I got the following email on 1/25/08.  The Subject Line was "Naming Bathrooms."

Mr. Feld:

My name is A, and I am a Cadette Girl Scout who is selling cookies to fund my dream of becoming an astronaut. This upcoming summer, I am returning to Huntsville, AL, for Advanced Space Academy, an opportunity offered through Girl Scouts. I am not sure if my dreams will take me to ATLAS at CU (my dad is a professor there), or Cal Tech (and the Jet Propulsion Lab, where my dad is on sabbatical), or even to MIT, where my dad went to school (Course XVI, 1978-1987).

My mom says that it is too bad that MIT did not accept your naming a bathroom offer — she thinks that you should have offered to build more women’s bathrooms at MIT as they can be somewhat hard to find when you need them. She also says that while the Sloan School and other east campus buildings had adequate facilities, you had to plan carefully if your work took you to the Humanities or Science Libraries.

I am writing to ask if you would like to make a contribution of $2008 to help me attain my goal. This translates to approximately 618 boxes ($3.25/box), of which there are eight available varieties. Of course, that might be a lot of cookies, even if you distributed them amongst all of your companies’ employees as a business expense. Instead, we can donate boxes to your choice — EFAA, the local food bank that was started in 1917 to help the families of World War I soldiers in Boulder, or directly to our soldiers overseas.

The 2008 cookie campaign is now taking orders with the cookies due to arrive in mid-February. I would enjoy discussing this with you further (I have prepared a presentation as to how businesses can use Girl Scout Cookies). You may reach me at myemail.com or my phone numbers, 303.xxx.yyyy (cell) or 303.aaa.bbbb (home).

If you decide that your 2008 charitable support does not include Girl Scouts or that you have a Girl Scout who is already your supplier, thank you. I would appreciate a reply regardless of your decision.

I thought this was absolutely brilliant.  I responded with:

A – thank you for writing me! I’m a big fan of the Girl Scouts and one of the organizations that I’m chairman of (the National Center for Women & Information Technology – www.ncwit.org – which is based at CU in the ATLAS building) has a partnership with them.

While I’m not interested in buying $2008 worth of cookies, I would be willing to buy 24 boxes (three of each type.) Tell me the best way to coordinate this with you.

My cookies showed up today and I got to meet A.  She’s a neat young lady in high school who is learning to sell at a young age.  Awesome.  Her parents (I got to meet her mom also) should definitely be proud of her.

My partner Seth Levine has a cathartic post up titled Failure where he describes failure from a VC’s point of view.

I’m working on a new project called Gnip.  It’s appropriately inspired by the following game from my childhood.

I look forward to gnipping while my friends gnop.

On the way to the airport this morning I twittered "Dell bought messageone (not sure i get that one) and someone bought bebo. Another m&a day."  Fred Wilson immediately responded with "@bfeld but the yahoo-msft deal is going to put a dent in M&A, right? i don’t think so."

I completely agree with Fred.  There was a lot of noise last week – especially from the VC community – that a Microsoft / Yahoo deal would be bad for tech M&A, especially in Silicon Valley.  Baloney. 

Yesterday Microsoft bought Danger and Yahoo bought Maven Networks.  Today Dell bought MessageOne and it is rumored (again) that Bebo has been acquired. 

Yahoo – bless their heart – has been at best an erratic acquirer.  In the late 1990’s they were rapacious.  They had a long dry spell post bubble.  Things picked up again in 2004, but many of the deals were small ones (sub $50m) – while fun and great for many of the entrepreneurs involved, it didn’t have much impact on VC returns. In the last year they’ve done some bigger deals – like Right Media and Zimbra – but not that many.

Microsoft – on the other hand, has been a very consistent acquirer post bubble.  In addition, their deals have been increasing in size.  Google has also been an aggressive and consistent acquirer.  But it’s not really about Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo.  The number of acquirers in tech / Internet / software is very robust and most of the large cap tech companies have very deliberate M&A strategies.

