What you suggest is certainly the construct that almost all professionally managed fund businesses have adopted. Considering the LP's of the large funds are almost the same LP's as in hedge funds, PE funds etc... they are used to this. They will want more transparency, more accountability, more client service etc... and all of that requires a larger fund size to deal with the overhead necessary to provide it. There will always be small funds run by sector specialists - or investors who are happy to earn a "small" living with a $50M fund size (and I can't emphasize the quotes on small enough - its a pretty fantastic job if you keep overhead low). At the smaller size the question is just how many people you really need on the team to make it work

You don't go far enough with the post.

Better search is not the answer - better content at the ultimate landing site is.

Google can make all sorts of money monetizing search when there is an actual product to be sold alongside the query. Search for mesothelioma (sorry about the spelling there, no clue how to spell it) and there are a lot of lawyers who are willing to pay top $ for the click through.

However, search for a story on Time Warner cable and how it is pissed that it has to pay higher fees to bring you the Food Network (it was in the WSJ this morning) and there's nothing to monetize for Google or Bing or anyone other than Newscorp, if they provide such compelling information that you ultimately subscribe when you get to the landing site.

Rupert and others are barking up the wrong tree with this one. I agree that others have built a business on his content - but probably not his news content - there's just no business there.

There is breaking news - which I believe will more and more be handles by things like Twitter or some video form of twitter (real time mashup of twitter and Youtube anyone out there funding these sort of things) and then there will be longer form investigative journalism and op ed pieces. Not sure what I would pay for the journalism - and as for the op-ed's the blogosphere has provided anyone who is looking for an opinion on any subject with a plethora of views - not just those of the managing editor and his or her guests.

So yeah, Rupert should find a way to get paid for valuable content - I'm just not sure starting with Bing and Google is the way to go - but he's a smart guy and if he gets paid anything by Bing, then it is incremental money he would never see from Google - less the traffic he might have seen from Google and the moentization of that traffic.

I think what he is really saying is that he cannot monetize the eyeballs in news particularly efficiently - so he might as well take some sort of preference payments for linking with Bing. Something is better than nothing - or damn close to nothing.

"If you’re not rich enough to screen your own potential investments then you’re not rich enough to be an angel investor."

Of course the corollary to this is: "If you are dumb enough to pay $4,995 to these guys to be in the beauty contest, you probably aren't smart enough to warrant a real VC's investment anyway."

Your continued fervor on this topic is certainly a welcome and positive for the whole investment community.

Brad:

One of the things I never understand is the distinctions people make as investors between seed investments, Series A, late stage etc...

It always seemed that these distinctions were made because of larger and larger funds - and the need to create free options on the potential success of companies in the future.

as far as I am concerned, the only reason you should invest in a start up is because you feel that the company has good future opportunity, and you really want to get involved and help the company out in the future.

If you want to just be a passive investor - get yourself quickly to the public market space! Otherwise dig in and become partners with the founders.

I fully understand the need to reserve in a fund for future rounds - but I never did understand the need for all sorts of distinctions.