My partner Seth wrote a short post earlier today about Trada titled Are you a PPC expert? Read on…  We funded Trada last year and Seth and I have an ongoing (and often entertaining) debate about “stealth companies”.  Well – Trada is one the edge of no longer being stealth – here’s a hint:

Trada is building the first crowdsourced marketplace for Pay Per Click marketing campaigns. On one side of our marketplace, advertisers create and fund PPC marketing campaigns for products or services they want to promote on the Google, Yahoo and Microsoft ad networks. On the other side of the marketplace, PPC experts like you (we call them Optimizers) select campaigns they’d like to work on and begin creating ad groups, ads and keywords, just as they would in Google AdWords.

If you are are a PPC marketing expert click here to find out more and sign up.  Especially if you are Google AdWords Qualified or SEMPO Institute trained.

I’ve personally made around 75 angel investments during two periods of time – 1994 – 1997 and 2006 – 2007.  The first was the period of time after I had sold my first company but before I co-founded what become Mobius Venture Capital.  The second was between the end of the “investment period” (the time when we could make investments in new companies) for the Mobius Venture Capital 2000 fund and when my partners and I raised our first Foundry Group fund in the fall of 2007.  Per my agreements with my limited partners, I can’t make angel investments during the time period that I have an active fund in the market.  So – I’m “out of the angel investment business” (although I can make a follow on investment in any company that I’ve made an investment in.)

I give you this background so that my statement below has some credibility.  I think it is grotesque that an organized angel investor group would charge an entrepreneur to present to their members. This is in response to the article I read over the weekend in the New York Times titled Angel Investors Become Less Available where this practice is described.

While there are some good and useful angel groups, there are plenty of bad ones.  And many of the members of organized angel groups aren’t actually angel investors.  I’d like to suggest that to “qualify” as an angel investor, you have to have made at least one equity investment of at least $25,000 in the past 12 months.  If you haven’t done this, you can’t call yourself an angel investor.

Now, I realize that running an “organized angel investor group” costs something > $0, but the number shouldn’t be very much.  And – the cost of this should be born by the angel investors that are members of the group, not by the entrepreneurs.  Does anyone else out there think having the entrepreneurs underwrite this is absurd?  It’s just completely backwards in my opinion.

I have an incredibly high regard for a number of angel investors that I’ve gotten the chance to work with – both as an entrepreneur, angel investor, and VC.  The great ones know that their purpose is to help entrepreneurs get up and running with a secondary goal of a long term economic return.  But – the economic return can’t possibly be there unless you are an active angel investor (e.g. your chance of having economic success by making one angel investment over your angel investing lifetime is extremely low – more about this in another blog post.)

In the mean time, I’d like to encourage any angel group that charges entrepreneurs to present to them to reconsider their position.

In January, I made a seed investment in a company called Standing Cloud.  My premise was that as “cloud computing” proliferated, it’d be a total mess for the typical application developer and ISV.  Over the past six months a small team of super talented long time software developers and system architects have been exploring a wide variety of cloud services, OS instances, and popular open source software packages to understand where the “extremely broad painful problem that no one is addressing” is going to be.

Dave Jilk, Standing Cloud’s founder, and I are going to hike Mount Bierstadt as part of our annual tradition of climbing a 14er together (this will be #4).  We’ll have each other trapped together for 5+ hours to consolidate our thinking on what we’ve learned so far this year and which particular angle to position Standing Cloud on the launch pad.

In the meantime, one of the other Standing Cloud founders – Joel Wampler – wrote a guest post on ElasticVapor titled Fixing Major Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities in the Cloud.  If you are interested in this type of thing, it’s a good hint about the types of things that Standing Cloud is uncovering every single day.  For example:

“Last week, a Linux kernel vulnerability that allows for local privilege escalation through a NULL pointer dereference was announced. Many of the major Linux distributions are still working to provide updated kernels, and a few already have. Once updated kernels are released, applying the patches should be straightforward. But for systems running in the cloud, additional complexities and delays may arise.

