Back on the wagon
Wow. Has it really been a month since I posted? Lots of excuses about being busy and traveling a lot, but I’ve done that before and not stopped blogging. Not sure what happened – sorry about that (for those of you that noticed, that is). One interesting observation about my unplanned hiatus: When I’m actively blogging, I often find myself viewing the world through the “blog lens”. Those of you that are bloggers will get this right away – what I’m referring to is the tendency to start looking at everything in terms of whether it would make a good blog post or not. Kind of a funny way to look at the world, but it happens when you blog a lot – probably a combination of looking for new content and more generally a rewiring of your brain to think about all things in the context of how you’d describe it to someone else. The halflife of thinking this way was probably about a 4 days. By week 2 of not blogging, I had kicked the habit – clearly reinforcing my not blogging. A good reason to not go more than a week without posting. . .
May 4, 2006· 1 min read
Lifescience blogging
Despite being in pretty much separate areas of technology investing, I continue crossing paths with Adam Rubenstein in a way that reminds me how small the Denver/Boulder business community really is. Adam is involved in a number of local bio related initiatives – MycoLogics, High Country Ventures and the Fitzsimons BioBusiness Incubator to name a few. We recently had an e-mail exchange on how he might encourage more thought leaders and venture capitalists from the bio-sciences to participate in the blogosphere and I suggested that he consider using his own blog as a platform and invite VCs and business leaders to write guest posts. You can imagine my surprise today when I saw that he actually took my advice and started a guest blogger series. The first entry in the series is by Harry Ross from Aweida Venture Partners. Harry is a well respected life sciences investor and always an interesting guy to talk with. You can check out his post here. Take a look at Adam’s full blog here.
April 3, 2006· 1 min read
Progress
Newsgator announced a series of product enhancements last week (see here and here) along with their new website layout. Looking at the new site got me thinking about how far they’ve come since our initial investment. In the spirit of a picture being worth a thousand words, take a look at the following links to see just how much progress they’ve made. Newsgator’s current web site Web site from January 2004 – right around the time of our first meeting with Greg …
April 3, 2006· 1 min read
How do you sign your e-mails?
For some reason I’ve been paying attention lately to how people sign their e-mails and thought I’d throw out a few thoughts. I’d be particularly interested to hear from people on the strangest sign-offs they’ve received. Below is a list of some of the more common sign-offs along with my take on what they really mean. Cheers! – I’m cool! Best – I don’t want to be locked into a specific sign-off – please interpret as you wish (best wishes, best regards, best cheers, etc.) All the best – When “Best” simply isn’t good enough _C_iao! – I’m cool! and trying to act foreign Sincerely – I took this really great business writing class in high school Thanks – I really do mean thanks (when used correctly) / I can’t think of anything else to say (when used incorrectly, for example at the bottom of a flame e-mail) Hope all is well – Please DO NOT write back with details of whether you are well or not – I’m just trying to be polite Warm regards – I’ve just returned from my latest analyst session and am feeling pretty centered [nothing but your name] – S_ometimes less is more_ [not even your name – just your full signature] – I’m so efficient/important/etc. that I don’t have time to even type in my name With my very cheeriest and best thanks and regards. Here’s hoping all is well …
March 29, 2006· 2 min read
Spring Break Reading
I hit a critical point on the vacation curve and last week took off to Mexico with my family for a respite. This one was a real break – no phone, no e-mail, no business contact of any kind. Along with relaxing on the beach and building sand castles with my daughter (mostly for the purpose of knocking them down right away), I was able to get quite a bit of reading time in. With that in mind I wanted to pass along two of these titles in case you’re looking to add to your reading list. The first is Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty. Sachs is an economist who has advised a number of developing nations on macroeconomic policy. He’s now the director of theEarth Institute at Columbia and a special advisor to the UN (advising on the UN’s Millennium Project). The book is extremely accessible – written for non-academics. For me, it challenged some of the notions I hold of Africa as a ‘lost continent’ and laid out Sachs’ version of how to Africa may be lifted out of poverty. I love macroeconomics (my college major) and in particular issues related to the relationships between economies. This book is very interesting reading. One word of warning – the last 1/5th of the book is essentially an advertisement for Sachs’ version of how to achieve the Millennium Development goals and got a bit tedious. The first 80% of the book was outstanding. The other recommendation is Captain Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone around the World. The book is, as you might guess, about Slocum’s journey around the world. He was the first to accomplish this feat solo – leaving Boston in 1895 in a 30’ wooden sloop and returning to Rhode Island more than 3 years later in mid-1898. The book is great – starting with the title (you can imagine that if this book was titled today it would be called “A historic voyage” or “Voyage of a lifetime” or something cheesy like that). Slocom’s style of prose is also reflected in the title – he’s to the point and comically matter-of-fact. …
March 28, 2006· 2 min read
smartfeed
NewsGator jumped deeper into the mobile app world with its recent purchase of mobile podcatcher smartfeed along with its companion mobile reader, smartread. They also hired the smartfeed/read creator, Kevin Crawley, to head NewsGator’s mobile product development. It’s a great move by NewsGator to extend their vision of ‘any time, any place, any device’. Greg Reinacker covered the key points about why we did this on his blog, and Kevin added some more background color in his, so I won’t repeat it here. The thing I like most about this story is how Kevin came to be hooked up with NewsGator – particularly relevant to a series of side-bar conversations I’ve been having recently on the value of VC blogs (thoughts on that topic from last year are here). Kevin apparently read something interesting in one of my blog posts and, since we were both Boulder locals, reached out to me. We met about 9 months ago for coffee and to talk about technology in general and RSS and podcasting specifically. It turned out that we knew a bunch of people in common, had common interests, etc (this being Boulder, it was pretty much a certainty that we’d have at least a dozen ‘one degree’ connections). Nothing specific came of the meeting, but we agreed to stay in touch, which we did over the months. Long story short, voila!, Kevin is working with NewsGator who now owns the IP from the project that we originally got together to talk about. Not where I thought that cup of coffee was headed, but a great blogging success story.
