Brad Feld

Month: April 2007

The first Boulder OpenCoffee Club happened yesterday at Amante Coffee on Walnut Street in Boulder.  I was in NY so I missed it, but I heard it was a lot of fun and had an interesting collection of people show up.  The next one is on April 24 – same place at 8am (although Jason is thinking about trying a different location to accommodate more people.)  I’ll likely be in town so I’m planning on showing up.  Hats off to Saul Klein for starting this phenomenon.


My partner and co-conspirator at AsktheVC (Jason Mendelson) guest blogs tonight.

Unfortunately, I (Jason) get stuck being the shareholder representative in our merger deals where we can’t find someone else to do the job. (Someone should start a company – hmmm.) We had a deal that over a year ago distributed the escrow, but the escrow agent wasn’t able to find a dozen or so shareholders and today, we still have $500,000 or so in the account.

Every month, I get a statement from U.S. Bank saying “Hi, you have $500,000 in your account.” And every month, I ask myself “what can I do to bring this to a close?” I’ve done the obvious. I’ve gotten the shareholder list, tried some Internet searching, asked former company executives if they know any contact information, etc. Nothing. (As an aside, I don’t really have a duty to do this, but I figured it’s all good karma to try.)

So today, I ask our friends at U.S. Bank “what happens” if these folks are never located. Simple, she says: the state gets the money. (In this case, the state being California.)

Huh?

It seems that money left in escrows defaults to the state after some period of time. Here is a little source of revenue for the state that I was previously unaware of. I began to ask myself is there a way that lawyers can better draft a merger agreement; i.e. all money left over in the account is distributed pro-ratably to shareholders who are locatable. Answer: no.

CA state law says that you must treat all shareholders equally. If you give one set of shareholders the consideration earmarked for other shareholders, you breach this covenant. Even is Delaware if the choice of law, or the companies involved are located outside of CA, it still may be possible for CA to go after you if the shareholder who doesn’t get paid is a resident of CA. You can, however remit the cash or stock back to the acquiring company if you so choose to do so. Um, yeah, thanks.

So, the bottom line is that the state has found a hidden revenue source and is using corporate law as a shield to support its position. I love it.

This example is relevant for California.  We haven’t done an exhaustive analysis of other states, but we will just for our perverse curiosity.


SharePoint Magic

Apr 09, 2007
Category Technology

Every now and then I stumble upon a piece of software that – after a few months of using it – I wonder how I ever lived without it.  My latest instance of this is SharePoint and it surprised even me.

I used to make fun of SharePoint when it was merely Microsoft’s Portal product (going back to 2000–ish.)  Folks I knew at Microsoft talked about the incredible number of seats they had sold, but I knew that they bundled it for free as part of their EA program.  Whenever it came up, I asked about the number of people that actually used SharePoint and often got blank stares.

In 2005, I first started hearing about Microsoft’s efforts to make Office a platform rather than just a set of desktop applications. There were lots of different names for the various technologies that Microsoft was going to incorporate into this platform – plenty of stuff ending in “Server” or “Platform Technology.”  In typical Microsoft fashion, they massaged and massaged and massaged this until they came up with MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Services.)

MOSS is great.  We’ve been using a variety of web-based apps, including one for our Wiki.  We tried a few CRM approaches (including the incredibly disappointing Microsoft CRM – as happy as we are with SharePoint, we are equally unhappy with Microsoft CRM.)  For the hell of it we tossed up a SharePoint server and started playing with it – we’ve never looked back.

Interestingly, we are still only scratching the surface of SharePoint.  The Wiki functionality works great, we’ve got a number of databases built, and we are starting to use it for internal document management.  Exchange integration works nicely and we’ve actually managed to create the level of CRM system we need with it with zero outside consulting help.

That said, there are interesting weaknesses in the product which several of our portfolio companies can help with.  NewsGator has had simple integration with SharePoint around RSS for a while – look for a much deeper integration with MOSS coming soon.  Microsoft promises a “Hosted SharePoint” (um – SharePoint Live?) product (expect an announcement at Mix in a few weeks), and there is an opportunity for cleaner integration with non-Microsoft APIs, especially around blogging and user-generated content.

I love finding a gem where I wasn’t expecting it.


Sometimes the web is a hysterical place.  Ryan sent me the brilliant description of The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel.  I wonder if this will have any impact on Chipotle’s stock price.

Also – if you were having difficulty getting access to my blog today, it apparently was a failure with the pneumatic tubes that connect my server to the Internet.


Longtime angel investor Bill Payne has a new book out called The Definitive Guide to Raising Money from Angels.  I read it last week and it’s excellent – if you are looking to raise an angel round it’s worth ever dollar of the $37 that Bill charges for it.

I first met Bill in the mid-1990’s when we were both working with the Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurial Leadership – I was an entrepreneur-in-residence and he was an executive-in-residence (both fancy titles for “consultant.”)  We worked closely with Jana Matthews in her “Learning Programs for High Growth Entrepreneurs” project, were deeply involved in the YEO / Kauffman Foundation relationship, and helped with the launch of the original Entreworld site (now eVenturing.)

