NoCal Report

We had an awesome trip (again) up to San Francisco and Napa.

Larry & I got the opportunity to do an interview with Bambi Francisco and the folks at Vator.tv (watch for it in the near future on the Vator.tv site), and also to have a great chat with Michael Stajer of WineCommune and JJ Buckley. We love getting to know more people in the wine industry as a whole, especially when it's someone who's worked hard to build his business over the last 8 years as Michael has. (We also love buying wines from them, and you should too!).

On the ride up, I attempted to finish editing, compositing and doing the audio work on our latest promo/pitch for our startup. The pitch is now up at Vator HERE, but I'm also going to embed it in it's own post following this one.

I can't say I ever tried editing on a laptop on a bumpy highway at 90 miles an hour. All I can say is that I can't really recommend it. It's hard. Here's a pic Larry snapped off on the way. I look happy in there, right?


I finished the piece as we pulled into the Vator TV shooting location at The Presidio, with the final render coming out at 2:53pm, our scheduled meeting time was 3:00, so we quickly changed shirts in the parking garage and boogeyed upstairs. (which, all we can say is *wow* - amazing architecture and offices there...)

It was great to meet and talk with Bambi, Roland, Meliza and Carl from the Vator team - thanks for making the interview a great experience!

We also took a few hours on Friday to check in with our friend over at Bacchus Caves, David Provost, who graciously took us to check out his companies latest masterpiece up in the hills of Napa. The work they've just completed at a private family's cave was just astounding and made us all that much more enthusiastic about our partnership with them.

Wine 2.0 Competition Update

Lots of thanks to all the folks who've supported what we're working on by checking out our video pitch over at Vator, Vino Veritas is now the highest rated pitch in the Wine 2.0 competition!

There's still a few weeks to go in the competition, so we'll see how the rest of the contest shakes out, but our closest rated competitor has been up a lot longer than we have and they have triple the views, but the same number of ratings. So on a vote-to-view ratio, we're kicking butt!

I want to take a minute to comment on some of the pitches over there and my favorites (besides our own, of course) because there are some great companies on there.

Crushpad's business is awesome and will only keep growing (their micro-competitor from ProVina's "Winepod", was recently capitalized by VantagePoint to the tune of $4m, as represented by WSGR - coincidentally, our legal counsel as well) - and with the booming custom-crush and small run vintage business, these micro-labels will be products that will dovetail very nicely with our premium cellaring services.

Just like a lot of the smaller run wineries, as these micro-labels start to get traction as great wines, there will be more and more wine enthusiasts who line up for these wines to pick them up at the moment they are released, and they're going to need to cellar those vintages so that they get the proper aging.

And hey, that's just what we'll be able to help out with!

I hope that maybe even some of our storage clients will make and release some of their small-run vintages exclusively to Vino Veritas members:)

The other great business that just popped up a few days ago with a pitch is WineCommune. Their auction site is an awesome place to find great wines and their growth the past few years has been phenomenal. Larry, our co-founder, has added substantially to his collection through their auctions (shhhh, don't tell his wife:).

They've also been around since 1999 and are a growth company as well.

These two companies are in very different places in the playing field of the current competition since the rest are all pretty much startups or not yet profitable.

There's also a number of social networks based around wines, which is cool, but personally I think social networks are over-hyped these days and there are only so many accounts and profiles we can all keep track of. I'd rather make sure our software has conduits for synching with other online databases, and then some FaceBook and MySpace widgets for showcasing wine collections, but unless our users tell us otherwise, I don't think we need to build yet-another-social-networking-application.

(Do any of you remember Friendster & Tribe? I think social networks are a bit transitory by nature...)

We're looking forward these last few weeks of the contest to see how it shapes up, so for those of you who haven't yet gone to view and vote, we'd love your support as well!