Now that I use 267 different social networking tools, I’m confused.  I’ve got so many different "friends", but I don’t know how to differentiate between them.

My "friend" Dave Nolastnamesogoogledoesntindexme recently asked me if I have seen any moves toward private hierarchies of relationships.  Specifically he (and I) want to categorize my "friends" into a hierarchy that I get to create.  One example set might be (lover, buddy, friend, acquaintances, met once, jackass, enemy).  This "friend set" should be user customizable and private.

My head starts to hurt when I think about this across Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Linkedin, Plaxo, Outlook, Gmail, Bebo, Dogster, Shelfari, …)  What a mess.

While I’d love a consolidation layer across all my social network (e.g. I want "one Dave Nolastnamesogoogledoesntindexme object"), I know I’m not going to get that anytime soon.  So – I’ll just settle for being able to create my own special unique proprietary private "friend hierarchy" within each social network tool.

Every day I get emails from people working on new startups.  I’m continually amazed at how many of them come from their existing corporate email address. 

There are lots of quick reasons I can think of why this is a bad idea.

• Your company owns your email.  Theoretically, everything you write in email is owned by your company.
• Your boss reads your email.  Especially if you suddenly quit to start a new company.
• You use Microsoft Office and don’t know how to turn off auto-complete.  C’mon – you’ve accidentally sent an email to someone you didn’t mean to because of auto-complete.
• It’s weird for me to get an email from joe@bigco saying "starting a new company" – it makes me think that you aren’t that serious.

I could come up with lots more.  It’s so simple to get a free gmail (or yahoo, or hotmail) email account.  Be bold – take the plunge.

In my book review of Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes, I said "This is a chewy and long but if you are looking for an exhaustive, comprehensively researched, and completely negative view of the history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes is the one for you."

Nicholas Dujmovic does not agree with me.  In his book review on the CIA web site he systematically tears it apart after asserting that "Legacy of Ashes in not the definitive history of the CIA that it purports to be."

I enjoyed Dujmovic’s review as much as I enjoyed the book. I took Weiner’s credibility at face value based on his history as a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for the NY Times.  Dujmovic makes me question it.

After all, that’s part of the CIA’s job, isn’t it?

Micah’s tweet led me to Phil Hansen, an artist who is a master of playing with his food.

Phil’s Goodbye Art series is awesome.  For a taste of what he is capable of doing, take a look at the Christmas Cheese Log.

I’m really pleased that Google has taken an aggressive position in fighting back against the Jarg search patent.  The Jarg patent is another absurd one and Google is on now on the receiving end of the same kind of patent troll (which – ironically – is being promulgated by a major university) action that has haunted Microsoft for a decade.

At some point I hope the folks at Google get motivated to really change the game here, like they have with so many things.  Google is one company that is well organized to dig up endless prior art to invalidate bogus software patents.  This has to become an organizational mission, not just the domain on the Google legal group.

In the spirit of "do no evil", if Google gets the religion that software patents are evil, some interesting things might happen.

I’m having such a great time watching and working with the TechStars companies.  As we get ready to launch the application process for TechStars 2008, it’s really gratifying to see how the 2007 class is growing up.

Today I noticed two blog posts from co-founders of TechStars companies that made me smile.  Jon Fox (Intense Debate) – wrote a post titled Decisiveness and Matt Galligan (SocialThing) – wrote a post titled The Hype Machine and Admitting When You’re Wrong.

Both of them are good, introspective posts.

If you are a venture capitalist and you haven’t heard about FAS 157 (also known as Fair Value Accounting), I recommend you ask your accounting firm’s audit partner about it.  Today. 

Until recently, most VC firms used a straightforward and consistent method to valuing their portfolio companies.  No more – now we have to conform to FAS 157 to get a clean GAAP opinion from our auditors.  Since our LP agreements require a GAAP opinion, FAS 157 here we come.

I received the following question by email recently: How will your firm be handling the requirement to value its investments in portfolio companies under the FAS 157 fair value standard next year?  A reason I ask is that I am on a panel at an Alliance of Merger & Acquisition Advisors conference discussing this topic.  The panel includes a business appraiser (me), and auditor, and a VC.  Since I follow your blog, I was interested in your thoughts.

My partner Jason Mendelson has been responsible for our implementation of FAS 157 so I asked him to weigh in with an answer – which follows:

We’ve been FAS 157 compliant starting in Q3 2007.  We worked alongside our auditors to determine a methodology to determine fair value for each company.  We aren’t naïve enough to think this methodology won’t change, as many predict this to be a moving target at least through the first half of 2009.  In short, we’ve developed a checklist of items that we review for each company every quarter.  Some of the questions that we ask are:

1. Has the company had a financing event during the period?
2. Has the company experienced a material adverse or positive effect during the period?
   • Any major sales made / missed?
   • Any major deals signed up?
   • Any financial results that were materially different than plan?
3. How have the company’s competitors fared during the period?  (Note:  this is much easier with public comparables than private)
4. Any acquisitions in the company’s ecosystem during the period?
5. Has the company received any acquisition interest during the period?

Along with those questions, we analyze the current capitalization table, financial results and public comparable stock prices.  It’s not a science – it’s an art, but one that we’ve had in place for a bit now and we are becoming more adapt to the process.

Who says VCs have all the fun?

One of my favorite things about blogging is that it lets you (if you have the courage) think out loud.  As a blogger, you get to try out a bunch of ideas in public.  As a blog reader, you get to see how other people think.

We’ve been working with Kevin Menzie and his gang at Slice of Lime for a long time (since it was just Kevin and Jeff.)  We’ve even got a small investment in them.  They’ve got some of the best ideas and insights of anyone I’ve worked with on the web design front.  I’ve encouraged Kevin to blog more aggressively about what he’s thinking and how they come up with their ideas.

Kevin has started doing this with his posts What Legos Can Teach Us About Web Standards and The Elongating Tail of Return Path.  

Great stuff – keep it up Kevin!

If you live in Boulder, you know that this is the epicenter of the natural foods and all things good for you revolution.  We all love our natural, sugar free, gluten free, no animals killed or harmed in any way deodorant, but we know it doesn’t work for shit.

Todd Vernon – CEO of Lijit – has come up with a killer Idea in the Natural Food Space.  Since he’s got his hands full with Lijit, he just wants someone to do it.  The entire idea is up on his blog – the following picture is the teaser.

It’s in the spirit of Just Gas, but a little more diversified.