MSFT still has it…
I spent last Thursday at Microsoft for their annual VC Summit. While there are plenty of ways that the company can improve, I walked away with the very distinct feeling that the “market” underestimates the innovation coming out of Redmond and the ways in which the company is clearly changing and adapting to the new technology world. Specifically, the products and people I encountered were forward thinking – clearly moving well beyond the OS and embedded software mentality that is the history of the business – and significantly more platform agnostic than they are given credit for (both product demos I saw included at least one Mac and other non-Microsoft based products). …
October 1, 2008· 1 min read
Move to Boulder!
A handful of Boulder companies are pooling resources to bring 100 software developers to Boulder (see Boulder.me). If you’re interested in a chance to come out and see what we have to offer, take a look at what they’ve pulled together (my partner Chris Wand is heavily involved and has a post up about the event on the Foundry blog). Not only is Boulder a beautiful place to live, it’s a fantastic place to work and build successful companies (see Ryan and Jason’s view of moving from the Bay Area to Boulder here and here). To quote from the “Boulder Wants You” post: …
October 1, 2008· 1 min read
Deals
I’m trying to purge the word “deal” from my lexicon – at least as it relates to investments (i.e., companies are not a “deal”, it’s an “investment opportunity”; the actual transaction itself is still fair game). I’m amazed how often the term comes up in the venture industry. To me it seems somehow demeaning and way too generic. Entrepreneurs who put their heart and sole into a company don’t need to hear us talk about their companies like they’re a commodity. …
September 26, 2008· 1 min read
Linking around
A few things that might be of interest. Foundry announced our latest investment – Pie Digital. Pie has created an “IT department in a box”. Brad jokes that he’ll no longer have to provide tech support for his parents. My dad is literally a rocket scientist, so I can’t exactly make that claim, but like Jason (see his post here), I’m looking forward to their product rolling out. You can read the Foundry post here. …
September 9, 2008· 1 min read
Wednesday night at the DNC
While I’m a fan of politics (and my wife and I are active supporters of causes and candidates we believe in), I’ve never been particularly “political” and generally don’t find myself at political speeches, rallies, etc. But last night when I had the chance to head over to the Democratic National Convention being held here in Denver, I figured that it was something worth seeing in person. I wasn’t disappointed – it really was an amazing scene. …
August 28, 2008· 5 min read
Denver to the top of Mt. Evans (and back)
Long overdue, but here’s an account of my recent bike ride from Denver to the top of Mt. Evans (elevation 14,264 ft) and back. First some quick technical and summary data in case you’ve found this post looking to do a similar ride. I ride a lightspeed titanium bike with a standard front crankset (39/53) and a slightly climbing friendly rear cassette (13/27). The ride up took us 7 1/2 hour (ride time) and covered some 10,000 feet of climbing over 72 miles. While that’s a lot of climbing, the gradient actually didn’t kick up much past about 8% (and for most of the climb from Idaho Springs was more like 6%). My training had been pretty modest – I ride about 50 miles a week, including a hill ride at least every other week – and this ride was probably about 2 times the length (and difficulty) of any other ride I had attempted (which is to say that if I can slog it up – you probably can too). I twittered my entire ride up, which turned out to be great way to keep my wife and friends informed of our progress while on route. The ride profile (until the battery on the GPS went dead) looked like this: …
August 27, 2008· 6 min read
"The Board"
I’ve written before on effective board communication, how to run effective board meetings and other “governance” topics related to companies and their boards of directors. Today’s post is a little more ethereal. I’ve noticed a real difference in how various CEO’s I work with refer to their boards – particularly when talking internally to the rest of their management teams and employees. On the one hand are the CEO’s that consistently refer to their board of directors as “The Board” (capital “T”, capital “B”) and often use them as some kind of foil (as in “The Board has said that we really need to do XYZ”) – almost separating themselves from whatever decision or direction it is that they wish to convey and treating the board as some kind of amorphous entity like the borg in Star Trek. On the other had are CEO’s that more often refer to the board by their individual names, including themselves in the list as well. It’s obviously much harder to absolve yourself of responsibility for a decision if you speak in this fashion. It’s also much more difficult to use the board as the foil (since “Seth, John, Jamie and Susan” sounds a lot less threatening than “The Board”). …
August 26, 2008· 2 min read
A different take on Twitter
As you know, I’m a big fan of Twitter. I’ve even gone so far as to call it the new IM. My wife Greeley has watched on with some amusement as I’ve twittered my life away over the last year or so. She finally sat down this weekend and read a few months of my tweets. What follows is a note she sent to me – an “if I’d been twittering too” list of tweets (to be read with heavy sarcasm; I was laughing out loud, but maybe it’s just me…). …
August 12, 2008· 1 min read
Track your favorite Olympic sports with Filtrbox
Information tracking company Filtrbox has put out a handy little widget for tracking TeamUSA at the Olympics. By choosing both sports (for example: “USA Cycling – Men’s Road”) or an individual athletes (“USA Cycling – Men’s Road: Levi Leipheimer”) you can keep up to date on your favorite Olympic stories.
August 8, 2008· 1 min read
hello? …. echo …. echo …. echo
Apologies for falling out of the blogging habit over the last month. A nice, mostly off-line vacation was followed by a few weeks of slowly catching back up. Blogging (and keeping up on my blog reading as well) fell to the bottom of the list. Or maybe I was just being lazy. Either way, I was off the blogging circuit for a while and I apologies for any of you who may have been waiting with breath held for the next post (hopefully you didn’t delete me from your feed reader). …
August 8, 2008· 1 min read