By Amy Errett, Partner

After a 25-year career as a CEO, entrepreneur, and senior executive, I recently made the jump to the “other- side” to become a venture capitalist. But what I’ve found most in my two and a half years as a partner at Maveron is that being a VC and a CEO are more similar than most people think. Sure, there are major differences – as a CEO you’re in the trenches; as a VC you’re flying 30,000 feet – but there are also keen similarities. Most importantly, no matter whether you’re on the operational side or the investing side, you must love entrepreneurship. No entrepreneur or VC would be successful without a passion for the spark of genius and the unbridled energy that every successful startup has at its core. That’s what separates venture capital from Wall Street and entrepreneurship from big business leadership; both are about making money, but also about fostering innovation.

But let’s talk about the differences between being a CEO and a VC for a minute. The first thing I noticed about being a VC is how the longer-term time outlook. When I was CEO of lifestyle media company Olivia, I was focused 100% on executing our goals and responding to consumer needs every day. I grew revenues from $2.5 to $30 million in a few years. Now, as a VC, I think in timeframes of 5-7 years. As a CEO, 5-7 years was an eternity! As a VC, I see clearly that that’s how long it usually takes to build a successful, profitable company.

Conversely, as a VC if you believe a great company will be created in fewer than five years, you will most likely get a bucket of cold water dropped on your head. This is very much a business where you need to realize that sustainable business growth happens “in the fullness of time”, rather than overnight. However, that’s not to say VCs can’t – and shouldn’t – be focused on strategic, short-term execution. I have been aggressively trying to increase the “urgency factor” at several portfolio companies, and I don’t mind rolling up my sleeves, working alongside CEOs, and getting operational tasks done to speed up progress.

The next big difference between a VC and a CEO comes down to responsibility. As an investor, my role is to influence and mentor – not to run things. That has been a huge adjustment for me, because I love doing operational work and getting things done. I’m starting to see how the active investor role is crucial to the success of a company, but sometimes my entrepreneur DNA kicks in and I have to stop my urge to grab the wheel.

Last but not least, the biggest difference in being a VC is that I now have to be polychromatic – meaning I need to see everything and keep abreast of industry-wide trends. As a CEO, you need to be more monochromatic, focusing on your industry, competitors, and vision. As a VC it is critical to spot future trends before they happen – such an example would be Maveron’s investment in Livemocha, an online language learning site that connects learners through the Internet. Livemocha rode the wave of a perfect storm – that of a huge market in need of language instruction, the virtualization of emersion and the social phenomenon that has caught fire online.

I feel privileged to have been a CEO and now a VC. In both roles, I get to think big, spur innovation, launch great companies, and generate success for entrepreneurs and their teams. And mostly, I feel that having been a CEO, I understand the challenges entrepreneurs face every day. I strive to leverage my past experience as CEO of two companies in my new role as a VC – helping entrepreneurs see both the wide-angle and focused picture as they build their companies into global leaders.

Anyone over the age of 30 tends to think in terms of the real world vs. the online world; young people make no distinction between the two. Social networks, where youth connect with their friends, research information, hang out, shop, listen to music, and discuss news and events, are the real world to most young people.

The stats speak for themselves:

• Nearly two-thirds of all online teens aged 12-17 use social networks like Facebook and MySpace on a monthly basis, and almost one-third do so daily. – Forrester Research, “Coolhunting With Teen Social Networkers”, October 2009
• 22% of teens check social networking sites more than 10 times a day and 51% of teens check social networking sites more than once a day. – Common Sense Media, “Is Social Networking Changing Childhood?”, August 2009
• In April 2009 alone, teens spent 21 million minutes on sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. – Nielsen Media, April 2009

The complete integration of social networks into their daily lives is not only impacting how they socialize, but how they learn. A recent article by a teacher and citizen journalist talks about how young people are increasingly using Facebook and Twitter to learn, share ideas, and complete class projects – yet educators are still forbidding use of all social networking due to fear kids are wasting time or getting into trouble online. Some high schools are beginning to experiment with online learning programs and controlled access to social networks to enable students to engage in group learning online, but these schools are still few and far between.

