I had an epiphany today while I was running about blog content. It’s taken me a few weeks of blogging, thinking about why I care, what right I have to consume incremental bits on the Internet, and why anyone else cares (or might / should care). One of the guys that works with me has a great quote – “blogging is like giving everyone a printing press – and NOT everyone deserves a printing press.” I’ve consistently countered that by saying “everyone should have a printing press – you just need tools to decide whether or not to read what they write.”

Over the weekend, I got an outbreak of self-referential blogs. Robert Scoble (the self proclaimed “Microsoft Geek Blogger”) wrote that Mike Padula is doing a study as a student at Cornell about why people blog. Marc Nozell referenced Fresh Air’s interview with Bill Moyers about blogging (among other things). My mother – after commenting in one of my blogs remember to write about your mother – then tried to convince me over the phone that blogging was a bunch of useless chatter – the world didn’t need anymore of it.

As I get deeper into the blog thing, I get more intrigued. It feels to me a lot like email did in 1993 and the web did in 1995 – there are endless directions to go in, lots of businesses to create, huge potential impacts on society, thought, communication, and technology. But – thankfully – it’s early, chaotic, and like most things that evolve – Darwinian.

So – while I don’t necessarily have an answer yet, I’m going to focus my blogging more on things that are relevant to me and assume that those that are interested in what I’m interested in will read this blog. Those topics – today – including (self referentially) the blogging ecosystem, venture capital, technology, creating companies, and running marathons.

I reserve the right to change my mind tomorrow.

The trailer for the new Pixar movie The Incredibles is out. While we have to wait until Nov 5, 1994 for the movie, you can get a peak of it on the Pixar (and Disney , and other) sites. Check out the teaser also for an overweight (“maybe just a salad and some rice cakes”) and somewhat frustrated Mr. Incredible.

It was such a brilliant move when Steve Jobs bought Pixar from George Lucas for $10 million in 1986. Now that’s guts.

I remember watching Luxo Jr. and Tin Toy in the mid-late 1980’s and thinking how amazing it was.

Steve Jobs, John Lasseter, and Pixar – thanks for all the entertainment!

I’m sitting in a technical advisory board meeting for one of my companies (Rally Software Development). I’m moblonging from my Danger – pretty cool (at least to me).

We’re having a great meeting. I’ve sat in on a bunch of these over the last 10 years since I started investing in (vs. running) software
companies. Often, these meetings are a complete waste of time because of some disconnect between the goal of the meeting, the group of people in the room, the facilitated process – or worse – the complete dominance of one or two people.

We’ve got 15 people in the room – 5 from Rally and 10 advisors. The
chemistry is awesome – Rally is about to go GA with the first version of their product so we’re dealing with tangibles (instead of the abstract of “what should we do, where should we go”). Management is facilitating well – leting people talk, but keeping them on topic. The richness of the discussion is noticeable to everyone involved – which causes the discussion / debate to feed on itself.

This is one of the funnest parts of this job – seeing / being involved with a group of people passionate about trying to create something new and revolutionary where six months ago there was nothing.

Matt Blumberg started a blog yesterday called OnlyOnce. It’s about being a first time CEO – Matt’s one of the best – he’s the CEO of Return Path – one of my companies that I’m an investor with Fred Wilson. Matt is a great first time CEO – his blog is worth reading for any entrepreneur.

Yes – I posted this one offline also, although the href thing (vs. automatic links) is a major drag. I haven’t manually typed HTML in – oh – 8 years – so it’s entertaining to trip over it again.

And I’m now manually fixing this in Typepad (the original said Matt’s one of the best – he’s the CEO of Fred Wilson since I left an “‘” out of my HREF – proving some point (the one that says I shouldn’t be manually typing HTML?)

I woke up this morning thinking that it should be easy to blog offline via email. I already read my blogs offline via Newsgator. Why can’t I simply send an email to my blog on Typepad. I popped up Typepad, hit my Control Panel, and voila – you can through their Edit my mobile settings shortcut. This blog is being posted offline via email. I can now post via my Danger Hiptop or offline email when I’m travelling. This is both simple and synchronistic (I love it when I wake up thinking of something techy and it’s trivial to do). The only drag is Microsoft Word – where rather than generating HTML for me correctly, I end up having to insert the href (HTML codes) automatically. I didn’t do it for italics – if “Edit my mobile settings” is italicized above, then Word (and typepad) did the write thing – if not – then not.

