I Want More Information, Not Less - Click To Read Article
I spent the last two days at the Defrag Conference. It was awesome on so many levels including the content, the venue, seeing a bunch of great friends, and meeting a bunch of new people.

The Ether and the Scrum - Click To Read Article
Every day I get emails from entrepreneurs that make me think. In this case, it’s from a friend who is on the fundraising trail. He started off the email with “I felt compelled to share this with you as someone who would appreciate it.” I thought it was dynamite and asked him if I could share it since – in its unedited form – it captured so nicely what I expect many entrepreneurs feel. And, just as importantly, it’s something I hope VC’s realize that entrepreneurs – even very experienced ones – feel.

Your Revenue Forecast Is Wrong - Click To Read Article
I received several questions in response to my post titled The Purpose of Numbers on a Y Axis and my followup post titled The Lack of Numbers of Y Axis Doesn’t Disqualify You. One of the questions prompted a rant in my brain that often spills out of my mouth when I’m on the receiving end of an early stage pitch.

Wikipedia for Patents - Click To Read Article
John Funk, an entrepreneur (I’m an investor in John’s newest company – Evergreen IP) and friend has a innovative proposal up concerning changing the rules on the current patent system. I’ve been on both sides of the patent aisle with John – we like to joke that early on in our relationship John’s company sued one of my companies (and then my company sued John’s company back) for patent infringement (the companies settled several years later for a cross license and $1 – much to the delight of the lawyers who got all the bucks.) Fortunately we got past all that crap and have developed a nice friendship.

Would You Want It If It Were Free? - Click To Read Article
The meme of “Free” is one again making the rounds. I expect it reignited when Chris Anderson’s new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price (available on Amazon for $17.81) quickly followed by Malcolm Gladwell’s semi-scathing review in the New Yorker titled “Priced to Sell. Is Free the future?” (I kind of feel like Gladwell wimped out on the review, even though I like Anderson’s point of view better than Gladwell’s.) This then created a predictable tussle in the blogosphere, the kind of which I find tedious and dull, so I avoided the rest of it.

Why Incorporate In Delaware? - Click To Read Article
Jason and I occasionally get asked \"why are the majority of companies incorporated in Delaware, regardless of their actual physical location?\" Besides being difficult to spell (c’mon – you thought there was an “e” instead of an “a”, didn’t you), Delaware offers some tangible advantages over incorporating in other states. While we aren’t experts on state laws outside of California, Colorado, and Delaware (e.g. feel free to offer “my state is better than Delaware to incorporate in” comments), we thought we’d summarize a few of the reasons below.

Why Do People Find Email So Difficult To Deal With? - Click To Read Article
I noticed two articles in the NY Times this morning that pressed my email theme button. The first was actually from yesterday - Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast. The second was In the E-Mail Relay, Not Every Handoff Is Smooth.

Whats The Best Corporate Structure For An Early Stage Company - Click To Read Article
I got the following question from a reader a week ago.

What's The Best Structure For A Pre-VC Investment? - Click To Read Article
I received the following question earlier this week. It’s conveniently timed, as I recently participated in two angel investments – each with one of the structures defined below.

When I Say Theme, What Do I Meme? - Click To Read Article
The newest blog post up on the Foundry Group web site is titled What Is "Thematic Investing?" In this post, we try to describe more deeply what we mean when we say "we are thematic investors" or "we like horizontal stuff."

What Does It Take to Scale A Web 2.0 Startup? - Click To Read Article
Last year, the meme of “you can start a company for minimal capital” made the rounds. This is still true. But – it’s not trivial to scale a company for minimal capital (it’s possible, but an exception, not the norm.) This meme is starting to make the rounds – Heather Green at BusinessWeek just wrote an article titled Make-or-Break Time For The Net Newbies.

Weekend Books - Click To Read Article
I've been in a reading slump lately - I just haven't felt like reading. This happens sometimes and whenever I break my "at least two books a week" rhythm, I just roll with it until it changes.

