Brian Kellner, my victim VP Product Management at NewsGator, writes a great timeline of “his view” of Product Focused Venture Capital. Look for the TypePad widget soon.
NewsGator released the beta of their Toolbar for IE and Firefox. While it’s beta, I’ve been using it for a few weeks and it’s pretty solid. A toolbar is long overdue, not just for auto-discovery (there are lots of plug-in options for NewsGator’s products – going back to 2004 – but you’ve got to work harder than necessary to find them or get them installed.) You can get the Toolbar here and – once it’s out of beta – it’ll be on the home page and in the product builds.
Remember – it’s beta. If you try it and have problems, tell us. Did I mention that it’s beta?
Now – this isn’t your ordinary toolbar. It’s tied tightly to NewsGator Online, NewsGator Inbox, and FeedDemon. As you’d expect, it has a Subscribe button and feed autodiscovery. However, it does smart things like find multiple feeds when they exist (say – on all those Typepad sites) and puts the FeedBurner one at the top of the list. Or – when you highlight a feed in Subscribe popup, it shows you the Title, URL, Description, and Number of NewsGator subscribers to the feed. Or – you can actually Preview the feed to make sure it’s got the stuff in it that you want.
Ok – you’d expect that. However, when you land on a page that has a bunch of inbound links, there’s a Discussion icon that lights up with the number of Recent Links. My FeedBurner Networks post got a lot of play over the weekend – Discussion finds 52 links (yeah – there are duplicates – those will get fixed – I already reported it) but via the drop down you can navigate around the inbound links. Yes – these are all in the NewsGator Online database.
How about the cute little Search box. Say you are interested in Marathons and want to find some Marathon feeds. The Search popup returns the top “marathon” feeds in NewsGator’s database, ordered by Number of Subscribers (remember – this is beta – there’s plenty of work to do on this one, including cleaning up duplicates and managing the search taxonomy.)
While the Toolbar in a vacuum might not be that exciting, I think the integration of the various products around the core NewsGator Online feed database in the middle – and the surfacing of a number of clever features (lots more coming) – is really cool.
On April 7, 2007 I’m going to run the North Pole Marathon. I’ve increased my marathon in every state goal to include the Marathon Grand Slam Club which is a marathon on every continent and on the Arctic Ocean in the North Pole Marathon. I’m super excited – in my “you only get one shot at this life thing” philosophy, this is a trip.
Tom Heinrichs, the Associate Director of the GINA Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, is the instigator of this madness. I met Tom last year on my trip to Fairbanks to talk about venture capital and entrepreneurship. He’s been a regular reader of my blog and we’ve corresponded by email over the past year about a variety of things. A week ago Tom asked me if I was interested in having the University of Alaska Fairbanks send me to the North Pole to run this marathon as part of International Polar Year. After doing a little research, I determined that IPY is a huge deal in research for the issues surrounding the Earth’s climate and – given all the focus on global warming (scientific, political, entrepreneurial, and otherwise) – it’d be fun to dig into, learn about, and participate in the real research side of things. In addition to UAF, a number of research groups in Boulder are going to be involved in IPY, which makes it all the more exciting and relevant for me. Today, Tom sent me a note saying that UAF has approved doing this and I said I “game on.”
I get to exercise three parts of me with this experience. The physical is obvious – this is not a trivial marathon. However, I’m a good cold weather runner and I like running in / on snow. The intellectual is – in some ways – even more powerful. I’ve been looking for an intellectual connection to global climate issues – beyond the mainstream global warming rhetoric. While I’ve been impacted by a lot of what I’ve read, I’m still struggling with the lack of critical thinking in many aspects of the discussion – both regarding the problem, but more importantly – the proposed solutions. International Polar Year has an extensive reach, over several years, which gives me a lot of different ways to exercise my brain and engage in these topics in non-mainstream ways. Finally, the experiential part – especially as I sit here typing in Homer, Alaska – cannot be denied.
I’ll be talking a lot more about this over the next nine months, including what I’m learning through my involvement with International Polar Year. We’re starting to line up sponsors – while UAF is making this happen – we plan to have a variety of interesting people and companies involved. Of course, I’ll be blogging regularly about the experience (and maybe even doing a podcast or two.) If you want to be involved – in any way – drop me an email.
Bill Venema sent me a copy of his book The Strategic Guide to Selling Your Software Company. If you are a founder of CEO of a software company and you’ve sold less than three companies in your career, this is a must read book. If you’ve sold three or more companies, it’s probably still worth having it on your bookshelf to pull down and look at when you are gearing up for the next sale you are involved in, or to be able to quickly hand it to one of your partners who has sold less than three companies.
I was surprised by the book – most books like this aren’t very good. I struggled through the first few chapters because of the setup – Bill uses a military context to describe how he approaches selling a company (the subtitle – “Essential Advice from a Veteran Deal Warrior” should have given that away to me.) However, once I got about 70 pages in (Chapter 4), I found the rest of the book to be easy to read, highly relevant, and a great basic overview of all the key issues involved in selling a company.
Bill has a broad background – including three degrees (one in engineering, an MBA, and a JD), Army officer experience, and 20 years as a transactional attorney. His writing is clear and concise – this book can be read from cover to cover or used as a reference. As you’d expect, Bill has a giant “caveat emptor!” at the beginning of the book followed by “this is not legal or accounting advice – hire a professional.” True – but this book will help you understand what the professional is talking about.
I love to invest in companies where I can be actively involved as a user of their products. One of the benefits of actively blogging over the past two years has been an opportunity to play / work with numerous entrepreneurs in my own “lab” (my blog) to understand how their technologies and products work, how the ecosystem around them evolves, and what seems compelling (vs. just interesting or clever.)
