Next week, Jason Schwartz organized an impressive Oxford-style debate between the leading sides of the Net Neutrality debate. Anyone working in the Internet, Media, political or other industry should attend.

Here's the info:

When: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 from 7:00 PM - 9:30 PM (ET)

Where: IAC Building, 555 W 18th St, btw 10th ave and the Westside Highway

RSVP: Here

Also, next month, come to the December NY Tech Meetup, where -- on top of our tech demos -- Josh Silver will be speaking about the Net Neutrality debate.

Over the last few years, I've come to believe that the strongest startups and VCs are those armed with a strong thesis.

Why? Despite common belief, a thesis is not most important when founding a startup or deciding to fund one -- those decisions always have a thesis of some degree behind them. No, a strong thesis comes to your advantage during the difficult times of a startup's life: trying to figure out the next move, when there are a thousand options; or, deciding whether or not to follow-on in a new round, when things on paper look less than ideal.

Take this video (above), where Sam Lessin, Founder and CEO of Drop.io, dives into the thesis behind his company.

Sam is the model thesis-driven-entrepreneur. Drop.io isn't just an arbitrage between a great UI and cheap cloud storage -- that's the Drop.io that competes with every other file sharing/transfer service on the Internet -- Drop.io is a belief and investment in how the Web works today and how it will work in the future.

And what's the result? Just last month, Yahoo! developers decided to integrate Drop.io into their massively popular Yahoo! Mail solution -- giving Drop.io access to tens of millions of new customers every day -- solely because the company had been built around a thesis to provide just this service (again, view Sam's video to understand just what this means), and Yahoo! developers took notice.

In the VC world, no one (who I know) is more vocal about thesis-driven investing than Union Square Ventures. In the comments of a recent post on AVC, (Hunch co-founder) Chris Dixon and Fred Wilson had a great debate on the merits of thesis-driven investing in which Fred declared, "you've gotta have a thesis that is well articulated and well understood among the partnership. that's what Brad Burnham does for USV and it is why we are doing so well right now."

If what Fred says is true, it's been Brad's thesis and Fred's gut that said Delicious, FeedBurner, Tacoda, Etsy and Twitter would be great investments, and -- knowing the roles each play in the firm -- I'd have to agree.

But moreover, it will be the same gut and the same thesis which will cause them to see Tumblr, Disqus, foursquare, AdaptiveBlue, and their other portfolio companies, through to their respective successes.

Case in point: Disqus (disclosure - AnyClip is a premium client). Since their launch, Disqus has done quite well in terms of adoption. However, to all those whose first question is "What's your business model?" Disqus' success has seemed less obvious.

This is because Disqus is another thesis startup, and the investment in them -- and continued support -- is also purely investment driven. In an interview with John Battelle at the Conversational Marketing Summit, Fred pointed out exactly how strange such investments can seem:

Disqus which is a company that a lot of people scratched their heads about why are you messing around with a blog comment service? I think blog comments are very important piece of the social media landscape. I think of, sort of the four big channels in social media as Twitter, Facebook, blogs and blog comments and Disqus is the leading provider of third party comment system on the Web.

While I can't disclose exactly how Disqus is going to bloom into a full-fledged company, I can tell you they're on track and will be a killer company. Over the past two years, they've exhaustively executed on their thesis, and -- just like Drop.io -- are beginning to see the fruits of their work.

Meetup.com is another thesis-driven startup and another example of a thesis driving a company into the top echelons of Internet success, all the way to profitability.

As a closing thought, I feel like I should defend my ardent support of thesis-driven VCs and startups by explaining AnyClip's thesis.

First a disclaimer: AnyClip is unique, in a sense, because it's a relaunch of a earlier company. While I can't speak for the original founding vision of the company, when I arrived with Aaron and we founded AnyClip, the thesis we extracted from the old company and took with us into the new one was that "Movie Moments Matter."

Since then, as AnyClip has become our own, our thesis has evolved. Today, the thesis more or less goes like this:

"The long-term value of content is proportional to the amount of metadata about that content which empowers people to relive it."

This thesis (which I've just tried to articulate for the first time -- meaning I'm allowed to amend in the future), gives us a single-headed mission to create as much metadata as possible about moments from films, and the tools (API) to make sense of it.

Our success, and the success of other startups, will be directly due to our ability to move forward with our thesis.

Please consider buying the book now.

I'm sure 75% of you already have heard of Gary, but if you haven't, here's all you need to know: Gary is living proof that with Hustle, Humility, Authenticity, Patience and Luck, you can really go far -- no Silver Spoon required.

