I hate spam. Over the years I’ve been an investor in a number of companies that address the spam problem, including Postini and Return Path. I’ve also been involved in lots of other companies in the email ecosystem and spam has always been something I’ve paid close attention to. I’ve thought hard about Blam (Blog Spam), Spim (IM Spam), Skam (Skype Spam), and SMam (SMS Spam). A few times in the past I’ve thought about Twam (Twitter Spam) but Twitter has done a good job so far of dealing with most of the nasty stuff, the most visible being the porn-follower twam that they somehow managed to beat back (or that I’ve successful ignored).

We’ve been having a running joke within Foundry Group for several years about “stealth mode.” My partner Seth alludes to it in his blog post a few years back titled To stealth or not to stealth. I’ve always been on the side of “not to stealth” but after watching the remarkable stealth experience of Trada, thinking about how Niel Robertson (Trada’s CEO), Seth, and the Trada team have effectively used stealth mode, and reflecting on what “stealth mode” actually means, I’ve changed my mind.

I’ve enjoyed my interviews on Vator.tv in the past and think Bambi Francisco and crew do a great job of highlighting up and coming entrepreneurs, companies, and their investors. Vator is holding a Splash event on May 13, at the Cafe du Nord in San Francisco. Like its last event, about 400 attendees are expected. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh will talk about how he built a company to a $1 billion exit to Amazon and Gurbaksh Chahal will talk about how he started and sold two companies for $340 million before the age of 25. About 30 investors from VC firms will be there and as a special bonus, there will be an afterparty with a band consisting of Adbrite founder Philip Kaplan, Mayfield VC Raj Kapoor and Norwest VC Tim Chang.

While some people hate the phrase “failing fast”, I find it instructive when it’s used to signify that one isn’t going to pursue a particular path in the context of a larger set of activities. A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about The Proliferation of Standardized Seed Financing Documents. It generated several hundred email responses and a handful of phone calls. A week or so later, my partner Jason Mendelson wrote a post titled Why There Will Never be a Standard Set of Seed Documents. I’ve concluded that Jason is right so rather than torture myself, I’m failing fast with regard to trying to help create a set of standardized seed documents.

Over the past year the amount of emails I receive on a daily basis from entrepreneurs has reached a point where I can’t deal with it any more. My partners at Foundry Group feel the same and as a result we’ve moved to twitter to deal evaluation. If you are interested in talking to me about a potential investment, please just tweet it. Limit yourself to 140 characters – that’s more than enough to describe what you are doing. Optimally, you’d DM me, although I realize that I have to follow you for this, so just use @bfeld in your tweet and I’ll see it. And please – don’t sent me multiple tweets – that kind of defeats the purpose.

On March 8, 2010 Amazon fired me as an Amazon Affiliate because of Colorado HB 10-1193. I proceeded to have a dozen different conversations (email and live) with several of my state representatives, including one of the co-sponsors of the bill, and each conversation made me more incensed at the abject stupidity and lack of understanding of the dynamics surrounding the situation. Ultimately, the argument came down to one of protectionism – e.g. “we have to protect our local merchants so Amazon shouldn’t get an unfair advantage by not having to charge state tax.” I could rant about this for a while, but I’ve got better things to spend my time on at this point.

I talk about human computer interaction (HCI) a lot on this blog. We’ve invested in a number of companies in our HCI theme, including Oblong, Organic Motion, and EmSense and have a few more that we are working on that hopefully will be announced shortly. When I think about the areas I’ve been paying the most attention to and am the most intrigued with as an investor, HCI rises to the top of the list. 

Tonight, during Lost, I tried to decide just how “willful” Locke-the-smoke-monster was being. I didn’t reach a conclusion – and doubt I will until the end of the season. In the mean time, my anonymous lawyer friend known as Sawyer sent me a nice essay on the notion of “willful infringement in the context of patents.” He also sent me some interesting comments about how pissed off a bunch of biotech patent lawyers were today are at U.S. District Court Judge Robert W. Sweet for invalidating seven patents related to the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2, but that’s not what this essay is about. Remember, no matter how sensible Sawyer’s advice is, none of this is legal advice and, if you have a specific issue, make sure you spend lots of money on your lawyers since they also have to eat. Sawyer’s comments follow.

After downloading Skype 4.2, I realized that I could now invite all of my Facebook friends who had Skype accounts to my Skype contact list. So I did. Unfortunately the Skype UI for this sucks so I had to go through about 1,000 entries a screen of five at a time unchecking the Facebook friends I didn’t want on Skype. I ended up inviting about 280 – fortunately I was on a conference call for the thirty minutes it took me to grind through this.