We’ve just made a modest investment in Slice of Lime.  We’re excited – but Kevin Menzie, Jeff Rodanski, and their team are “extremely excited.”

Before you say “hey Brad – why are you making an investment in a small, local, web design and development firm”, stay with me for a second.  Put your Warren Buffett “I invest in great people that I like in businesses I understand that can make money over a long period of time’” hat on, and try to remember a little about my past.

I first met Kevin when he was working for Return Path.  At some point, he went to part time (Return Path didn’t need a full time person in Kevin’s role) and he worked out a deal with Matt Blumberg (Return Path’s CEO) to start Slice of Lime with Return Path as his first client.  As part of this, we introduced Kevin to a few of our portfolio companies and he was off to the races.

He reminded me a lot of myself when I was starting my first company (Feld Technologies.)  Hungry, smart, willing to do anything to satisfy a client, unusually responsive, and a complete sponge for new information.  I loved his style and we were (or at least I’d like to think we were) continually helpful – for no reason other than we thought Kevin did great work.  Over time, I got to know Kevin’s partner Jeff – who also is a stud – and my respect and enthusiasm for them grew.

Over time, they did a lot of work for companies I have invested in, including Return Path, NewsGator, and Collective Intellect.  They also did work for some of the other organizations I’ve been involved in, including the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, the Women’s Wilderness Institute, and Blink Gallery.  They did a bunch of work for me also, including the Feld Thoughts and AsktheVC sites.

Thanks for staying with me.  If you know me, you know why we made this investment.  Kevin and Jeff have been running a nice, small, cash flow positive business.  They have been in the good position of having too much demand for their services.  They also have built some great frameworks that allow them to do stuff very economically.  Over the last year we’ve spent some time with them giving them advice on how they could expand their business.

One of the biggest stresses of trying to grow a small professional services business is to hire slightly ahead of demand.  If you do this too fast, you’ll run out of money.  If you do this too slowly, you’ll choke on the work and go through a classic feast and famine dynamic (too much business one month, not enough the next.)  If you are capitalized the way Feld Technologies was (e.g. with ten dollars), there is no buffer.

We decided to provide a little bit of buffer for Slice of Lime.  While we would never force any of our portfolio companies to work with them, we obviously endorse them and recommend them highly.  And – as a number of other people did with me early in my first business – I hope when Kevin and Jeff look back 20 years from now they view us as key mentors for them.

On 8/8/06, while in excellent shape (I ran the New Mexico Marathon on 9/3/06), I somehow convinced myself that it would be a fun idea to run the North Pole Marathon.  By the end of December, I realized that there was no way I’d be able to maintain the level of training necessary to do it.  I also realized that I’d taken leave of my senses in August when I signed up for this.

I’d paid for everything so I decided that – in conjunction with YourRunning.com – I would give away my entry.  Today we’ve announced that Bobby Bostic is the winner of our contest and will be running the North Pole Marathon in April.

See more videos like this at Running at YourRunning.com

There were 65 incredible entrants with awesome stories.  I’m blown away – and inspired – by the fitness level and accomplishment of these folks.  Congrats Bobby.  Time for my run. 

My dad (Stan Feld) has been talking about the electronic medical record for as long as I can remember (probably 30+ years.)  As a kid, some of my early computer projects were trying to write a program that had some semblance of addressing this – well before I had any grounding in (or understanding of) databases, user-centric data entry (um – the “web” anyone?), or distributed data (um – the “Internet” anyone?)

When I finally learned what a relational database was (about 24 years ago – Btrieve was the first database that I mastered – yes – I’m old enough to have started with an ISAM instead of an RDBMS.) I got excited about the idea of building an electronic medical record.  I’m sure part of this was to please my dad – but part of it was because it seemed like such an obviously useful thing.

Over the last 24 years, I’ve watched numerous people and companies fail miserably at this.  In my first company, we did some consulting to a few larger health care organizations (really “multi-group medical practices and a few hospitals) around this but nothing really emerged, other than a couple of customer patient management systems that really had very little to do with the patient’s medical record.

30 years later Stan is still talking about it.   His post yesterday titled Electronic Health Record Part 2 continues a theme he’s been on for most of his career.  I’m sure there are plenty of other doctors out there that say something like “I believe a patient should be responsible for his / her medical history”, but I know my dad has been saying this to his patients since the day he started his medical practice.  My dad tells you how to solve the Personal Medical Record side of this equation today for $15 but goes much further by detailing the issues around The Complexity of the EMR Issue.

Over the last dozen years, I’ve seen many entrepreneuers and many business plans that proport to create a universal electronic medical record.  I still don’t have one and I know there isn’t a ubiquitous approach for this.  You’d think that with all the money that’s spent (and wasted) in our health care system, we’d be closer to a solution. 

If you are an entrepreneur that is working on this problem and you want to hear the issues from the belly of the beast, I’m sure Stan would be happy to talk to you.

Last night at dinner Howard, Jason, Amy, Elizabeth, and I were discussing the JetBlue meltdown from last week (that continues today.)  The most bizarre thing to me was the relatively weak response from David Neeleman – the CEO – who is known for being outspoken, direct, and clear minded even in a difficult situation.  This morning’s New York Times finally has a strong quote from him in which he says he is mortified after fliers are stranded.