His story is inspiring and, because of his journey from a hole in the wall liquor store to becoming the largest wine retailer in the country, he's one of the wisest entrepreneurs I know.

One of the greatest lessons I learned from Gary was the requirement that one lives and works his or her life's passion, if he or she wants to "Crush It!" in business.

In 2008, at a tech conference in Chicago, Gary keynoted and called me out in front of hundreds of fellow technologists saying, "I know my friend Nate Westheimer is not living his passion right now and it kills me." He was right. That was when BricaBox was on its last legs, and he was a big part of helping me know it was time to let go and move on -- one of the most important career moves of my life. (I subsequently got to work with David S. Rose and founded AnyClip with Aaron Cohen).

"Living your passion" is one of the chapters in Crush It!, and I'm very proud to speak more about this in a video series about the book that's coming out soon.

So again, please check out the book and support my dear friend and a friend to all people working their tails off to "Crush It!" in this world. If you're not convinced yet, listen to this awesome NPR interview with Gary that my dad heard, loved and sent to me.

I am happiest when my friends and loved-ones are doing amazing things, and today's release of Crush It! makes me a very, very happy man.

Give on my giving page here.

I would love it if you would take 4 minutes of your time and find a project to contribute to on DonorsChoose.

Just the other night, I participated in an amazing panel of philanthropic experts at Sam Lessin's Brooklyn Futurism Meetup.

DonorsChoose.org's CTO, Oliver Hurst-Hiller was on the panel too, providing a lot of valuable insight about the future of philanthropy.

This is certainly one way it's going.

With DonorsChoose there's an amazingly efficient and tangible cycle of giving. You find a real project posted by a real teacher at a real classroom in need. When you donate to their cause you hear back from those students and teachers and see how the resources affect their lives. It's very powerful.

So, please: join me by contributing on my giving page. It could be $10, $50, $100 or more.

My View of Jerusalem

This week marks the 6th month anniversary of AnyClip for me.

It was the last week of March that I partnered with Aaron Cohen and spent my first official day with the company en route to Jerusalem to meet a company called PopTok and the team behind it.

March 29th, 2009 was Day 1 of this turn-around story.

What's transpired over the 6 months following has been thrilling, exhausting, intellectually challenging, and -- most importantly -- personally rewarding. I've worked late nights and red-eyed mornings with some of the most amazing people on this planet; Together, we've built a new company, with a vision which inspires young, old, computer and otherwise illiterate, poor and rich, friends and family; and, we've built the technology to back it up.

Today, we're AnyClip. We're building a World Class company.

I'm a lucky guy to have had these 6 months. I'm looking forward to the next 6, and those that come after.

Earlier this month, it was rumored that Google was in talks to buy Brightcove -- the once "we-do-it-all" video platform, now forced (by YouTube) cut back and specialize in a a video asset management solution and cheap(er) CDN bandwidth for publishers.

I didn't really get the rumored deal at first -- I thought a premium, video asset management solution was the sort of unscalable, sales-heavy business Google would try to avoid -- but Peter Kafka's recent report on the YouTube/Warner Music Group deal re-openned the issue for me.

In his report, Peter notes:

Unlike Vevo, Warner and YouTube won’t be creating a separate site for Warner videos, and Warner won’t be creating a separate company dedicated to its videos. Instead, YouTube will help Warner create a “premium advertising platform” for its videos within YouTube.

Immediately upon reading this I thought back to Brightcove. A backend solution for Warner, while not rocket-science, would be rather distracting for the main YouTube team, and outside the expertise of Google's AdWords/Sense teams, which are more focused on direct-to-advertiser/publisher solutions -- not something built for a sales force.

For the YouTube/Warner deal to work, however, YouTube needs a solution Warner can stick a sales force on, and they need to do it fast.

I know I'm adding speculation to speculation, but I wonder if Brightcove would make a good solution for Google in that role. Sure the $80 million a year in revenue would be good for YouTube's unit, and it could further solidify YouTube in the online video market, but what if -- at the end of the day -- it was just a really good ad management solution.

I don't know the answer. Do you?

Credit: TechCrunch50

To read "why" we founded AnyClip, check out this post on our blog, or read an abridged version on Alley Insider.

Last week, we launched AnyClip at TechCrunch50.

The results were tremendous. We took home the Audience Choice award and were also the runners up for the grand prize, making us the first TC50 company to win two prizes. Heck, AnyClip even won Robert Scoble's unofficial whisky award for being the first company to "wow" him.

