Month: June 2010
I don’t care what your political orientation is, if you want an awesome two hour lesson in leadership watch the movie Thirteen Days. It’s the story of the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis based on the book by May and Zelikow titled The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Amy and I watched it last night. I was exhausted from two weeks on the east coast and was having trouble speaking (Amy refers to it as “getting the dregs of Brad.”) I think I was even out of dregs so I just laid on the coach and watched the movie. I half watched it a few months ago while catching up on email and I saw it when it first came out so I knew the story. But when I watched it a few months ago I didn’t give it my undivided attention. This time I did because I didn’t have the energy to do anything else.
On Thursday and Friday I was in DC and had four significant experiences. The first was a tour of the CIA which, while limited to very specific physical areas (including the CIA gift shop), included a 75 minute roundtable with the CIA’s CTO and his team about the future. Later Thursday night I had a very quiet tour of the West Wing. Friday morning I was on a panel on The Need for Net Neutrality with Brad Burnham (Union Square Ventures) and Santo Politi (Spark Capital) followed by a dynamite meeting at the White House with Phil Weiser and members of the National Economic Council team, Aneesh Chopra (CTO of the US), and Vivek Kundra (CIO of the US). For two days I was immersed in government leadership.
Yesterday I woke up very late in the morning to Brad Burnham’s post titled Web Services as Governments. It’s a must read post where he makes several very specific analogies for which web services act like which kinds of government. He specifically breaks down which government he thinks Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Craigslist look like. While you may not agree with his mappings, the general construct is incredibly powerful when you think about creating a company that operates on top of a web service (or platform company.)
And then – after sleeping most of the day – I watched Thirteen Days. As I was immersed in it, I kept thinking about examples from Brad’s post as well as my experience dealing with web services that are powerful governments. When I think about those examples, Thirteen Days is a movie that every CEO and every member of the management team in these companies (or any company for that matter) should watch.
As a bonus, in both my CIA meeting and the Net Neutrality panel I got to toss out my line that “in 40 years we will not be able to distinguish between biological machines and non-biological humans. Basically the machines will take over and our goal should be that they are nice to us.” After waking up this morning feeling much more rested, it was extra fun to see a huge NY Times titled Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday about the Singularity.
I’m in Washington DC again – this time to talk about innovation. I’ve been here three times in the past year – the first time was to hear Bilski at the Supreme Court in November and then I was back in March to talk about and promote the Startup Visa.
Yesterday, Thomas Friedman article wrote another great OpEd about the topic titled A Gift for Grads: Start-Ups. As with many Friedman OpEd’s, rather than just railing against the situation, he suggests several specific things that can be done – in this case by the current administrationb. His premise is that to solve the unemployment issue, especially among recent college graduates, we need three things: more start-ups, more start-ups, and more start-ups. And to do this, Friedman talked to Robert Litan (vice president of research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation) and Curtis Carlson, (CEO of SRI International) and came up with the following.
- Create a cabinet position (Secretary Newco) that is focused on pushing through initiatives that help startups and unleash millions of entrepreneurs
- Staple a green card to the diploma of every foreign student who graduates from a US university
- Create a meaningful entrepreneurs visa
- Cut capital gains taxes to 1% for startups
I strongly agree with each of these. My one small addition to the Secretary Newco idea is that person should be an accomplished entrepreneur rather than a career politician, policy person, academic, or lawyer.
Over the next two days I’ve got a meeting with each of my Colorado Senators (Michael Bennet and Mark Udall) as well as a summit at the White House led by Phil Weiser (Director of Technology and Innovation for the National Economic Council), Aneesh Chopra (CTO of the US), and Vivek Kundra (CIO of the US). Our summit includes a small group of VCs from different parts of the US that I’ve helped put together and it’ll focus on the issue of early stage entrepreneurs and innovation throughout the country (specifically – more than just Silicon Valley). I’m also participating in a roundtable titled Implementing The National Broadband Plan and Protecting Consumer Choice: The Venture Capitalist Perspective with fellow VCs Brad Burnham from USV and Santo Politi from Spark Capital. And, as a special bonus, I’m going over the CIA later today for a tour, although I can’t talk about it, so you didn’t just read that.
I don’t spend a lot of time in DC, in politics, or even following politics (I’ve never been a political junkie) so these short immersions are fascinating to me. Hopefully when I look back on the time I’ve spent on this stuff I’ll feel like it’s been a productive effort for the cause of entrepreneurship and innovation in the US which is the thing I spend all my time actually working on by helping create new companies.