Unintended Consequences of Hybrid Vehicles - Click To Read Article
I heard a "superb" cynical statement today. I have no idea if it is factually correct, have no data (empirical or anecdotal) to support it, but it is such a great potential example of unintended consequences that I thought it was worth putting out there.

To Listen or Not To Listen - Click To Read Article
Yesterday, I was on a conference call with an entrepreneur that I’ve backed in the past. He wanted to walk me through the idea for a new business that he was working on. His goal was simply to get feedback from me at the very early stage of his idea – he wasn’t pitching me for an investment. We got about five minutes into the pitch when I interrupted him.

Undergraduate Viewpoints on Social Networks and Music - Click To Read Article
Following is a guest post by my partner Jason Mendelson. All of the thoughts and grammar errors are his. All of the formatting errors are mine.

Understanding Ignorance and Humility - Click To Read Article
I've made a large number of mistakes in my life. My goal when I make a mistake is to understand what I did wrong, learn from it, pick myself up, and move forward. When I've made the same mistake for the third time, I usually finally figure out what I'm doing wrong.

The Stockdale Paradox - Click To Read Article
Read the following phrase and think about whether or not you practice it. You must retain faith that you can prevail to greatness in the end, while retaining the discipline to confront the brutal facts of your current reality.

The VC Version of Kick the Can - Click To Read Article
I got an email this morning from an entrepreneur that I know that has been trying to raise an early round from a "seed VC investor" for the past few months. He's put together (and closed) a decent angel round and left it open for this seed investor.

The Wrong Things - Click To Read Article
Close your door. Turn off your computer monitor. Sit quietly and look out the window. Now - ask yourself the following question: "How much time do I spend on the wrong things each day?"

The Semantic Web Can Be Your Friend - Click To Read Article
Alex Iskold, the founder and creator of Adaptive Blue, has a long and helpful post up titled Semantic Web: Difficulties with the Classic Approach. I have a small investment in Adaptive Blue (Union Square Ventures is the lead investor), love what Alex is up to, and relish anything that comes out of his brain.

The Rhythms of My Life - Click To Read Article
I was in a board meeting yesterday with a company planning a major commercial release of their product “at the end of summer”. We managed to turn this into 8/31/09 at 11:59:59pm pacific time (since I don’t believe you can release something unless there is a time/date stamp associated with it.) As part of this discussion, we spent some time discussing the notion of a daily / weekly / monthly rhythm for both the CEO/CTO as well as the product team.

The Joy of Registration Rights - Click To Read Article
As Jason and I close out our Letter of Intent series, we thought we’d cover one last item that has screwed many a seller – the case where a public company acquires a private company for unregistered stock. Some buyers will try to ignore this – a good seller should work hard up front to get agreement on what type of stock and what kind of registration rights they will be receiving. Expectation setting is key in this situation.

The J-Squared Facebook Someday Millionaires - Click To Read Article
BusinessWeek has a fun article about my buddies Jesse and Joe from J-Squared Media titled Who wants to be a Facebook millionaire? Jesse and Joe were founders of one of the TechStars teams this summer – when they showed up their original idea was to create a sharing tools that would distribute links to your networks of friends (not in Facebook – on the web.) The Facebook Platform launched shortly after TechStars started and Jesse and Joe got all over it.

The Knives Your Sales People Should Have - Click To Read Article
In December, I wrote a post titled Give Your Sales People All The Knives. While I let you draw whatever conclusions you wanted from the post, I thought I’d follow through and give you a little more detail about what I meant by the statement.

The 80-19-1 Rule - Click To Read Article
I expect that many of you are familiar with the Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule.) If you aren’t, the simple definition is that for many phenomena 80% of the consequences come from 20% of the causes. Or – more practically – 80% of your company’s revenue comes from 20% of your customers, or 80% of your problems come from 20% of your customers, or 80% of your employee problems come from 20% of your employees. While it’s overused, it’s a good rule of thumb.

Talking to Directors - Click To Read Article
On Saturday, I called a director at a company I’m on the board of to get a reality check on something that is going on. Ten minutes on the phone solved three things: (1) I was able to road test my idea with someone I respect and (2) I incorporated his feedback into my idea, and (3) we were calibrated.