The event and the response was an absolute thrill.

Launching at TechCrunch50, however, is about much more than winning.

In fact, the experience leading up to TechCrunch50 is arguably more valuable than the 10 minutes you have on stage, or the attention you receive afterwards. Here's why I recommend launching at TechCrunch50:

1. External dates focus a Company. From the time we decided to apply to TC50 to the day we launched, TC50 provided at least a half-dozen dates which served as valuable internal deadlines to prioritize and rally (or, in Agile terms, 'sprint'). Having deadlines is very useful in a startup environment, where you can alway try to add "just one more thing" and everyone is launching "oh, sometime in the next few months." Whether it was demoing to get in, practicing our pitch, or the day itself, launching at TechCrunch50 made us put our heads down, suffer a little, but come out with nothing short of an awesome result.
2. Jason's pitch-coaching. I know good pitch-coaching: my friend and former boss, David S. Rose, is one of the best pitch coaches in the business. Well, it turns out that the West-Coast has its own pitch-coaching master in Jason Calacanis. When Aaron and I (cumulatively very experienced in the art of the pitch) flew out to Sand Hill Road two weeks before the event, Jason gave our pitch a 4.5 out of 10, and then proceeded to tell us how to make it better. After Jason gave his feedback, Aaron flatly replied, "There isn't a single thing you just told us I disagree with." The feedback was so fantastic, and worth the 24 hour, cross-country trip, that when we came back a week later with a new pitch, we scored an 8 in TC50's internal ratings system. On the day we launched, with one last bit of advice from Jason, we scored a perfect 10.
3. Meet 49 awesome companies. TechCrunch50 is cool because of the 49 other companies you launch with. Every single one of them is cool and run by cool people. I love this business because everyday I get to hang out with some of the most innovative people in the world. Some of these people become my friends. Being at TechCrunch50 means hanging out for two days with other innovative people going through a very similar life-experience. It was one of the most delightful aspects of the event.
4. No "pay to play." I'm a big fan of "open" conferences. When you force people to pay to be featured at a startup conference you have to wonder, "Is this person on stage for their cool tech, or because they dropped a load of cash?" Knowing that, I feel it would be tough to be a startup who's launching where everyone knows you paid to be on stage. It's like showing up to your high school reunion with a hooker as your date! For this very same reason I introduced the NY Tech Meetup Showcase, where I let 60 companies demo their stuff for free. Yes it's disruptive to the existing conference market, but its a good thing, and it's honest to both the companies and the attendees. TechCrunch50 has the right model here and I hope it lasts.

While not every launch and release cycle can center around a great event, I'll surely keep my eye on TC50 in the future, as AnyClip releases big new products or if I (eventually) start another company. The event was incredibly well executed on and very much worth our time as a presenting company.

The problem, however, is that to-date most of these programs have widely missed the mark, in my opinion. In a City where virtually every building has a glut of un-used office space, why would we need more cheap space? In a City where tens of millions of dollars are invested by local VCs in local startups, why would we need a few million dollars extra?

Adult education programs are interesting, but without the explicit goal of taking adults and making adult companies today, our educational resources are much better spent teaching young folks the skills necessary to engineer the next great thing in New York. Just teaching adults how to understand the startup and tech world is not even close to transformational.

Over the past few years, I've come to believe that there are very things we can do on a City-wide level which would actually be transformational. One of the most creative ideas I heard came from Stu Ellman, during a meeting we had with EDC leaders: His idea was to force big companies who deal with the government, as well as the government itself, to buy software, when available, from area startups. If you're going to invest $2million, he pondered, why not use it as insurance against those startups failing, while making sure they have access to the big contracts which will help them succeed?

While politically unfeasible, Stu was thinking at the level needed to create big change here. Another idea, which is more feasible, though potentially less game-changing, is to start a significant accelerator/seed program in New York.

Yesterday, Jed Christiansen had a wonderful post outlining the successes and failures of accelerator/incubator programs like Y-Combinator, TechStars, LaunchBox Digital, and DreamIT.

This sort of data analysis is something I've wanted to do for sometime, with the goal of finding an appropriate model for New York City.

As Jed says,

• The first rule of copying Y Combinator is: Do Not copy Y Combinator.
• The second rule of copying Y Combinator is: DO NOT COPY Y COMBINATOR.

This leaves the question:
What's right for New York City? What sort of program would accelerate the pace of startups here? How could an accelerator be transformational, instead of just additive?

To answer this question, we must dive into what makes New York special. We must identify those unique characteristics of New York City which either aren't supported by the current early-stage infrastructure, or where there's too much friction.