How’s that for a title?

I’ve got two books, a Homer Simpson like “doh!”, and blog spam for you today.

First the books. My wife and I are huge readers (she’s also a writer). So – we read pretty much anything we can get our hands on. I’m always looking for recommendations – so send them to me.

Book one is Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin. Seth is an amazing writer (and fantastic guy). Everything he’s ever written is worth reading – even the stuff that’s crap (since it’s better crap than the other crap out there). I haven’t read Free Prize Inside, but mine is on order and I hope to have it soon. If you have any interest in business – read Seth’s stuff.

Book two is The Radioactive Boy Scout by Ken Silverstein. It’ll have you rolling on the ground laughing while you concurrently shit bricks about how close this teenager came to building a makeshift nuclear breeder reactor in his backyard (ok – it wasn’t really a breeder reactor, but a few more steps and all his neighbors would have been dead). The book started out as an article in Harper’s Magazine and evolved into a well written exploration of what happens when you mix the nuclear energy industry, a teenage mind, and a very dysfunctional family.

I’d just finished reading The Radioactive Boy Scout when I saw the following Market Alert from the WSJ: MARKET ALERT: Stocks Fall Sharply on Rate Fears. Now doh!

Finally, Mitch Kapor got blogspammed and is pissed. Spam, Spim, and now Blam?

I ran the fourth marathon of my life today – the Ft. Collins Old Town Marathon. It wasn’t my fastest marathon (that was at Chicago last fall), but I was very happy with the results. I’ve been on a steady training regimen since the beginning of the year – which – given winter and travel has been challenging to keep up. However, my coach, Jeff Kline of RunFitUSA is both supportive and relentless – which helps.

Now running a marathon in 4:30 isn’t quite the same level of accomplishment as running a sub-4 minute mile – something that was first done 50 years ago. For a fabulous book on this quest – try The Perfect Mile : Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It – both historically detailed and extremely inspiring. However, a marathon and a mile are radically different races.

I’ve heard the cliche “this is a marathon, not a sprint” a bunch of times and decided to poke around on the web looking for it. Apparently even Meg Whitman said it at some point. E-businesses must be like marathoners – at least according to Chris Pickering. Enterprisewide supply chain technology initiatives should be like marathons – according to Ram Reddy as recently as May 1, 2004. I even ran across I guy I hadn’t thought of in about 10 years – Scott Johnson – the founder of Ntergaid who is now the co-founder of Feedster – who has an old blog where he refers to businesses as marathons.

You get the picture – it’s a cliche. But – it’s a good one. Anyone that has run a marathon knows that it’s a long way to run.

Anyone who has created a sustainable and valuable business knows it’s a long way to run.

During the Internet bubble, it was easy to forget how most companies are created. I remember endless presentations where the punch line from two guys and a powerpoint presentation was “all we need is a seed round of $10m and we’ll be able to get going.”

I occassionally get a chance to tell the story of how my first real company – Feld Technologies – was funded by me and my co-founder Dave Jilk with $10 (yes – 10 one dollar bills) of equity (we had 10 shares of stock – $1 / share – that’s all the money we ever raised). There was an interesting constraint – at the time – it was basically all the money we had and it never occurred to us to go try to raise money from venture capitalists (we did eventually get a $10,000 bank line that my dad personally guaranteed with us).

Since many of the companies I fund are raw startups, I often think about the best way to get from an idea to a business. I keep coming back to the value of sweat – which has been perverted in the sweat equity cliche – which is fundametally different than sweat (you know, the stuff that rolls down your back on a hot summer day – or the stuff coming out of your pits when you are about to pick up the phone for that critical call.)