Talking About Your Product Roadmap - Click To Read Article
There are two opposite approaches in the world that most software companies take when talking about future products. 1. Say nothing until the day of the release and 2. Talk regularly about your roadmap. There used to be a third – “announcing a product but then not shipping it for a while” (anyone remember vaporware?) – but that’s faded into the background for the most part at this point (and is distinctly different than #2.)

The Business Plan - Click To Read Article
I periodically get questions from readers of this blog about business plans. I was pondering the best way to work through a “business plan series” (similar to the Term Sheet series and Letter of Intent series) when Dave Jilk - my partner in Feld Technologies (my first company) - dropped a few documents on my desk, including the original Feld Technologies business plan. A scanner, Adobe Acrobat PDF maker, and a little OCR later, I had the document in electronic format.

Spam Continues to Try To Pollute The Universe - Click To Read Article
I occasionally hear things from people about how “spam is on the decline.” This always entertains me because immediately after receiving an email like this, I get a 200 message comment spam attack on my blog and three IM windows pop up in Trillian with random people I don’t know saying “Hi” with a link to what I’m sure is something truly evil.

Strategy vs. Fundamentals - Click To Read Article
Creating companies is hard. Most fail. Overnight success is rare (my favorite “overnight success stories” are the ones that take 10+ years, like iRobot or Harmonix.) While strategy plays a key part in the outcome of an entrepreneurial venture, the fundamentals matter a lot. Take the following parable that I got from a friend recently.

Silicon Valley is Like High School - Click To Read Article
The quote of the week (at least in my world) was from one of the CEO’s I work with regarding Silicon Valley.

So Many Things Hinge on Leadership - Click To Read Article
Will Herman wrote a super post on The Leadership Power of Great Public Speaking. I’m a closet introvert, but I know the value of being a great public speaker (and am very comfortable – both as a public speaker and working a room.)

Should You Force Your Investors To Use Your Product? - Click To Read Article
I had the following exchange with the CEO of one of my investments the other day. Q (Brad): It’s strange to me that only a few of the investors / board members are using Product X. Any insights?

Social Graph - The Next Future Overused Phrase - Click To Read Article
Get ready to start hearing “Social Graph” as frequently as you hear “Web 2.0.” The construct of the Social Graph (and its friend – Social Network) has been around for a while. Now that Facebook has stolen our minds (and help us control our friends), we all are part of a social network. Or nine. Or 721 (that’s my best guess for the number of different services that have a social network that I’m a user of.)

So I Just Wasted 60 Minutes of System Time - Click To Read Article
This rarely happens to me so when it does, I notice it. And - in my effort to write some of my tricks about work-life balance, I thought I'd call this one out, especially since it was totally my fault.

Serial Entrepreneurs and What Motivates Them - Click To Read Article
The WSJ has an excellent article titled The Secrets of Serial Success. The “serial entrepreneur” is a mysterious beast and entrepreneurship sociologists have been poking and prodding at it for some time. Most articles I read about the “motivation of serial entrepreneurs” falls short – this one nails a lot of the things I’ve observed and experienced.

Right of First Refusal - Click To Read Article
Following is a question I got the other day.

Running Helps Entrepreneurs Succeed - Click To Read Article
Ah - two of my favorite topics - running and entrepreneurship.

Questions From A Regional Federal Reserve Bank - Click To Read Article
I have a friend who sits on the board of one of the regional Federal Reserve Banks who sent me the following email the other day.

Recruiting a New Director - Click To Read Article
In the life of most companies with an active board of directors, it occasionally becomes necessary to recruit a new director.

Recommendation: Get A Gmail Account - Click To Read Article
Every day I get emails from people working on new startups. I'm continually amazed at how many of them come from their existing corporate email address.

Rejection - Not By You, Really - Click To Read Article
Rejection isn't failure. I've been back from vacation for five days (including the weekend) and I've send out around 100 50 (if felt like 100, but I went back and counted and it was slightly more than 50) rejection emails to deals that came into my inbox while I was on vacation. It's part of my job - and I try to always at least give a little context as to why something isn't interesting to me. But 50 in five days (really 10 days including the vacation) starts to be a little discouraging.