In this article, Neeleman shows he is very aware how badly JetBlue has screwed up dealing with this situation.  The article states “Mr. Neeleman said he would enact what he called a customer bill of rights that would financially penalize JetBlue — and reward passengers — for any repeat of the current upheaval. He said he would propose a plan to pay customers, after some amount of time, by the hour for being stranded on a plane.”

In addition to finally speaking up, Neeleman is quoted as saying “I can flap my lips all I want. Talk is cheap. Watch us.”

Shortly after reading the NY Times JetBlue article, I came across Sagi Rubin’s post titled A great startup CEO comparable in which he reminded us of the management greatness of Winston Wolf.

“So, pretty please, with sugar on top, clean the fucking car.”  I sure hope Neeleman has a Winston Wolf on his team to help him deliver on his promises.

When I first met Dick Costolo – the CEO of FeedBurner (well before I had invested in FeedBurner), he had a blog called SomethingICantRemember that had a hysterical “what would I do if I was CEO of Disney” post.  Over the last three years we’ve become really good friends and business partners.  I’ve learned a huge amount from Dick and his partners – and not just about feeds.

Relatively early on in our relationship, Dick stopped blogging.  He’s a classic always working entrepreneur and blogging quickly fell to the bottom of the pile as FeedBurner started its incredibly rapid growth curve.  Amy and I have had a few nice dinners with Dick’s wife (who I’ve nicknamed Tiffany – hi Tiffany) and I can only imagine her rolling her eyes whenever Dick says something (at 2am) like “I really should start blogging again.”

Apparently the effort that Jason and I have put into Ask the VC has motivated Dick to start a blog named Ask the Wizard.  If you know Dick, you get the sarcasm here and – if you don’t know him he gives you a hint with in his Welcome to Ask the Wizard post where he says “and it also brings to mind the Wizard of Oz, in which unsuspecting Dorothy only realizes too late that the Wizard is just another jackass with stage lights.”

If you are an entrepreneur (at any stage – including an aspiring one), wander over to Ask the Wizard and subscribe.  At the minimum Dick will have you chuckling whenever he posts and says something like absolutely correct like “If you find yourself reading this and thinking “There’s no way I can pitch everything about my product in only 8 slides”, I assure you that you are wrong. Nobody wants to sit in a room and read data-packed powerpoint slides with pull quotes from Gartner Analysts that describe your market as being a 9 bazillion dollar industry in 2012. Get a short pitch deck together that tells a story.”

Chris Anderson notes that The Innovation In Gaming Isn’t On The Screen.  Having just benefited from the incredible success of Harmonix / Guitar Hero and and having become fascinated with the Wiimote, I’m starting to search for the input jack on the back of my head.

One of my favorite CTO’s (Tim Wolters – CTO / co-founder of Collective Intellect) is on the road fundraising and has some posts out on the process and terms he’s starting to see as they move from foreplay to term sheet.  Me and VC is a great quick rant on feedback (“why would you even meet if you knew geography would be an issue?”, Term Sheet Terms: On Good Terms is a setup (hopefully) for some additional posts on Term Sheet terms, and Travails of Travel is a priceless post channeling whatever anyone who has been on the road recently has been feeling (including yet another example of the business value of a Slingbox.)

Since I’ve been working with and investing in Internet-related companies, I’ve always been fascinated with what creates a community.  Most of my investing activity has been around the infrastructure side of this problem – most notably companies that create the Internet substrate for creating, engaging, and managing community.  Occassionally I’ll venture into a company that is trying to do something with an actual community.

Recently, my head has been in this in two dimensions.  I’ve got a couple of “substrate” investments, including Me.dium and Lijit.  They started in different places but addressed a similar problem.  As they have evolved, they are diverging even more, but helping me really understand two sides of a very complicated issue.

The stimuli for thinking about both of these came from my realization – mostly through playing with MyBlogLog and talking to Fred Wilson – that I already had an actively engaged community on Feld Thoughts (yes – that would be you.)  My playing around with coordinating the FeedBurner VC Network helped me understand the dynamic even better.  But these were all self-referential communities – ones that were oriented around “Planet Brad” (I like to describe my own little world – the one that I’m at the center of – as Planet Brad – to distinguish it from the real universe), rather than ones that I joined because of affinity.

I’ve had a couple of investments around actual communities, including Judy’s Book, Enthusiast Group, and Dogster.  I’ve learned different things from each of these, but the most from Dogster about how a high affinity community actually grows.  When I first heard of Dogster, my reaction was probably the same as most investors (“social networks for dogs?  That’ll be a dog.”)  Wrong.  Ted and his gang get it and are masters of Planet Dog (and Planet Cat).  They’ve got a great quick presentation up that they did at CommunityNext titled Community Is Your Most Valuable Asset that is worth a look if you care about any of this stuff.

If you don’t, just remember that for those of us with mild dyslexia (or compulsions), we occassionally confuse dogs and gods, which occassionally turns into a really religious experience.

Yum.  Snowcrash anyone?