Today we announced our investment in Gist on the Foundry Group website.  This is a really exciting investment for us in that Gist is attempting to solve the "inbox problem" that we’ve been thinking about and living with for a long time.

If you are like me and have multiple inboxes and social networks, I spend a lot of time wondering "where" the particular information that I’m looking for exists.

Gist takes the users inbox and connects it with the flow of information on the web to make it more meaningful to the end-user. They’ve built a web service that integrates tightly with Microsoft Outlook, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In addition, a Microsoft Exchange server version is in the works and will be released by the end of the summer.

Gist does a magical job of dynamically building a user’s social network from existing information sources, using this to surface relevant information around the web in real time and then organizing and presenting it in a way that is useful both in the short term as well as over a longer period of time. Gist addresses both the issue of inbox fatigue / email overload and information discovery on the web, while doing it in a way that is unobtrusive to a user’s existing information flows.

As for my blog post title, I apologize to Will Smith (and embarrassingly this video still works for me), but figured that everyone else was saying that we got the "gist of it" and I wanted to be unique. 

While at the NVCA meeting, I had a good discussion with a general counsel of a venture capital firm (name unreleased) who posited that cultures at law firms are dead / dying.

His theory was that 10 years ago, one could hire a law firm not only based on skill, but also culture.  Some firms where aggressive, some more laid back, some more nerdy technicians, etc.  In short, you could find good lawyers with cultures that either were similar to yours, or were needed for a particular matter.

Today, however, his feeling was that law firms have become homogenous.  The last ten years have seen legal fees and legal salaries grow exponentially.  With this, we’ve seen more transition and firm switching with lawyers than we’ve ever seen.  Because of this, firm DNA has been diluted.  Consider it the free agency era in law firms.

Furthermore, the layoffs that are occurring are only speeding up this process.

It’s an interesting theory and one that sounds correct.  I’ve certainly noticed over the years that the unique firm cultures that existed a while ago are disappearing.  Yes, there are still cultures at firms and some of the "old guard" still reflect the attitudes 10 years ago. That being said, I think he has a point.  What do you think?