Relationships Matter – A Lot - Click To Read Article
It blows my mind how many people think they can treat entrepreneurs and other investors poorly and think that it won’t come around to negatively impact them some time in the future.

Passive-Aggressive Behavior Is Useless In A Startup - Click To Read Article
If you are making the move from a big company to a startup, Scott Converse has a must read post up about passive-aggressive behavior titled Corporate vs. Startup behaviors.

PDF Your Board Package - Click To Read Article
Thankfully I no longer get fedexed binders of board packages from my portfolio companies in advance of a board meeting. Through the modern miracle of email, the board packages show up in my inbox – hopefully a few days (rather than a few hours – or even minutes) before the board meeting. The board packages tend to show up in three different formats – one that is easy to deal with, one that is ok, and one that sucks.

Payroll - Bi-weekly vs. Semi-monthly - Click To Read Article
I was on a board call for a company today that pays their employees bi-weekly (every two weeks). At some point in time there was a rationale for this since this company has a lot of hourly employees and there was a perception that folks would want to be paid every two weeks. So - presumably this was a logical decision at the time.

Parallel Universes - Click To Read Article
I’ve been in a few parallel universes recently and am noticing it happening more and more. I like parallel universes – it always smells like opportunity to me (plus I get to see how another “species” lives.)

Post Acquisition Integration - Click To Read Article
My friends at FeedBurner surfaced today with a post titled Hello? Hellooooo? In it, they explain what they've been up to post-acquisition by Google. Two words - technical integration.

Planes, Trains, and AutomobilesShare - Click To Read Article
By the time you read this I'll be in New York (right now I'm on a plane.) If you follow me (or any of my partners) on twitter, you will quickly understand why a Boulder entrepreneur recently referred to twitter as the "Foundry Group location / travel finder."

Play the Point, Not the Score - Click To Read Article
I watched Rafael Nadal play two incredible matches at the Australian Open over the weekend. In the semifinals, he defeated Fernando Verdasco in a 5 hour and 14 minute match 6-7(4) 6-4 7-6(2) 6-7(1) 6-4. He returned to the court a little over 40 hours later and defeated Roger Federer 7-5 3-6 7-6(3) 3-6 6-2 in a match lasting 4 hours and 23 minutes. If you are a tennis player, you know this is an amazing physical and emotional achievement.

Pee Tweet - Click To Read Article
I had a great flight home from LA on Southwest Airlines on Friday. My boycott on United has been going pretty well, but Amy and I are flying on it tomorrow to New York as it seems to be the only reasonable way to get from Denver to New York. I’m pessimistic. Plus I have a nasty cold so that’ll just make it more enjoyable.

My Work is Play to Me - Click To Read Article
Amy said a really nice thing to me the other day. We were talking and she said “One of the things I really admire about you is that your work is play to you.”

Ok - It's Called Enterprise 2.0 - Click To Read Article
I hate the 2.0 label. Hate it hate it hate it. Hate it.

Not Everything Works - Click To Read Article
You hear a lot about successful companies on most VC blogs. It’s a lot easier to talk about success than it is to talk about failure.

More Thoughts on Consumer Internet Innovations Migrating to the Enterprise - Click To Read Article
I have very smart friends. They challenge me all the time. One of them sent me the following email in response to my recent posts about the enterprise such as Get Ready For Selling To The Enterprise To Be A Big Deal Again.

Modest Deals, Happy Deals - Click To Read Article
I was talking to a friend yesterday about exits. In it, he suggested that the tech M&A market had shut down just like the tech IPO market had.

Managing Emotions Under Pressure - Click To Read Article
I got the following note the other day from a friend: After reading your latest post on Board Room Rules, I started thinking about the pressures that entrepreneurs experience starting, growing and managing start-up companies (whether it\'s their first company or their fifth.) So I wonder if you as an investor/board member/partner/cheerleader have ever had to counsel your entrepreneurs on this topic and if so what advice did you dispense?

