I’m really excited to see the progress being made on The Peer to Patent Project.  Beth Noveck is doing a great leadership job on getting serious software companies – including HP, Microsoft, IBM, and Red Hat to engage and work together try to figure out a real Community Patent Review approach in conjunction with the USPTO.

At mile 15 on my run today, I heard one of my three favorite quotes in Atlas Shrugged.  Galt says to Dagny, “… it’s not that I don’t suffer, it’s that I know the unimportance of suffering.  I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one’s soul and as a permanent scar across one’s view of existence.”

As you can see from the elevation graph of my run, the timing of this was perfect. 

During my run from Anchor Point to Homer today (17.5 miles, 2000 vertical feet up, 1800 vertical feet down, 7 miles of highway with way too many 18 wheelers and mobile homes, and a steady rain), I had a lot of moments of suffering.  This was a hard run – but a glorious one.  Atlas Shrugged was playing on my iPod Shuffle – I’m almost to Galt’s radio speech.  I had just finished the major descent from the top of Homer Hill and was feeling great to have the really difficult run almost behind me.

I carry this mantra around with me every day in all things that I do – “it’s not that I don’t suffer, it’s that I know the unimportance of suffering.”  I’ve suffered plenty, especially when things don’t go as planned, products don’t work, customers defect, competitors stomp on your head, employees quit at critical times, people don’t live up to expectations, and – the ultimate – companies fail.  I’ve suffered everytime I had to downsize a company, lay people off, fire a CEO, drag my ass across the country on a redeye to try to deal with an emergency, or deal with someone that is irrational.  Failure – at any level – is a perfect opportunity to spend some time suffering.

However, the suffering is truly unimportant.  If you make a minor shift in Galt’s statement, substituting failure for pain, you end with “I know that failure is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one’s soul and as a permanent scar across one’s view of existence.”  Every entrepreneur should memorize this, remember it, and live it.  Failure (and suffering) is part of the experience, but it shouldn’t be part of your soul or a permanent scar across your view of existence.

I usually enjoy Tom Wolfe.  I remember reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test when I was in junior high and thinking something akin to “far out.”  I loved I Am Charlotte Simmons, especially Wolfe’s extraordinary detailed characters and complete mastery of the word fuck.

I never got around to reviewing I Am Charlotte Simmons but Ben Casnocha did today.  Ben is a recent high school graduate, a close friend, and an amazingly articulate guy.  His review of the book was as good as the book.  If you are in high school, recently started college, or a parent of either of the preceding categories of kids, this is likely to be a wildly interesting book for you to read.  If you simply love the incredible characters and storytelling of Tom Wolfe when he’s really on, you’ll also love it.

Tom Evslin, one of my favorite entrepreneur bloggers, has started a FeedBurner Network called My Way, The Entrepreneurs Network.  I love Tom’s blog Fractals of Change, was absolutely delighted by his book hackoff.com: An Historic Murder Mystery set in the Internet Bubble and Rubble, and enjoy all my interactions with him.  His Network already includes a few of my entrepreneurial friends that blog – such as Will Herman and Matt Blumberg – but have some folks that I don’t know such as Brian Berliner.

If you are looking for a daily feed of entrepreneurial wit and wisdom, I recommend subscribing to My Way, The Entrepreneurs Network. 

There’s been a lot of talk about Oracle being the major consolidator of mature software companies, but IBM continues to march forward aggressively.  They bought FileNet today for $1.6 billion and MRO Software a week ago for $740 million.  While – according to the Wall Street Journal – IBM has acquired 56 software companies since 1995, FileNet is the fourth largest after PWC Consulting ($4 billion), Lotus ($3.5 billion), and Rational ($2.1 billion). 

Historically, IBM has been a small to medium sized acquirer – many of their acquisitions are between $25m and $200m.  FileNet and MRO are chunky ones and help continue to build scale in the $17 billion plus (probably over $20 billion now) IBM Software division.

In the past few years IBM has acquired two companies that I was on the board of – Cyanea and DataPower.  Both companies were growing quickly pre-acquisition and doing great in their respective markets. IBM paid a nice price for each of them and – based on what I’ve been able to gather – is seeing a significant ROI on their purchases as they push the companies’ products through IBM’s massive sales and marketing machine.  This is both great for IBM and great for entrepreneurs as IBM will presumably be willing to continue to be an acquirer of strong, high growth software companies.

Cliff Reeves – currently at Microsoft – but also an alumni of both IBM and Lotus – had some good thoughts on the deal.  In my dealings with IBM, I’ve found them to be a deliberate and thoughtful acquirer – I expect IBM Software will continue to grow effectively through acquisition for the foreseeable future.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how pleasantly surprised I was by the thanks I got from John Minnihan of Freepository for a little help that I had given him.  I never expect anything specific in exchange for helping out – a simple thanks is plenty – but in this case his effort and thoughtfulness was really nice.

