It’s DNC time in Denver and all kinds of weird advertisements are popping up all over the place, including the airport.  My partner Jason sent me a photo of this one today with the heading "Puke".

I put this in the "you’ve got to be fucking kidding me" category.  Let’s break it down.  Here are the messages:

• Life Liberty and the Pursuit of More Patents
• Averaging 2 Patent Applications Per Day
• Official Wireless provider for the Democratic National Convention

Let me guess – AT&T is positioning themselves as a key supporter of no patent reform.  Or, maybe AT&T is positioning themselves as key advocators of patenting everything under the sun.  Maybe they are advocating that they should give their engineers bonuses for every patent they file.  Maybe they are trying to say that a good democracy has lots and lots of patents.  What ARE they trying to say?

Regardless we know that big companies can submit lots and lots of patents.  Hey AT&T – two applications per day isn’t actually all that many anymore!  How about telling us about some of the real innovation you are doing. 

Actually, can you just spend some time improving your 3G network so my iPhone calls don’t drop as often?

At Foundry Group, one of our investment themes is Glue.  We’ve done a handful of investments in this area, including Gnip.  Since Gnip’s launch last month, it’s been put into production in a number of cases – some obvious, some subtle.  Part of the fun is watching the adoption of it evolve rapidly as we continue to build out the core capabilities of the what Gnip can do.

I had a long conversation with a VC I work closely with about the value Gnip ultimately provides to its various constituencies (data providers, data consumers, and end users) and how / where it expects to get paid in the long term.  During the conversation, we covered a number of different potential areas, but I realized that my thinking could be much crisper.  That’s normal for this stage of a startup as Gnip is still very early stage (we’ve done one seed round of investment and are gearing up for the next financing) but the exercise of defining a clear business endgame (vs. just a technology endgame) is extremely helpful and self referential, as it creates more focus on what we should actually be building.

There is nothing quite like an example.  Yesterday, we had the TechStars 2008 Investor and Demo Day.  EventVue – one of the TechStars 2007 companies – provided the online community infrastructure for the event.  They automatically extracted all the data from the registration system and build an online community.  As part of this, members of the community could add their twitter account and – if they had already been a member of another EventVue conference community – like me – would automatically have all their information already in EventVue and wouldn’t have to do anything.

The then created a techstars08 twitter account.  This rebroadcast all the tweets from anyone at the event that had a twitter account set up in their EventVue profile.  However, rather than writing the polling software to Twitter to continually check for updates in the twitter stream, the used Gnip for this.

EventVue had a data set (I don’t know the number – but lets say it was 100 userids) of twitters at the conference.  They wrote a tiny piece of code that monitored Gnip’s twitter notification stream.  Whenever someone in the set of 100 usersids appeared in the twitter notification stream, EventVue’s handler then queried twitter for that one discrete piece of data and then rebroadcast it on techstars08.

This took a huge load off of Twitter.  It was much easier code to write for EventVue.  It created a virtually real time twitter rebroadcast stream.  I’m sure I’m missing at least one of the technical nuances – hopefully the guys at EventVue will write up a deeper post on what they did, how they did it, and why it was valuable to them.

Update: Josh Fraser, the co-founder and CTO of EventVue, has posted How Gnip rescued us from our twitter nightmare.

Look for plenty of more thinking out loud from me on our Glue theme as we bring some of the investments we’ve made into sharper focus.

Jason and I were talking about some of the running events in the Olympics as we walked in to the office together this morning.  After chatting about the marathon, he asked if I’d seen the Bolt 100 meter final.  I did – and it was an amazing performance – but I was perplexed why Bolt coasted the last 20 meters and "only" did 9.69 when he most likely could have broken 9.60.  Now – 9.69 is a world record, but 9.60 (or even the symbolic 9.59) would be mindblowing.

Jason suggested that it might be marketing.  Whoever is "advising" Bolt said "just win and break the world record by a little.  Then the endorsements will flow.  Then you can keep breaking the world record and steadily upping the stakes."  Cynical, but it rang true.

This just in – Bolt won the 200 meter and set a world record – 19.30.  This time he ran hard through the finish.

Now – I think both Bolt and Phelps are incredible athletes.  Amazing.  Mindblowing.  But I was really baffled to see Bolt pull up short.  It made no sense to me, especially when compared to the incredible effort by Phelps across all of his races. 

This made me think of sales people or teams that beat their number in a quarter and then bank something for the next quarter.  I’ve never ever liked this practice, especially in private companies.  I much prefer the Phelps approach – where you give it your all through the very end and bring in as much as you can, take a deep breath, and start all over again – than the Bolt approach (at least in the 100) of when you know you have it nailed, you coast to the finish.

I like this life thing.  Good luck TechStars Class of 2008!

Marathon #12 is on Saturday.  I’ll be running the Mesa Falls Marathon in Ashton, Idaho.  157 people ran it last year so it’s a deliciously small one.  I’ve been training with a new coach – Gary Ditsch – for the past six weeks with a goal of ultimately getting below 4 hours.  My goal for Mesa Falls is sub-4:45 which given my training and how I feel should be achievable.

If you recall from my last marathon (a mere two months ago in Duluth) I’m now running to raise money for the Accelerated Cure Project.  My goal is to have raised $100,000 at the end of running 50 marathons ($2,000 / marathon); to date I’ve raised $2,375.