Lighten Up / Tighten Up - Click To Read Article
As I was writing my previous post about The Constipation of Scale I got an email from a co-investor talking about a CEO / CTO conflict. It had an interesting phrase in it that I realized applies to many CEO / CTO relationships – “CEO needs to lighten up and CTO needs to tighten up.”

Let's Make Software Patents "Defensive Only" - Click To Read Article
In my quest to abolish software patents, I've been pondering "short term approaches" since I doubt the Supreme Court is going to wave a magic wand and make my fantasies come true anytime soon.

Learning From Failure - Click To Read Article
I haven't written much in the Failure series lately, but I've got a doozy or two coming soon.

It's Not That I Don't Suffer - Click To Read Article
At mile 15 on my run today, I heard one of my three favorite quotes in Atlas Shrugged. Galt says to Dagny, “… it’s not that I don’t suffer, it’s that I know the unimportance of suffering. I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one’s soul and as a permanent scar across one’s view of existence.”

Lack of Focus - Click To Read Article
As the stock market continues to flounder around (mostly the wrong direction) and some people in the middle east continue to try to destroy each other, I woke up this morning pondering failure. I thought of another “classical entrepreneurial lesson” that we made at Martingale Software – lack of focus.

Labels That Mean Nothing - Click To Read Article
I’m going to pile on to Fred Wilson’s post titled Web 3.0 Nonsense where he suggests that Jason Calacanis’s Web 3.0, the official definition is “nonsensical versioning.”

It's Better to Fail Quickly - Click To Read Article
Mitchell Ashley has an excellent post up titled Fail Early, Fail Often. I'm seeing a little more chatter about failure, introspection about how it feels, and suggestions about how to turn it into a positive (or at least effective) experience making the rounds.

Interview With Jon Fox of Intense Debate - Click To Read Article
Allen Stern has a great interview up with Jon Fox, the co-founder of Intense Debate. Jon and Intense Debate were part of the first year's crop of companies from TechStars and are going great guns right now. They create the comment replacement system that I use on my blog - if you are a blogger and haven't tried it yet, wander on over to Intense Debate and take a look.

I'll Never Do An Investment In That Kind of Thing Again - Click To Read Article
Every great investor has made some investments that he wishes he’d never made. Occasionally he’ll make another one like it. And another one like it. Eventually you learn. Or maybe you don’t.

I Blog, I Tweet, But Why - Click To Read Article
Fred Wilson has a great post up today titled Can We Live In Public? If you go back in time to May 4, 2004 when I started blogging, you'll see that Fred was one of the key inspirations with his post Transparency to my question of To Blog or Not to Blog. At the time, my interest came from a very simple place.

How Many Angels is the Right Number - Click To Read Article
I got the following question via email today: All things being equal and all things being perfect, is it better to have more or less 'angels' in the mix? I can come up with reasons for both more and less. Also, it seems to me that more and less are very relative - but, in this case, Ohio has a limit of 25 investors before exemptions no longer apply (we're still investigating that one), so that is the absolute upper limit. I'm thinking "more" is in the range of 4 - 10 and "less" is in the range of 3 or fewer -- allowing more growth later, if needed.

How Many Founders Does A Startup Need? - Click To Read Article
I love my NewsGator and Technorati key word search feeds - they help me find the most interesting things. A NewsGator key word search on “Ryan McIntyre” picked up this post by Chan Chaiyochlarb titled If you are going to launch a startup, how many friends would you need?

How Not To Impress People - Click To Read Article
I answer my own phone. I always have. If I’m sitting at my desk working on something and my phone rings I’ll usually pick it up, even if I don’t recognize the phone number. I know this doesn’t fit the “be hyper-productive” method of life, but I like the randomness of it.

Harmonix Music Systems - Now That's How An Angel Deal Should Work - Click To Read Article
I’ve invested in over 50 angel deals in the past 12 years. Several have been big winners for me, a few have done ok, and some have failed. Many are still active – including several that I did before I started making venture capital investments in 1996.

