Brad Feld

Month: April 2008

We all know this, but it’s useful to be reminded of it periodically.

I’m chairman of the board of the National Center for Women & Information Technology.  It’s a remarkable organization that has accomplished a great deal under the leadership of Lucy Sanders.  While it would be easy to categorize NCWIT as a "gender equality" organization, it’s not.  Instead, NCWIT is focused on helping the US be more competitive in the long term in the field of information technology and computer science. 

Simply put, the only way to satisfy the increasing demand for computer science / IT folks in the US over the next decade is to get more women involved.  There is a long list of other important reasons to get more women in the US engaged in computer science / IT, but the need to stay competitive in this arena is the one that seals the deal for me.

NCWIT periodically gets emails like the following:

Subject: Answer of why woman in IT is shrinking

IT is a very hard field in which you have to study all the time to keep up with technology.   Also, it involves incredible troubleshooting skills, which by nature woman lack.   What you need are more special laws, so that woman have special privilages, which is the only way their will be an increase of women in IT.   Until then just keep complaining as your gender is perfect at it.  Please post this on your wall at your Facist Woman in IT offices.   Or just delete as women hate the truth.

Someone should teach that guy how to spell fascist.


I’ve gotten to know Alex Iskold over the past few years (I’m an angel investor in his latest company – AdaptiveBlue).  Alex has a huge brain that I always enjoy interacting with.  He also has a huge heart, which comes through loud and clear in his retrospective story about his career progression in his post titled The American Dream: 17 Years of Engineering Software

I love stories like this – they make me feel happy and optimistic about the future.  Alex – thanks for the fabulous post.


I was talking to a friend yesterday about exits.  In it, he suggested that the tech M&A market had shut down just like the tech IPO market had.

This didn’t square with my experience.  I’ve seen plenty of modest M&A in the last two months (which I categorize as sub-$100m deals.)  Two popped up today – AOL acquired Sphere for a reported $25m and someone is rumored (possibly Expedia) to have acquired Farecast for $75m. 

While these are modest acquisitions, they are not distressed deals (e.g. company that is struggling gets bought for very little by other private company, usually for private company stock.)  There are plenty of distressed deals happening – they are usually pretty easy to recognize.

While modest deals aren’t the end game of a VC investor, they are definitely a key part of the diet.  Everyone knows that "singles and doubles" don’t turn a VC fund into a winner, but they are needed to fill in the holes.  So – it’s good to see a steady tempo of these modest deals continuing.  Plus, it makes for good copy.


I’ve written about this in the past so I expect this is nothing new for you, my dear reader.  The title summarizes everything I am going to say.

My buddy Fred Wilson had a comScore chart about Delicious’ growth (or lack of growth) in his hugely popular We Need A New Path To Liquidity post.  He used this data to make the point that web companies are languishing under the ownership of their acquirers when they get bought relatively early in their life.

The founder of Delicious – Joshua Schachter – disagreed with Fred’s conclusion on Delicious and Fred wrote an updated post titled Delicious where he corrects his assertion and asks the (probably rhetorical) question "I wonder how many other web apps are accessed via third party services (twitter’s traffic is largely through its api)? And if that’s a growing trend, then what does that mean for our ability to measure audiences, traffic, and growth from a distance?"

I’ve been a web analytics junky since my first ever angel investment – $25k in NetGenesis (it was net.Genesis at the time) – back when a "web log" was an uncomfortable thing to ponder.  I’ve watched, used, and invested in several generations of web analytics companies.  I am comfortable making the statement that "whenever one becomes a dominant analytics platform, it immediately starts to decline in accuracy."

While the graphs and tables might be pretty and are almost always used by the "leaders" to assert their "leadership", they distort and misrepresent what’s really going on.  When comScore first published their Widget Metrix in 2007, Om Malik correctly compared it to a Jellybean Contest.  I’ve yet to meet a widget report that is remotely accurate based on my inductive reasoning (e.g. so far I’ve been able to come up with at least two widget providers in the top 10 of any list that is missing from any list that I’ve seen.)

Now, I don’t mean to pick on comScore.  I’ll pick on a friend.  My FeedBurner reader data shows that I have 117k readers (or subscribers) to my Feld Thoughts blog.  While I’m flattered, this is bullshit.  When I dig into the actual user agent data, I find that 98,966 come from a Feed Reader called BlogRovR.  I happen to know that BlogRovR is what used to be called Activeweave Stickies, which is a company I looked at 18 months ago.  They "autosubscribe my feed" whenever someone installs BlogRovR (which means my subscriber count is inflated by around 99k – I imagine some of the BlogRovR people look at my feed, but certainly not 99k of them.  Do the math.)  Oh – everyone else that is autosubscribed to BlogRovR (A VC, TechCrunch, …) has the same subscriber count inflation.

While it makes me feel all warm inside that I have the number 117k visibly displayed on my blog and I show up on as #9 on Rating Burner, this is just a very personal example of why "your analytics data is very wrong."

