Today, FeedBurner announced that it has acquired Blogbeat.  Congrats Jeff.  Congrats FeedBurner.

On February 22nd, I installed Blogbeat (ah – the joys of a good stats package – it’s easy to find out the day you started using it.)  On February 28th, I wrote an updated “New and Exciting Stats” post on my blog where I mentioned Blogbeat.  I’m a stats junkie – I was the seed investor in one of the first web analytics companies (NetGenesis) and had one of my big investment successes with another (Service Metrics).  Stats have been very good to me.

I liked Jeff Turner (Blogbeat creator) from the first time I met him (via email).  I had a very similar experience with Jeff that I did the first time I interacted with Dick Costolo (FeedBurner CEO and co-founder).  In both cases, I was messing around with their stuff and I had a problem.  I sent an email asking a question.  Within minutes I had a response, an answer, a suggestion, and a conversation going.

Jeff was one of the first people I knew to exercise the FeedBurner API and integrate FeedBurner subscriber info into his stats.  He got it – and knew what to do with it.  As FeedBurner continued to build out depth in their stats, it made sense to take a classical “build vs. buy” approach.  The fit with Jeff / Blogbeat was great.  Hopefully you’ll agree when the new, integrated products roll out in Q4.

Lest you think I’m one-dimensional, email has also been very good to me.

Rick Segal carries his toilet seat into a grocery store to make a point and Scott Converse builds a craptop.  It must be summertime.

On page 16 of the July 3rd BusinessWeek, I noticed a short article in the Wired Life section titled “Teaching The Press Release A New Trick.”  I was kind of hoping it would say something like “don’t bother with press releases anymore.”  Oh – how wrong I was.  BusinessWeek was crowing about SHIFT Communications new “Social Media Press Release” template.  At least Jack and Suzy Welch are podcasting – maybe the two things will balance themselves out (or not.)  And – if you ask why I’m reading the paper copy of BusinessWeek – a guy has to have something to read in the bathroom.

Both Amy and I love to read.  Normally, I read a book or two a week; when we are up in Alaska I usually get through four to eight per week.  If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know I review a lot of books (or at least comment on them.)  Rather than torture you with lots of posts, I figured I’d do a weekly summary of what I covered.

Amy and I are both determined to lose some weight this summer (marathons are tougher when you are dragging an extra 20 pounds around.)  For inspiration, I started the week with 8 Weeks to Optimum Health and The Raw Food Detox Diet.  Neither of these had much impact on my weight (ok – I had some fried halibut at Boardwalk Fish and Chips) – 8 Weeks to Optimum Health was useful if you are overweight and have never really thought about healthy eating / healthy living and The Raw Food Detox Diet has way too many exclamation points in it for my taste (although it has some good recipes.)  I did drop a pound this week, but I attribute that to the mileage I covered, not the change in diet.

A blog reader introduced me to the writing of Dennis Lehane (I can’t remember who you were – can you leave me a comment here so I can publicly send you the equivalent of a dozen roses.)  His books are amazing, intense, complex, scary as shit, deep, extremely well written.  I got through the first four (of five) this week: A Drink Before The War, Darkness Take My Hand, Sacred, and Gone, Baby, Gone.  Like all good murder mystery PI crime books, the characters are complicated, get built up over time, and their past plays into their future.  Lehane feels like a cross between Robert Parker (set in Boston, a pair of PIs) and Harlan Coben (deep, sick, twisted bad guys), but more sinister, more sexy, and more violent.  Yum.  I finished each of them late at night and had trouble going downstairs alone.  If you like these kinds of books, these are must read mental floss. 

My pile of unread business books continues to grow faster than I read them (hmmm) so I tackled three of them this week.  The first one I read – So You Built It And The Didn’t Come, Now What? – was disappointing.  The author – Jackie Bassett – was an early employee of NetScreen and someone recommended this to me.  I thought it was poorly edited, lightweight, and weak on examples (lots of examples, but very few of them were impactful.)  There were a few good chapters on sales and sales management – the book is probably worth buying and skimming just for this if you are struggling to figure out how to effectively build and manage your sales organization.

Compassionate Capitalism is a book co-written by Marc Benioff – the CEO of Salesforce.com.  Salesforce.com and Benioff have been outspoken about the value of corporate philanthropy and the Salesforce.com Foundation is a great demonstration of Benioff’s philosophy in action.  The book is well organized, full of examples, and though provoking.  Every CEO should read this book, even if you don’t think you value corporate philanthropy.  As a special bonus, in addition to philosophizing and giving examples, it has lots of practical suggestions about how to approach corporate philanthropy.

Fire Someone Today was written by Bob Pritchett, the co-founder and CEO of Logos Research Systems.  It turns out that Bob is a Seattle YEOer and friends with some of my Seattle friends such as Andy Sack and Richard Rhodes.  I really enjoyed this book – Bob’s full of practical advice and experience.  It’s an easy and quick read – perfect for a CEO or entrepreneur that wants to brush of some of the mental cobwebs, or someone who is thinking about starting a business.

Every week deserves a good nerd book – this week was Growing Your Business With Google written by local Boulderite Dave Taylor.  Dave is an energetic writer and this book is in “The Complete Idiot’s Guide” series of books.  It’s definitely “a beginner’s guide to Google, blogging, and making money with your website”, but it’s well written, covers plenty of ground, and is easy to get through. 

