I want to welcome Pixie Maté as a sponsor of the Feld 50 by 50 Marathon Team.  Pixie Maté joins Return Path as one of my sponsors and has committed $250 to Accelerated Cure for every marathon I complete going forward.  I’ve got 39 to go, so that’s a total commitment of $9,750 – wow guys, awesome! 

Pixie Maté is a Boulder based organic foods company taking yerba maté to the masses.  Yerba maté is the national drink of Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and S. Brazil where it is a dietary staple next to bread and meat.  This liquid vegetable contains more antioxidants than green tea and affords a buzz like coffee, but without the jitters, and peaks and valleys.   Pixie Maté calls it the balanced buzz with a llama-load of antioxidants.

I’ve gotten to know T.J. McIntyre – the founder of Pixie Maté – over the past few years.  I’m a regular Pixie Maté drinker, especially when I need a little more than tea in the mid-afternoon.  I’m powered by Maté and maybe even more invincible than Ironman.

To date, including the first $1,000 from Return Path for running Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, MN, I’ve raised $2,375 for Accelerated Cure.  Between funds raised so far, the Return Path sponsorship and Pixie Maté sponsorship, I’m well over $50,000 committed.  Thanks to every one that has supported me (and Accelerated Cure) to date.

My next marathon is in Ashton, Idaho on August 23.  Last year 159 people finished the marathon.  Matt Blumberg – the CEO of Return Path – is running the second half of the marathon with me to help bring me in under 4:45.  Wish me good training over the next six weeks.  And if you feel inclined, please click on the donate button in the widget and help support me and – more importantly – Accelerated Cure.

If you follow my tweets you know that I am starting to get desperate for some sun.  I could never live in Seattle.  There’s a rumor that we’ll see the sun in Homer again later today – if it comes out to play I’ll post a picture of it (did you hear that Mr. Sun – that’s called a blibe ("blog bribe").  Here are some interesting things I’ve collected over the past few days of my cloud induced web reading.

Boulder Olympians weigh politics, pollution as they prep for Beijing: I’m really glad I didn’t quality for the 2008 Olympic Marathon.  If I had, I’d currently be struggling with whether or not to compete.  I sure hope no one dies.

Frontier going under the knife: It looks like there might be more to the Frontier bankruptcy than Frontier getting shafted by First Data.  Unlike Southwest, apparently Frontier didn’t hedge oil prices (nor – apparently – did any of the other major airlines.)  Oops.  My prediction – Southwest cleans up in the Denver market and United goes bankrupt again.

Thank you, Adobe Reader 9: Here’s a scathing review of everyone’s favorite bloatware, Adobe Reader. Oh – it’s also sort of a virus if you’ve ever gotten stuck in the "update – oops – didn’t work – try again" infinite loop. I’ve switched to Foxit Reader – much nicer.

You Just Dont Get It: Outstanding short post from Mark Cuban. If you tell me that "I don’t get it", you are either (a) being lazy or (b) being lazy.  You are also indirectly calling me an idiot, which isn’t necessarily a good way to get someone’s attention for your idea. 

Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis: I put this one in the "well duh" category.  The real irony is that the World Bank – through a confidential report – suggests that global food prices are up by 75% due to biofuels, while the US claims the number is only 3%.  Who knows what the real truth is – like most "economic indicators", we will only know what really is going on sometime in the future when we look at back and study the past.  Regardless, don’t believe everything you read and hear in the media or from our world leaders.  "Well duh!"

Dispatches: A Post-Wimbledon Dialogue: I love tennis.  I used to be really good (as a junior) – I’m now able to occasionally torture – but not beat – someone that is a 4.5.  Watching Federer and Nadal play is a joy that harkens back to my childhood watching Borg and McEnroe play (I loved Borg because my game was like his but rooted for McEnroe because I was an angry and volatile tennis player.)  This is a brilliant recap of some genius tennis.

