Brad Feld

Month: April 2007

Exactly 20,000 miles.  What numerical fun!


The Cool Product Expo

Apr 08, 2007
Category Education

I got a note yesterday from David Abramson – an MBA student at Stanford – about The Cool Product Expo which is taking place from noon to 6pm on Wednesday (April 11th) at the Arrillaga Alumni Center (326 Galvez Street) at Stanford.  Admission and parking is free – the event sounds very cool.  Following is a description.

The Cool Product Expo is an annual exposition celebrating innovative technologies and product design. An attendee walking through the Expo will encounter exciting demonstrations by budding startups, global manufacturers, local design studios, and university research projects. It is a great opportunity to learn about the latest technology advances, as well as interact with successful entrepreneurs and industry leaders.

This year the Expo will be hosting 40 companies, including Tesla Motors, Toyota, Sling Media, Aliph, Venture Vehicles, Method, Linden Labs (creators of Second Life), Neurosky, Logitech, AiLive, Frog Design, Oliso, Powercast, Optibike, Lunar Design and many more.

As a special feature this year, Gibson (renowned maker of fine guitars) will be giving away a cherry-sunburst Les Paul Standard electric guitar with 50s style neck. Entering the drawing is free, and the winner must be present at the time of the drawing.

The Cool Product Expo is supported by Stanford Graduate School of Business and Stanford’s Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing (AIM). The event attracts over 1000 visitors each year include Stanford students, technology investors, school children, and members of the greater Bay Area Community. Please feel free to invite your family, friends and colleagues to this entertaining and educational event.


My partner Chris Wand is finally blogging (even though he’ll deny it) over at AsktheVC – he’s writing a series on what should be in a “board reporting package.”  My long-time friend Will Herman – who happens to be hanging out in Boulder this week making the rounds (and getting his bike fitted – whatever that means) – inadvertantly contributed with his post titled Communicating with Your Board: Sales NumbersWill’s post covers some good ground – I can’t tell you the number of times a clear sales report is missing from a board package.  It’s even worse when there is a sales report, but given the fact that I attend N board meetings a year (where N is a large number) the CEO doesn’t create any linkage to historical performance, current expectations or the plan.  Great stuff.


Books: My Start-Up Life

Apr 06, 2007
Category Books

My friend Ben Casnocha’s book titled My Start-Up Life hits the stores on May 18th.  The website for the book – being published with Jossey-Bass (Wiley) is up.  It’s all great stuff – I’m super excited about this having read, commented on, and contributed a short piece to the book.   It’s always fun to end up on the back cover of a book – here’s my quote:

This book is extraordinary. I predict it will be a New York Times bestseller. While the world is filled with inspiring stories, there are few as insightful, enlightening, and powerful as Ben’s.

Help my prediction come true – pre-order your copy of My Start-Up Life now.


On Monday StillSecure announced their Cobia Unified Network Platform (UNP).  Alan Shimel (StillSecure Chief Strategy Officer) and Mitchell Ashley (StillSecure CTO / GM Cobia) have blogged extensively about it.

I’m a huge fan of John Zagula and Richard Tong’s book “The Marketing Playbook” – especially their notion of a Platform Play.  I use this approach with many of my portfolio companies – StillSecure is one of them.

StillSecure’s historical products form the base of this platform play.  While security software is a fast moving and very fragmented market, StillSecure has built a security software platform business with Strata Guard (IDS/IPS), VAM (Vulnerability Management), and Safe Access (Network Control).  These are best of breed products that have won many awards and have rapidly growing customer bases.

Cobia builds on this product family.  About a year ago Raj Bhargava (StillSecure’s CEO) started talking to me about the idea of the convergence of security into the core of the network.  Historically there has been a huge amount of focus on security at the edge of the network with the latest incarnation being end point security (which StillSecure’s Safe Access addresses extremely well.)  

The traditional approach ends up with a proliferating number of single purpose devices that are needed (proprietary and otherwise) to secure a network.  This is silly – there are two approaches to this cutting down the number of individual devices needed: SaaS and converging multiple functionality on a single device.  While some people talk about SaaS being a tough one in the security domain, our portfolio company Postini has had superb success with SaaS for Email Security.  

StillSecure has taken the second approach with Cobia: today’s hardware is powerful enough that converging multiple functionality onto one device – especially that which combines networking and security. To support this thesis, unified threat management (UTM) systems have become a huge market in security.  These devices combine firewall, VPN, gateway AV, anti-spam, content filtering, IDS/IPS, etc. in one box.  Why stop there?  The basic networking functions such as routing, switching, DNS, DHCP in addition to newer networking functionality such as wireless access points and VoIP can run on the same platform! 

