Today the Houston Chronicle went live with FeedBurner’s feed management service.

When I invested in FeedBurner, one of my premises was that traditional media would rapidly adopt RSS for content distribution and – as part of this adoption – would aggressively look to outsource part (or all) of the feed management activities to a company (e.g. FeedBurner) that had built out a broad series of feed management tools and services.  I had real conviction about this (as did Dick Costolo and the FeedBurner team) so I didn’t bother calling anyone that I knew in traditional media – given how early things were with regard to the adoption of RSS, most of the people I knew would have said “tell me what RSS is again?”

A potential investor was less convinced and talked to a number of his traditional media friends.  They all said – unambiguously – “no way – we’d never outsource that – what that RSS thing is.”  Of course, a year later, all the folks that this potential investor had talked to has outsourced their feed management to FeedBurner.

This is a classic challenge in the VC “due diligence” process.  All VCs (including me) want validation that the product, service, or technology will be adopted by the market targeted by the entrepreneur.  However, in very early markets, this is extremely difficult to validate and more often than not you end up with “potential customer bipolar disorder” – either customers say (as in this case) “no way – not interesting” or – alternatively – they say “definitely – I’d love that” but leave off the key phrase “if it was free.”  Obviously, bad decisions can be made if one places an inappropriate weight on this variable.

In an early market, I’ve decided that this validation isn’t important to me.  I don’t blindly invest – I think hard about it – but I recognize that whatever market data I collect could easily be a complete head fake.  As a result, I look for analogous situations in older markets (especially ones that I have experience with), use my instincts, and think hard about how things might play out.  I recognize – a priori – that I could be wrong and I’m willing to take that chance.

In FeedBurner’s case, I was right.  FeedBurner has already built up an incredible customer base of traditional media companies who are outsourcing their feed management to FeedBurner.  Look for more announcements coming soon – the Houston Chronicle is simply a good example of how deep into mainstream media (the Houston Chronicle is a top 10 newspaper and is part of Hearst Corp) this can go.

Several weeks ago, Postini announced a new product called PTIN Access – enabling enterprises, solution providers, and OEMs to have access to the Postini Threat Identification Network.  PTIN is Postini’s real-time sender behavior analysis for email threat prevention and is the core for Postini’s remarkable email security service (which I like to refer to as “magic” as this is what it’s like to go from a spam-filled inbox to no-spam at a flip of a switch.)

Today, Postini announced that Return Path will use data from PTIN to support the Return Path Bonded Sender email accreditation service.  While whitelist and blacklist services have existed for a long time, they don’t work very well anymore in today’s spam filled world.  As a result, legitimate emailers get blocked (or categorized) as spam regularly and – in an effort to deal with this via whitelists – spammers exploit these lists and bad stuff gets through.  There’s a tough balance here as directory harvest attacks, phishing attacks, virus, and ever more sophisticated spam approaches increase the pressure on email security providers, resulting in “tighter filters”, which then blocks legit email, and on and on it goes.

Return Path has been at the forefront of the email deliverability issue.  Postini has been at the forefront of the email security / anti-spam issue.  I’ve been involved in a number of investments around email over the past 10 years and know – as well as most – how the level of complexity around email has increased as it has become pervasive in our lives.  It’s completely logical and exciting to me that Postini and Return Path would work together to help separate good email from bad email. 

I ran the New York Marathon with Matt Blumberg yesterday.  We started together, finished together, but only ran about 3 miles total together.  This was my fifth marathon as part of my quest to run a marathon in every state by the time I turn 50.

Since the first or second question I get asked is “how did you do” (the other one is “how do you feel”), I feel surprisingly good today (only a little “extra soreness”) and finished in 5:06:45 (place 27,811, although I came in first in the “brown haired jewish guy from Eldorado Springs, CO 39 year old category).  It was a little slower than I was shooting for (my marathon PR is 4:05 and I’m usually around 4:30) as it was hot, humid, deceptively hilly, and I was a little undertrained for this one.

The New York Marathon is one of the crown jewels of marathoning (there is a group of people trying to put together a “grand slam series” for marathons and New York will undoubtably be one of them.)  The start is unbelievable – about 40,000 people congregate at Fort Wadsworth in Staten Island and wander around for two hours eating bagels, stretching, peeing, drinking water, and peeing some more before the cannons go off.  It took us about 10 minutes to get across the starting line, at which point Matt took off as he was planning to run faster than me.  The race touches all five boroughs, although the bulk of it is in Brooklyn and Manhattan. 

Since I can’t recall ever being on Staten Island or in Brooklyn or Queens (other than passing through on the way to an airport), I feel compelled to rate them.  Using a marathoner’s point of view, Manhattan was by far the best energy of the race, followed by Brooklyn.  Queens was so so (and pretty bleak looking), Staten Island was a non-event (it was – after all – merely a two mile bridge run across the Verrazano-Narrows), and the Bronx was just depressing (at mile 20, you really want someone to cheer for you, rather than just sit on the steps of a building looking totally bored by your agony).

The race was surprisingly hilly.  As I struggled down 5th from 120th to 80th (mile 22 to mile 24), I kept feeling like I was in an Escher painting as I remember running uphill on 1st from the 80s to the 120s (or maybe I was just delirious).  I’m a good hill runner but I took the Queenborough bridge way too hard and was completely wasted at mile 18.  It was a very long last 8 miles.

I passed Matt around 17 (he went out too fast, the heat got him, and he started struggling at mile 12).  I was completely surprised to see him, not only because I expected him to sail through the race, but because I was already in tunnel vision mode at 17 and only looked up when I heard a mildly annoyed “Mr. Feld.”  We stuck together a little and then I clomped on, only to hear a cheerful “Mr. Feld” at mile 23 as Matt caught back up.  We stumbled through Central Park and put on a good show the last mile, passing about 1,000 people (but no Ethiopians) on the way to the finish line.

Matt and I were both very happy to be finished.  The city of New York really showed everyone a good day – if you are a runner, this is one you must do sometime in your life.

5 down, 45 to go.  The next one up is Miami on 1/29/06.

A few weeks ago I wrote about web design mistakes.  One of the things that stuck in my head was that Google (and now Microsoft and Yahoo) have trained us to use a [blue black green] design.  It’s interesting to run into sites that use search and observe how I react to either (a) this design or (b) a different design.

Today I saw a demo of Indeed.com which was positioned to me at “the Google for job search.”  A quick search for jobs for firemen in Colorado brought up that [blue black green] thing.  In contrast, when I looked for jobs in Colorado in delicious (no fireman jobs, so I had to drop that tag) the [blue black green] UI was now [blue light_blue red_highlight].  My brain definitely reacted differently – on the Indeed site I knew exactly what to do based on the colors; on delicious I had to think a little (not much) harder.

It’s well known that Google AdSense performance varies dramatically based on how they are incorporated into the site (position, background color, foreground color, size).  My instinct is that this applies to the UI format that search is presented in as well.

Now – I’m not a huge fan of the [blue black green] UI – it doesn’t take a lot of effort to come up with something that is aesthetically nicer.  However, given the zillions of people who have had their “search behavior” trained by Google (and Yahoo and Microsoft), it seems like paying close attention to this UI is important.

Steve Rubel has a good article up that answers the question “What is enterprise RSS?”  There was a point in time where people talked about this thing called “SMTP.”  Now – it’s just “email.”  Wouldn’t it be fascinating if the same thing happened to the thing called “RSS”?