Electronic Papyrus: The Digital Book, Unfurled: I love my Kindle (I haven’t read a physical books since I left for Alaska last week.)  I’m not sure that I love the Readius, but I’m definitely game to try it.

Time for a run.  The sun is still not out.

We announced Our Investment in Topspin Media today.  My partner Ryan McIntyre has a long post up titled Topspin, Baby! that describes the history of how the investment came together over the past ten years.  Ian Rogers – the CEO of Topspin who was profiled in TechCrunch a few weeks ago in the article Ex-Yahoo Music GM Ian Rogers Launches Topspin Media has a nice a post up on the Topspin blog titled Old Friends, New Opportunities. 

Oh – and there is that really cool Billboard cover and article.

As a special bonus, Ryan blogged the text from The Declaration of Independence yesterday.  This seemed somehow fitting when you consider what Topspin is planning to do for music artists.

Yes – those are the lyrics – buried at about 2:05.  Who said mathematicians don’t know how to rock.

Thanks Ryan.  Cornell just went up a notch in my book.

I’m a huge believer in land conservation.  I believe one of the best ways to protect our environment is to take wide swaths of land permanently out of circulation.  I was delighted to read an article Amy forwarded me from the New York Times today titled Deal Is Struck in Montana to Preserve Forest Areas.

The Nature Conservancy and the Trust for Public Land have put together a deal to pay $510 million to buy about 500 square miles of forest currently owned by Plum Creek Timber.  Half of the money will come from private donations; the other half will come from a new tax-credit bond mechanism that was recently passed.  I’m delighted our government is spending – via a tax-credit bond – $250 million on land conservation.  I’d like to allocate 50% of my taxes next year to stuff like that.

I’ve been involved directly in some land conservation; we have a conservation easement on all of our land in Eldorado Canyon, I am a trustee for the Colorado Conservation Trust, I’m a huge fan (and beneficiary) of all the Boulder and Boulder County Open Space activity, and I’ve been involved in several very contentious land use issues.  The political and economical dynamics of public property rights, land use and development rights, and conservation are incredibly complicated and often extremely polarized. 

It’s gets especially messy in areas that are fragmented (or "checkerboarded") like the land in Montana.  In these situations, the amount of work to figure out how to get all the land in one contiguous area into an actual deal can be mindboggling.  The Nature Conservancy and Trust for Public Land are pros at this and it looks like they’ve pulled off something amazing this time around that will have long term benefits for a beautiful part of our country.

I’m knee deep in reading The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company, listening to Pink Floyd, and enjoying a perfect Homer, Alaska evening with Amy.  I was an undergraduate at MIT during the Lucasfilm days of what became Pixar and vaguely remember early Media Lab / Project Athena animation stuff and watching super cool computer graphics wizardry post-SIGGRAPHs at the Computer Museum in Boston.  Fortunately, YouTube has all the old classic computer animations online, including The Adventures of Andre and Wally B.

Awesome! (the animations and the book).  While sneak peaks of this one and other old Pixar shorts are available on the Pixar website, due to the magic of the Internet they are all available on YouTube.

Part one of a video interview with Mike Cote of ColoradoBiz talking about TechStars.  Get answers to the following questions in under four minutes.

1. What’s the elevator pitch of TechStars (payback for David since he makes all the TechStars teams give their elevator pitches over and over.)

2. What’s the latest crop look like?

3. Are there any women in TechStars?

4. How many applicants did you have this year?

5. What criteria did you use to select them (see me make a nerdy Dungeons and Dragons reference.)

6. Is it the idea you get excited about?

Observe also that I have a much larger proboscis than David.

Earlier this year we made a seed investment in a new company called Gnip.  Yesterday, Gnip launched their first service – a free centralized callback server that notifies data consumers (such as Plaxo) in real-time when there is new data about their users on various data producing sites (such as Flickr and Digg).  I’ve written my version of the overview on the Foundry Group blog in my post titled Gnip is Ping Spelled Backwards, there are a couple of posts up already on the Gnip blog, and a number of people have already written about Gnip including TechCrunch, TechCrunchIT, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, Dave Winer, and Joe Smarr (Plaxo’s Chief Platform Architect).  Rather than repeat what Gnip is here, I’m going to tell you how this investment came about.