Giving Up Salary for Equity After VC Funding - Click To Read Article
I got a great question the other day which highlights the tension that can emerge in an early stage company between VCs and entrepreneurs.

Getting Value From Experimental Technology - Click To Read Article
David Cohen (who I have done a few angel deals with – including ClickCaster and Solidware) recently spent a couple of weeks building a cool new tool called earFeeder. earFeeder scans your music collection and automatically creates a single RSS newsfeed containing news about your favorite artists including new releases on iTunes, concert dates and ticket availability, Rolling Stone articles, etc.

Great Example of Blogging Changes to Your Product - Click To Read Article
I'm a small investor in Shelfari. I read a ton and thought it would be fun to play along with them at home and both a user and an investor. About a month ago I started noticing increasing chatter about Shelfari spam during the invite process in my RSS search feeds on "Shelfari." I regularly passed them on to Josh Hug, the CEO of Shelfari.

Getting My Attention - Click To Read Article
Every day I get inbound emails from entrepreneurs looking for funding. I triage these quickly as I can usually tell within a couple of minutes of looking at whatever is attached (executive summary, overview, intro powerpoint) whether or not it's in an area that I'm interested in investing in. Since my top level filter is "theme" it's easy to make a quick call. If you've ever sent me something, hopefully you've gotten a quick response.

Focusing on the Wrong Thing - Click To Read Article
I saw the post A Thousand Hall Monitors from Yahoo this morning and immediately thought \"why is YPN focusing on the wrong thing?\"

Financial Fitness for Entrepreneurs - Click To Read Article
While creating a growth business can be exhilarating, many entrepreneurs – especially those starting a company for the first time – don’t pay enough attention to some core issues surrounding the financial management of their businesses.

Fear of Failure - Click To Read Article
Dick Costolo, the CEO of FeedBurner, has another awesome post up titled Too Many Companies??

Falling Down and Getting Back Up - Click To Read Article
There’s nothing quite like taking a major spill an hour into a 90 minute trail run - in the mountains – alone – early in the morning.

Fear Is The Mindkiller - Click To Read Article
I had a long phone call with a CEO of a company on Friday. He’s had an intense few weeks and was clearly stressed out. His summary was “my stomach hurts.” My objective view of his business is that it’s fine – lots of things are going well – but there are plenty of issues he needs to address and they don’t necessarily have a short term time horizon for resolution.

Failure Comes From Not Following Your Additive Rules - Click To Read Article
The cliche “rules were meant to be broken” is a common one in the world of entrepreneurship. Paul Berberian – a great entrepreneur (and dear friend) almost died yesterday when flying his airplane because he broke three of his rules of flying in a row. Paul got lucky and I very glad he’s alive.

Facebook Email Sucks - Click To Read Article
I’m an email junkie going back as far as I can remember. It’s by far my favorite way to communicate.

Failure Is An Option - Click To Read Article
My friend Dave sent me a hysterical Onion article titled Failure Now An Option. I hate the phrase "failure is not an option" - of course it is. Some choice quotes:

Excellent Story on the Failure of Monitor110 - Click To Read Article
It's unusual for a founder to write a long thoughtful post on the failure of his company. Roger Ehrenberg - the co-founder of Monitor110 - which shut down earlier this week, did just that on his outstanding post titled Monitor110: A Post Mortem. The post is oriented around Roger's "seven deadly sins":

Fantastic Post By Calacanis On How To Get PR - Click To Read Article
Anyone who has worked with me knows that one of my favorite lines is "marketing is stupid." And - if you really know me - you know that I don't actually mean "marketing is stupid", but I use it as a proxy for "most PR people suck, most marcom is done poorly, and most companies have no idea what they are trying to accomplish with all the money they waste on shitty marketing and PR."

Eyes Wide Open - Click To Read Article
I'm sitting in my hotel room in Palo Alto after 20 hours of travel from Hampshire, England. Amy and I took our Q3 vacation in the English countryside at the Hampshire Four Seasons where we had a glorious week off of the grid. I find myself really wanting to be tired, but I am so far beyond tired that I'm wide awake well past midnight California time.

