Month: April 2010
Steve Bell of StartupTrek once again does a nice job of capturing my thoughts in under 7 minutes – this time on TechStars and some advice for young entrepreneurs.
At Foundry Group, we often talk about our thematic approach to investing. Steve Bell from StartupTrek did a nice job of capturing my perspective in under eight minutes.
Props go to The Form Group. Deeply brilliant.
Colorado HB10-1193 – also known as the “Amazon Tax” – really upset me as I wrote about in Amazon Fires Its Affiliates in Colorado (Including Me) Because of Colorado HB 10-1193. While I discovered a partial solution via a service from a company called Viglink which I wrote about in I’m An Amazon Affiliate Again – Sort Of I’m still really annoyed with the myopia of our Colorado state representatives around this issue.
I’m also disgusted by the protectionist turn this took as our governor, many representatives, and several progressive organizations that I’ve supported called for a ban on Amazon because of the need to “level the playing field for local merchants.” When I talked to a number of folks about this, including the organizations that I had previous supported, they demonstrated that they didn’t really understand the issue, were getting confused about states rights vs. federal rights (an issue I expect we’ll see come up a lot over the next few years given our federal, state, and local government search for additional revenue wherever they can find it), and didn’t get that a protectionist attitude was actually offensive to most business people (except, presumably, those being protected by the government.)
Finally, legislation like this is completely tone deaf to both the growing impact of technology on our society as well as a huge shift in the way information based goods are bought and sold.
I’ve been told by several Colorado representatives that didn’t support this bill that there is no way this tax will be repealed, but I haven’t given up yet. I’ve enlisted my friend David Binetti to crank up another Twitter Campaign To Repeal Colorado’s Internet Tax. If you are a Colorado citizen with a twitter account, it’ll take less than a minute to tweet out this message along with delivering a physical letter to your specific representatives.
Let’s make sure our representatives know that this is a piece of legislation that should be repealed.
Jon Pierce of BetaHouse has decided to organize an Angel Boot Camp in Boston on June 1st. The idea is that anyone interested in learning more about how to get started with angel investing can attend and learn from some people who’ve been there and done that.
David Cohen at TechStars wrote about why he thinks it’s important. Jon Pierce also wrote about why he’s doing Angel Boot Camp as well as listing some of Boston’s Best Angel Investors.
While June 1 is still several months away, sign up and put Angel Boot Camp on your calendar now.
When I saw this a few minutes ago as I trolled through my daily folder, I thought of an email I got yesterday titled “turtles all the way down” that referred to an article yesterday on TechDirt titled What If The Very Theory That Underlies Why We Need Patents Is Wrong? The article discusses a new paper out by my MIT advisor Eric von Hippel and his Harvard Business School colleague Carliss Y. Baldwin titled Modeling a Paradigm Shift: From Producer Innovation to User and Open Collaborative Innovation.
I expect this to be a key paper cited in the ongoing debate about software patents (and patents in general). Anyone in the software industry will quickly understand this paper and the massive shift we’ve seen from a “producer innovation model” to a “open single user and open collaborative initiative model” of innovation.
In the mean time, here are the butterflies.
What do you think this is? I’ll give you a hint – the little white line in the left corner is a scale that represents 5,000 km.
How could you not fall in love with a company named AgileZen? Today, Rally Software – a company I’ve been an investor in since 2003 – announced that they have acquired AgileZen. If you are an Agile software development shop, or follow ALM, Rally just added Kanban to the mix.
This is the second acquisition Rally has made – the other was 6th Sense Analytics which they acquired at the beginning of 2009. If you follow this blog, you know that I’m a big fan of having established companies I’m an investor in buy smaller companies to help build out their product road map. I’m explicitly not a fan of rollups – I’ve had my share of investments in rollups that didn’t work. But I love targeted acquisitions that build out specific capabilities on an established company’s roadmap or add key people to the team. If you are looking for recent examples of this in my world, two others are NewsGator’s acquisition of Tomoye or Zynga’s acquisition of Serious Business.
Both companies have detailed blog posts about the deal – Welcome AgileZen! and We’ve joined Rally Software. If you are a company operating in one of our themes, don’t ever hesitate to reach out to me if you think you might fit with a company we’ve already invested in – you never know where the conversation might lead.
And congrats to both Rally and AgileZen – I’m excited for you guys.
After the chaos of some days, it’s a delight to come home, stand outside, and look at my backyard.
Today was (another) one of those days.