If you are in Boulder on February 21st and interested in blogging and RSS, the Boulder Software Club is putting on an event at Cooley Godward’s offices at 380 Interlocken Crescent, Suite 900 in Broomfield. The panelists are Howard Kaushansky (Umbria CEO), Greg Reinacker (NewsGator CTO), and Seth Levine (Mobius Venture Capital). Paul Gross from Cooley Godward is moderating.
They’ll be covering the following topics:
If you are interested, RSVP to sms@dimensional.com or call 303–642–7168.
One of my favorite examples of things newspapers do that baffles me is to print the stock tables every day. While I imagine there are a small number of people that continue to read these over the breakfast table, I can’t imagine the cost/benefit analysis of providing these in every local newspaper is worth it.
Recently, there’s been a trend of newspapers deciding to dump the stock tables. Hint – there’s this thing called the Internet – you can get real time quotes for free all day long.
I talked to editors at two of the three local Denver/Boulder papers today and found out that The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News stopped publishing stock tables within the past two weeks and the Boulder Daily Camera is in the process of doing this also. Of course, I didn’t notice this because I read the newspapers online (via RSS and the web).
Oh well – I guess there’s one less thing that I can use to kick the local papers around about.
The following question appeared in my inbox the other day. “As you mention in this blog VCs never sign NDAs. Maybe you can also tell me why actually not? If I follow your blog does it mean that in most cases they simply want to check the startup out?”
For starters, I’ll restate the assertion. Most VC’s don’t sign non-disclosure agreements. Guy Kawasaki had a good comment on it in his Venture Capitalist Wishlist post.
“Before you even start addressing the hard stuff, never ask a venture capitalist to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). They never do. This is because at any given moment, they are looking at three or four similar deals. They’re not about to create legal issues because they sign a NDA and then fund another, similar company–thereby making the paranoid entrepreneur believe the venture capitalist stole his idea. If you even ask them to sign one, you might as well tattoo “I’m clueless!” on your forehead.”
That basically says it all. I’d add a few things:
There is one type of NDA that I’ll sign. Some large companies – for some reason – want to show you stuff, but then don’t want you to tell anyone about it “until they are ready.” I can usually deal with this as it’s not worth the ensuing arguement. However, I don’t need to sign an NDA for this – all they have to do is ask me to keep my trap shut “until they are ready.”
As an entrepreneur, don’t think of this as “arrogance”, think of it as “practicality.” Your friend the VC is actually trying to save you time and money. If you think you have something super secret that no one else should know, just don’t tell me about it. Oh – and check your assumption in that case – especially since the value is in creating the thing, not simply having the idea.
NPR had a priceless piece on blogging and marriage last night by Julie Zickefoose. “I’m trying to figure out when these slim white machines took over our lives.” Julie covers heroin, reader comments, and daily postings. “This is weird, scary, and strangely satisfying at the same time. Where did they find me? Why do they care?” Lots of good advice about marital blogging and topic swiping.
I can’t get Chris Wand – who works with me at Mobius – to write a blog. Nonetheless, he is a good writer. He’s just published an article on the Kauffman eVenturing site titled Considering Debt Capital. Well worth reading if you are an entrepreneur thinking about using debt financing, even if Chris won’t start a blog.
Googlepark: The Spaghetti Code is out in the continuing saga of Google vs. Microsoft vs. the world. I especially liked the sing along.
I’m chuckling as I write this. After writing a few posts on S-Corps, C-Corps, and LLC’s, I had an email exchange today with someone that is putting together a small angel round. He read my posts and concluded that he should do a C-Corp. He’s only planning to raise a small angel round now and a follow-on angel round in a year – no VC, no significant financing, and no complex capitalization. In addition, if the business is successful, it’ll start generating profits and positive cash flow in year 3.
In this case, a C-Corp makes no sense, especially because of the risk of double-taxation if the business becomes profitable. An S-Corp is fine, but the company potentially has a foreign investor as one of its angel investors. In addition, the company is already an LLC, so converting to an S-Corp would be a pain. Since the entrepreneur has no plans to raise money from VCs, the answer – in this case – was to stay as an LLC.
See – it depends. Snicker.
Last week West Corp announced it was buying Raindance Communications for $110 million. This comes two weeks after West Corp announced it was buying Intrado for $465 million. You could say this is “Omaha making a move to take over Boulder” as both Raindance and Intrado are based near Boulder (Raindance is in Louisville, CO and Intrado is in Longmont, CO – the two are 18 miles away from each other and the fastest way between them is through Boulder.)
I was a seed investor in Raindance and on the board through their IPO in 2000 (I left the board in 2001). The three co-founders of Raindance – Paul Berberian, Jim Lejeal, and Todd Vernon are close friends. While Raindance never hit their IPO valuation after the dotcom crash, the company became a real business that has been solidly profitable and cash generating over the years.
Intrado – which is soon to be Raindance’s cousin – is also a strong Colorado company. It’s been around for a long time and through plenty of ups and downs, but has done well under the leadership of George Heinrichs. I met George once and – while I haven’t done much with Intrado – George and his team are extremely well regarded locally.
I have no idea if West’s move into Colorado is deliberate, but they’ve just picked up two good local public companies. While I can no longer buy conferencing or E911 services from a Boulder-based company, now that Crocs has gone public, I can still buy bizarre shoes.
Amy and I both travel with our laptops. Lately I’ve been using my Verizon EVDO card everywhere. It’s awesome. I was thinking about getting Amy one when Ross suggested that she could simply buddy breathe off of mine. We tried it for a week when we were in Miami – it worked flawlessly. It’s a little tricky (e.g. “non-obvious”) to set up – the directions are below.
There are two laptops. The first – the “Master” (e.g. mine) is connected to the Internet. In my case, it was connected via EVDO, but it could be WiFi or via a physical ethernet connection. The second – the “Slave” (e.g. Amy’s) connects to the Master via a WiFi connection.
Configure The Master Laptop
Configure The Slave Laptop
That should do it. Both computers should be able to access the Internet (assuming the Master is connected to the Internet.)
While this works nicely when you want to share, it’s no so nice when you want to go back to your primary connection. On both the Master and the Slave, you’ll need to undo this change. If you don’t do this when you’re done you’ll effectively be cutting yourself off from WiFi.
Undoing Buddy Breathing
This assumes you are using DHCP to connect. If you settings – prior to making the buddy breathing change are for a static connection (e.g. you don’t “Obtain Automatically” the IP and DNS) – you need to put the static IP settings in.