Brad Feld

I’ve been really busy so January was a slow reading month.  I hurt my knee running today so I decided to lie on the couch, ice my knee, and chow down on some books.  I consumed the second half of A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, which I had been slowly wading through the past two weeks.

This is one of the most intense books I’ve read in a long time.  It’s Frey’s autobiographical account of his six weeks in rehab.  The fly leaf sets up the story with the following: At the age of 23, James Frey woke up on a plane to find his four front teeth knocked out, his nose broken, and a hole through his cheek.  He had no idea where the plane was headed nor any recollection of the past two weeks.  An alcoholic for ten years and a crack addict for three, he checked in a treatment facility shortly after landing.  There he was told he could either stop using or die before he reached age 24.

The first half of the book is just fucking bleak.  I’m fortunate that drugs, alcohol, and addiction have not had a meaningful role in the play called my life.  While I’ve got a friend who became addicted to drugs 20 years ago and I spent a decade trying to help him before giving up, the vast majority of my “one degree of separation” friends and family have not had any addiction issues.  As a result, the impact of the book on me might have been amplified as the landscape was so unbelievably foreign to me.  I worked my way through the first half slowly during the past two weeks – both because I was concentrating on other things – and it was hard to move through it very quickly.

The second half is a story of renewal.  Slowly – painfully slowly – Frey starts to make progress.  As the period of time that he’s sober and clean lengthens, he starts to address – with the treatment counsellors and lawyers – his legal issues, his parents, and some of his real demons.  He is incredibly stubborn, yet extremely insightful, and admirable in how he takes responsibility for himself.  When one of his counsellors – in treatment with his parents – suggests that the core of his problems may be a combination of genetics and a severe / chronic ear infection he has for the first few years of his life (unbeknownst to his parents) he rejects it.

James: It’s an interesting theory.  It probably holds some weight.  I can accept it for what I feel it is, which is a possibility.  I won’t accept it as a root cause, because I think it’s a cop-out, and because I don’t think it does me any good to accept anything other than myself and my own weakness as a root cause.  I did everything I did.  I made the decisions to do it all.  The only way I’m going to get better is if I accept responsibility for the decision to either be an Addict or not be an Addict.  That’s the way it has to be for me.  I know you’re going to try and convince me otherwise, but you shouldn’t bother.

Joanne (counsellor): … you are the single most stubborn person that I’ve ever met.

James: I just won’t let myself be a victim.  … People in here.  People everywhere, they all want to take their own problems, usually created by themselves, and try to pass them off on someone or something else.  I know my Mother and Father did the best they could and gave me the best they could and loved me the best the could and if anything, they are victims of me.  I could say I’m flawed in my genetic makeup, that I have this disease and my addictions are caused by the presence of it, but I think that’s a lot of shit.  I’m a victim of nothing but myself, just as I believe that most people with this so-called disease aren’t victims of anything other than themselves.  If you want to call that philosophy stubbornness, go right ahead.  I call it being responsible.  I call it the acceptance of my own problems and my own weaknesses with honor and dignity.  I call it getting better.

This exchange reminded me of my favorite quote from Atlas Shrugged, “Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.”  Buried in this emotionally devastating and ultimately awesomely inspiring 400 page book about one man’s effort to overcome his addiction is a component of my own personal philosophy – “take complete responsibility for all of your actions.”  Intense.

I was on a phone call yesterday with a co-investor in one of our companies who asked “are you concerned that RSS / blogging is the long tail of the Internet – only relevant to millions of individuals, but nothing beyond that?”  I responded with an emphatic no.  I noticed two things this morning as I was poking around that reinforced this. 