Mark Cuban has a great rant going on his blog (Success and Motivation Part 1, S&M almost p2, S&M p2, S&M p3) about starting up his first company – MicroSolutions. Some of you may know Mark as the owner of the Dallas Mavericks or the founder of Broadcast.com which had a huge IPO and then was bought for over $5 billion by Yahoo!. I remember Mark’s articles in CRN in the early 90’s when I was running Feld Technologies thinking “man – this guy has his shit together.” Perspective is everything – he had it together because he was obsessed with succeeding. Now – I’m sure Mark doesn’t remember me – but the one time we met, I sat in a big red chair in the middle of his Audionet (Broadcast.com’s early name) office – which was just an old warehouse on the edge of downtown Dallas with a bunch of tables, computers, and whiteboards everywhere and listened to him tell me about how amazing Audionet was going to be. I was just starting to work with Softbank at the time (I think I was described as a “Softbank Affiliate” or something silly like that) and since I grew up in Dallas, I stopped by when I was visiting my parents for Thanksgiving. Mark was raising a round and wanted the outrageous valuation of $80m pre for his business (ok – that would have only been a 50x on an investment at the Yahoo price). Charley Lax was at Softbank and was the guy I was working with most closely at that time and when we talked about it on the phone, he completely gacked on the valuation so it was a short exploration. I remember leaving thinking “This Cuban guy has balls”. Duh.

One of my new companies – Newmerix – is sweating it out the right way. I’m incredibly proud of the founders of this company – Niel Robertson and Ed Roberto – for starting this business up the right way. There was a nice article about them in the Boulder Daily Camera yesterday. Niel and Ed embody everything I love in entrepreneurs – they sweat every day, all day, never relent, and are determined to succeed no matter what.

As I got out of my car at home after dinner last night, my wife Amy was snickering. “My jedi mind trick worked – I got those guys to back up their car by thinking you will back up your car.”

To get to our house in the mountains, you have to drive through a state park and up a narrow dirt road wide enough for one car. Our friends that run the state park have kindly put up a sign that says “Only authorized vehicles past this point” at the beginning of the one lane road. Daily, there are a number of people that either can’t read, ignore the sign, or decide they are in an authorized vehicle. At the end of the road, they reach what we hope is an unpenetrable gate (unless you know the magic code), turn around, and have to retrace their steps. It’s exactly in the middle of this route when we inevitably reach these morons.

During this whole escapade (which added about five minutes to my otherwise idyllic drive home), I was thinking to myself “what idiots, can’t they read the sign, they will back up now”.

As Amy is snickering, I’m grousing about these annoying people, the lousy drivers on 93 on our way home, and the fact that people just don’t get the economics of offshoring.

“What was that phrase we used to use at Feld Technologies – Thinly Disguised Contempt?” says my tranquil wife.

This shuts me up quickly. While running my first company (aptly and very creatively named Feld Technologies – after my father), I attended the inaugural year(s) of the Birthing of Giants program. I roomed with a great guy named Alan Trefler, who at the time was running a fast growing private company called Pegasystems (PEGA). Late one night, Alan started telling me about TDC (Thinly Disguised Contempt). At Pegasystems, they’d decided that respect for the customer was one of their highest values. Consequently, they created the notion of TDC – basically thinking or saying something negative about a customer. If I remember correctly (and I probably don’t) acts of the management team generated a $1,000 fine, which went to pay for some joint leadership event in the future.

When I got back to my office after the Birthing of Giants weekend, TDC was echoing in my mind. We were a software consulting company at a time when creating working custom PC database applications for businesses was hard (I mean really hard – remember dbase II and Novell Netware 2.0a)? Our clients were usually great, but it always hard to be on the other end of the phone telling someone for the 17th time “Ok, type f colon backslash public” as you got ready to go through yet another troubleshooting session over the phone (since no businesses had Internet connections back then (I guess Al Gore hadn’t created it yet – is that TDC or sarcasm?) and the Carbon Copy remote control software crashed more often then it was worth using).

We decided Alan was right and TDC is bad. TDC is toxic. It lingers. It spills out over everything. Your friends and colleagues notice, but don’t really understand, as you send them mixed signals. TDC is dangerous – it gets inside, around, and all over everything.

Be blunt. If you don’t like something, say it. If someone does something stupid, say it. If stuff needs to change, say it.

Stomp out TDC.