I’m playing around with ads in my feeds. I’ve enabled the Feedburner feature to insert Amazon ads in my book feeds and Overture “context based” ads in several (but not all) of my other feeds. The ads should appear at the bottom of the feed so they should be easy to ignore if you aren’t interested in them.
I’m looking for both feedback (a) on relevance and (b) unobtrusiveness.
I just finished Joel on Software. It is fabulous! Joel Spolsky – CEO of Fog Creek Software – has written a must read book for everyone in the software industry.
Joel has a popular blog by the same name as the book. While some of the book is a simple refactoring of his blog posts over the past few years, don’t be fooled – this is a well organized, often hilarious, and always insightful compendium of Joel’s thoughts. It’s fresh. And relevant. And – almost always dead nuts on.
If you are a software developer, I expect you’ll roll around on the floor in empathy while simultaneously gleaning new insights into why the world are you is so bizarre and the marketing people in your company are so stupid. You’ll gain a deeper understanding of the cause of the general cluelessness of venture capitalists and still wonder why Microsoft doesn’t have a .NET linker (but it’ll inspire you to go searching for one on Google.)
If you manage software developers, or are a manager in a software company, you’ll end up with a much deeper understanding of what a typical software developer worries about when he’s not smirking at the last thing that came out of your mouth. You’ll learn why you should never try to set software development strategy based on what you read in airline magazines and why it’s just fucking dumb to create incentive programs for software developers that treat them like they are still in kindergarten.
If you are the CEO of one of my companies, don’t bother buying this book. You’ll get one in the mail from me in the next week or so. However, if you are someone else, and want to learn about – in Joel’s words – “on software and on diverse and occasionally related matters that will prove of interest to software developers, and managers, and to those who, whether by good fortune or ill luck, work with them in some capacity”, buy it now.
P.S. I don’t know Joel, but I respect him, even if he worked at Juno.
My NewsGator Keyword Search Feeds picked up a couple of new blogs from employees of two of my portfolio companies. I posted recently about a few new Mobius VC bloggers – it’s fascinating to see the spread of blogging to our portfolio companies.
First up is Sandy Hamilton. I’ve known Sandy for several years – he’s worked at a couple of my portfolio companies. He’s currently the SVP of Sales and Business Development at NewsGator where he’s kicking butt. He just started two blogs – the first on his personal musings on business and life and the second on corporate applications of RSS.
Next up is Jason Groshart, one of the software engineers at Gold Systems. Gold Systems CEO – Terry Gold – recently started blogging. It’s neat to see Jason follow.
Welcome guys!
Jeff Nolan beat me to it with his “Attn PeopleSoft Employees” post, but he’s right on the mark. Given Oracle’s announcement that they are laying off 5,000 people today, a lot of experienced IT folks will be hitting the streets in the next few weeks. Like SAP Ventures, we’ve got a number of enterprise software companies that would love to talk to experienced sales, marketing, and engineering ex-PeopleSoft folks.
Email me if you are ex-PeopleSoft and are looking for a new gig and I’ll hook you up with some of our relevant companies.
My friends at Return Path just released a book called Sign Me Up! : A marketer’s guide to creating email newsletters that build relationships and boost sales. We’re really excited about it – Matt Blumberg does a nice job talking about it in his post today. I read the final draft a few months ago – if you care about email marketing in any way, this is a must read.
Writing a book is a bitch. I was involved in one of the first books on the web called Build a Web Site: The Programmer’s Guide to Creating, Building and Maintaining a Web Presence (Practical Programming). I was chairman of Net.Genesis at the time – we managed to get a book contract with a publisher called Prima (who now appears to be part of Random House) – they paid us a whopping $25,000 advance and we committed the book in a few months (three or four – I can’t remember.) I remember the Net.Genesis guys torturing themselves to get this done with a Prima-sponsored writer who had minimal technical chops, but was a good person and forced the beast out. It’s pretty cool to look back and see one of the first web books with a publishing date of April 1, 1995 (no – it’s not an April 1st joke, but it sure felt like one at the time.)
For some unknown reason, the memory of this experience had the same half-life as childbirth, and the Net.Genesis guys wrote a second book called Build a World Wide Web Commerce Center: Plan, Program, and Manage Internet Commerce for Your Company – this one was even more painful (I remember Raj Bhargava and Eric Richard surrounded by piles of paper pulling all nighters as they tried to grind it out in the midst of running a rapidly growing software company) – and I can’t even remember the size of the advance. Its publication on June 1, 1996 was the end of Net.Genesis’ book publishing career (although they went on to publish plenty of software.)
