Tracking Venture Voice Alumni

Soon after stating this blog, I realized I had no consistent and reliable way to track the latest news about our past guests. What have I gotten myself into? Only a few of them have PR people who send me press releases regularly -- and press releases are usually pretty boring reads.

So I've decided to try using the tools built by past guests to track them. I first went into Feedster (which used to be CEOed by VV interviewee Scott Rafer) and entered in this short little search phrase: "Dick Costolo" or "Philip Kaplan" or "Joe Kraus" or "Scott Heiferman" or "Kelly Perdew" or "Jeremy Hague" or "Brad Feld" or "Scott Rafer" or "Deborah Farrington" or VideoEgg or "Tom Szaky" or "Jason Fried" or "Mena Trott" or "Derek Sivers" or "Joel Spolsky" or "Fabrice Grinda" or "Randy Komisar" or "Bo Peabody" or "John Bogle" or "Shoba Purushothaman" to get these search results. I then ran that RSS feed of the search results through FeedBurner (CEO Dick Costolo was our first guest) so it would be a bit more manageable and came up with this feed (if anyone subscribes to it I'll update it with the names of people we interview in the future).

Just for fun, you can view some of the real-time headlines about our past guests here:

The results are overwhelming. There are hundreds of entries a day! When I did this search the first time it was dominated by references to a post titled Kate Moss is Not an Accredited Investor in response to Brad Feld's post Are You Accredited?. While Brad recommends against taking money from unaccredited investors, the thought of never having Kate Moss as an angel gives some pause for thought.

This could be a lot of work.

I tried giving Google News (no, I haven't interviewed Larry and Sergey... yet) a shot and the results were pretty good. On average it has about one news item per day. However, it only searches traditional news sources which often miss the most interesting stories about entrepreneurs.

Looks like I'll have to do some work to get the real story here, but these searches should be a good start. In the end, there may be no finer method to get the scoop than working the telephone.