Half.com

If you want to get on the map, just convince a damn town to change its name to Half.com. You ever go to the urinals and you see those little urinal guards? We went and got them printed up to say, don't piss away half your money, shop at Half.com.

It was the ultimate form of streaming media.

I believe

Great to be here.

Everyone introduces you as the founder of First Round Capital.

I still remember you as the founder of Half.com and Infinotics.

Wow.

Does that make us both old? It really does.

It was in the Wall Street Journal.

He just sold his company, Half.com, to eBay.

It was big news.

So I was like, oh shit, he's a qualified buyer.

So he was like, what are you doing here? I'm like, I'm here for the conference.

And he's like, what do you do? I have a private jet company called Marquee Jet.

And he's like, you've got to be kidding me.

I'm in the market for a private jet.

But dude, it's, it's fucking, I don't know about you guys, but the iPod for me was like, fuck a CD.

I would get CDs on this site called half.com. Do you remember that site?

Mm-hmm.

That sounds risky.

All at your fingertips.

Um, I think that's one of the things that helped started this thing of people watching movies passively at work, um, 'cause it's just right there on your device.

Uh, this comment from Dizzle says, "Nothing like Limewire to give your computer AIDS just to download a shitty remix of the same song." So when you were talking about, what is it, half.com, I was like, oh no, that's gonna wreck you.

But-

Um, I had like lukewarm success too like in other businesses like, uh, my, uh, my education in e-commerce really was because at my school they would leave all the lost and found books, um, behind and, you know, months would go by and I finally just told like, you know, the teachers like, "What, what happens to these books?" They're like, "Oh, we throw them away." And I was like, "Well, can I have them? Can I sell them on, on Amazon?" You know, and then, uh, I, I think at the time it-- I didn't even know about Amazon.

I was saying half.com because it was like eBay.

Um, and so like I...

That process was like such a free educate-- Like I didn't know back then.

I'm glad to call you a friend as well.

And Rob here, who we backed in Backupify many, many years ago when I was at First Round Capital, which I started with Josh Koppelman, who I had invested in several companies with prior to First Round Capital, Infonautics, which we took public, and then Half.com.

So lots of interesting stuff going on.

How do you feel about the New York tech scene today? You've been in this a long, long time, and it's been up and down.