, and get a broad overview of the startup landscape. But, most of all, I look forward to seeing Chris Shipley on the DEMO stage one final time and to wishing her the best as she passes the torch to Matt Marshall. Chris has been a wonderful steward of the DEMO conference and her thoughtfulness will surely be missed.

[1] I personally believe that the suggestion that DEMO's business model is somehow less ethical because startups are charged to participate in the event is silly. It is, no doubt, a different model than Arrington and Calacanis's conference which makes its money through sponsorships and registration fees, rather than demonstration fees. But that does not make it less ethical. Is it unethical for Sprint to charge for 411 calls merely because 1-800-FREE411 will provide information for free? I don't think so. It's a shame that Chris Shipley has had such strong accusations leveled at her over these last couple years.

For almost a decade I've been enjoying the TED conference. For those of you who haven't heard of it, the TED conference is a mind-blowing gathering of deep thinkers from the worlds of Technology, Entertainment and Design (plus any number of fields in and around Technology, Entertainment and Design). Over the years, the audience has become almost as star studded as the speaker lineup -- folks like Matt Groening, Paul Simon, Al Gore, who once graced the stage now show up to listen and be a part of the broader TED community. The result is 4+ days of mental over-stimulation, followed by exhaustion and then a countdown until next year's TED.

This year marked the 25th anniversary of TED. The conference started as a small gathering back in 1984 and has grown over the years in both scale and notoriety. Up until a few years ago, TED grew by virtue of word of mouth. Folks like myself who had the good fortune of finding our way to TED would inevitably return signing its praises and bring a few friends with us the next year and the next year and the next year. That all changed when the TED organization decided to release videos of the TED talks into the World Wide Web. Since that time, TED talks have been viewed over 100 Million times and awareness of the TED conference has skyrocketed, as has demand for the conference.

In response to rising demand and the logistical challenges associated with TED's old venue in Monterey, California, the TED organization moved the conference this year to the Long Beach Convention Center. In many ways, Long Beach could not be further from the quaint, upscale TED tradition in Monterey. For one thing, the old Monterey theater held a mere 500 people, whereas the new Long Beach venue accommodates 1,700 in the orchestra alone. Long Beach is a city. Monterey, a town. For those of us making the transition from the TED of old to the TED of new, the contrasts were great and comparisons near impossible to avoid.

Given all that, it is not surprising that many of the TED old guard expressed deep concern about TED in Long Beach. They felt that it was too large, too impersonal, too lacking in community. They objected to the new, bigger theater. They complained about the impersonal character of the city of Long Beach. And they weren't too fond of the food either.

So why am I not surprised by these complaints? And why do I think that the TED organization should not be too concerned? Those of us in the startup world have seen this play before. When companies succeed, prosper and grow, there inevitably comes a time when they need to move out of their quaint, nostalgic offices and into new, bigger, often less-personal digs. The employees who have been with the company since its inception bemoan the change, pointing to it as evidence that the company has lost its bearing. They are certain that the company will not survive the transition intact. And while some of those early employees may not make the transition themselves, the growing and prospering company usually does.

Those companies that manage to transition best from small, gutsy startups to large, established companies are the ones with the strongest corporate cultures. While growing companies inevitably have to make certain adjustments to their traditions to accommodate their increased scale and trajectory, the heart of their corporate cultures remains vibrant and continues to support the companies' expansion.

So too with TED. The TED culture is a powerful one. Indeed, the culture of TED has continued to grow over the two and a half decades it has been in existence. That powerful culture has been reinforced by the philanthropic bent of Chris Anderson, who has been TED's "curator" for almost a decade now. People attend TED, not only to have their minds expanded, but with high hopes for helping build a better planet. And with that overarching goal, the TED culture remains vibrant.

I suspect that some long-time TEDsters will drift away as a result of the move to Long Beach. But there will be plenty of eager participants ready to take their place. And those of us who remain will continue to be treated to a dizzying mental carnival, surrounded by an eclictic community of friends, old and new alike.