Month: August 2009
There was plenty of chatter about my post The Best Board Meetings. One idea popped up a few times and was well articulated by John Boyd in his post What Makes a Good Board Meeting? In it he talks about what is expected from a VC in a board meeting, rather than just from the CEO / entrepreneur.
“So one thing I would add is nothing is worse than a board member that just gives "good body temperature". i.e. I think it’s important for investors to have well articulated views and data to support their advice on strategic choices the company faces. I think it’s also important that when a CEO asks for investor help on an issue, it’s incumbent on the investor to tap his/her own extended network to get the best help possible. My point is, while a lot is expected of the CEO, the VC board members need to step up too and a lot of times they don’t.”
I love the phrase “gives good body temperature” – that captures the behavior of so many VC attendees at board meetings (including partners, not just associates.)
Worse, though, is the endless addiction to a blackberry / iPhone or laptop during a board meeting. I long ago stopped taking my laptop to board meetings because I knew I had no ability to ignore it. I still find myself regularly taking out my iPhone during board meetings. I don’t do anything on paper so I’m often taking my iPhone out just to write notes to myself for tasks to do, but I always end up scanning my email due to “poor impulse control.” While it’s rude to everyone in the room, it’s even worse because no matter how good I think I am at listening while reading my email, I’m not. And I’m certainly not participating.
Yesterday, during a board meeting, I tried something different. I put a piece of paper and a pen in front of me and whenever I had a thought I wrote it down. When I reflect on the meeting from yesterday, my level of engagement (which I like to think is usually high) was as complete as it gets – I was “in the board meeting” for the entire board meeting, except for the two minutes when I took a call from Amy (which will always supersede whatever I’m doing, except sex, but since I only have sex with Amy, this won’t be an issue.)
So – starting now, I’m going to banish my iPhone from board meetings. I encourage my VC colleagues to give this a try.
I haven’t written about software patents in a while. I still hate them and think they are an illogical construct. But first, a haiku from xkcd to warm you up (and make you smile).
I woke up this morning to the announcement that Microsoft can’t sell Word anymore. Apparently a judge in that hot bed of intellectual thought and discourse, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, has ordered a permanent injunction that "prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML.”
Wait, is this the same Microsoft that was forced to change their doc formats and make them “more open” by some judiciary somewhere for antitrust (“anticompetitive”?) reasons. Ok. But wait, the rabbit hole gets deeper.
Apparently this injunction (filed by i4i – a company that according to their web page provides “Labeling Conversion, Collaborative Authoring, Document Management and Publishing Solutions to support your global regulatory compliance requirements.”) is based on an assertion that Microsoft willfully violates a 1998 patent (No 5,787,449) about how to “create and edit XML content from a word processor.”
Pause for a second. Note the irony and weirdness of all of this. There have been a spate of specific XML related patents recently (I’m going to bet that Microsoft has a few of them – why not, gotta keep that patent group busy.) Um – isn’t XML an open standard? Aren’t there a bunch of document processors that read and write XML (like all of them)? Seems like it should be illegal (or at least invalid) to be granted a patent on something built on top of an open standard! Nah – let’s just argue about GPL and its various forms for a while – that’s more fun.
It gets worse. The judge in the case, in addition to enjoying torturing Microsoft with an injunction, ordered Microsoft to pay i4i over $290 million in damages. At this point I paused and pondered why a Canadian company was suing Microsoft in East Texas. Maybe it’s warmer there. I certainly know the beer isn’t better. I could keep going, but I’m running out of sarcasm (has someone patented that yet?)
In one of my fantasy parallel universes, long time software thought leaders – ranging from individual software artists (you know who you are) to the very largest companies would get together and decide how to take an approach to this absurdity that could be proposed to the appropriate government entities (we’ll start with the PTO and Congress, but it’s always worth a trip to the Supreme Court if necessary.) To do this, some of the largest software companies need to step back from their stupid case by case legal strategies and decide to try to reform (transform?) how this works. Until then, it’s probably going to just going to go on and on and on.
Q.E.D., Bitches! indeed. That’s often how I want to just end my argument on software patents, but I know this particular universe doesn’t work that way. Too bad for me.
Oh – and did anyone notice that a different judge (Patel in this case) ruled against RealDVD and “granted a preliminary injunction in favor of the major motion picture studios and DVD-CCA in their legal battle with Real Networks over its RealDVD products.” I’m going for a run now – maybe that’ll make me happier.
Long time readers of this blog know that we helped put together the Defrag Conference series and are enormous fans of Eric Norlin and everything he does. Well – we’re starting to gear up for Defrag 2009 on November 11th and 12th in Boulder, Colorado. The agenda is starting to take shape (anyone that knows Eric knows that he tunes it all the way up to the event.) As usual, Eric has some tricks up his sleeve (Mwahahahahahahaha).
Eric wrote a post today titled Come Early, Stay Late. In it he discusses the reason he has Defrag in Boulder (rather than in the bay area). If you want some more recent chatter on Boulder (on the heals of TechStars Investor Day) take a look at Fred Wilson’s post TechStars and Mark Solon’s post Boulder, Colorado.
Come join us. I promise it will be worth your time.
Even though investor day happened last week, this week’s TechStars’s video – Practice Like You Play – is the lead up to investor day. Watch the Everlater guys kick Seth’s ass on bikes (plus they look so cute in their Everlater kit).
