How could you not fall in love with a company named AgileZen? Today, Rally Software – a company I’ve been an investor in since 2003 – announced that they have acquired AgileZen. If you are an Agile software development shop, or follow ALM, Rally just added Kanban to the mix. This is the second acquisition Rally has made – the other was 6th Sense Analytics which they acquired at the beginning of 2009. If you follow this blog, you know that I’m a big fan of having established companies I’m an investor in buy smaller companies to help build out their product road map. I’m explicitly not a fan of rollups – I’ve had my share of investments in rollups that didn’t work. But I love targeted acquisitions that build out specific capabilities on an established company’s roadmap or add key people to the team. If you are looking for recent examples of this in my world, two others are NewsGator’s acquisition of Tomoye or Zynga’s acquisition of Serious Business. 

After the chaos of some days, it’s a delight to come home, stand outside, and look at my backyard. Today was (another) one of those days.

To start off the Learning to Program series with Nate Abbott and Natty Zola from Everlater, I asked them the simple question “What Was Day 1 Like?” Nate responded first: Day one was totally overwhelming. Overwhelming because we didn’t know what we didn’t know. It’s one thing when you don’t know how to do something (e.g., validate email addresses or change a button’s hover state). But we didn’t know what we needed to learn, and that made it difficult to even start down a path. The first week was spent just googling “web site design”, “web site architecture” and “web server” to try to get a handle on all of the acronyms we were coming across (such as CSS, HTML PHP MYSQL, ROR, JS, AJAX). Our goal was to piece together the list of skills that we were going to collectively learn in order to create a web service like Everlater. Day one was also thrilling and exciting. It’s the same feeling I get when I’m starting a long bike ride in the mountains, the same feeling I got when I first got to college, or when I got my first offer letter for ibanking in New York. To me, there’s nothing more exciting than beginning a large task, and nothing I had done was quite like the task at hand.

I love my morning reading routine. Most mornings during the week – between 5am and 6:30am – I sit at my computer, catch up on email, read the stuff in my daily folder, go through my RSS feeds, and generally explore whatever I can on the web. Some is systematic (my daily folder, my RSS feeds), some is more random (Techmeme, Hacker News), and some comes from places that I couldn’t tell you how I got to.

Yesterday I published one of Sawyer’s posts titled Why the Decks are Stacked Against Software Startups in Patent Litigation. In it, I realized that Sawyer hadn’t defined the different types of plaintiffs in a patent case. Below are good definitions (from Sawyer) of each type and clear explanations about what you are up against in each one. If you’re sued in a software patent case, the first thing you should do is figure out what kind of plaintiff you’re up against, because that will have a major impact on your negotiation posture, and you will almost surely want to settle out sooner rather than later.

*The conventional wisdom has long been that software startups benefit from patents. I’ve been investing in software / Internet companies for over 16 years and I’ve never once had a patent influence my investment decision. More importantly, since it takes a number of years to get a patent, most startups haven’t even contemplated applying for a patent when they raise their first angel or venture round. Our friend Sawyer has seen this first hand and has some specific thoughts on what they decks are stacked against software startups in patent litigation. *

In the last few days there have been a large number of posts about two platform companies – Apple and Twitter. These posts covered a wide range of perspectives (a few of the better ones are linked to below) but fundamentally came down to the tension between a platform (e.g. the iPhone OS or Twitter) vs. third party developers that build applications on top of the platforms. Several of the Twitter related posts include The Twitter Platform’s Inflection Point, Twitter and third-party Twitter developers, and Developers In Denial: The Seesmic Case Study. Several of the Apple related posts ones include and Adobe Vs. Apple War Generates Rage, Facebook Group, Why Apple Changed Section 3.3.1, Steve Jobs response on section 3.3.1. If you missed the leads to the story, Apple made a major change in their TOS and Twitter launched an official Blackberry client and acquired the Tweetie iPhone client, rattling their developer community. And Twitter Officially Responds To Developers and Tries To Calm Fears.

Sometimes I feel like a conference promoter. It’s worth noting that while I put plenty of events up on this blog, I only post the ones that I’d consider going to. Specifically, I probably get 10 requests to post something for everyone one I do. Over the past year, I’ve gotten to know Eric Ries through the work we’ve done together on the Startup Visa initiative. If you don’t know of Eric, he’s a software entrepreneur who over the past few years has been developing and evangelizing the idea of the Lean Startup. He’s an extraordinary writer – I gobble up every word that he writes on his blog Lessons Learned.

Amy and I love sushi. While my sushi dining experiences have been limited to the US and Europe, I’ve had a number of amazing sushi dinners, including Masa in New York. Boulder has a bizarrely large number of sushi restaurants and over the years we’ve frequented them all numerous times. A year or so ago a new one – Kasa Japanese Grill and Bar – opened up on the corner of Pearl and 15th. It’s around the corner from our condo in Boulder so we stopped in a few times. The first time went there it was empty, but the owner and manager Mimi was delightful and upbeat, shining her happiness on us. As we kept going back, the number of people in the restaurant at any given time increased, but Mimi always welcomed us as if she was welcoming us into her home, doted over us, and made sure we had an amazing time.