Cobia is envisioned as the platform that will allow you to run any number of combination of these on one appliance. My friends at StillSecure have been hard at work on this product for the past year and have released the first beta.  The initial response from technical folks that have looked at and played with the platform has been outstanding.  If you are involved in managing your network infrastructure and want to play around with the software or contribute to the Cobia community, we’d love you to come take a look, give us feedback, and participate.


Reuters had an article out today titled US reaches visa cap, skilled workers out of luckAs someone who is constantly trying to recruit great software developers for companies I’m an investor in, this is an insane situation.

The US Immigration Service apparently “reached its annual quota for visa applications in one day.”  The article summarizes the situation:

“The Citizenship and Immigration Services received a record of more than 150,000 applications for the H-1B visa on Monday, nearly double the number of visas it can grant for the fiscal year beginning October 1, 2007. Individuals cannot apply for the visa. The employer must apply or submit a petition on the worker’s behalf. The visa is good for up to six years. The government will grant 65,000 visas to those who hold the equivalent of an undergraduate degree and possess the technical expertise in a specialized field, such as engineering and computer programming. Another 20,000 visas will go to people with advanced academic degrees who have technical expertise.”

There is just no reason why there should be a quota on this type of H-1B visa.  I don’t want to delve into the more generic immigration policy issue, but we are talking about highly educated employees in a segment that is seriously supply constrained, especially if you believe anything about demand over the next 10 years.  One of the main reasons I’ve been as involved as I have been in the National Center for Women & Information Technology is because I believe that we don’t have enough qualified software developers in the US and one way to solve for this is to get more women interested.  

It certainly doesn’t help when the government artificially constrains the supply of H-1B visa, especially from people that are already employed.  Maybe a few of our presidential candidates gearing up for a 2008 run will understand this issue.


Boulder OpenCoffee Club

Apr 03, 2007
Category Places

Earlier this year Saul Klein sent me an email about an idea he had to create a meeting spot for entrepreneurs and VCs in a community to get together on a regular basis.  Saul’s idea was that this would be like a “Coffee Club” – same location and time on a weekly / bi-weekly basis.  I responded that I thought it was a cool idea and my partner Jason decided to help set one up in Boulder.  Saul subsequently launched OpenCoffee Club which is sprouting up in a bunch of cities around the world.

Saul’s vision was simple: “the key is a regular place and a regular time – it’s not important who comes along, some days it might be no one – just that people know if they want to meet, this is the time and this is the place.”

So – the Boulder OpenCoffee Club’s regular place is Amante Coffee at 1035 Walnut St, Boulder, CO 80302 and the regular time is every other Tuesday starting April 10 from 8am to 9:30am.  If you are interested, sign up on the Upcoming site.  Also – join the OpenCoffee Club Boulder social network.

Looking forward to seeing you sometime.

 


Traveling Fool

Apr 03, 2007
Category Places

As I stared across the table at my partner Ryan, he said to me “hey – we just got up in the middle of the night to come to California to have breakfast in at Stacks in Menlo Park.”  Alarm clock start time: 3:15am Mountain.  Stacks: 8:00am Pacific.  There’s something fundamentally wrong with this.  The Lox Scram (without capers) however is yummy.  Who said “blogging about what I had for breakfast” wasn’t trendy.  Maybe I should start Twittering.


In 2005, Jason Mendelson (my partner and co-author of AsktheVC) wrote what has become an extremely popular series dissecting the “term sheet.”  The feedback we got from it encouraged us to write several more series of blogs and ultimately led to us deciding to start writing AsktheVC to answer random questions from entrepreneurs.

Last Friday I pointed to a post from Dave Naffzinger (Judy’s Book) about Stock Options from an Entrepreneurs Point of View.  I woke up today to two more great entrepreneur posts on term sheets.  The first is from Dick Costolo (FeedBurner) titled Venture Terms – Liquidation Preferences and ParticipationThe second was titled Term Sheet Hacks was on a new blog titled Venture Hacks and written by Naval Ravikant (Vast.com) and Nivi (EIR at Atlas Ventures.) 

When I started this blogging thing back in May of 2004, I stated that I was motivated by Fred Wilson’s post on Transparency I love that smart entrepreneurs are adding to the body of knowledge out there around the funding process.  I’ve always been befuddled that a financing (both angel and VC) and the “term sheet” are such as mysterious thing.  It has been rewarding to get thousands of emails over the past two years thanking me / Jason for what we’ve written – and it is fun to see some smart entrepreneurs continuing to add to the demystification of the term sheet.