Don’t forget to live life.
Some mornings I come across a blog post from a friend that breaks my mind – in a good way. Today’s post from Todd Vernon titled My 100 year hobby was one such post. Look at the picture below.
The picture on the left is Central City, Colorado from around 100 years ago. The picture on the right is it from last weekend. Todd describes how he put the shot together and makes a few observations about Central City, Blackhawk, and the Colorado Central Railroad. He even manages to weave a reference to the Internet into his post, along with some comments on trees (note the absence of them on the left on the hill in the background.)
I run a lot in the mountains around Boulder and I live in a canyon that has been around for a very long time. I’ve seen plenty of old pictures – it’s fascinating to me to juxtapose them with current pictures. It’s just the other side of the augmented reality coin.
Oh – did anyone notice the M&A and IPO markets seem to be back? It suddenly feels a lot like 2006 / 2007 in the tech world. At least for this week.
I heard the phrase “a small set of simple moves” a few weeks ago from someone and it stuck in my head. Since then I’ve been thinking about it regularly as a fundamental operating principle.
Building any company is hard, but when I look back on the success of many of the companies I’ve been involved in, it occurs to me that it is built on a small set of simple moves. Now, these moves are rarely obvious, and are often hard to figure out, but once you nail it, you can do them over and over again all the way to greatness.
While running this morning, I was thinking about this in the context of running marathons. I know exactly what I need to do to get in shape to run a 4:30 marathon. Going from 4:30 to 4:00 requires a small set of simple moves. Anyone that has run a marathon knows this, but also knows that it’s a bitch to knock 30 minutes off your time, even if you start from a base of 4:30! The moves aren’t complicated but aren’t obvious to someone running their second marathon. I’ve run 14 and have a coach so they’ve become pretty obvious to me. Yet I’ve still never crossed the 4:05 mark.
The reason is that it requires conviction. You now know the moves – now do them. Over and over and over again. Not so easy. Especially when you get tired, have other things come up that get in your way, lose confidence, get distracted, or just get bored. But – when you stick with it, execute the small set of simple moves, and then run the marathon in 4:00, it’s magic.
Just like building a company. When I look at the great entrepreneurial CEO’s that I’ve worked with, they understood this innately. They worked extremely hard to figure out the small set of simple moves that would work, and then just did them over and over again. When they inevitably got distracted or bored their fundamental conviction pulled them back to the small set of simple moves. Occasionally they introduced a new move into the mix, but only when they had conviction that it would be additive. And – in a phrase that is trendy today – they “failed fast” on things that weren’t going anywhere.
I learned a phrase from my dad that I love – when I was a teenage he said “don’t make complicated mistakes.” A “small set of simple moves” fits nicely with that. If you are a CEO, have you figured out what your small set of simple moves are?
I’m heading out for the first run in 10 days since I hurt my back playing tennis. It’s a beautiful day here in Keystone and I’m looking forward to enjoying the mountains for a while.
I slept late, had breakfast with Amy, and then went through my morning information routine. In addition to leveling up in Mafia Wars and Pirates, checking to make sure my Farm didn’t need harvesting until later today, and making sure my workers were feed and working the rides in Roller Coaster Kingdom, I ran across a pair of very inspiring blog posts.
Fred Wilson wrote a great post titled Doubling Down. In it, he describes the biggest double down of his life – his decision around the Flatiron portfolio in late 2000 / early 2001. In addition to a good story, he ends with some sage advice about how to think about doubling down.
Mark O’Sullivan, the CEO of Vanilla (one of the TechStars 2009 Boulder companies) also wrote an inspiring post titled TechStar for Life. In it, he captures the essence of TechStars along with showing his depth as a person and entrepreneur.
While scanning my Facebook news feed this morning, I saw one more gem posted by Shawn Broderick (who runs TechStars Boston). It’s the .sig of the day and says “How about instead of spreading the wealth around we spread the work ethic around? Amen, brother.” Having just come off an amazing summer with the Boston TechStars, I can comfortably say these guys all have an incredible work ethic that reinforces how important innovation and entrepreneurship is to our country and society as a whole.
I’m lucky to know and work with a large number of people that I put in the “strong work ethic club”, including many who are on their first venture as well as those that have been at it for a long time. There is a common thread that runs through all of them – they believe in innovation, entrepreneurship, and getting things done that matter. I’d like to think that I’ve been in this club my entire life and hope to retain my membership until the lights go out, whatever I’m doing.
Congrats to Rally Software and Return Path – two of my portfolio companies that made the Best Companies to Work for in Colorado ’09. Unlike many “happy lists” this is a pretty serious one as it’s put together by the Society of Human Resource Management, Jobing.com, and ColoradoBiz and involves a survey process by Modern Think.
Rally came in first place in the Medium Sized Company category (100 to 249 employees) and Return Path came in either in the Small Company category (25 to 99 employees). While Return Path has about 150 employees, less than 100 are in Colorado (although Colorado is their largest office) so I guess they ended up only looking at locally based employees.
I’m really proud of both of these companies. We’ve been investors in Return Path since 2000 and Rally Software since 2002 – both had less than five employees when we invested (primarily founders). I’ve watched both companies grow with an obsessive focus on creating unique and powerful cultures.
Congrats to everyone at both companies – and keep on rocking! Oh – and both are hiring (Rally careers page; Return Path careers page).