Fred Wilson has a nice post up titled The Ideal First Round Term Sheet. In it he describes the process of closing a financing using a standard set of Series A terms from Gunderson that he agreed to as part of the term sheet. In this case, the VC (Fred’s firm – Union Square Ventures) isn’t using a law firm. Fred states: “I’d like to see this practice become standard in our industry. We need to lower the time and cost of raising capital. We need to eliminate a lot of bad terms that have caused a lot of harm (tranched investments, mutiple liquidation preferences, super pro-ratas, etc, etc). We need to converge on a set of standard Series A terms that everyone uses.”

Tired of the health care debate? There’s a ton of other great stuff out there today. Here’s some of the things I came across on my Sunday morning pre-run scan of all things web. A Laser Strike at the Galactic Center: I like to learn at least one new thing every day. The Astronomy Picture of the Day site insures this happens. Today I learned about our Galactic Center and very powerful lasers that create artificial stars. This is something for my Boulder Hack friends to aspire to.

There was plenty of chatter about my post The Best Board Meetings. One idea popped up a few times and was well articulated by John Boyd in his post What Makes a Good Board Meeting? In it he talks about what is expected from a VC in a board meeting, rather than just from the CEO / entrepreneur. “So one thing I would add is nothing is worse than a board member that just gives “good body temperature”. i.e. I think it’s important for investors to have well articulated views and data to support their advice on strategic choices the company faces. I think it’s also important that when a CEO asks for investor help on an issue, it’s incumbent on the investor to tap his/her own extended network to get the best help possible. My point is, while a lot is expected of the CEO, the VC board members need to step up too and a lot of times they don’t.”

They seem to be having a very nice day. Good thing the coyote didn’t catch them.

I haven’t written about software patents in a while. I still hate them and think they are an illogical construct. But first, a haiku from xkcd to warm you up (and make you smile). I woke up this morning to the announcement that Microsoft can’t sell Word anymore. Apparently a judge in that hot bed of intellectual thought and discourse, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, has ordered a permanent injunction that “prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML.”

Long time readers of this blog know that we helped put together the Defrag Conference series and are enormous fans of Eric Norlin and everything he does. Well – we’re starting to gear up for Defrag 2009 on November 11th and 12th in Boulder, Colorado. The agenda is starting to take shape (anyone that knows Eric knows that he tunes it all the way up to the event.) As usual, Eric has some tricks up his sleeve (Mwahahahahahahaha).

Even though investor day happened last week, this week’s TechStars’s video – Practice Like You Play – is the lead up to investor day. Watch the Everlater guys kick Seth’s ass on bikes (plus they look so cute in their Everlater kit). Don’t forget to live life.

Some mornings I come across a blog post from a friend that breaks my mind – in a good way. Today’s post from Todd Vernon titled My 100 year hobby was one such post. Look at the picture below. The picture on the left is Central City, Colorado from around 100 years ago. The picture on the right is it from last weekend. Todd describes how he put the shot together and makes a few observations about Central City, Blackhawk, and the Colorado Central Railroad. He even manages to weave a reference to the Internet into his post, along with some comments on trees (note the absence of them on the left on the hill in the background.)

I heard the phrase “a small set of simple moves” a few weeks ago from someone and it stuck in my head. Since then I’ve been thinking about it regularly as a fundamental operating principle. Building any company is hard, but when I look back on the success of many of the companies I’ve been involved in, it occurs to me that it is built on a small set of simple moves. Now, these moves are rarely obvious, and are often hard to figure out, but once you nail it, you can do them over and over again all the way to greatness.