Somewhere in the middle of the week I read 24-Karat Kids.  Again – someone recommended it (I can’t remember who – if it was you, please post a comment).  This was good, lighthearted mental floss.  Amy kept looking at me and asking “why are you reading that book?” but it was fun, entertaining, and a Nanny Diaries-like book that I could sort of relate to.

Overall, it was a great week for books in my world.  If I had to chose a few, I’d definitely do all the Lehane books, Compassionate Capitalism, and Fire Someone Today.  Time for a two hour run (and another two hours of Atlas Shrugged on tape) to see if I can knock a little more weight off.

The very first angel investment I made after I sold my first company was in a company called NetGenesis.  Will Herman and I were the initial seed investors; I was chairman of the company for the first couple of years.  Eric Richard was one of the co-founders and one of the technical brains behind the company.  Eric stayed actively involved with company for much longer than I did – through the IPO and then the ultimate sale to SPSS.

I haven’t seen Eric much over the last eight or so years, but we email periodically.  This morning, among other things, he pointed me to the first letter to the editor that he’s had published.  It’s a letter in his local paper (the Sudbury Town Crier) titled: Nobody cares about 50 years from now.  Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” had an impact on Eric and he writes eloquently about it.  Regardless of whether or not you believe in “the crisis of global warming”, Eric’s thoughts and suggestions apply.

I’m in love with The Hamilton Building – the expansion to the Denver Art Museum designed by Daniel Libeskind.  Not everyone is – Slate had a generally critical photo essay titled “The Mile-High Club: Why Experimental Architecture Isn’t Working Out For Denver” that was forwarded to me by my friend Ben.  In it, the author Witold Rybczynski shows the three signature buildings that are clustered together with his commentary.  He has great photos of The Hamilton Building, Gio Ponti’s original Denver Art Museum (built in 1971), and Michael’ Graves’ Denver Public Library (built in 1996). 

Rybczynski concludes that “the three buildings in Denver make an odd grouping.  Not a success – they simply don’t add up to anything meaningful – but an interesting failure. For one, they reflect the different faces of architectural Postmodernism: Aestheticism, Historicism, Expressionism. Architecture’s tottering, wayward course between 1970 and 2000 is all here. These buildings also show the peril of shock as an architectural compulsion…  Shock is delightful in an amusement park, but in a building it can only, in the long-run, prove an anticlimax.”

While I’ll never be an architecture critical (or professor) – my reaction to these three buildings is the opposite.  When standing at a place where you can see all three, my reaction is a simple “whoa.”  They are extremely different styles – all expressing deep creativity – that provoke strong emotions.  When you do a 360 and look at all the surrounding buildings, the cluster of the these three building are a bold and radical statement in the middle of an otherwhile bland, typical, and unremarkable scene.

I guess Rybcznski’s experience with the Mile High Club is not as positive as mine.

No – this isn’t going to be a post about the father, the son, and the holy ghost. 

I’ve done a number of investments in the past few years that have three possible constituencies: (1) subscribers, (2) publishers, and (3) advertisers.  While I won’t try to map them to a particular member of the trinity, they share one thing in common with the trinity – if you believe in them, they are all critically important.

Early in my career, I ran a custom software company.  We built PC-based business applications primarily for small and medium size companies back when dBase II was considered state of the art and a Novell fileserver took 24 hours and 600 disk swaps to build (assuming you had the right drivers for v2.0a.)  We had our equivalent trinity: (1) cost, (2) speed, and (3) quality.  After a while, we learned that we could solve for two of these, but not all three. So – we started explaining to our customers that we could deliver on any two of cost, speed, and quality, but not all three. 

I’ve been pondering the same trend today, just with a different set of constituencies.  The metaphor is a little different this time around – I’m finding most successful companies serve one constituency and get paid by another.  For example, Google serves the subscriber (or user – although I prefer to call end-users “subscribers” in this metaphor because I think you can map “user” to any of the three categories) and gets paid by the advertiser. 

Interestingly, I’ve run into a number of companies that can’t decide who they are serving and who they are getting paid by.  In a number of cases, I’ve run into people that think they are serving all three but getting paid by none, or who present potential revenue models to me where they get paid by all three.  Now – a company can have different segments of their business where they shuffle the constituencies around (Microsoft is a classic example of this) – but this is really hard for a startup.

As with my experience with my first company, I’m finding that when companies understand how they are serving their constituencies, they are much more effective at accelerating their business.  It also makes partnering a lot easier, as you know that someone who serves the member of the trinity that you don’t should make an easy partner (e.g. neither of you is a threat to the other), while someone that has perfect overlap with you is a more difficult partner to solve for.

Time to go pray (I mean work.)

I’m trying to do a marathon in every state by the time I turn 50.  I’ve got 7 down and 9.5 years to go.  Today, I got an email from a reader named Gary that pointed me at Sam Thompson’s website describing his efforts to run a marathon in each state in the next 50 days.  Sam has already nailed 12 of them (in the last 12 days) and is in Albuquerque as I write (probably recovering from the Duke City Marathon or on his way to Wichita, Kansas for tomorrow’s Wichita Marathon.)  He’s doing this to donate to the Mississippi Coast Hurricane Relief efforts – my check is in the mail.  Sam – you are a nut – a good nut.

I expect The Chairman post I just put up will be controversial.  If you have a different perspective, or a bad experience with a board that has a chairman, please feel free to weigh in.

Also – I’m still thrashing around a little with Writely and its blog posting feature, so if you got two copies of the post in your feed (one starting with the title “Rob Shurtleff – a”, please ignore that one – the correct post is “Board of Directors: The Chairman.”

And – no – not all of the boards I sit on have a Chairman.