I usually sleep in on Sunday’s but I’ve got a 16 mile run and want to meet Amy at the end of it at 10:30 for brunch. So – good morning 5am and my normal daily reading routine. I ran across a lot of intriguing stuff this morning that I thought I’d share with you. I encourage you to trade your TV watching time for a handful of clicks.
Will Google’s Purity Pay Off? If you have engaged in the “yes Twitter is cool, but how will it make money” conversation I encourage you to read this BusinessWeek article from Pearl Harbor Day in 2000. And I quote: “LIMITED BUSINESS. But how will Google ever make money? There’s the rub. The company’s adamant refusal to use banner or other graphical ads eliminates what is the most lucrative income stream for rival search engines. “
Are We Home Alone? Sometimes Thomas Friedman nails it and sometimes he doesn’t. Today, he nails it. I completely agree that Obama (who I voted for) completely blew it on the AIG bonus thing. Per Friedman:
“President Obama missed a huge teaching opportunity with A.I.G. Those bonuses were an outrage. The public’s anger was justified. But rather than fanning those flames and letting Congress run riot, the president should have said: “I’ll handle this.” He should have gone on national TV and had the fireside chat with the country that is long overdue. That’s a talk where he lays out exactly how deep the crisis we are in is, exactly how much sacrifice we’re all going to have to make to get out of it, and then calls on those A.I.G. brokers — and everyone else who, in our rush to heal our banking system, may have gotten bonuses they did not deserve — and tells them that their president is asking them to return their bonuses “for the sake of the country.” Had Mr. Obama given A.I.G.’s American brokers a reputation to live up to, a great national mission to join, I’d bet anything we’d have gotten most of our money back voluntarily. Inspiring conduct has so much more of an impact than coercing it. And it would have elevated the president to where he belongs — above the angry gaggle in Congress.”
Dov Seidman, the CEO of LRN (I’m an investor) summarizes it well: “Laws tell you what you can do. Values inspire in you what you should do. It’s a leader’s job to inspire in us those values.”
Tit for tat: TomTom sues Microsoft for patent infringement: The Microsoft / TomTom patent suit battle is heating up. This is an important one to watch for a variety of reasons including it’s one of the few offense patent litigations from Microsoft to date.
SpringStage goes live: A year ago, David Cohen (TechStars co-founder and author of the ColoradoStartups blog) told me about the idea he had with Alex Muse for creating a national network of startup blogs. SpringStage now has over 30 startup blogs in its network. Pretty cool – take a look.
Concur’s stock sinks after CEO admits he didn’t earn degree: I have never, ever understood why people lie about graduating from college. The reputational effect (and general ease) of getting caught – especially today – far outweighs any benefits. For the record, I have an S.B. (bachelors degree) and S.M. (masters degree) in management science from MIT and was in the Ph.D. program for three years before I got kicked out. I do not have a Ph.D. My dad is Dr. Feld, but I am not.
Investing in open source hardware: Eric von Hippel – my MIT advisor and professor that I worked with (before getting kicked out of the Ph.D. program) has been researching user driven innovation since the 1970’s. He invited me to come talk at his annual MIT Innovation Lab seminar last week about open source hardware from a VC perspective. I wasn’t able to make it to Boston, but suggested Bijan Sabet from Spark Capital talk, as Bijan is an investor in BugLabs and Boxee and has a point of view about this stuff.
What Is A Good Venture Return: Fred Wilson digs a little deeper into what makes a good venture return on the heals of the PE Hub article asserting that the $590m acquisition of Pure Digital by Cisco was a decent return for a middle-of-the road VC firm, but “for big name backers Benchmark Capital and Sequoia Capital that’s pretty much a dud.” Fred decomposes this more and concludes “It’s an investment that worked out well for the investors and I am sure they are quite happy they made the investment and with the returns.”
Try, Try Again, or Maybe Not: I guess I have to go read this paper by Harvard professor Paul Gompers, Anna Kovner, Josh Lerner, and David Sharfstein. In it, they claim to have determined that the answer to the question “Does failure breed new knowledge or experience that can be leveraged into performance the second time around?” is “In some cases, yes, but over all, he says, “We found there is no benefit in terms of performance.” Mark Pincus and Zynga (I’m an investor) are highlighted in the article. I’ve been an investor in two of Mark’s successes and missed one of his failures; my experience is that the lessons he learned from his failure have been extremely well integrated into his brain. My own anecdotal experience runs counter to the study – I love working with entrepreneurs that have both success and failure.
Ok – I’ve stalled long enough. Time to go run.
Wow – Operating System Interface Design Between 1981-2009 is awesome (thanks Dave). It is a screenshot from every major graphical OS since the Xerox Alto. Some old favorites of mine include the Apple Lisa (1983), the Amiga Workbench (1985), Geos (1986), NeXTSTEP (1989), and OS/2 2.0 (1992). At some point in time I had a computer that ran these and/or installed them on a computer of mine.
