Last week, NewsGator announced that they had raised a new round led by Masthead Venture Partners.  This brings the total amount raised by NewsGator to over $10 million.  David Beisel – an associate at Masthead who worked on the deal – has an extensive post on why they decided to make the investment.  Rather than repeat what David said here, check out his post on why he likes Masthead’s NewsGator investment.

In addition to all the obvious reasons I’d be excited about this (additional capital, strong validation of NewsGator’s position in the market, more hands on deck to help build the company), I’m particularly happy to have the opportunity to work with Rich Levandov – the partner at Masthead who is joining the NewsGator board.  Rich and I worked together in the mid-1990’s when we were “Softbank affiliates.”  At that time, Softbank had started aggressively investing in US-based Internet companies and the initial team at Softbank roped in a few people – including Fred Wilson, Jerry Colonna (fka “the Flatiron guys”), Rich, and myself in an “affiliated” role.  We did investments with Softbank and were an extension of the initial Softbank team.  Rich had two very successful investments with Softbank – Art Technology Group (Nasdaq: ARTG) and Personalogic (acquired by AOL).

This affiliate relationship ended when a group of us – including me – decided to raise the first Softbank Technology Ventures fund – which was a Softbank “sponsored fund” (independent of, but still affiliated with, Softbank, who became one of our limited partners.)  Rich opted not to join this fund and while we stayed in touch, we didn’t make any investments together. 

At the beginning of this year, Rich gave me a call asking about NewsGator.  We had just closed a round and were not looking for additional money (or investors) as the company was well funded.  However, I got excited about the idea of working on something with Rich again and he quickly got engaged with the NewsGator gang.  The normal VC process ensued with both sides getting to know each other and it quickly became clear that Rich / Masthead would be a big addition to the team.  We reached terms that made sense for all parties about a month ago and quickly closed the deal.

While the team at NewsGator has spent some time on this financing, they have a huge pipeline of new things coming in the next 90 days.  For a taste of the stuff we are doing with traditional media companies, take a look at the demo of News Hound, the new Denver Post News Aggregator.

A few months ago I bitched about my experience with the TSA at the San Jose Airport.  Today, I got to see a picture of two penguins being ushered through security by the TSA folks at DIA.  Brilliant.

Last summer, I decided to read all of Stephen Frey’s books.  Most were good, a few were not so good, but it was clear that Frey was becoming a better mental floss writer with every book.  His books are about Wall Street, power, intrigue, finance, and most recently private equity.  As a managing director at a private equity firm, he speaks from experience.

Thanks to Stephanie Miller from Return Path who sent me a copy of Frey’s latest book, The Chairman, as a gift.  I thought it was his best one yet and a great start to the “summer reading extravaganza” that’s in front of me.

I’m thrilled excited about the progress StillSecure has been making.  Raj Bhargava – the CEO – and I have done five companies together in the last decade (going back to our first one – NetGenesis) and I love working with the guy.  StillSecure had an awesome year last year, but Raj saw an opportunity to meaningfully expand StillSecure’s footprint by building out a “security management platform”, rather than a series of “security point solution products.”  StillSecure is starting from a position of having several of the best and hottest products in the segments they play in, so expanding the footprint to be more of a platform is a logical step.

StillSecure VAM – the “vulnerability management” component of the product line provides a superb stand alone vulnerability remediation product.  However, StillSecure went a step further and built a VAM Integration Framework to be able to incorporate VAM into any existing IT infrastructure and rather than serve as a stand alone product, it becomes the central command and control center for all vulnerability–related activities.

Today, StillSecure announced two vulnerability scanner connectors – one for ISS Internet Scanner and one for eEye Retina.  If you are an existing ISS or eEye customer, you can now integrate it with the StillSecure VAM Framework and use the two products together, leveraging existing investments in the ISS and eEye products.

You’ll continue to see this “platform” theme from many of my companies – I like the way John and Rich describe it and its a natural strategy for many of the things I like to invest in.

Feedburner announced a partnership with 20six to incorporate Feedburner’s feed statistics and syndication capabilities for the 20six blogging community.  This will immediately add an additional 50,000 feeds to Feedburner’s “feeds under management” and is the first implementation of the Feedburner partner API.  I think that one of the key drivers of success these days with web-based services is to quickly build out a robust published API to generate real partner activity – John Zagula and Rich Tong at Ignition Partners explain this as part of the “platform play” that they successfully executed at Microsoft as well as other companies they’ve been involved in.  It’s the right metaphor and this is a first visible step in that strategy.

I miss my wife Amy – she’s been in Paris since mid-March learning French, enjoying the Parisian lifestyle (she’s was born in Paris in another life), and wandering around one of the best spring time cities in the world.  Oh – and she’s eating amazing meals – she put up a detailed post on two of them as well as her top 10 list – especially aimed at foodies and people who like to live vicariously. Yum.

Amy and I have been collecting contemporary art for a number of years.  If you’ve even been to our house, my office, or The Nature Conservancy in Boulder, you’ve seen some of our collection.  I attribute this vice to my mom the artist, who always had a great eye for art and surrounded me with it from a very early age.

We’re also big supporters of the Denver Art Museum and are hugely excited about the new Hamilton Building by Daniel Libeskind.  So excited that when we heard from a friend of a showing at The William Havu Gallery of several paintings by Rick Dula of the museum under construction, we bought one.

There was a great article on tax day about the show and Dula’s work as it pertains to the Hamilton Building in the Rocky Mountain News article titled On the edge of hyperrealism.   If you are in Denver and into (a) art, (b) the Hamilton Building, and (c) things that get you “culture points”, swing by The William Havu Gallery and check out the exhibit – tell Nick Ryan I sent you.

Mark Pincus has finally put up a blog (ok – he had one at Blogger – but it’s just his bio.)  Mark’s been a successful entrepreneur for a number of years.  Mark’s latest company – Tribe – is squarely in the middle of all the Web 2.0 stuff going on.  Mark has a history of successful companies – we were investors in two of them (Freeloader – bought by Individual in 1996 and SupportSoft – currently public.) 

Mark always has strong opinions, is super smart, tireless, and has a broad range of interests.  If you are into hearing directly from successful entrepreneurs, his blog is well worth following.

I heard on NPR today during their series this week on income taxes that according to IRS calculations, American’s spend 6.6 billion hours doing their taxes each year.  We apparently also waste 6.6 billion gallons of gas annually while waiting in traffic, there is a 6.6 billion pound gap in AIDS funding, mail volume dropped by 6.6 million pieces in the month following the terrorist attacks in 2001, and the Pak Mun Dam cost 6.6 billion Baht (actually 6.507 billion, but the budget was 6.6 billion.)

Back to the tax thing.  According to the CIA, the current US population is 293,027,571 (estimate as of July 2005).  That’s 20.48 hours per person.  Eek (especially since all the kids under 12 in the US don’t do taxes yet.)  Now, it takes Windows 60 seconds a day to boot.  Assume there are around 200 million PCs in the US and they get booted on average of twice a day (yeah – I know – I (re)boot my various computers at least five times a day – you can have real fun with Windows Math facts if you want.)  That’s 8.30 hours per person.

So – annually, each person in the US spends 20.48 hours on taxes and 8.30 hours rebooting their computer.  Since the average household is around 2.5 people, this is 51.2 hours on taxes and 20.75 hours rebooting their computer per household per year, or three days / household wasted per year. Yeah – I know these numbers are just directionally correct, but they are the right order of magnitude. 

I love numbers – and these are just scary ones.  Good luck on your taxes tomorrow.