Most providers of on-demand cloud servers require the use of custom kernels, which are tuned for the provider’s specific virtualization implementation. These custom kernels significantly change the upgrade path, and may even affect the short-term workarounds provided by the upstream distribution.

For instance, the Ubuntu bug report for this issue states the following:

Ubuntu 8.04 and later have a default setting of 65536 in /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr. When set, this issue is blocked.

However, if a system is running Ubuntu 8.04 on Amazon EC2, the underlying kernel is likely based on a Fedora Core 8 Xen kernel. This is one of the kernels Amazon provides to those who create boot images for their service, and most such images use this kernel regardless of the distribution running on top of it. Thus the default setting of 65536 cannot be relied upon; and worse, this proc setting does not even exist in the Fedora kernel, so there is no way to repair the image to match this workaround.”

Lots more coming soon – get ready for it.  In the mean time, I hope there are no clouds on my hike tomorrow.

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).

My friends at Zynga just put up a short video on the YouTube Zynga channel titled Inside Zynga which is an intro to their company.

I’ve never been involved in anything like Zynga – Mark Pincus and his team have created an amazing company. They continue to add people to the team at an incredible rate.  If you are in the bay area and interesting in joining one of the fastest growing Internet companies on the planet, give them a shout.

And – as a practitioner of “using the products my companies create” – feel free to friend me on Facebook and join my mafia (I’m level 132 if you need a strong wingman) or become my neighbor on FarmVille (I’ll send you a Duck.)

When I ran my first marathon in 1983, I remember carefully filling out all the information on my race number so that when I crossed the finish line the race organizers could actually figure out my time and place.  I can’t remember, but I don’t think any computers were involved; I believe it was entirely a manual process.  Maybe there was an Apple II and a copy of Visicalc or dBase II somewhere behind the scenes, but I doubt it.

This is a photo of 25,000 people running the inaugural Seattle Rock ‘N’ Roll Marathon last weekend.  Each of them is wearing a tiny ChronoTrack D-tag which contains an RFID chip made by Impinj. 

Now, if you’ve ever run a marathon (or any organized road race), you know that the timing systems have made huge progress in the past decade.  Runners in big races now talk about “chip time” which is the actual time you ran the race; the time it takes from the point you crossed the starting line to the point you crossed the finish line.  No more adjusting your “time” for the 2 minutes and 33 seconds it takes to get across the starting line (or – if you are a back of the pack starter like me, the 10+ minutes it occasionally takes.)

However, if you are like me, you hate the fucking two ounces of plastic you have to tie to your shoe, or wrap around your ankle, or weave into your shoelaces.  It’s uncomfortable, unbalanced (two ounces on your right ankle over 26.2 miles is actually noticeable), and super frustrating when it doesn’t work. Then, when you get to the finish line, you have to get it off your shoe (usually with help from a race helper person) and give it back!  Blech.

The RFID chip approach completely changes the whole dynamic.  It’s light weight (imperceptible), trivial to attach to your shoe, and you can keep it because it’s extremely inexpensive.  Plus, I find it awesomely cool to wear an RFID tag while I’m running (and use another product from a company in which I’m an investor in a way I hadn’t expected.)  Fun!

Yesterday, Gold Systems released their new Conference Server.  This is a new conference call product built on top of Microsoft Office Communications Server. 

I’ve been a user of conference call services since the early 1990’s.  I remember when you had to set up a conference call in advance with an AT&T operator, get a unique dial in number, pay a ridiculous fee for the entire experience, and worry about how much the bill was going to be as you anxiously sat on the call and listened to people go round and round about whatever topic the call was about.

In 1997, I was a seed investor in a company called Vstream.  While it started off as a video streaming business, it evolved into one of the first “reservationless conferencing” systems.  After several name changes they settled on Raindance, incorporated web collaboration into their products, built a meaningful and profitable business, went public, survived the Internet bubble, and were ultimately acquired by West Corporation.