At some level, there isn’t anything wrong with the analytics data being wrong (or inaccurate) – that’s the nature of the beast and why anyone that uses analytics data to figure stuff out should use multiple sources to generate their own analysis.  However, I’m regularly amazed by how many conclusions are derived from data sets that have known, fundamental flaws.

As always, check your assumptions.


How’s that for a run?  Yes – that’s a 1.75m hill starting at mile 3.  And it’s steep (>10% grade).

Elevation gain: 2,081.  Elevation loss: 2,867.  Number of people seen during run: 5.  Number of animals seen during run: > 5. Mental happiness: priceless.


As April 15th looms again (it seems to come every year), all the same old articles appear about taxes, budgets, deficits, government spending, and the inequities in the universe.  This year, Ben Casnocha sent me a link to an article from the LA Times titled Tax and spend with a twist with a note saying "I think you expressed a similar sentiment awhile back."

Indeed I did.  I dutifully pay my taxes every year, yet I feel helpless when I think about how the government spends my tax receipts (and all the other tax receipts they get – which appears to be about $1.2 trillion this year according to the LA Times article.)  Yeah, I know I can vote (I do) and I can get involved in influencing my little corner of the universe (I try), but I don’t feel like I have any impact on how any of this money gets wasted spent.

A college friend mentioned the idea to me 20+ years ago that everyone should get a line item allocation when they paid their taxes.  His idea was that you’d essentially create your own spending plan for your taxes and the government would have to honor it. 

While I love the "vote my taxes" idea, Adams and Hamilton wouldn’t like this very much since it shifts a lot of power back to the individual. So, how about an intermediate step – a category allocation that the government has to publish in aggregate.  Everyone gets to allocate their taxes across 20 categories when they pay their taxes.  The IRS aggregates all this information anonymously and publishes the macro data.

Step one would be to get this information out there.  Let’s show our politicians how "the country" thinks about how our tax dollars are spent.  Guns?  Butter?  Or maybe education.

Happy day before tax day.


Last week was Google App Engine announcement and brouhaha.  This week is deeper analysis and understanding of Google App Engine. I spent some time last week trying to understand this better, read a bunch of stuff, and spent some time having a top secret special meeting that I can’t talk about with some of my friends at Microsoft where this was discussed.

Following are three interesting things for you this morning (all courtesy of my friend Scott Moody) if you are interested in learning more:

1. The Google App Engine Q&A – an in-depth blogger-created FAQ that provides great links to other blog posts on the topic and summarizes various opinions and known facts.

2. Google App Engine for developers – Nial Kennedy’s overview from his meeting with the App Engine team leads.

3. A high level comparison (via email) from Scott Moody where he compares App Engine and Amazon EC2.  Since Scott doesn’t keep a blog, following is the pertinent text from his email.

Google hides infrastructure from AppEngine users. AE programmers never (and, in fact, aren’t allowed to) think about database scaling and configuration, load balancing , fail-over, etc. In theory, the complexity of writing a highly scalable app completely disappears.

With EC2, you still have to set-up load balancers, configure multiple replicated database servers, implement scalability hacks if things grow too fast (such as distributed caching of data via memcached), keep distros and apps up-to-date, etc. Bottom Line: EC2-based companies still require sys admins, AppEngine companies don’t. That will certainly change as more companies begin offering EC2 server management services.

Google provides a non-relational datastore and that’s the only datastore available (no traditional file system, no relational databases). With EC2, people generally use MySQL or Postgresql. Amazon offers a non-relational datastore called SimpleDB, but it’s a bit *too* simple. For example, it does not support sorting of results sets. Huh? That makes it non-workable in my opinion. There’s also an issue with using EC2 virtual machines for your database servers — Amazon says that when a virtual machine crashes, all the data managed by it disappears, so virtual machine crash = hard drive crash.

With EC2, programmers can use any (non-Microsoft) language to develop their apps. AppEngine users must code in Python. Also, Google does not support sockets at this time. All cross-app communication must be done via HTTP.

At *this* moment in time, it would be difficult to move apps off of AppEngine. Doing that in EC2 is trivial. This, to me, is the biggest issue, as I believe it could make startups less-interesting from an acquisition perspective by anyone other than Google. This will most likely change as people develop compatibility layers. However, Google has yet to provide any information about how to migrate data from their datastore the best I can tell. If you have a substantial amount of data, you can’t just write code to dump it because they will only let any request run for a short period before they terminate it.

Some people are complaining about Google having access to their source code. I don’t see this as an issue. I’d rather have it be stored at Google than at some small hosting company.

One final nice little thing in AppEngine’s favor: Websites that store less than 500MB of data and get roughly 5MM pageviews per month or less can use AppEngine for free. The downside is that Google has yet to say what they’ll charge if apps go over that quota, but I have to believe that it will be reasonable.  Right now, you’re prevented from going above the free-level quotas.

If you are into this and have other good links, please leave a comment with them.


Holy Absurdity Batman, someone actually writes a dedicated 409A site called 409A DismayFor the latest and greatest 409A silliness, you are one click away from a subscription.


Is this a surprise to anyone?  I suggest Harvard take on Stanford next since they’ll actually have a chance at victory.