This disconnect between most educators (older people) and students (young people) is starting to narrow, however, with more discussion around how social networking and the Internet can play a key role in education. At Maveron, we’ve been thinking a lot about these issues. Our highly successful investment in Capella University, home of the world’s leading online-only university degree programs, and our recent investment in Altius Education, a provider of technology and services that enable real-world universities to offer programs online, shows how committed Maveron is to evolving education in the next decade and beyond.

College-level institutions have been much quicker to understand the power of online learning and social networking to enable students to collaborate on projects and studying, and reach professors in online office hours sessions. Online degree programs are extremely popular, in large part because young students can learn in an environment where they are entirely at ease: on the Internet. According to the a higher education market research firm Aslanian Group, nearly 12% (2.1 million) of all students at degree-granting institutions in 2007 were enrolled solely in online programs – and that percentage has climbed significantly in the past two years as college costs continue to soar. Enrollment in online higher education is projected to nearly double by 2013.

Altius Education’s first partnership is with Tiffin University. Together, they established Ivy Bridge College, the first online-only, two-year degree program that provides students an accredited path to admittance into a four-year university program.  Ivy Bridge students have access to 24×7 online tutoring and learn with faculty and other students in chat rooms, message boards, and threaded discussion groups. Ivy Bridge refers to its students not as a “student body”, but as an “engaged online community”.

Teens and young adults don’t separate their online and offline lives, so it makes sense that they would comfortably adopt social-networked learning – extending the classroom, study hall, and discussion group into the online realm where they already hang out. At Maveron, we’ll continue to look for promising investments in educational companies that are successfully leveraging the link between social network and education.  After all, for young people, there is no ‘offline’ and ‘online’ – just ‘life’.

At our recent CEO Forum, we had the pleasure of welcoming WIRED Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson as a keynote speaker. As always, Chris presented some thought-provoking, future-forward ideas. Anderson talked about how the Internet forever shifted a centuries-old content model, with the Web enabling everyone to become a creator, author, and collaborator and turning the communications, publishing, and media worlds on their head. This wealth of content, of course, is the “long tail” – Anderson’s now-celebrated term that describes the enormous amount of information generated and distributed online. But Anderson also spoke about how the Internet’s “democratization of production” model in the digital world is now giving way to a “new industrial revolution” in the physical world, a topic on which he’s now writing a book.

In the below video, hear Anderson talk about how the past decade was about finding new social and innovation models on the Web, and how the next decade will be about how consumers and individuals apply these models to the real world to make physical products. In the consumer world of the future, people won’t just buy mass-produced products, but will instead design the specific products they want themselves, and get them made through low-cost, on-demand production methods. Anderson certainly got the crowd of CEOs thinking about what’s next in industrial design and manufacturing. Listen for yourself to hear about the not-too-distant future of consumer-driven production.

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With education spending on the rise, education has become one of the hot investment sectors of the recession.  Jason Stoffer, Principal at Maveron, shares his views on this sector.

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Allconnect, the leading comparison shopping and connections marketplace for essential home services recently reported another record quarter of earnings, customer, and revenue growth. In the third quarter of 2009, Allconnect reported a 42% increase revenue year-over-year and a 34% increase in customer traffic.

Allconnect is the type of consumer-driven company that Maveron is excited to back: one that offers an easy-to-use, free, and useful service that saves people time and money. Consumers are flocking to Allconnect’s free phone and Web-based service that helps them get their household services like gas and electric utilities, high-speed Internet, phone, cable TV, satellite TV, and home security systems up and running before moving into their new homes. People simply call Allconnect’s 1-800 number or log onto their site to compare pricing and service options across dozens of providers with complete transparency, choosing the providers that are right for their budget and personal needs. Allconnect does the rest – setting up all the services for free and guaranteeing the lowest prices available.

Founded in 1998, Allconnect has connected over 10 million people through its partnerships with more than 30 utility companies and hundreds of service providers across the U.S. With its recent increase in customers and partners, Allconnect’s marketplace has grown annual sales to more than $3 billion in home service products from over 200 service providers.

Allconnect’s tremendous growth proves what Maveron has believed since day one: a business built around delivering trusted information to consumers to empower them to make better purchasing decisions is not only useful to consumers, but delivers substantial returns to investors.