I think part of this answer lies in the unlocked potential of the brilliant young minds we have in the big established industries here. These people are artificially restrained from creating big, disruptive businesses, because the size of NYC's Titan Industries gives them the resources to compensate some of the smartest among us to keep those Titan Industries whole, versus finding new ones.

Building a program which effectively identifies the best and brightest locked away in these industries, and providing the resources to turn their disruptive ideas into disruptive startups, is a big answer for me. As I explore the founding of a New York accelerator program, either as a part of NY Tech Meetup or outside of it, this will be a central theme.

But what are more transformational themes to pursue? Your ideas here are much appreciated.

Tomorrow night -- on Tuesday, September 1st -- the NY Tech Meetup will feature 4 presentations of technology and research which originated at New York and Columbia Universities' computer science departments.

It's about time the University and Commercial tech communities did something together. This is why you should RSVP for it now:

The "NY tech community" as most of our 10,000 members consider it, is largely comprised of people in the commercial world. We are entrepreneurs, investors, service providers, and technologist-employees in companies large and small.

For the most part, in the commercial world, we do an amazing job at solving tech's medium-sized and important problems. If you're lucky enough to work a small handful of our member startups and you work on something like Health Care, you're among the few working on a super-sized problem and massively important.

However, for the most of us in the private, commercial space, we're at our best when giving you the ability to find what bars your friends are in or edit images in browsers or even serve advertisements in effective manners.

Great stuff. Innovative stuff. But that's not always where revolutionary technology comes from.

Universities are hugely important pieces of a technology ecosystem because they often produce revolutionary technology (TCP/IP, Apache, Mosaic, Google), and thus should be cornerstones of our communities.

However, in New York City, we fail at integrating our University and Commercial technology communities.

Until now. Tomorrow night we're showing off 4 amazing demos from some innovative teams located at NYU and Columbia University. You'll learn about "Musically Intelligent Machines," "Teaching Robots to See" and much, much more.

So come out and celebrate this great research happening in our back-yard.

It's important.

Over a year ago, I wrote my most-read article ever, detailing how a payments system in Twitter would create a tremendous amount of value and revenue for the startup. While I heard from company insiders that the proposition was considered at a high level, their focus on premium features for businesses and getting more high profile users to actively use the service indicates that any payments system currently sits on the back burner.

In my mind here's why now is the time to bring payments to the front burner, and why soon may be too late:

1. People still use Twitter like the command-line.

   Take advantage of this!! As I detailed in my post last year, Twitter has a leg-up in the mobile payments space specifically because it's users are already comfortable using odd syntax in their messaging. As I pointed out then, while most of us have a PayPal account none of us know the syntax to send mobile payments with it. Twitter users understand what an "@" and a "d" do within days of using the service. In this regard, Twitter is the MySpace (where my little siblings "learned" CSS and HTML) of the command-line; and mobile payments, because mobile is a multi-platform world, requires command-line-like interfaces.

   This being said, mobile is converging. More and more applications are cross-platform and more and more people have phones which run applications. Twitter's leg-up in mobile could evaporate in the next few years. Don't think for a second that PayPal has given up on this space.

2. TipJoy shutting down delivers the two best people to implement the service to their doorstep.

   (When I wrote the first draft of this post, news hadn't leaked that Ivan was hired by Facebook).

   Abby, the co-founder of TipJoy, is now the best person in the world to hire if you want to take on P2P and mobile payments. Fresh out of her TipJoy experience, Twitter would be wise to either hire her or work closely with her while her experience is still fresh.

3. Twitter is the only one who can do it on Twitter.

   Twitter prides itself on being a "platform." "Let developers add value," they cry. Not in this case. Forget owning P2P payments, if Twitter even wants payments to ever exist in a meaningful way on their platform, they can be the only ones who do it.

   I explained this in my post last year and TipJoy confirmed in their postmortem, saying, "We believe that a payments system directly and officially integrated into social networks such as Twitter and Facebook will be a huge success." Abby, Ivan and I aren't the only ones who believe this, by the way. Facebook's hiring of Ivan says they're serious about payments being a part of their platform.

4. Social/mobile payments innovation will happen.

   Many chalk mobile/social payments up to blabber from trend speculators like yours truly. After all, folks have been talking about it for a long time.

   What's missed, however, is that while tools around the trading of money of money in mobile and social spheres has lagged, tools and services where virtual goods are traded have flourished -- because they've focused on getting the tools right.

Twitter can still get this right. But the time to focus on payments is now.