As a result of my two anchor sponsors – Return Path and Pixie Mate – I’ve already got $1,250 in the bag as Return Path is contributing $1,000 and Pixie Mate is contributing $250.  So – all I need from you dear readers is another $750 of contributions to make my goal for this marathon.  Any amount will do.

Thanks in advance for Matt Blumberg, the CEO of Return Path who will be running the second half of the race with me with the explicit goal of getting me across the finish line sub-4:45.  And finally, thanks to Amy for putting up with all of this marathon nonsense.

I have no idea where this joke came from, but I couldn’t resist posting it because it combined Alaska, Massachusetts, Democrats, Republicans, Guns, the Pope, and a Grizzly Bear.

The Pope took a couple of days off to visit the rugged mountains of Alaska for some sightseeing. He was cruising along the campground in the PopeMobile when there was a frantic commotion just at the edge of the woods.

A helpless Democrat, wearing sandals, shorts, a ‘Save the Whales’ hat and a ‘To Hell with Bush’ T-shirt, was screaming while struggling frantically and thrashing around trying to free himself from the grasp of a 10-foot grizzly.

As the Pope watched in horror, a group of Republican loggers came racing up. One quickly fired a 44 magnum into the bear’s chest. The other two reached up and pulled the bleeding, semiconscious Democrat from the bear’s grasp. Then using long clubs, the three loggers finished off the bear and two of them threw it onto the bed of their truck while the other tenderly placed the injured Democrat in the back seat.

As they prepared to leave, the Pope summoned them to come over. ‘I give you my blessing for your brave actions!’ he told them. ‘I heard there was a bitter hatred between Republican loggers and Democratic environmental activists but now I’ve seen with my own eyes that this is not true.’

As the Pope drove off, one logger asked his buddies ‘Who was that guy?’

‘It was the Pope,’ another replied. ‘He’s in direct contact with Heaven and has access to all wisdom.

‘Well,’ the logger said, ‘he may have access to all wisdom but he doesn’t know squat about bear hunting! By the way, is the bait still alive, or do we need to go back to Massachusetts and get another one?’

Did anyone mention that the DNC is happening in Denver next week?  Egads.

Matt McAdams has a clever blog up titled Up next: telesoftware!  He discusses the rise of our favorite new buzzword (hint: it’s "Cloud Computing") and spends some time harkening back to its origin (hint: it’s the "Application Service Provider.")

I was around at the birth of the ASP as the co-chairman of one of the early ASPs (Interliant) which started out life in 1996 as a "web hosting company" (how passe) and evolved in 1997 into an Application Service Provider.  I clearly remember the tech media latching onto the ASP label at the end of the 1990’s right alongside prefixing everything with a lowercase e and postfixing everything with ".com". 

The cynics were simple minded – they simply referred to the ASPs as the return of mainframe – or even better – timesharing.  Interliant enjoyed rapid growth and a brief period of what looked like success before being decimated during the collapse of the Internet bubble.

Platform-as-a-Service has emerged suddenly with a vengeance.  IBM System/370 anyone?  The S/370 had this nifty thing called "virtual memory", which evolved into VM, which lives on today as the great new "virtualization" trend.

Telesoftware?  Nah – that sounds too much like Telemedicine (what ever happened to that one?)  I think we are going to be talking about "planetary computing" once "cloud computing" runs its course since "Sun computing" has already come and mostly gone.

My partner Chris Wand has a long guest post up on Ask the VC titled How Should I Approach a VC I Don’t Know?  Lots of good do’s and don’ts for anyone looking to connect with a VC.

I’m baffled whenever I hear from a CEO that he’s having trouble getting a response from one of his VC investors.  Unfortunately, this is a very common occurrence in VC-backed company land.

After noticing this during the Internet bubble around the turn of the century (doesn’t that make it seem like so very long ago), I’m starting to notice this again more frequently.  As I pondered this the other day, I tried to discern a pattern, but I just think it’s just the way the universe works for some people.

I’ve always thought that my "priority hierarchy" was very straightforward.  In order:

1. Amy (my wife)
2. My extended family
3. My partners
4. Our employees
5. The investors in our funds
6. The CEO’s of the companies I’ve invested in
7. Other board members of the companies I’ve invested in
8. Employees of the companies I’ve invested in
9. Everyone else

If you’ve spent any time with me, you know that I handle #1 pretty easily since I love being with Amy.  #2 is also easy – fortunately – as my family is pretty functional (yeah – we have our issues like every family, but they are more "entertainment" than "problems.") 

Once you get into the work hierarchy, it just seems painfully obvious to me that my partners, our employees, and our investors are the next chunk.  Without them, we don’t have a business.

Then comes the CEO’s of the companies I’ve invested in.  Notice that there is no "noise" before them.  No new deals.  No potential investments.  No conferences.  No baseball or golf games.  No boondoggles.  No hanging out with other VCs.  No … (random other thing goes here.)

All of the CEO’s I work with are excellent on email.  As a result, the tempo of our initial communication is immediate.  They send me something; I respond almost immediately (worst case – a typical "catch up on email cycle time" which is rarely more than 12 hours for me.)  If it requires a phone call, that happens "next" (immediately after whatever I’m doing, as long as I don’t have 1 … 5 scheduled "next".  If it requires a face to face interaction, that happens as soon as we can get together.

This seems so simple to me.  Maybe I’m missing something but I’m always kind of amazed to hear CEO’s talk about how difficult it is for them to get a response from some of their VC investors.