I caught the tail end of SXSWi (showed up yesterday and gave a speech sponsored by the Canadian Consulate) and am hanging around today for some night time music entertainment as the music part of SXSW. It’s pretty cool to watch Austin shift from “nerds” (the SXSWi gang) to “hipsters” (the SXSW music gang); while the music scene is not my thing (I’m a nerd), it’s highly entertaining to observe this species in action.
On Monday night I co-hosted a meeting at the Governor’s Mansion in Denver with a group of about 20 significant Colorado entrepreneurs (and a few academics, government people, the Governor and State CIO, one other VC, and two CxO’s of a large Denver-based “ICT” company). The discussion was around ICT in Colorado and our local entrepreneurial ecosystem. I’ve long believed that the entrepreneurs are the motive force behind all entrepreneurial ecosystems – not the VCs, the other service providers, the government, or anyone else. It might be a tautology (e.g. “entrepreneurs drive the entrepreneurial ecosystem”) but I regularly hear people – including very smart and experienced ones – assert other things such as overstating the importance of the presence of VCs to the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
My experience with TechStars has given me a set of great insights into the notions of entrepreneurial communities and how they develop, evolve, and sustain themselves. I’m heading over to Capital Factory this afternoon to talk to the guys there about what they are doing (a similar type of seed stage mentoring program that is running their first year in Austin this summer). When wandering around SXSW yesterday, I saw floods of techies and entrepreneurs – nary a VC in sight.
When I think about who I spend most of my time with, it’s entrepreneurs. When I think about who really drives innovation, it’s entrepreneurs. When I think about the core of any entrepreneurial community (or ecosystem, or whatever you want to call it), it’s entrepreneurs. When I think about the history (and future) of innovation in the US, it’s all about entrepreneurs.
Last fall I read Spencer Ante’s fantastic book Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital. It’s been bouncing around in my mind as I ponder my view of the role of the VC in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, especially as all the noise has started circulating again about the inevitable change / re-invention of the VC industry.
VC’s play a role in all of this, but it’s one that I regularly feel is dramatically overstated, misrepresented (including by many VCs) and misunderstood. We provide different resources and value than lawyers, accountants, investment bankers, and PR and marketing firms, but we are still simply one of the inputs into the entrepreneur ecosystem.
I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this as I continue to think out loud on my blog about the dynamics of “entrepreneurial communities.” As always, feel free to challenge me about anything as I play around with these ideas in public.
If you have been thinking about applying to TechStars for either the Summer 2009 program in either Boulder or Boston, now is the time to do it as the application deadline is Saturday, March 21, 2009 at 11:59:59 PM MDT.
In my first company (Feld Technologies), when we set deadlines we started out with days of the week (e.g. Wednesday). In the late 1980’s, this meant “sometime before Thursday morning when people start showing up at work.” So – we tightened it up and put a date on it (e.g. Wednesday 3/18). This was supposed to mean “by the end of the day” but inevitably meant 11:59:59 PM. So – we started putting date and time stamps on deadlines. I continue that practice to this day.
So – the deadline is Saturday, March 21, 2009 at 11:59:59 PM MDT. It’ll take you about as long to apply as it took you to read this blog post (ok – maybe a little longer, but not much.) What are you waiting for?
As co-chairman of the Colorado Governor’s Innovation Council, I’ve been regularly exposed to the acronym ICT. It’s not a familiar or comfortably one to me and I chronically call it “CIT” or expand it incorrectly.
I am looking for a phrase that covers IT + Communications + Software + Internet. These are the four components of ICT that drive a huge chunk of business activity and innovation in Colorado. In my world as a VC, I call this software + Internet, but that doesn’t cover the full landscape.
My friends at Silicon Flatirons have put together a Wiki titled Innovation in Colorado and Information and Communications Technology (ICT) where we are compiling the history of the ICT ecosystem in Colorado. If you have participated in this in any way, feel free to jump on and add your thoughts and facts.
What’s your favorite phrase or acronym for this?
In response to my post The Beginning of the Real Mess in the Clouds I received several emails / twitters / comments saying some variation of “these are easy problems to address” or “the cloud computing providers will quickly fix all this stuff and even my mother will be able to use cloud computing.”
Uh huh. Here’s another one. We’ve got hundreds of these already and it has only been 75 days since we started the company.
A heads up to anyone attempting to connect to Slicehost using Java:
There is a subtle bug in the JDK (including 1.6), such that long username/password combinations (like the long username used with the Slicehost API) are encoded improperly in an HttpURLConnection. If you include the username in the URL, you will get a 401 error; if you attempt to use an Authenticator you will get an exception from Java that there is an invalid line. The solution is to override the base64encoder and set the authorization property manually OR potentially use the Apache Http client rather than the built-in JDK client.
