Brad Feld

Month: December 2007

As snowstorm #2 in Boulder the last week starts to diminish, I thought I’d offer up a picture of what it looks like in Homer, Alaska right now (at 10:30am Homer time.)

That dark stuff on the bottom 10% of the picture is land.  That lighter dark stuff at in the middle of the picture is the ocean.  The top half of the picture is probably dark, fog, and clouds.  That little dark stretch of land going to the left across the bottom of the picture is the Homer Spit.

Dark.

I went for a 5 mile run on the Boulder Creek Path this morning at 7:30am.  No one was out, the snow was coming down hard, and there was plenty of "cushion" (e.g. snow) on the ground.  It was stunning.  And light.


One of the hallmarks of a great entrepreneur is knowing what you suck at.  I suck at plenty of things – Paul Berberian’s blog The Name Game reminded me of one of them – naming things.

I was an investor in Paul’s last company – Raindance Communications – which went through five names to get there (Intellistat Media Research, Vstream, Evoke, Evoke Software, and finally Raindance Communications.)  At some point I suggested we change the name to Ekove (read Paul’s story to learn why) but I was over-ruled – or rather, ignored.  Paul ends his story with the line "My Advice – don’t do what I did" which should always be an enticement to read it.

My legacy of names for companies is long and troubled.  It starts back at the beginning with the name of my first real company – Feld Technologies.  Very creative.  My dad was proud of me, but I learned rule #7341 – don’t name your company after yourself.

After moving to Boulder, I co-founded a company with Andrew Currie and Brian Makare.  The business created the first known (at least to me) email service providers.  At the time (1995) none of us knew what an email service provider was.  We struggled to name the company.  Over beers one night I asked "so – what do we do?"  One of Andrew or Brian (I can’t remember) annoyingly looked over at me and said "We publish email."  Hence – the name of the company – Email Publishing.

Another company that I helped start at the time was an attempt to create one of the early consolidated web hosting companies.  At the time there were lots of companies doing web hosting with loads of creative names that typically included the words "web" or "communication" or "network" somewhere in their names.  We named our business "Web Hosting Organization" and then shortened it to WHO, which caused much amusement (and confusion) in the ensuing legal documents we used to acquire other companies.

Around 1999 I gave up naming things.  I realized that virtually every company I invested in was going through name changes and the marketing people were gleefully spending investor money "rebranding."  I put this in the "what a fucking waste" category and started being more aggressive about my current mantra – "pick a name and stick to it, but please don’t ask me for my opinion on it."

Oh – and the name of this blog fits in that category also.  Feld Thoughts?  C’mon…  But I’m not changing it.


Just in time for the annual presentation of The Nutcracker, I can now get my very own Hillary Nutcracker without having to go to the ballet (thanks Dave.)


Tristan Louis nails it in his post Personal Relationship ManagerI think the only thing he missed are blog comments.  Too bad PRM stands for the now mostly defunct "Partner Relationship Management" category.


A Bad Microsoft Day

Dec 10, 2007
Category Random

My IT guy Ross has been having his fair share of them lately.  Ross has been blogging about silly Microsoft tricks, including Microsoft you’re about to lose me and Why Microsoft, why?

Ross isn’t limiting himself to bitching about things – he’s also offering useful suggestions such as Disabling Vista auto update.  Plus he’s writing about some obscure stuff such as Installing Vista on a MacBook Pro using Imagex.exe (only obscure if you don’t want to do it!)

I’ll continue to endlessly torture Ross by saying "hey Ross, can you …"  Hopefully he will continue to write about his experiences.  If you have an inner IT guy within your soul, or if you are an end user who just wants to hear about someone who is banging their head on the wall trying to get this crap to work quietly in the background, hang with Ross.


A Good Microsoft Day

Dec 10, 2007
Category Random

I’ve been having plenty of bad Microsoft days lately.  If you’ve been following the adventures of "Brad the boy who loves new toys" you know that I recently bought a new MacBook Pro to try – once again – to switch from a Vista box to a Mac.  Since I’m writing this on my Vista desktop (with my beautiful 30" Apple Monitor) you can likely infer that the switch hasn’t been going very well.  Yup – I’m having bad Apple days also – mostly "using Exchange and Sharepoint on a Mac sucks rocks" days, which might actually still be classified as a bad Microsoft day with Apple as the collateral damage.