1. Greg Reinacker’s blog post on NewsGator Outlook 3.0.  Greg is the founder/CTO of NewsGator and on Wednesday afternoon he asked the question “what do you want to see in the next version of NewsGator?”  We’re in the midst of the development cycle and still have room for some more features, so we’re looking to see what people think are today’s “killer feature” for the next version of the best RSS aggregator for Microsoft Outlook.  By Saturday morning, there were 30 separate posts with over 75 suggestions.  Many of these are features we are already incorporating, but some were new, and it was fascinating to see the patterns.  I’ve long been a believer in the theory that users are the source of most innovation (this is one of the things I worked on in my doctoral program at MIT under Eric von Hippel and is obviously a huge driver of the open source revolution.)
2. Peter Hoskins’ blog post on SpikeSource referring back to his blog post on open source stack management.  SpikeSource’s news page has a section on it called “Blog Mentions of SpikeSource” (in addition to the normal “SpikeSource Articles” section from traditional media).  Smart move – every company should put something like this up on their news page.  It’s not a surprise that Kim Polese – the CEO of SpikeSource – has a clue – as she’s on the Technorati board.

While different cases (case 1: use blog as user community to generate new feature requests for product; case 2: reference blogs as equivalent to traditional news sources about product / company), both are powerful examples of the quickness, ease, and leverage of blogs as a part of the corporate communication and information collection process. 

Oh – and I’ve never really worried about “the long tail problem” – I don’t think it’s a problem if the tail is “long” enough.

If you are Denver/Boulder based, my portfolio company – Rally Software – is in Denver on Friday, February 25th as part of their “Rally Agile Roadshow” to spread the message about Agile development and how to transform your software development organization to Agile processes.  Attendees will also be registered in a drawing to win either a day of Agile Coaching or a free pass to the Agile 2005 conference.

When I run, my vision of myself is a lumbering hulk going “clomp clomp” down the road.  Whenever Amy and I are driving over a road that I recently ran, I often cannot resist adding “clomp clomp” sound effects to our driving experience.  In appreciation for my enunciating skills, Amy emailed me the following haiku from her Zen Page-A-Day Calendar 2005.

Clomp clomp the monk’s feet
through ice and dark
drawing sweet water.

by Basho

On Monday, Stratify announced release 5.0 of their Stratify Legal Discovery product.  This is a major product release for them, as it incorporates a raft of new features and gives them a huge technology leadership position in the legal discovery software market.

Today – Stratify announced that Merrill Corporation – the leading global supplier of diversified communications and document services – has signed a partnership to integrate Stratify’s products with Merill’s Discovery Navigator (Merrill’s proprietary electronic repository technology).  Merrill is a huge established service provider to top law firms and Fortune 100 companies and this type of deal is – in the words of my partner Rex Golding – a classic transformational channel deal. 

If you sell enterprise software and services, you have to have partnerships like this to be successful.  Our company Cyanea is a poster child for this – they had an OEM deal with IBM early in their life which had a dramatic positive impact on their growth and ultimately resulted in IBM acquiring them for a very nice price due to the success and customer adoption of Cyanea’s products. These partnerships must work both ways – Merrill sees huge value in Stratify’s product (we’ve been through an extended and deep evaluation period where we were chosen over other companies) – and Stratify is delighted to be part of Merrill’s toolkit that they sell to their customers.

I had a pair of situations recently with executives from two different companies that reminded me what a pleasure it is to work with A+ people.  I won’t single them out by name in order to not embarrass them, but they know who they are.  Both demonstrated what I call “an unexpected display of class” in completely unnecessary, but appreciated ways.

Case 1: This person was promoted from controller to VP Finance.  She had been with this company from their inception, is an incredibly hard and diligent worker, and is extremely capable.  Her reaction to a quick congratulation note regarding her promotion can be summarized as “thanks, but a title change wasn’t necessary – I’ve been here since the beginning – I’m extremely committed to the team and the investors – I’m excited about the future.”  I had to reread the email a couple of times, not because I was so surprised by her response (it was completely in character), but it stands out in stark contrast to the endless discussions I have had over the past 10 years about title inflation, desire for more “external recognition”, and general noise from execs about how important it is to have the right title to position themselves “properly.”