I’m proud of Matt and crew for getting this one out. Matt and his team didn’t seem to lose their minds writing this book – in fact, Matt’s ends his post by saying “boy was the experience we had different than it would have been 10 years ago.” No doubt (and thank “whatever diety you worship, if any!”)
I love my T-Mobile Sidekick (powered by Danger’s hiptop platform) – which you can currently get for free on Amazon.com with all the rebates. Of course – since Danger is one of our portfolio companies – I’m supposed to love it. But – I really I do (I’ve been a handheld user forever and have a closet full of Palm’s and RIMs, including a Palm VII (yuck-o-loa – remember that dog?.)
I’m not alone. Danger just announced that over three billion (3B!) IMs were sent and received over the hiptop wireless platform in 2004. For perspective, there were 22.8B SMS messages sent across ALL OF the carriers in the US last year. If you’ve ever sent an SMS message on a cell phone and had the opportunity to send an IM on a hiptop, you’ll understand why IM’s on hiptops represented 10% of the total SMS traffic on cell phones (a huge percentage of traffic on a small percentage of enabled devices when you count cell phones + Sidekicks.)
IM just keeps on rolling.
BusinessWeek Online just launched a blog called Deal Flow – Inside the World of Venture Capital and Startups. It’s fun to see Main Stream Media get in the blog game.
In our series of posts on Term Sheets, Jason and I thought we’d take on a relatively easy one today. In our previous posts on Price and Liquidation Preferences, we discussed the key economic terms that VCs care about. In this post, we tackle one of the two primary “control terms” that matter to VCs.
VCs care about control provisions in order to keep an eye on their investment as well as – in some cases – comply with certain federal tax statutes that are a result of the types of investors that invest in VC funds. One of the key control mechanisms is the election of the board of directors.
There is no secret science in the board of director election paragraph – it simply spells out how the board of directors will be chosen. The entrepreneur should think carefully about what they believe the the proper balance should be between investor, company, founder and outsider represenation should be on the board. There are many existing VC (and entrepreneur) posts concerning the value of a board, the desired composition of the board, and what a board is responsible for. This post doesn’t delve into those issues – we are simply addressing how the board is selected.
A typical term sheet looks as follows:
Board of Directors: The size of the Company’s Board of Directors shall be set at [n]. The Board shall initially be comprised of ____________, as the Investor representative[s] _______________, _________________, and ______________. At each meeting for the election of directors, the holders of the Series A Preferred, voting as a separate class, shall be entitled to elect [x] member[s] of the Company’s Board of Directors which director shall be designated by Investor, the holders of Common Stock, voting as a separate class, shall be entitled to elect [x] member[s], and the remaining directors will be [Option 1: mutually agreed upon by the Common and Preferred, voting together as a single class.] [ or Option 2: chosen by the mutual consent of the Board of Directors].
If a subset of the board is being chosen by more than one constituency (e.g., two directors chosen by the investors, two by founders / common holders and one by “mutual consent”), you should consider what is best: (a) chosen my mutual consent of the board (one person, one vote) or (b) voted upon on the basis of proportional share ownership on a common-as-converted basis.
VCs will often want to include a board observer as part of the agreement either instead of or in addition to an official member of the board. This is typical and usually helpful, as many VC partners have an associate that works with them on their companies. While there’s rarely any contention about who attends a board meeting, most VCs will want the right to have another person from the firm at the board meeting, even if they are non-voting (an “observer”).
Many investors will mandate that one of the common-stockholder chosen board members be the then-serving CEO of the company. This can be tricky if the CEO is the same as one of the key founders – often you’ll see language giving the right to a board seat to one of the founders and a separate board seat to the then CEO – consuming two of the common board seats. Then – if the CEO changes, so does that board seat.
While it is appropriate for board member and observers to be reimbursed for their reasonable out-of-pocket costs for attending board meetings, we rarely see board members receive cash compensation for serving on the board of a private company. Outside board members are usually compensated with stock options – just like key employees – and are often invited to invest money in the company alongside the VCs.
I can’t claim credit for this one – it was the header of an invite I just got to an upcoming ThinkEquity Software Research and Banking Team’s lunch. Their suggestions are:
I’m definitely up for join the gym.