Here is the basic code for the solution:
static final String Credential = "my Slicehost API username here"; // the part before the @
class LongLineBase64Encoder extends BASE64Encoder { @Override public int bytesPerLine() { return 1024; } }
…
URL ServiceURL = new URL("https://api.slicehost.com/slices.xml");
HttpsURLConnection Conn = (HttpsURLConnection) ServiceURL.openConnection(); String EncodedUsername = (new LongLineBase64Encoder()).encode(Credential.getBytes());
Conn.setRequestProperty("Authorization", "Basic " + EncodedUsername); Conn.connect();
What part of mess wasn’t I clear about? Oh, and my mother is really smart, but I’m betting that “The solution is to override the base64encoder and set the authorization property manually OR potentially use the Apache Http client rather than the built-in JDK client” doesn’t mean much to her.
Anyone who has driven to DIA has seen the mysterious big blue horse. Yes – it has special powers. It has killed before (its creator – Luis Jimenez) and may kill again.
I’ve just joined the I am afraid of the big blue horse at DIA Facebook group. Here’s one of the best quotes from the wall.
Approaching DIA, my heart began to thump. Summoning all my resolution, I gave my Suby half a score of kicks to the gas pedal in an attempt to hasten my journey. At just that moment a splash of blue caught my eye. In the dark shadow of the field, on the margin of the airport, I beheld something blue, so blue, and towering, a gigantic monster ready to pounce upon this weary traveler. "What are you" I whispered, and received no reply. Agitated, I repeated my question. Pushing the gas pedal, I closed my eyes and uttered an involuntary psalm. I opened my eyes. The shadow took shape, a huge horse with powerful frame, whose eyes burned red and followed me, keeping pace. I rounded the curve, bringing the relief of the giant against the sky and I was horror-struck on perceiving it was…art? ~ Jenn Bma (Boulder)
I am – in general – afraid of horses so it’s appropriate that I am fucking terrified of the Big Blue Horse. I am so glad Facebook has provided me with a place to find some new friends. Thanks Jill for pointing this out to me.
All the economics and newscasters like to talk about GDP Growth Rate (and its importance to life, the universe, and everything). Whatever. One of my very smart LPs sent me this the other day.
He sent the attached note:
This is not meant to be exhaustive or to suggest any correlation – only a reminder that great companies continue to be created at shitty times. It is, however, interesting to think about what attributes might lead companies founded in shitty times to go on to be successful. How about: single-mindedness of purpose, frugality/capital efficiency, and more sweat than equity.
The list of companies started during periods of negative GDP Growth include Wang, TI, DEC, Fairchild, EDS, Compuserve, Intel, Atari, CA, Apple, Microsoft, Amdahl, Autodesk, Sun, Compaq, Cisco, 3Com, Genzyme, EMC, Amgen, Lotus, EA, Adobe, AOL, Dell, Cisco, and Network Appliance. I know the startup story of many of them and it includes single-mindedness of purpose, frugality/capital efficiency, and more sweat than equity.
We made a seed investment at the end of last year in a company called Standing Cloud. They are working on a set of application development and deployment tools for cloud computing that build on some of the ideas in the posts What Happened To The 4GL? and Clouditude. They’ve spent the first quarter of 2009 testing out a series of hypotheses we had concerning issues with Cloud Computing as well as building an first release of their cloud deployment tool.
Things in cloud computing land are much worse than our hypotheses, which were already suitably cloudy. Following is a simple example of a real issue that even a non-techie will be able to understand.
When starting cloud server instances via an API, it’s important to realize that the instance may become "available" from the perspective of the cloud provider system before all of its standard services are running. In particular, if your automated process will connect to the instance via ssh or http, it will be at least a few seconds after the instance appears before the applicable service is available. This problem generally does not arise if you start servers manually, because by the time you see that it is running, copy the IP address or domain name, and type the command or browser URL to connect, the services are usually ready. Possible solutions include:
- Wait a safe, predetermined amount of time. This is the simplest, but obviously is not robust.
- Attempt to open a socket on the applicable port (e.g., 22 or 80), and do so in a loop, with a brief sleep between attempts. These attempts will fail until the service starts, and you should have the loop time out after some period in case there is a deeper problem with the instance.
- In a similar loop, directly attempt to connect to the service. Depending on the SSH API you are using, this may have additional overhead or abstraction that is better avoided, but it is robust and likely to work.
A related, but more insidious issue is that the sshd authentication services are not necessarily available as soon as sshd is available on the port. Thus it is possible to connect to the service and have authentication fail, even though everything should be in order. A sufficient wait period or a loop is once again the solution. However, if the loop wait period is not sufficient, you may attempt too many failed authentications and lock yourself out of the system. Thus this approach has no fully robust solution aside from an empirically safe wait period either prior to authentication or in the loop wait.
Clearly these problems are tricky to diagnose if you are not aware of their idiosyncrasies.
A more robust but also more complex overall solution would be to incorporate a service on-board the instance that starts up at boot and checks the status of sshd from the inside, then makes an otherwise unused port available when the system is fully ready for connection and authentication. Of course, this requires that you can boot from a pre-configured image rather than a stock image, and it also requires that another port be open on the firewall.
The set of things like this is endless. In addition, each cloud computing environment has different nuances and each stack configuration adds more complexity to the mix. There are so many fun puns I that apply that I get giddy just thinking about all the storms ahead and the need for umbrellas.