One of my often quoted lines is that “fear is a useless emotion in business.” Sure – self doubt enters the picture on occasion and there are plenty of dark days, but why be fearful of anything? There’s just no value in it. Watch as some of the TechStars founders confront some new and exciting types of fear that includes some of Boulder’s majestic rocks.
"Be Fearless. Today." The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 3 from TechStars on Vimeo.
On the eve of re: Bilski, the anxiously awaited Supreme Court decision on business method patents (with potential implications for software patents), I decided to collaborate with the End Software Patents coalition and send out 200 copies of the short movie they recently produced called Patent Absurdity about why software should not be able to be patented to a focused list of key people. The letter follows.
Dear XX
My name is Brad Feld and I’m a venture capitalist who has a popular web blog about innovation and investing in tech start-ups at www.feld.com.
I’m writing to you about a new documentary film "Patent Absurdity: how software patents broke the system", and including a DVD of that film with this letter. I hope you will spare 30 minutes to watch.
I selected you as one of two hundred influential people to receive this DVD because I wanted to make sure that the film is reaching the right people–people who can help inform the debate over the patenting of software. Specifically, I’m hoping the film will bring you to an understanding of why patents on software are a massive tax on and retardant of innovation in the US.
I’m including with this letter a full list of the 200 people who are receiving a copy of this film as well as publishing those names on-line at: https://en.swpat.org/wiki/Who_should_see_Patent_Absurdity.
Any day now the US Supreme Court will issue a ruling in a landmark case known popularly as "Bilski". This ruling is likely to have significant impact on the US economy and the prospects for the new innovative companies that I partner with and who create great new products and services.
Patents, as you are probably aware, are government granted monopolies that last 20 years. They allow the patent holder to restrict others from entering the market. Historically, patents have covered novel machines, processes for industrial manufacture, and pharmaceuticals. In more recent years, patents on software have been granted–hundreds of thousands of patents. These patents cover essential techniques in computer programming, and their existence is having a chilling effect on the startup companies that I work with. These start-ups are finding it increasingly difficult to make headway through this software patent thicket.
Here are some specific points I would like to bring to your attention about software patents:
* The financial cost of defending yourself against a software patent claim are impossible to overcome. Just to analyze whether the claims being made against you are justified will incur legal fees in excess of $50,000.00, and more than $1 million in legal fees before trial. Yet it costs the price of a postage stamp for a software patent holder to make a legal claim against you.
(https://www.wsgr.com/PDFSearch/09202004_patentpirates.pdf)
* Economic research demonstrates that software patents are acting as a drag on the US economy.
(https://en.swpat.org/wiki/Studies_on_economics_and_innovation)
* Programmers – those skilled in the art of writing software, would be expected to benefit from, and support the patenting of software. They do not. They uniformly despise them as a limitation on their art.
(https://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/indprop/comp/analyses_en.htm)
* Venture capitalist like me, who work with new innovative start-ups can testify that software patents have a chilling effect on the market.
(https://en.swpat.org/wiki/Statements_from_venture_capitalists)
* With well over 200,000 software patents having been issued, non practicing entities and hedge funds are buying up tens of thousands of these trash patents and using them to extract hundreds of millions of dollars from US companies. This activity takes the form of a protection racket.
(https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100217/1853298215.shtml)
I would be happy to offer my time to answer any questions you might have about this film and what we can do to help end this software patent absurdity.
Yours sincerely,
Brad Feld
I was in a meeting with Rich Miner from Google Ventures on Friday with some entrepreneurs we are working with on a potential investment. While the team isn’t a rookie team, they’ve never worked with VCs before and they’ve been wrestling around the dynamics of how to interact with the two VCs in the room (me and Rich) and the various angels that are part of the seed round we are planning to do.
In the middle of the discussion, Rich used a brilliant metaphor of “VC as produce suppler”. The CEO was talking about how she realized she was the lead chef in the kitchen, but viewed us as some combination between sous chefs, owners, and the diners in the restaurant. This was apparent in the interactions – was she trying to “please us”, listen to us and do what we said, or put us to work? This was made even hard with the handful of angels involved – where did they fit in? And, it was clear that the kitchen was getting crowded.
In this middle of what was a rambling conversation, Rich said “think of us as produce suppliers.” He said something like: “We bring you produce. Some of it will be awesome and you’ll want to use it immediately. Some will be moldy, or won’t fit in your recipes, or you won’t need any more of it. And sometimes we won’t show up. Occasionally you’ll want to put us to work in the kitchen teaching you how to make a new dish with our produce. Other times you’ll politely ask us to get out of the kitchen so you can get some work done. And – ultimately – all of us – the investors (VC and angels), the entrepreneurs, and the employees are the owners!”
