BizDev 2.0
When another blogger notices something you said, and points out its blogworthiness, the temptation is strong to scoop them. And so I'm scooping Fred, who contacted me about a small startup that wanted an introduction, but I said we (that is, Flickr) probably didn't have the space …
Context & Ripple Effects
Caterina Fake's post is a deliberate scoop of Fred himself: he approached her about brokering an introduction between a small startup and Flickr, and she is publishing the exchange before he can. The syndicated pickup on A VC the same day means both ends of the introduction told the story at once — the connector declining and the would-be broker scooped on his own channel.
Her stated reason, that Flickr "probably didn't have the space," reads less like a brush-off than an operational fact in summer 2006: weeks earlier Flickr had disclosed a temporary storage failure hitting old photos and was moving roughly 20 terabytes of images between data centers to restore consistency, all while riding a traffic curve that had already overtaken Webshots per Alexa the previous November.
First-order effects
- The unnamed startup loses a warm path into Flickr through two of the most-read voices in its orbit, and learns its pitch will be adjudicated publicly on blogs rather than privately over email.
- Flickr converts scarce engineering and ops bandwidth into an explicit deal-flow filter: during the 20TB migration and post-failure cleanup, inbound partnerships get declined on capacity, not merit.
Second-order effects
- Fred publishing the approach anyway turns A VC into a de facto public deal-flow board — other founders can see that a blogger introduction is legible, quotable, and fast, so they route pitches through attention-rich bloggers instead of corporate BD departments.
- For startups, the cost of being passed over drops: a public mention by a connected blogger functions as marketing even when the target company says no, softening the downside of a rejected intro.
Third-order effects
- If introductions increasingly happen in public on blogs, business development migrates from conference-and-contact pipelines toward reputation-weighted matching where the intermediary's audience size is the asset — the "2.0" in the title is that structural claim.
- Capacity-constrained winners like Flickr face a standing incentive to productize inbound interest (APIs, self-serve channels) so that scarcity stops gating every deal individually — otherwise the bottleneck simply moves to whoever controls access.
The trend: Deal flow in the mid-2000s web industry is migrating out of private BD channels and into the blog network, where well-connected bloggers act as public matchmakers between startups and platform companies.