Bill has been an angel investor in a handful of companies that I have been involved in (both successes and failures.)  I’ve always found him to be a thoughtful, helpful, and decisive angel investor.  He knows when he can help and when he can’t – and jumps in with both feet when he can. 

I’m glad Bill has spent the time putting together a book on his thoughts and experiences regarding angel investing.  So much of the stuff out there is garbage and many of the “experts” are really promoters looking for a quick buck on the back of an entrepreneur.  While there are loads of excellent angel investors, Bill is one of the few credible thinker / writer who is also an active angel investor.


Last August I somehow convinced myself that I was going to run the North Pole Marathon.  Fortunately around the end of the year I came to my senses and decided to give away my entry via a contest on YourRunning.com.

Bobby Bostic won the contest and ran the marathon (and the first 26.2 mile North Pole bike race.)  Yesterday I turned to Amy and said “well – the North Pole Marathon was today and our guy finished.”  She looked at me and said “even though the weather sucks here today, aren’t you glad you aren’t at the North Pole.”

Congrats Bobby. 


The Growth of Lucene

Apr 09, 2007
Category Technology

All of a sudden I’m seeing Lucene (and Nutch and Solr) being adopted by a bunch of my companies.  While several have been using it for a while, it’s spreading rapidly.  I’m curious about the experience folks have had with it – everyone I’ve talked to is thrilled; I’ve yet to hear from someone that said “it didn’t work for me and I decided to use ‘X’ instead.”  Any feedback?


Machine Beauty by David Gelernter was phenomenal.  I love the notion that a book written in 1998 should be classified as “a classic”, but given the premise of the book and the evolution of technology during the last decade, it fits this categorization perfectly.

Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale.  Machine Beauty is his treatise on the “elegance at the heart of technology.”  The first third of the book is his philosophical setup; the last third is his future vision – including a description of Linda and Lifestreams.  These are both fun and interesting.

The “classic” is his middle section detailing his view of the evolution of the aesthetics of computers, most notably the desktop metaphor and user-interface.  It’s not “just another history” – Gelernter is a clever and engaging writer and even though the history is now 10 years old, it holds up nicely.

I’ve been spending some time lately working on a theme called human computer interaction (HCI).  I’ve seen some amazing stuff in the past year around HCI, the radical success of Guitar Hero prompted me to think harder about different ways of interacting with computers, and the Nintendo Wii reinforced this. I’ve concluded that the world is ready for a new HCI model; while WIMP will be around for a long time, in many ways it has reached the same types of limitations that the text-based interaction model reached before the Xerox Alto appeared.

Gelernter anticipates a lot of this in Machine Beauty.  I don’t like his particular implementations (although if I manage to put my brain into 1998 context, they are pretty impressive), but his paradigms are thought provoking.  His narrative reminds us to remember that the huge breakthroughs are fundamentally elegant and successful implementations tend to build on these.  This appeals deeply to my inner architect / art lover which – of course – is part of the point.

Beautiful.


I wrote a post on March 12th titled Daylight Savings Time is Stupid.  A bunch of people agreed with me, but some didn’t, suggesting that (a) I was missing the point and it was more fun to have light at night than in the morning or (b) the “authorities” insisted that we’d get GDP gains, (c) there would be big energy savings helping save the world, and (d) restaurants and stores would make more money due to sunny night shopping.  Oh – and I also learned DST = daylight saving time, not “savings.” 

The guy in my shop that suffered the most was our IT guy Ross who had to update – well – a bunch of stuff.  Here are his thoughts a month later.

Good thing we all went through the DST change, right?

Well according to the US Department of Energy no.  It turns out what many of us already knew has been confirmed, the DST change (Daylight Savings Time) has made no difference in national energy consumption and probably cost us more than it saved in lost productivity.

So why didn’t this work? Weren’t we supposed to have more daylight and therefore have to use less electricity?  Apparently most of the electricity we use isn’t just for our lighting anymore.  It is our computers, plasma TV’s, Xbox’s (playing Guitar Hero of course), etc.  Since we are all home the same amount of time we’re all pretty much using the same amount of energy.  Seems like a no brainer to me and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Guess what, I’m not.  According to Southern Co. Power: “We haven’t seen any measurable impact.”  New Jersey’s Public Service Enterprise Group said the same thing: “no impact” on their business.  Great, so we went through all this work for, uh, nothing?

Well I guess not nothing.  It was a good excuse to update the phone system to the latest and greatest software (which didn’t prevent issues….) and I got to spend more time in the office late at night.  The guys got to miss meetings, doctors appointments, and have to constantly verify their calendars.  I guess it wasn’t all bad, it was really easy to blame anything and everything on “that damn DST change”.  Thanks Congress – all the IT guys out there appreciate it!