We are in a world where M&A has been and will continue to be the primary exit for most tech companies.  The old cliche that companies are bought rather than sold continues to be true – if you focus on creating something great that generates cash over the long term the exit will eventually find you.

As I wander around in my own little virtual universe, I lovingly look for all the ways the various content I create gets wired together.  I have a twitter account, a blog (well – several), and am using Intense Debate for my comment system of my blog.

The Intense Debate guys just did a neat integration with Twitter.  I had already put my Twitter name (bfeld) into the Intense Debate profile information.  Now – my most recent tweet shows up when you mouse over my picture on an Intense Debate comment. 

You can also go directly to my blog, Facebook, profile, Linkedin profile, and Twitter account.  Now any comments I leave a on a blog using Intense Debate is subtly getting wired into my social network.

Next up – look for Lijit to start indexing this data also (hint to the gang on the third floor of 1050 Walnut.)

Jeff Nolan from NewsGator has a good post up on the Enterprise RSS blog titled Attention Data: Content vs. User that describes both attention data and privacy dynamics.  There’s a lot more where this comes from, but it’s a good starting point if you keep hearing "attention" in the context of RSS and wonder to yourself "what is it / why do I care?"

If you are curious about the progress our investment in Zynga is making, Inside Facebook has a good blog post up titled Looking for the next big thing?  Social gaming startups heating up.  Zynga was founded last summer and has had incredible acceleration since it began (hint – the reach numbers are low – we should easily break 1m dailies by the end of this week.) 

It’s fun to be an investor in a company that has more money in the bank than the day it was funded.  Fortunately, the company knows where to invest it to accelerate its growth even faster.

Scramble anyone?

I got an email this morning from an entrepreneur that I know that has been trying to raise an early round from a "seed VC investor" for the past few months.  He’s put together (and closed) a decent angel round and left it open for this seed investor.

This morning the entrepreneur was told by the VC that they are "postponing their decision on investment until a future round" because one of the partner’s friends at BigCo "isn’t comfortable with the direction the startup is headed." 

I asked the entrepreneur who the person at BigCo was.  I know plenty of folks at BigCo in the relevant area and wanted to do a reality check for the entrepreneur.  He responded that the partner at the VC firm wouldn’t say – just that it was a good friend.

I told the entrepreneur to move on and not worry about it because I put this in the "VC kick the can" category.  Given that data above, I don’t think the VC was ever serious – if they were at a minimum they would have connected the entrepreneur up with the person at BigCo. 

Remember kick the can?  It’s a game that is mildly entertaining but fundamentally pointless.  You play it because you are hanging out, have nothing better to do, and feel like playing a game is better than doing nothing (with my apologies to children all over the world.)  For whatever reason, VC’s play this game with entrepreneurs all the time.

I’m sure I am occasionally guilty of it but I try really hard not to be.  The best move for an entrepreneur – when they find themselves in a game of kick the can – is to pick up the can and say something like "so – are you serious about funding us or not.  If not, just tell me.  If you are, what do we need to do next to get to a deal?"

Dear entrepreneurs: Just because your VC can’t seem to make a decision doesn’t mean you should be an enabler.  Kick the can usually ends when everyone gets bored of playing.

Starbucks announced that today that you can hang out, drink coffee, eat high calorie baked goods, and surf the web for "free" for two hours (assuming you are drinking coffee and eating high calorie baked goods.)  This is due to a very smart move on AT&T’s part where they have displaced T-Mobile as the WiFi provider at Starbucks stores. 

I’m really surprised that T-Mobile let this deal get away from them.  I happily pay $10 / month to T-Mobile for WiFi service – the two places I use it 99.4% of the time are Starbucks and the United Red Carpet Club.  If AT&T takes the Red Carpet Club deal, T-Mobile is going to lose that incremental $10 / month from me.  I realize that "free for two hours" at Starbucks might not have kept me paying this $10, but I probably wouldn’t have noticed (or done anything) for a while.