Case 2: I was at a board meeting recently and the CEO voluntary requested that he not be paid his 2004 bonus because it was the difference between the company being profitable for the year.  We had acrued for his bonus throughout the year and the company had outperformed at the EBITDA level (they were solidly EBITDA positive), but just barely missed being Net Income positive for the year.  This CEO had decided – prior to the board meeting – that it was more important to him to post a Net Income year for 2004 then to get paid his bonus.  After some discussion, we agreed to his request, but insisted that we have a separate mid-year bonus test for 1H05 performance that is independent of his 2005 bonus plan and that the board reserved the right to grant him a discretionary bonus mid-year.

In both cases, these execs acted in a humble and selfless way – clearly putting their company ahead of their own ego and financial interests.  Fortunately for me, this is not unique in my portfolio – as I’m really proud of the group of people that I have running the companies I’ve invested in.  However, these two examples both felt like great object lessons that were worth singling out.

I personally try to regularly have “unexpected displays of class.”  It’s obviously one of those things that is very hard to “self measure” – I hope I compare to the two folks above.

I stumbled upon references to two new bloggers today that are must reads for anyone interested in technology, venture capital, and entrepreneurship.

• Roger McNamee – a hugely successful public market and venture capital investor – has started a blog called The New Normal (after a book he just published).
• Tom Evslin – founder, chairman, and CEO of ITXC.  I remember meeting Tom at Fred Wilson’s office at Flatiron when Fred was considering funding ITXC.  We (Softbank) passed – Fred went on to fund Tom and made plenty of money as a result.  My recollection of Tom was super-high energy, great thinker, and incredibly passionate about what he was up to.  Tom rode out the bubble with style, creating a successful business that was acquired last year by Teleglobe.

Happy reading.

There was a flurry of news from several of my portfolio companies the last few days.  For those of you that track what I’m up to, here it is:

• Xaffire closed a $3m financing.  The company had a great Q404 – landing several significant customers and building real momentum with a couple of key partners.  Wendy Lea – an experienced entrepreneur, sales and marketing consultant, and ex-Siebel exec joined the board.
• ePartners has begun reselling LiveVault’s Online Backup and Recovery Service.  The ePartners customer base is one of the largest collection of mid and upper market customers of Microsoft Business Solution products (they added over 300 new customers last year.)  As one would expect, they’re systematically expanding their services with third party products that enhance the range of services to their customers – in this case augmenting their existing Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery offering as well as fulfilling record retention and regulatory requirements mandated by Sarbanes-Oxley.
• Stratify released v5.0 of their Stratify Legal Discovery product.  In addition to a range of new features, they’ve added visual email analytics capability, which enables litigators to identify critical relationships in email message flows as part of their legal discovery process.
• Rally announced the availability of Release 4 of their on-demand software development management solution for Agile teams.  One of the cool things about making (and using) an Agile product is rapid release cycles – Release 3 came out on August 16th – not a bad rev cycle for an early stage company.
• StillSecure Border Guard was awarded “Best Buy of 2004” by SC Magazine: They won top rating in the IDS/IPS (Intrusion Detection / Prevention) category. 

It just turned Wednesday – not a bad start to the month.

I fly United – well – a LOT (yeah – I’m a 100K Premium Exec again this year) since I live in Colorado and United has something like 75% of the gates at DIA.  Like most United frequent flyers, I am somewhat skitzo about my “support” for United – if they get out of bankruptcy, I don’t expect them to operate any better than they traditionally have, but if they liquidate, I expect that my travel will be totally fucked for some period of time since DIA is such an economically unattractive hub for the airlines.

I’ve been referring to United as “Untied” as they struggle through the bankruptcy process and was pleasantly surprised today when I typed www.untied.com and discovered a delightful “complaint site” against United that’s been around for a while.  The stories are hysterical (in that sick, sad, sort of way) and eerily reminiscent of some of my experiences.