Feld-Weiser One-on-One: Feld on Work-Life Balance - Click To Read Article
On Wednesday, June 10th, 6:00-7:00pm in the Wittemyer Courtroom, Wolf Law Building at CU Boulder I'm doing an interview with Phil Weiser titled Feld on Work-Life Balance. I've written extensively about Work-Life Balance on this blog and have a wide range of opinions and perspectives on it. Phil's intro the event sets it up nicely.

Eliminate Ranges From Your Negotiating Vocabulary - Click To Read Article
I was fortunate that two of my early mentors were master dealmakers. They had different styles and approaches so I learned an incredible amount from each of them. Before I met them I’d never made an investment, acquired a company, or sold a company. In the past 17 years since I met them, I’ve done a ton of each.

Don't Be Casual - Click To Read Article
Coming out of the Venture Capital in the Rockies conference, I was pleasantly surprised with how solid most of the presentations were. There was plenty of pre-conference preparation, practice, and iteration from the companies presenting – and it showed.

Don't Adjust My EBITDA - Click To Read Article
In my first business, we didn’t have a line for EBITDA on our financial statement. We went straight to Net Income. We knew our cash flow from our statement of cash flows (and our bank account which we checked regularly since we were self funded.) We never talked about EBITDA, nor did we ever feel the need to come up with things like “Adjusted EBITDA.”

Do CEO's Overcompensate for Their Strengths? - Click To Read Article
As I sit in the Seattle airport waiting to board my delayed flight to Anchorage (Dear Alaska Airlines: Since it’s a “mechanical delay”, please feel free to delay it as long as you want until you are absolutely sure the airplane works), I was pondering a conversation I had at the very end of Gnomedex with an entrepreneur that I’d met for the first time.

Do Your Investors Use Your Product? - Click To Read Article
Brad Spirrison has a nice article in the Chicago Sun-Times titled Feedburner’s investors have its technology at their fingertips. Among other things, he highlights that three of the FeedBurner investors – me, Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures, and Matt McCall at Portage Ventures are active bloggers that use FeedBurner’s services regularly.

Crazy Dad Stories - Click To Read Article
Entrepreneurship requires serious determination. So does life. My friend Andy’s story of his dad’s fractured back reminded me of my favorite story about my dad’s dad.

Do I Practice What I Preach? - Click To Read Article
At dinner I was pondering the answer I gave on the post How An Entrepreneur Can Protect Himself Post-Funding. Something was bothering me about it and I thought to myself “do I practice what I preach?” (Amy suggested that I should be bothered by my title of the post, which should have been “… Can Protect Himself or Herself …”)

Customer Enthusiasm - Click To Read Article
One of the great things about blogs is that it makes it easy for anyone (that has a blog) to express things – both good and bad. While mainstream media seems to be endlessly focused on “bad stuff sells newspapers”, people like to express (and consume) a full range of their experiences.

Daily Data - Click To Read Article
I had a call this morning with a CEO of a young company I’m on the board of. They are well funded so they have plenty of urgency, but no panic, around what they are doing. During the conversation, he asked what he could do to increase the board member’s visibility of the progress they are making.

Company Stages Revisted - Click To Read Article
A few days ago I wrote about the transition from a small to medium to large business. I had a few people write to me with additional questions, including requests to define the sizes, talk more about the issues during the transition, and make suggestions about how to address things. One of the notes came from a long time friend – Barry Culman – who is currently the president of SPADAC (Spacial Data Analytics Corp.) I’m not involved in SPADAC, but Barry shared a framework that he used recently at a management retreat to explain his view of the evolution of a company. Following is a quick summary of the stages according to Barry.

Communicating Sales Info To Your Board - Click To Read Article
My partner Chris Wand is finally blogging (even though he’ll deny it) over at AsktheVC – he’s writing a series on what should be in a “board reporting package.”

CEOs That Are Introverts - Click To Read Article
Often there’s a perception that to be a successful CEO, you need to be an extrovert. Media and pop culture reinforces this – we regularly see people that are comfortable in the spotlight and equate them with the model of success.

