David Cowan – a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners – has started a blog called Who Has Time For This?
Frighteningly, David and I have known each other for almost 20 years. We met in college when David was at Harvard and I was at MIT. He had written a piece of software called DataRoute for his dad’s law firm and I had started a software consulting company called Feld Technologies (first client – a fraternity brother step-father’s dental practice in California; another early client – my dad’s medical practice – see a trend – thanks Dads!) I think I placed a stupid advertisement for our consulting services in some magazine (an early “Boston Tech Journal” type of thing) and got one phone call – David. We got together and eventually cut a deal (which included a legal document – I think drafted by David’s dad – which I think I read carefully about 30 times) for Feld Technologies to resell and support the DataRoute product and pay David a royalty. I think we sold about 10 copies at $500 apiece (although I fondly remember trying hard – it even found its way into an article in Legal Information Alert). Our motto for the product was “Today is the day to route with DataRoute!” Eek.
David’s had way more success as a VC than we had with DataRoute, having made a long series of successful investments since he joined Bessemer in 1992 including Verisign, Ciena, Flycast, Keynote, NetGenesis, ON Technology, PSINet, Register.com, and Trigo. We’ve currently got one active deal with Bessemer (Postini) and hope to have another one soon.
David’s extremely smart (even though he went to Harvard), an excellent writer (ok, he went to Harvard), and never shy about speaking his mind – his blog promises to be a good one. Welcome David!