It started in 2004.  I got an IM out of the blue from someone named bpm140 (my IM addresses are easy to find – AIM/Y!: bfeld; Skype: bradfeld; MSN: brad@feld.com.)  bpm140 asked me if I’d be willing to take a quick look at a business plan he had.  I IM’ed back that he should email it to me – I got it 30 seconds later.

I took a look and scheduled a call.  It was a plan for an educational game thing that I didn’t really get but I was intrigued by some of the stuff in it.  I talked to bpm140 (Eric Marcoullier) and gave him some feedback.  After talking for a little while I told him it wasn’t my thing, but he should feel free to holler if he thought I could be helpful.

Over the next few months I periodically got IMs from Eric.  We’d have quick interactions – usually around a specific question – and he shared with me a new idea he was working on.  He and his partner Todd Sampson (who I only knew through Eric’s references to him) had this idea for a thingy (this was before little lines of javascript that you put on a blog were called widgets).  You put this thingy on your blog and it gave you statistics of how many times someone clicked on a link.  I’m a stats junky so I loved it.  Eric said it would cost $3 / month.  I told him it was stupid to charge for it, but I’d prepay for a year for $25.  He took my money. 

Over the next few months I gave him plenty of feedback on this new thing he was calling MyBlogLog.  The UI of the stats service was hideous, but the popup link data on my blog was awesome and the stats were killer. By this point I had invested in FeedBurner, so I introduced Eric to Dick Costolo – FeedBurner’s CEO.  More feedback ensued.

One day, I got a familiar bpm140 IM saying something like "we came up this amazing idea to turn your blog into a social network."  All I needed to do was put a little different piece of javascript on my blog.  I did and the old version of the MyBlogLog widget – with names only and a really yucky font appeared on my blog.  For those of you that remember it, it was one of those amazing widgets that you suddenly couldn’t ever remember living without.  Names were great, but soon little images appeared and the idea of seeing who had recently been on my blog was incredibly satisfying.  MyBlogLog took off like a rocket.

Up to this point, Eric and his partner Todd hadn’t raised any money.  I remember the first "are you interested in investing call" happening in May 2006.  Amy and I had rented and apartment in Paris for the month and I can remember the conference call with Eric and this new guy Scott Rafer who Eric and Todd had brought in to be CEO.  They were considering putting together an angel round with the idea of going for a venture round in three or four months.  I committed $25k on the spot, although I remember Scott saying he really didn’t want investments of less than $50k.

MyBlogLog continued its torrid growth over the summer, appearing on virtually every blog I read.  Fred Wilson – one of my co-investors in FeedBurner and another fan of MyBlogLog – and I started talking about doing a VC round.  We came close to do a deal (the documents were a few days away from being signed) when Yahoo! acquired MyBlogLog shortly after getting excited about them after seeing them at the Web 2.0 conference in 2006.  I had one awkward conversation with Eric where I quickly told him that while I was disappointed that I wouldn’t be investing in MyBlogLog, I was psyched for him, Todd, and Scott and wished him luck.  I also told him that I’d love to stay in touch and have another chance to work with him in the future.

I didn’t expect Eric to stay at Yahoo! very long (he lasted about six months, although Todd is still there trying hard to keep the MyBlogLog flame alive.)  True to my invitation, Eric and I stayed in touch, he and Todd were a big help at TechStars in 2007, and Eric started making occasional trips out to Boulder to see me.

