Things I learned on vacation – part I
One of the nice things about sitting on the beach for a week is that it gives you time to think about a few things. I won’t profess to having had profoundly deep thoughts, but I’m working on a few posts that cover some of the topics I was thinking about as I soaked in the rays. First a light topic, but one that actually does have a real message despite its levity. …
March 9, 2005· 1 min read
Taking Time
I’m really bad at taking time away. I mean real time away where I’m completely out of touch and can fully recharge – not the run away for a long weekend but bring your laptop with you kind of away. I need to get better at this – it’s not fair to my wife and daughter and it’s not fair to me. Brad is very consistent about taking real time off – he and his wife take one week a quarter where they go away and completely relax. I need to follow their example more. …
March 1, 2005· 1 min read
M&A Part I – Lines in the Sand
I’ve been involved in executing mergers and acquisitions for a large part of my career. I’ve never stopped to count the number of deals I’ve been involved with, but would guess that the total is several hundred, with probably somewhere between 50 and 75 where I had primary responsibility for negotiating (the rest I was an advisor to). I’ve seen a lot of different types of deals over the years and many many different negotiating tactics (my own style varies from deal to deal, and my default style has changed a lot over the years – a topic for another post). Over the next few months I’m going to do a series of posts on m&a – some general comments on the subject; some war stories; some m&a 101; etc. I’ll try to keep them short and to the point. My first post is on a topic that I’ve experienced a lot recently – ultimatums. There’s definitely a place for ‘this is the best we’re going to be able to do’ statements in deal negotiating, but too often people use this tactic when they don’t mean it. The result is something akin to the never cry wolf fairy tail – but with a faster outcome. It only takes one time drawing a line and then crossing over it to completely lose your deal credibility. Hearing about a company’s ‘best and final’ offer 5 times over the course of 2 days doesn’t drive the best deal – it just annoys all involved and has the affect of disengaging the party you are negotiating with and ultimately making you negotiate against yourself (which is #1 on the negotiating 101 list of things not to do). I respect that there is a certain amount of gamesmanship involved in negotiating a transaction – both sides in a deal understand that. But outright lying (i.e., saying something is the best you can do when its not) and then stepping right through your lie flies in the face of good negotiating tactics and leads to busted deals and to the party you are negotiating with retrenching rather than trying to reach a happy medium. …
March 1, 2005· 2 min read
Paying for what you get?
Ever notice that the nicer the hotel you stay in, the more you have to pay for? It seems to me that the more I pay for a room, the more likely it is that I have to pay for local phone calls, internet access, breakfast, gym access, etc. I was thinking about this a couple of weeks ago. I was in San Francisco and staying at a reasonably nice national chain hotel and paying over $200/night for the privilege. On top of that I had to pay forInternet access ($9.95 for crappy 200kps throughput), local calls ($0.75 a pop) and access to their gym ($10/day). Not so when I stay at cheaper hotels(particularly down on the peninsula, but I’ve found this to be true all over the country) – I rarely pay for this stuff. On one recent trip to Palo Alto I stayed at a hotel that was less than $100/night, had fee internet access, free local calls,a descent work-out room and provided me with a nice continental breakfast (also for free). …
March 1, 2005· 1 min read
Data are plural!
Ok – short post on a real pet peeve of mine. The word “data” is plural. See the following examples: Incorrect: Them data is cool! Correct: Them data are cool! It’s a minor annoyance and, coming from someone who can’t figure out when to use affect vs. effect, perhaps you should just ignore me . . . but really – data are plural.
February 25, 2005· 1 min read
NewsGator and VNU
Ok – I’m a little late to the party on this one, but I promised NewsGator that I wouldn’t forget to drop a post on their recently announced deal with VNU (see the press release here; Brad has a post on the announcement as well – view it here). The two companies are going to co-brand an RSS aggregator for 7 European markets(VNU is a big tech publishing house in Europe). It’s a great deal for both companies and an important step forward for NewsGator in their continued development. …
February 25, 2005· 1 min read
Conveying Information Effectively
Here’s an interesting experiment to try. Get a friend. Think of a song (one that you would reasonably expect your friend to know as well). Tap along with your finger while you play the song to yourself in your head. Now ask your friend what song you were taping out. It turns out that the taper’s estimate of how easy it will be for someone to guess what song they are tapping is vastly greater than the success their friend will have in actually coming up with the correct song. The taper believes they are conveying much more information than they really are. (Apologies for not being able to find the actual study reference I was looking for – I couldn’t find it on Google Scholar and I’ve long since thrown out the psychology textbook I had that referenced the study.) …
February 22, 2005· 2 min read
A small step?
This is a totally vain story, but I’ve been asked about this a few times, so I’ll repeat it here – plus it goes to the heart of why I blog which is something I realized in looking over some of my posts that I haven’t been writing much about. (This reminds me that still haven’t finished my post on ‘is blogging about vanity?’ yet – not sure what’s keeping me from doing that . . .). …
February 17, 2005· 2 min read
What it takes to go public
I’ve sat through a few presentations by investment bankers recently on what it takes to go public (most recently at VC in the Rockies – see my post about the conference here). I thought I’d throw out some of my notes so you could see what I’m being told it takes to get public in the current market. The VCIR panel I sat through included some thoughts on the state of the m&a market, so I’ll include those notes as well. Company ‘Requirements’: – Revenue: ‘Bigger the better’; minimum of $60m/year annualized (so $15m/quarter at the time of the IPO; however 60% of 04’ IPO’s were < $100m in revenue (up from only 30% in the depths of the market); this has been a very consistent metric across all of the bankers I’ve talked with. – Profitability: Companies should be at or near profitability prior to IPO; there was some debate across the people I talked with about whether this was a requirement – some people thought companies absolutely needed to be profitable, others gave a little bit (but not much) of wiggle room. – Funding Needs: Company needs to be fully funded – the money raised in the IPO should be expansion capital, not core operating (get to profitability) capital- Team/Execution: Company probably needs to have been around for 4+ years; management teams are coming under much closer scrutiny by investors (was not the case in the bubble) …
February 17, 2005· 3 min read
Who vs. Where
I recently wrote a blog – The Power of Location – about Quova (one of the companies I work with) and the idea of “place” on the Internet. In response, Dimitar Vesselinov (who has a great blog) dropped a couple of comments to the post. My sense is that not everyone pays attention to the comments section of blogs, so I thought I’d post the links he suggests here. I also want to be sure I’m clear on the differences between digital identity (the subject of Dimitar’s comments) and geolocation (the subject of my post) as well as how the two ideas overlap. …
February 16, 2005· 3 min read