Brad Feld

Month: October 2007

dot.corn?

Oct 13, 2007

Today’s Rocky Mountain News has an article titled Is dot.corn honeymoon over?  As someone in the middle of the dot.com thing (and I hated hated hated the label dot.com – or dotcom as it evolved), I found this completely hysterical (and appropriate.) 


Frank Shorter has an excellent essay in the NY Times titled Running Into TroubleIf you are a long distance runner, you are probably aware that last week’s Chicago Marathon was halted after three hours after dozens of people were hospitalized and one runner actually died. 

I ran Chicago in 2003 and it was my PR by at least 20 minutes (4:05) and an awesome experience.  It’s a great race for first time marathoners which makes the experience last Sunday even more devastating as anyone that has trained for a marathon for the first time knows how emotionally important it is to finish.

Everything I’ve read the 2007 Chicago Marathon so far has been reactive – speculating on what happened and laying out facts and figures.  Shorter’s essay is the first prescriptive article I’ve read – if you are a marathoner or race organizer Running Into Trouble is worth five minutes of your life.


Evil Patent Things

Oct 12, 2007
Category Technology

This one has all the trappings of a potential debacle.  Patent holding company targets Linux, files lawsuits against Red Hat and Novell

  • A patent dating back to 1987 describing a “user interface with multiple workspaces for sharing display system objects.”
  • A firm that appears to exist only to be a patent troll.
  • Suspicious links to various companies.
  • Our “friends” in East Marshall, Texas.

As some superhero once said, “there are evil forces at large in the world.”  Where is Super-No-Software-Patent-Man when we need him?


In his post 30 Thoughts At 30,000 feet, Fred Wilson referred to Alex Iskold as “a freak of nature.”  Fred supports this by saying “He writes code, runs a company, and does amazing blog posts for Read Write Web that are better than most Gartner research reports. I’d ask how he finds the time to do all of that, but I know the answer. Full disclosure – Alex’ company, Adaptive Blue, is a Union Square Ventures portfolio company.”

I’ve gotten to know Alex over the past year (I’m also a small investor in Adaptive Blue) and I’ve begun referring to Alex as “the big brain.”  Almost all of our communication is via email (I see him every now and then) and I’ve started envisioning him as a gigantic brain suspended in some funky liquid with a cable coming out of it that is connected to a computer (if I was a little better with Photoshop I might even draw you a picture of it.)

As Fred says, Alex “does amazing blog posts for Read Write Web that are better than most Gartner research reports.”  I agree and read each of them carefully as part of trying to increase my cognitive reasoning functions around the theme I call The Implicit Web.  Alex’s post today titled The Structured Web – A Primer is another excellent one.  In this post Alex does a great job of linking together four things that I spend plenty of time thinking about – APIs, semantic information, microformats, and RSS. 

Keep them coming Alex.


The really cool thing about having friends like Paul Berberian is that I can act out my desire to participate in a real life equivalent of Being John Malkovich.  Paul has a fascinating new company that is launching at the end of the year.  His product is both physical and virtual; the physical part of it (nicknamed “the bong” by me) is manufactured in China. 

I don’t really have any desire to go on an eight day business trip to a factory in Qingdao, but it’s awesome to read Paul’s description of it in his post China visit – nothing is as it seemsNow – the conclusion (signaled by the title) is no surprise, but my voyeristic view of Paul’s week was satisfying this early morning in Boulder.

Best “how I viewed it” moment: “Generally negative on the food experience but positive on the environment – we ate inside a giant green house –trippy. BTW dog sucks – it is chewy and tastes like dog!”

As a special bonus this week, I got to go to GwangJu, South Korea as part of my experience of Being Kimbal Musk.  Those pig heads look worst then I envision the dog did.


BusinessWeek has a fun article about my buddies Jesse and Joe from J-Squared Media titled Who wants to be a Facebook millionaire?  Jesse and Joe were founders of one of the TechStars teams this summer – when they showed up their original idea was to create a sharing tools that would distribute links to your networks of friends (not in Facebook – on the web.)  The Facebook Platform launched shortly after TechStars started and Jesse and Joe got all over it – today they have two very popular apps on Facebook (Sticky Notes and GlitterBox) and are generating over $45,000 / month of revenue (wow – not bad for two dudes in a basement on $10,000 of investment.)

Jesse and Joe exemplify scrappy first time entrepreneurs.  Other than the tiny initial TechStars investment, they bootstrapped everything.  I fondly remember a meeting in early July when Sticky Notes started taking off and Jesse and Joe were dying – they were staying up all night every night trying to keep their rapidly expanding number of servers up.  We tossed some smart people at them (including Tony – the ClickCaster stud) who quickly helped them figure out some magic server stuff to deal with scale.  By late July, Jesse and Joe still looked tired, but they weren’t lying on the floor in agony.

The BusinessWeek article is a quick read through the kinds of things Jesse and Joe are dealing with as they figure out their next step.  Early acquisition offers (from both private and public companies), rapidly growing revenue (reinvest this cash now while it’s coming in!), potential VC investment (how much should we take at what price and why?), and endless feature requests (“Hii! Awsome app!! Just one thing You have the PowerPuffs except for one, Bubbles!! Can she be added, plz?”)

What a great example of early stage entrepreneurship.


Scoble has a 20 minute interview up with Eric Norlin discussing Defrag and other conferences that Eric has helped start.  If you haven’t heard of Defrag, it’s a new conference being organized by Eric taking place in Denver on November 5 – 6.  The sound bite overview is:

Defrag is the first conference focused solely on the internet-based tools that transform loads of information into layers of knowledge, and accelerate the “aha” moment. Defrag is about the space that lives in between knowledge management, “social” networking, collaboration and business intelligence. Defrag is not a version number. Rather it’s a gathering place for the growing community of implementers, users, builders and thinkers that are working on the next wave of software innovation.

In short – “the Implicit Web.”  The agenda and lineup of speakers is incredible.  Eric has done an incredible job and has been blogging furiously about it.  

Now that we are less than a month out, it’s time to register if you want to join us.  The conference will sell out because we’ve capped the total number of attendees so sign up now and come play.


Well – now that a few days has passed it’s old news that Solidware has joined the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado.  I’m pleased to announce the newest member of EFCo – ClickCaster.  We are now up to nine announced members with several others coming soon.

If you are the CEO or founder of a startup and want to learn more about joining the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, drop me an email.  Or – grab me after my morning keynote session at the CSIA DEMOgala on Thursday with Governor Bill Ritter.


I’m about to head out to play an early game of tennis with my brother Daniel.  He sent me the following picture from our recent trip to the US Open for inspiration.

It’s pitch black outside but I’m sure the sun will be up around 7am when we hit the court.  Note the snazzy belt I’m wearing – that was my September life dinner gift from Amy (she upped the ante in October – a lot.)