When Raindance launched its reservationless conferencing service, I remember it being a huge breakthrough.  I got this little credit card like thing with a unique conference call number (8006333) and a pin.  I could set up a conference call by telling people the 888 number to dial into (888-742-8686 – god, it’s absurd that I can remember this shit – I need to do a major garbage collection routine on my brain) and giving them my conference call number.  At the time, this was super magic unique; today it is commonplace.

Reservationless conferencing rapidly accelerated the growth of the conference call market on one dimension while web collaboration accelerated it on another dimension.  As this was happening, the telecommunication costs dropped steadily.  I vaguely remember the cost per person per minute on a conference call being north of $0.30 at one point; at each board meeting we talked about the number being smaller ($0.15 was a big moment).  Of course, at $0.30 / minute the margins were absurd; at $0.10 / minute, not so much.  While this was happening, the whole Free Conference Call movement emerged so in some cases the price was theoretically free (note the important use of the word theoretically.)

I left the Raindance board in 2002 so I missed what I expect were endless conversations about the impact of VoIP on the whole shebang.  Fast forward to 2009.  We are all really comfortable with reservationless conferencing.  So comfortable in fact that we probably don’t notice that you can do what used to take a data center full of gear and pipes on a high end server today running Microsoft Office Communications Server.  Oops.  Hi Mr. Disruption.  Welcome back.

If you want a quick feel for whether this is cost effective for you, take a look at Gold Systems’ ROI calculator to see what your savings over your current approach would be.  And – if you want more info on this, contact my friends at Gold Systems.

I’ve long been fascinated by venture capitalists who blog.  I’ve also spent a lot of time in and around various blog networks, as a participant, as an investor, and as an technology supplier.

A few months ago Lijit rolled out their “Blogger Network” service and I created a new version of the VC Bloggers Network that I have been managing for a while.  On the right hand side is a blogroll of all of the VCs in the network (if you are a VC blogger and you aren’t on the list, just email me and I’ll get you added.)  All of the other bloggy stuff is here (the site is powered by WordPress) including an RSS feed for all the aggregated content, archives, tags, and the recent content.

The special magic happy thing is the search box at the top right of the page.

This is a search capability across the entire content generated by the VC Bloggers Network.  If you want to search for something you “remember from a VC blogger, but can’t remember who wrote it”, this is a good place to search.  Or, if you want to learn more about something like the “Glue” theme that Foundry Group invests in, you’ll get a very different search result from Glue on the VC Bloggers Network than you will from Glue on Google or Glue on Bing.

Give it a try and tell me what you think.  Reminder – if you are a VC Blogger that isn’t in on the blogroll, just email me.  If you are a VC Blogger that isn’t using Lijit’s search service (it’s free), or for that matter any blogger that isn’t using it, give it a try.  As a special bonus, or for more context, see what our friends at Google Blogger just wrote in their Partner Profile on Lijit.

Last night I sent the Puttermans (the co-founders of Cloud Engines – the makers of Pogoplug) a note with a few ideas about features I’d like to see in the product.  Included were requests for drop-dead simple integration with a few other products that I use including Sonos, Boxee, and AppleTV.  As investors in Pogoplug, I’m an aggressive lead user and unapologetic fan boy – it’s just an incredible product with insane potential (how about them adjectives, eh?)

Dan Putterman sent me back a response that included words like UPnP and Rendezvous along with a link to OpenPogo – a new website aimed at “getting the most out of your Pogoplug.”  The super cool thing is that Cloud Engines has nothing to do with this site – it was created by a user / fan / hacker that is building a series of guides for getting the most out of your Pogoplug.  For example:

• OpenPogo-Base Installation + Package Manager: You need the package manager installed as a starting point.
• Web server: Lighttpd (and PHP): How about a Web server on your Pogoplug.
• MySQL: Installing MySQL on your Pogoplug!

Extremely cool.