March 17, 2006· 2 min read
Baby loves disco!
Let’s face it – disco is a universally loved form of music (well . . . almost). This is certainly true of the under-6 demographic. I witnessed this phenomenon first hand last weekend as several hundred kids and their parents descended on the Boulder Theatre to rock out to the sweet beats and floating falsetto of the Bee Gees, Diana Ross and other 70’s greats. I can promise you that you have not experienced disco until you’ve seen a mass of kids rocking out, complete with bubble machine, lights and disco ball. …
March 15, 2006· 1 min read
Why NOLs should be transferable
Dad stopped by the other day on his way back from a meeting and we were kicking around some ideas. One of the things that he brought up that I’d been toying around with as well was the notion of enabling companies to sell their NOLs. I think this is an outstanding idea – both at the state and the federal level. I don’t really want to get into it here, but you should assume a priori that I believe that NOLs should also be more transferable in acquisitions as well. That’s a related topic for sure but here I’d just like to address the ability of companies to literally sell their NOLs to the highest bidder. Let my address this from the perspective of the three entities most affected by this idea: –The selling company. The company selling its NOLs clearly benefits. It turns an asset that it can not currently make use of (and one that has a limited lifetime) into immediate cash to fund its current operations (and perhaps to generate more NOLs). Clearly this is a way for the selling company’s investors to double down their investment, to the extent to which their money is spent on things that give rise to expenses. Depending on how the market for NOLs develops and the company’s expected near to medium term prospects for generating taxable income it can plan with some accuracy to balance the generation of near-term benefit (cash) with expected later benefit (the tax shelter their NOLs would provide). -ont-size: 7pt; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;”> The buying company. Different companies would derive different benefits from purchasing NOLs – companies have different tax rates, tax rates vary by domicile, companies have different expected needs for sheltering income, etc. Presumably a relatively perfect market would develop for the buying and selling of NOLs and these differences would work themselves out in the form of different prices companies would be willing to pay for $1 of NOL shelter. I don’t see much downside for buying companies if this idea were implemented – they’ll be able to do similar planning as the selling companies and determin the right balance of NOL need vs. price based on their individual outlook. -ont-size: 7pt; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;”> The government successful because they have access to additional investment capital. This will. The government clearly ‘pays’ for all of this NOL transfer activity. In their best case scenario they’ve just lost the time value of money, if you assume that all of these NOLs would have been used anyway. In reality there will also be a real cost to a program such as this because under the current system there are lots of ways companies lose the ability to use their NOL balances (the NOLs run out; the company is purchased by another entity limiting the use of transfered NOLs; companies go out of business before they use their NOL balances; etc.). That said, there will also be some tangible benefits from businesses that stay in business longer and become more result in higher employment (and employment related taxes) and a more stable business climate (i.e., more profitable companies in a region and the resulting increased corporate tax base). I’m scaring myself because this sounds a lot like trickle down economics, but in this case I think society as a whole benefits. I’m not ready to argue that for government this will be a zero sum game (i.e., I think there will likely be a true hard dollar cost to government revenue if a plan like this were implemented), but I think there are real benefits to business that would ultimately make their way back to government coffers in the form of future business and personal tax revenue. Clearly there would need to be some limits to a program like this – limits to the total NOLs that a company could buy or sell over a certain period; limits to the total income a company could shelter with purchased NOLs; etc. I did some searching around and found a few state level initiatives that are pushing a program like the one I’m describing (and at least one – in New Jersey of all places – that was already in place, allthough in a limited form). My dad told me that there’s a group working on this idea in Colorado (I couldn’t find any reference to it on-line) and that he’s been talking this idea up on some of his recent trips to Washington. I hope the right people are listening . . . …
March 13, 2006· 4 min read
It’s just technology
I was on a panel presentation about blogging and RSS at the Boulder Software Club recently along with Walker Fenton from NewsGator and Howard Kaushansky from Umbria. Very fun time (hey – what VC doesn’t enjoy an opportunity to share their opinion); plus I got two beers out of Brad for managing to say “fuck” twice – both completely in context I might add. What struck me most during the presentation is how much more power the technology which is RSS has when you explain it in terms of what it does rather than what it is. RSS is pretty meaningless beyond a relative small group of techies and frankly no one really cares about the underlying technology – they all care about what they can do with it. Those of us who spend a lot of time talking about RSS/Blogging/Feeds/Aggregators/etc do a shitty job of separating out useless concepts to most audiences (“RSS” or “XML”) with useful ones (“this stuff helps you do xyz”). Speaking in jargon solicited blank stares; giving examples of what people were doing with RSS to further their business solicited engagement and follow up. As a community of technologists, we should be better at this.
March 6, 2006· 1 min read
Linking around 3/6
A few links for today that you might find interesting: Here’s a great presentation by Dick Hardt, CEO of Sxip Identity from OSCON 2005. Very fun if you have a few minutes and a nice example of how not to bore people with your presentation. (thanks to Ryan for the link) Since I was digging on MBAs the other day, I thought I should link over to a more thoughtful piece on alternatives to getting an MBA by Rajesh Setty who, other than having a great last name, also has a few relevant things to say about the topic. (from Lorne) …
March 6, 2006· 1 min read