Business Plan - Charter - Click To Read Article
Back when I was 21 years old I figured you had to start somewhere. Our business plan started with a “charter statement” which – in hindsight – was roughly equivalent to a vision statement.

Can Anyone Be A Major League Pitcher? - Click To Read Article
Alan Shimel has a fantastic post up titled Do they have to grow up? As I read it, I thought of some of the great lessons my dad taught me when I was a little kid and how hard they must have been for him to carry out.

Bye Bye Business Method Patents - Click To Read Article
While it's not over yet as the Supreme Court might weight in, the Federal Court Kills Patents on Business Methods. I haven't read things carefully yet (I'll leave that for the bathroom this weekend) but from the quick analysis I've read (In re Bilski: Patentable Process Must Either (1) be Tied to a particular machine or (2) Transform a Particular Article) it looks like it is a strong, unambiguous decision in the good fight to eliminate ridiculous patents.

Celebrate Your Victories - Click To Read Article
Q109 is over. The numbers are starting to roll in. After all the gloom and doom at the end of 2008, I’m very pleased with the performance of most of the companies in our portfolio. As I mentioned the other day, some struggled, but many met or exceeded their Q109 plans, and several of them destroyed them (sandbaggers, how I love thee.)

Board of Directors Number of Meetings - Click To Read Article
As Jim and I continue our Board Meeting series, we\'ve decided to address a question that we are often asked - \"How Many Board Meetings Should A VC-backed company have?\"

Board Meeting Rules - Click To Read Article
Following are some board meeting rules that were recently presented to me and my fellow board members by a CEO at one of his first board meetings at a newly funded early stage company. I thought they were brilliant. Feel free to pass them out at your next board meeting.

Berkshire Hathaway's 2006 Chairman's Letter - Click To Read Article
I’m a huge Warren Buffett fan and have been for as long as I can remember.

Being A Doer Is How You Change Things - Click To Read Article
A few weeks ago, my friend Alan Shimel connected me with Jennifer Leggio. Jennifer is the Director of Strategic Communications at Fortinet and an active blogger in - among other things - security and communication. Alan suggested to Jennifer that she might be interested in the work we have been doing at the National Center for Women & Information Technology.

As Usual Im Nobodys Market - Click To Read Article
After a brief email exchange today from an extremely smart and capable friend suggesting a potential feature for my blog, his response was “As usual, I’m nobody’s market.” He provided a humorous followup to the comment “that’s a great blog title” from one of the people on the email thread with “Ah, if only I didn't have to suck up to the world, that would be a great title for my contrarian-curmudgeon blog.”

Amazing Q&A with Alan Greenspan - Click To Read Article
If you ever have the chance to see Alan Greenspan do an hour of improptu Q&A in front of any audience (in this case 500 business people in Denver), do it. I went to the AMG National Trust Bank sponsored event today at the Denver Art Museum titled “Art, Alan and AMG.” It was awesome.

A Mental Model For VC Investments - Click To Read Article
A reader asked me the other day if – in the words of Charlie Munger – I have a “mental model” for investing in early stage companies. I do, but I’d rather give examples of the two best approaches I’ve heard of from other people.

A Great Book Week - Click To Read Article
One of my favorite things about going dark for a week is that I get to consume a bunch of books. Since we’ve been back from Alaska, my reading pace has been slower than normal, so it was nice to have plenty of uninterrupted time to lay on a couch and read. I usually manage to read a book a day on vacation - this time I only gobbled down five. All but one was great.

A CEOs Thoughts on Collaboration - Click To Read Article
I had breakfast with Matt Blumberg – the CEO of Return Path – yesterday. I’ve worked with Matt for at least six years and love the way his brain works. During my frustrating quest for the best chocolate croissant in Boulder (so far all of the ones I’ve found appear to be exactly the same – I’m guessing there is one chocolate croissant distributor in town) we talked some about “collaboration.”

A Small Set of Simple Moves - Click To Read Article
I heard the phrase “a small set of simple moves� a few weeks ago from someone and it stuck in my head. Since then I’ve been thinking about it regularly as a fundamental operating principle.


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