I’ve editorialized, but I stopped, wrote it down, and asked Rich if I could blog it. It’s one of the best, freshest, and crisp metaphors for the VC / CEO relationship that I’ve ever heard.
The video from the second panel I was on at Google I/O 2010 – Technology, innovation, computer science, & more: A VC panel – is up. Dick Costolo – the COO of Twitter – is the moderator and my fellow panelists are Albert Wenger, Chris Dixon, Dave McClure, and Paul Graham. Someone didn’t like the title so it was renamed “VCs Who Code” but apparently that didn’t stick with the official event panel namers.
While I stopped writing production code in the early 1990’s, I still fuck around with something each summer when I’m in Alaska (in past years it has been Perl, Ruby, and PHP.) I haven’t decided what it is going to be this year, but it’ll probably be Python as I’m seriously considering taking 6.189 using MIT OpenCourseWare.
For the curious ones in the crowd, I’m a self declared “excellent BASIC programmer.” When I got my Apple ][ in 1979 the only choices were BASIC and 6502 Assembler. I learned each, but only wrote commercial software on the IBM PC in BASIC (and compiled BASIC, back when getting a BASIC program to compile was a trick in and of itself) between 1983 and 1985 (using Btrieve as the database manager.) By 1986 I was doing a lot more work in Dataflex and Pascal. At MIT, I learned Scheme (via 6.001) and was ok with it, but never did any production work with LISP even though every time I looked at a Symbolics machine I drooled. I learned a handful of other languages in school, such as CLU and IBM System/370 Assembler (and something on a Prime computer – I can’t remember what) but never used any of it outside a class. Feld Technologies did most of its work with Clarion, although I never really learned it well enough to do anything production quality since by that point I wasn’t coding regularly anymore. While I was proficient with a bunch of database languages such as dBase, Paradox, and R:Base, I never liked any of them and we never really wrote production systems in them (although we took over and managed a lot of crap that other people had tried to write.) Oh – and I was pretty good with Lotus 1-2-3 Macros.
In some parallel universe, I sit in front a computer all day and write code.
The TechStars Boston 2010 program finished up the other day. I was at investor day and it was awesome to see how far the ten companies came over the last 90 days, especially since I was there on the first day of the program and really had a baseline perspective.
If you follow my twitter feed, you’ll notice that I’ve been posting a bunch of “Mar.gy links” from a company called Marginize. This is one of the companies that I was a mentor for this year and I love what they are doing and what their vision is. But they weren’t recently on CNN – and StarStreet Sports was. If you are into The World Cup, you’ll love this one.
I’ve always had a knack for quickly finding bugs. It’s not hard with most software / web services as the bugs are everywhere, but they like to emerge from the shadows when I tickle my computer.
I’ve been running Outlook 2010 for a few weeks since it shipped. Now that I’m used to the new ribbon UI, I find it much improved over Outlook 2007. I particularly like the Conversations view which was long overdue (and works really well) and am amused that most of the memory leaks / shut down issues are gone. Given the amount of email I jam through on a daily basis, my Outlook workflow is particularly well tuned and while I’ve tried to switch to Gmail, it hasn’t happened yet. Maybe I’ll try again when Gmail gives me an option to not have a conversation view.
I ran into a surprisingly lame Outlook 2010 bug the other day. I run an inbox zero drill although I fought to get there for about ten days after my week off the grid in May. When I got there the other day, I was stunned to see that apparently no one tested for a classic off-by-one error – namely what happens when you have no messages in your inbox after you delete the last one.
They got half of it right.
Note the “There are no items to show in this view” in the left mail items list view. However, not the remnant message – the last email that I was reading that I recently hit delete on – in the right reading pane. Since there are no items in the mail item list view and nothing selected (since there is nothing to select), the right reading pane should be blank. It’s obviously not.
Through the magic of email I was able to test this several times. Specifically, inbox zero is a condition that doesn’t remain for long in my world. As a few new messages came in, I read, responded, and deleted. The error persisted.
It’ll be interesting to see if Microsoft fixes this in a quick patch or, if like the Snipping Tool close error, it persists – well – forever.
A few weeks ago I was on two panels at Google I/O 2010. The video from one of them – Making Freemium work – converting free users to paying customers is up. Don Dodge from Google is the moderator and my fellow panelists are Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier, Matt Holleran, and Joe Kraus. It’s 60 minutes long, but we covered a lot of ground.