It happened again yesterday.  A week ago, a woman named Melissa Cummings was referred to me by an old friend.  She recently left Sun Microsystems (in Colorado) and is looking for a new job in the Boulder area.  My friend spoke highly of her and her resume was solid so I introduced her by email to a few of my portfolio companies along with a few other people in town that I know that I thought Melissa might fit with.

I got the following note from her yesterday.

Thank you so much for your help in introducing me to the companies affiliated with you and Mobius. I really appreciate it. I have a meeting with Lee on Friday afternoon — hopefully that will lead to more discussions.

As a token of appreciation, I’ve donated $X in your name to NCWIT — you should receive the tax receipt in the mail. That’s wonderful that you are on the board — it’s an important organization.

I was blown away.  Again, a thanks would have been plenty, but Melissa did some research on me, found out that I was chairman of the National Center for Women & Information Technology, went to the NCWIT website, and made an unexpected and generous donation to the organization. 

It’s gestures like this that make it easy for me to keep up random days, quickly help people that are introduced to me via one degree of separation (even if there’s no obvious benefit for me), and generally pick my spirits up about human beings whenever I read too much of the newspaper and get discouraged.

Terry Gold – CEO of Gold Systems and a long time friend – has a great story about his experience yesterday being up on stage with Microsoft at the SpeechTEK 2006 conference demoing Microsoft Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging and Speech Recognition.  Terry gives a good demo – and tells a great story – especially about a demo that was done with no safety net.

As the reality of agreeing to run a marathon at the North Pole settled in today, I was bombarded by intros from Tom Heinrichs to great cold weather / snow runners that had lots of advice to share.  All were incredibly quick to respond, encouraging, and full of great info. 

One of the first email exchanges was about snowshoes.  There’s at least a 50% chance I’ll have to run the race in snowshoes, so I might as well learn about them, train in them, and be ready for the possibly that my IceBugs won’t be enough.  The United States Snowshoe Association has tons of info about snowshoeing so that was a good start, but Tom’s friend Hal had a great summary of the stuff I needed to think about.

• Success in snowshoe racing is very dependent on the conditions. Most official snowshoe races in the US are a mix of groomed trails (by snowmobile) and “single track trails” that have usually been broken in – there are not many cases where racers are running through virgin powder. As a result, snowshoe racers commonly wear very small shoes.
• You should prepare for various conditions. You want a pair of very small, light weight shoes, a pair of “middle of the road” shoes, and a larger pair of hiking snowshoes.  Snowshoes tend to have a give and take between surface area and size/weight (inversely proportional).  Consider the following models:
• Small – Crescent Moon Dual Trac Super Lite (135 sq. inches) for groomed trail
• Medium – Tubbs Catalyst (used to be Tubbs 10K and many dealers know it by this name).
• Large – Atlas or Tubbs hiking snowshoes.
• It is very hard to hike in powder and I’m not sure how long it would take to do 26.2 miles of hiking in this. Some of the hardest stuff to hike in is crusty snow, but that usually occurs after a rain on snowpack or when diurnal sun cycle is high (when sun is rising in day and setting at night, causing melting and re-freezing.) I don’t think it’s possible that the temp is going above freezing at north pole, especially in April, so you should be fine with this. There is no melting/ freezing diurnal cycle because the sun angle is basically constant at pole.
• As for training, it’s a bit different than running. Training hip flexors is key and the best way to do this is to get on the snowshoes as early as you can in season.  Another way is to train with Power Cranks on a bike.
• If you started training in the fall you should be good. Some of the best snowshoers in USA are coming out of Colorado. There are usually several big races in Colorado each winter and I would definitely check these out as you will get practice running in shoes and meet other people into this.
• The advantage of snowshoes, even on light powder, is that they help keep each step consistent. With sneakers sometimes you’re staying on top of snow for 3 or 4 steps, then punching through and this disrupts your rhythm or can lead to injury.

If any of you have information or experience running in snowshoes, I’m all ears.

Yesterday Brocade announced that it was acquiring McData for $713 million.  McData is another of the long time Colorado storage technology companies – it’s now joining its friend StorageTek (now owned by Sun) as part of a California company (Brocade).  Look for lots of layoffs from this one as there’s plenty of overlap between Brocade and McData.  This is par for the course in Colorado and is actually part of the basis for the entrepreneurial activity here – the great people will cycle out of Brocade (either during the layoffs or after a little while when they get bored or frustrated) and join other startups.  I’ve seen this over and over again in the 10 years that I’ve lived in Boulder – it’s an interesting and powerful phenomenon.