At BlogWorld Expo a few weeks ago, I was wandering the exhibition hall while killing time before my panel.  I noticed a small Microsoft booth with Windows Live Writer on the monitor.  I made a catty comment to the guy in the booth (something like "so – is it out of beta yet?")  He recognized by name, grabbed me, and said "yup – I’ve got to show it to you."

I tried to run away, but I’d lost.  "But I use BlogJet and am very happy.  I tried to use Live Writer before and it was good, but sucked at a few things."  The guy didn’t give up.  It turns out he’s Charles Teague, who is the dev manager for Live Writer. 

Charles made me stand there for a few minutes and tell him what I had trouble with in the past.  I threw out a few things I vaguely remembered and he showed me the solutions.  He then had me so he kept on demoing.  As I saw more and more good stuff, I finally broke down and said I’d give it another try.  It’s free, so what the hell.

A month later I’m a complete convert and ready to uninstall BlogJet.  Live Writer is fantastic, does what you want it to do, and even works seamlessly across Sharepoint (which we use extensively.)  Plus, Charles reminded me of the passionate Microsoft product guys of yesteryear that I used to know and love.  Keep it up Charles!


Upon my return from a week off the grid, I was slaughtered by Facebook invites, LinkedIn invites, and an endless stream of unread blog posts.  It only took me 75 minutes of my morning routine to get through all of them.  The most entertaining ones had parallel structure to them:

  • "you are my friend on Facebook – I thought we should be friends on LinkedIn"
  • "you are my friend on LinkedIn – I thought we should be friends on Facebook."

Of course, if I hadn’t turned off email reminders for both services I would have also had email messages alerting me to my new almost friends.

Pete Warden – who I met through some special friends that I’ll be talking about shortly after the new year – showed me a really cool visualization of his Outlook Graph when he was in Denver for the Defrag conference.  He’s now made the alpha available for anyone to play around with (against your Outlook data store.)  Social network as a function of email.

Fred Wilson is now living in twitter, tumblr, and disqus.  I’ve been pestering Fred for a few months about the hidden social network across blogs, especially embedded in comments (Fred uses Disqus – I use Intense Debate.)  Social network as a function of blogs + comments.

There is another layer of structure here that some smart people are working on, but so far I haven’t found "the company" that is doing this.  The metaphor that popped into my head was portal vs. Google.  Before Google, we had Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, and a bunch of others.  They all did search and discovery, but were completely eclipsed by Google.

Today we have Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, Hi5, Meebo, Orkut, …  We also have email, blog comments, …  Seems like a parallel universe.  Be a good friend and help me find the answer.


Cabo Wabo Vacation

Dec 09, 2007
Category Books

If you’ve noticed that I haven’t been blogging, it’s because I went off the grid for my Q4 vacation with Amy.  As is our habit, we checked out completely, spent a week at the beautiful Palmilla One & Only in Cabo, and did our normal quarterly vacation thing, which includes reading a bunch of books.

I started off with William Gibson’s latest – Spook Country.  It started off slow – possibly because I kept comparing it to his last book, Pattern Recognition, which  was amazing.  I almost gave up but Amy encouraged me to stick with it.  After 100 pages Gibson clearly established three parallel stories that clearly were going to converge at some point and I got sucked in.  Around this point, the amazingness of Gibson also kicked in.  The end result – great book, highly recommended, but be patient with the set up.

As is my way, I switched to non-fiction next. King of the Club – the story of Dick Grasso’s rise and fall at the NYSE – was recommended to me by someone so I picked it up.  It’s a well written and detailed account of the whole Grasso thing, albeit from the perspective of the author playing investigative reporter.  I don’t really care much about the public markets, investment banking, and the omnipresent backroom politics, but I learned a lot from this book and developed a different impression than I previous had.  If Grasso’s story and/or the history of the NYSE interests you, this is well worth the time.  If you prefer simple gossip, stick with BusinessWeek or People Magazine.

After Spook Country and King of the Club, I needed a small, short book.  During the commercials on Monday night football I read The Tao of Warren Buffett.  I’m a huge Buffett fan and this was a juicy little morsel of his aphorisms with a brief explanation by his ex-daughter-in-law Mary Buffett.  Yum.

It was 80 degrees in Cabo and sunny. It’s 15 degrees in Boulder today with a foot of snow on the ground.  I’m procrastinating going on my 10m+ run.  Shocking.