Uncategorized

Random question, but I have received e-mails from readers across the word. I’m going to be in Addis Ababa later this week and was wondering if I had any readers there. You can e-mail me here

There was a lot of traffic on my recent post on the best time to sell your business (comments link here), including a few points that I wanted to highlight. Chris Zook sent me a graph with the following note that I think sums up the underlying driver of what I was describing in that post. focusing more on the idea that while companies generally increase in value as they grow in size/revenue/customers (per your chart), there is often a period of accelerated value that diverges from the standard trajectory as a function of “strategic value perception” or “buzz” about a specific segment or product. The thought being that a given  company would optimally want to sell at or around…

I got a great postcard today from Ben Casnocha. It said: Yay, summer has come Business, reading, deep thinking Time to change the world I LIKE YOU! Ben understands networking. He’s thoughtful. He posts comments to blogs that are relevant and interesting.  He sends private e-mails in response to things he reads. He forwards articles of interest that are targeted to the people he interacts with.  He clearly thinks networking is a priority and does it well. Ben also just graduated from high school, which I think puts him light-years ahead of his peers in his understanding of human interaction (ok – lets face it – it puts him light-years ahead of people of any age in his understanding of…

I was talking to a friend of mine recently who was telling me about the weekly meeting that he used to have with his boss in which he was asked to talk about his top 21 priorities. 21 priorities – seriously. Talk about getting defocused. . . .

I’ve posted a few times about my desire for better users stats (most recently on April 1st but also way back in January). Well – now I’m doing something about it. FeedBurner announced today the closing of a new investment lead by Mobius (yours truly and Brad Feld – Brad will take the board seat and I will be the board observer), with new investor Sutter Hill and existing investors Portage and DFJ. Needless to say, I’m pretty excited about the deal – Mobius’ third investment in the RSS/blogging space (FeedBurner joins Technorati and NewsGator as RSS/blogging related Mobius investments). While I’m hopeful that the new capital will solve some of the problems I’ve been having with my user statistics…

I’ve written a couple of posts in the past 2 months on the power of location (read them here and here). Quova – the leading player in the geo-location space – has had a couple of articles published about them in the past week that I wanted to pass along. I particularly like the article about how MLB is using the technology (not because it describes the origin of the Quova name – which I’m embarrassed to say that I never knew – but because it speaks to ways that companies are using geo-location information to create new and significant sources of revenue). Baseline – Major League Baseball Struggles to Reach Fans Online Bank Director – Keeping Online Banking Safe:…

I thought I should post this after making such a stink about data being plural and all.  Here’s a link to a little word test for those of you (like me) who are interested in seeing if you really have a clue about these things (turns out I have only a partial clue – I scored 93% on each of the beginner and intermediate, 100% on advanced and a paltry 66% on expert). You can take the test here (the direct url in case the link doesn’t work is http://www.okcupid.com/tests/take?testid=14457200288064322170). Thanks to Dave Jilk for sending this over to me. Let me know how smart you are . . .

One of the companies that I work with closely, ProSavvy, announced this week  that it merged with eWork (the combined company will keep the eWork name). The merger creates perhaps the largest private company in the workforce management/services procurement/payroll services business. As part of the merger, Mobius led a new round of financing into the combined business. You can read the press release here. In layman terms, the combined business offers products that allow businesses to manage various aspects of procuring, managing and payrolling temporary employees (contract laborers) and what are called fixed project deliverables (consulting projects). The combined business has three main products: eWork Enterprise – a enterprise software platform for managing contract work (whether that be contract labor,…

One thing I’ve noticed since I started blogging is that starting a blog entry is a lot easier than finishing it. There are plenty of things to write about and I find it pretty easy to start a new blog (I usually do this in my head first and try to think it through before committing it to paper). It’s a lot harder to finish them, however. My blog draft file is full of ½ completed blogs that are waiting for me to finish up. I’ve been thinking about this a bunch recently and trying to figure out if this is specific to blogging (or any forming of putting thoughts to paper) or if it is just a part of the human condition –…

I’m intending this blog to be a mixture of my personal thoughts on being a venture capitalist (and my travels through the maze of the VC world); thoughts on life more generally; and what I’ll call VC 101 tips and pointers. One of the things I’ve noticed (and this is something that I’m happy to say the TypePad statistics really do a nice job of, my rant about them last week aside . . .) is that my VC 101 posts get a lot of traffic (and cross-posting/track-backs that drive this traffic). The impetus for my starting this blog was to capture my personal thoughts on being a VC, however I want to be sure I mix up my content…