Several of my companies give me great opportunities to dig really deeply into their products and help with strategy, product vision, and implementation. They intelligently keep me away from any real coding or product development activity, but I’ve developed skills as a great alpha tester and feature describer.
An example of this is FeedBurner. I’ve been an active user of their service since May of 2004, well before I invested. I got to know the founding team (and they got to know me) through my use of their service. I was suggesting features and finding bugs well before I invested – and their reaction to the feedback was part of what caused me to invest (not simply listening to me, but arguing with me, and often explaining why I was wrong.) I’ve continued to aggressively use all the features and am excited whenever something new – like the early beta (or even alpha) of the FeedBurner Networks comes out – and I get to help dig in and help shape the final product. Of course, the real benefit (ultimately to FeedBurner and their publishers) is the phenomenal feedback loop – both positive, negative, critical, and random – that emerges as a result of both users and observers – and – in today’s world – is readily available on blogs commenting about the service.
Another example is NewsGator. I downloaded NewsGator for Outlook the day before I met with Greg Reinacker for the first time in 2004. I didn’t completely understand it, but after we met, I completely got it. Since then, I’ve been banging away with glee on all of the NewsGator products – along with the competitors products – as we try to stay solidly ahead of the pack with regular innovation across the entire product line.
Every now and then I stumble into a fun random gem buried in a product that I never realized as I’m trying to solve a problem. I had one of these experiences today – Amy asked me if she could have the blogroll on the right side of her blog be the same as a subset of the feeds she subscribed to in NewsGator. She had been manually maintaining this in TypePad (and I was doing the same on my blog on the left hand side – I subscribe to 800 or so feeds but only list the ones I regularly read on the blogroll.) I knew about the NewsGator Online “locations” feature that allows me to create different locations – my Homer computer, my Laptop, my cell phone – and select a subset of the entire feedlist for the specific location (e.g. I don’t want all 800 feeds on my cell phone.) However, I’d never thought about using this for the blogroll.
Yes – that is way too fucking hard. But – since I worked through it once, I was able to do it in under 5 minutes for Amy’s TypePad blog. Plus, because of the magic of synchronization, you can change the blog titles in whatever reader you user (e.g. Amy uses NewsGator Inbox – she right clicked, chose Properties, and changed the names of the feeds to what she wanted – e.g. “Feld Thoughts” became “Brad Feld: Feld Thoughts” and then appeared correctly on her blog in TypePad.
When I think back over the past dozen years that I’ve been doing this, my most successful investments were ones that I personally related to, could use their products, and could really dig into them. Now – I know I’m not the broad market user, and I never confuse myself with that person (especially with enterprise related products), but I do play one on TV. Plus – it’s a really satisfying approach to this business.
Amy grew up in Anchor Point, Alaska until she was 8 years old. We still own the land and make an annual pilgrimage when we are out here. Following is the view (of Mount Redoubt) from what used to be her living room window.
It’s 18 miles from our house in Homer. I know because it’s my run on Friday.
David Cohen, a Boulder-based entrepreneur and angel investor who I’ve done a few angel investments with and am now working on an interesting project with, has a great post up on how angel investors make investment decisions. If you are raising angel money, it’s worth a read.
I grew up with tornados (I lived in Dallas) so I never experienced many earthquakes. My first one was in the middle of the night in Walnut Creek, CA while sleeping in a hotel in the late 1980’s (Ramada Renaissance, I think). I’d taken a late night flight from Boston to California and was sound asleep in preparation for an early morning meeting at one of my California clients (Contra Costa Endocrine Associates.) I woke up, noticed the ceiling moving in the opposite direction of the bed, then noticed it going the other way, then noticed it going the other way, and thought I was having a heart attack or an aneurysm. About 15 seconds later it stopped and I laid in bed for a minute or so trying to figure out what was going. “Earthquake?” popped into my head, I called down to the front desk, and got a busy signal. Yup. “Hmmm – what do I do?” I didn’t know, so I went back to sleep. The next morning I read in the paper that it was a 6–something and one person died when they got disoriented and jumped out a window.
Amy – on the other hand – grew up with earthquakes. So – tonight as we were both reading as she was finishing her tea – in advance of a trip to Anchor Point – she looked up and said “Earthquake!” It took me a few seconds to figure out what she meant. We went downstairs to our computers, went to the Alaska Earth Information Center site, and didn’t see anything. A few minutes later, an earthquake (3.97 – let’s call it a 4) was reported at 7:39 PM AKDT 52 miles from Homer. It was short (only a second or two) – but it was definitely an earthquake.
JB pointed me at Dilbert’s comic on 8/3/06 that does a perfect job of explaining the problem with most PowerPoint presentations in 10 seconds.
A while back I wrote one of my periodic rants against PowerPoint. I’ve sat through so many horrible PowerPoint presentations that I’ve ceased to be patient with them. When I occasionally get a good one, I stand up and cheer. Of course – the problem isn’t PowerPoint – it’s the person that created the presentation in the first place.
After my rant, Cliff Atkinson sent me a copy of his book Beyond Bullet Points along with a nice note that said:
Brad, A complimentary copy hot off the press. Hopefully this can ease the “tortuous world of PowerPoint” a little bit! Enjoy, Cliff.
I’m usually pretty good about quickly getting to books that people send me. However, this one sat on the pile for a long time. Every time it got near the top, some mischievous book resorting goblin moved it back down in the pile. I finally chased the goblin away and read Cliff’s book tonight.
If you have to create or give PowerPoint presentations, you owe it to yourself to read this book. You won’t necessarily agree with everything Cliff says, nor should you slavishly follow his instructions, but his broad approach to using PowerPoint to tell a story – without bullets – is excellent and thought provoking. Nicely done Cliff.