Taking To Dos and Moving Up The Y Axis (a post by @FredWilson)

"Dec 17 2013 Targetspot and Radionomy Yesterday we announced a deal that I have been working on for the past three months. Our portfolio company Targetspot has merged with Radionomy, the leading streaming radio company in Europe. The combination creates the largest global audio ad network and brings Radionomy to the US. It also gives the Targestpot network an anchor tenant that will make it easier to do sophisticated targeting campaigns that require both scale and reach. Advertisers can now leverage the capabilities of a digital audio network with reach to over 75M listeners and more than 80 publishers in both the U.S. and Europe. The streaming audio business has gone mainstream in most parts of the world and is operating at a very large scale now. The advertising opportunities in streaming audio are attractive and there is no better place to reach a large and diverse base of listners than the Targetspot network. I always look for mergers where 1+1=more than 2. This is one of those. And I am excited to see what Radionomy and Targetspot can do together. More from my Circle Brad Feld: Shifting My Focus To Scaling Up (feld.com) Rand Fishkin: Mixergy Interview On Startup Marketing, Reaching Early Adopters, Burnout, & More (moz.com) Albert Wenger: Sharing: One Network (To Rule Them All) or Network of Networks? (continuations.com) CODE2040: I can create something to inspire others (code2040.org) Zemanta 67 CommentsDisqus commenter breakdown posted in streaming audio Dec 16 2013 Taking To Dos and Moving Up The Y Axis I chromecasted the kitchen laptop to our family room TV yesterday morning and watched the entire Sarah Lacy interview with Dick Costolo. Yes, I had posted it as the video of the week without watching it in its entirety. But I knew it would be good. And it was. All two plus hours of it. Dick has this management framework that I've heard him talk about before. He and Sarah talked about it in the Pando talk. It goes something like this: If you think about what you are trying to accomplish in a meeting with someone you are managing and you plot the following: one the x axis - whether you clearly communicated the issue to the person on the y axis - whether they walk out of the meeting happy or mad at you Dick's point is you want to optimize for the x axis, clear and crisp communication, and not worry too much about the y axis. In his talk with Sarah, they talked about meetings that "move up the y axis". Dick put it this way. In delivering difficult news to the person, you start trying to make them feel better. The next thing you know "you are taking to dos and moving up the y axis and you are going to spend all afternoon on those to dos you took". Dick's meta point here is your job as a manager is to give people direction not to make them feel good. And if you, in an effort to make them happier, take on a bunch of work that you shouldn't, you will be less effective too. As Sarah put it, "don't move up the y axis". It's good management advice and I thought I would share it with everyone who did not watch the whole video on this MBA Monday." Content from Fred Wilson's blog, avc.com, used under Creative Commons License. Fred Wilson is a VC and principal of Union Square Ventures. Originally posted on December 16, 2013.