I spent most of 2007 raising our first Foundry Group fund.  By the fall we had finished raising our fund and had turned our focus towards making investments.  It was in this context that Eric and I sat down on one of his trips in the fall of 2007.  Over a couple of hours, Eric ran me through a half dozen ideas he had for a new business.  He was hedging a little – struggling with whether to go deep on one business or try to start a few.  I strongly encouraged him to focus on one.  I told him that four of the six ideas were stupid, one wasn’t for me, but one was awesome.  It was the seed of what turned into Gnip.

During that trip, I dragged my partners Ryan and Seth into a conference room to sit with Eric and sketch out Gnip more.  Eric was originally calling the idea Pingery but somewhere along the way Gnip popped out and it stuck ("meta-ping server" was a little awkward).  Gnip fit perfectly in a new theme that Ryan, Seth, and my other Foundry partners were calling Glue and we told Eric that if he wanted to do Gnip as the exclusive thing he worked on, we’d be game to go after it with him.

I got a call from Eric a few weeks later that he’d decided to go all in with Gnip.  We’d recently made an investment in Zynga and Eric had spent some time with Mark Pincus, the founder/CEO of Zynga.  I think Mark’s single-minded obsession with the business he was creating made a deep impression on Eric, especially since Mark is a multi-time successful entrepreneur who also has plenty of angel investments and can basically spend his time wherever he wants.

Part of Eric’s success in MyBlogLog was his partnership with his technical co-founder Todd.  I told Eric he needed either Todd, or a technical co-founder like Todd, as part of Gnip.  Todd wasn’t available as he was committed to staying at Yahoo! so we introduced Eric to a few people, including Jud Valeski.  We’d known Jud for several years as he was a Netscape/AOL refugee that had settled in Boulder.  Jud had recently left Me.dium and was working out of our offices as he contemplated his next gig.  Jud and Eric hit it off immediately and started working together remotely (
Eric in the bay area; Jud in Boulder) to both flesh out the idea behind Gnip as well as see if they could work together.

A few weeks later Eric and Jud gave their formal pitch to us for Gnip.  It was a 10 page PowerPoint presentation that outlined the idea, opportunity, and how they would go about it.  We committed to leading a seed investment of $1m on the spot – either by ourselves or with another VC firm.  A few weeks later we closed a $1.1m round with SoftTechVC (Jeff Clavier) and First Round Capital (Josh Kopelman) and were off to the races (BTW – Josh has written a really clever post about Gnip titled The Story of Francis Bates.)

Eric, Jud, and Gnip have surpassed all of our expectations from our seed investment at the beginning of the year.  They’ve totally nailed the concept we were kicking around when we first started talking about Gnip, have built a superb initial service in a remarkably short period of time with the help of Pivotal Labs, and have added a handful of awesome technical people to their team.  They’ve managed to do this while still being split between the bay area (Eric, Tiffany, and Pivotal) and Boulder (Jud and the rest of the team).

It took a three year courtship, but Eric and I are now working together as partners.  As my grandmother used to say, "My Gnip Runneth Over."

Microsoft is trying to.  It’s up on PeerToPatent and you can comment on this patent application (and the USPTO will presumably listen to you) if you’d like to help keep the world free of really silly software patents.  Following is the abstract.

"A method and system for recommending potential contacts to a target user is provided. A recommendation system identifies users who are related to the target user through no more than a maximum degree of separation. The recommendation system identifies the users by starting with the contacts of the target user and identifying users who are contacts of the target user’s contacts, contacts of those contacts, and so on. The recommendation system then ranks the identified users, who are potential contacts for the target user, based on a likelihood that the target user will want to have a direct relationship with the identified users. The recommendation system then presents to the target user a ranking of the users who have not been filtered out."

Dear friends at Microsoft – please stop patenting stuff like this.  Just implement it in Outlook – or – even better – Exchange. 

I hate writing blog posts like this – it makes me tired.  If I’m the guys at Xobni, I’m working on (a) getting my patent filing updated and filed and (b) commenting on the PeerToPatent site about my prior art.  Actually, I’m probably just ignoring this and innovating like crazy.  But that’s just me.