I love to invest in companies that are developing broad horizontal technologies. Many of them – such as NewsGator, FeedBurner, and Rally – can be applied to many different vertical markets. I personally revel in the tension between engineering, product marketing, and sales. It’s challenging to sell a horizontal product in an emerging market, especially to enterprise buyers. You need a special type of salesperson – one who doesn’t constantly say “I can’t sell that” but instead knows how to ask his early adopter customers “what is your pain around [problem category X]?” and then figures out how to repurpose the horizontal technology to solve this pain.

In 1991, a group of ten people (including me and Amy) gathered at a resort in Stowe, VT to have a Chautauqua to discuss the future. We had a magnificent weekend which included a field trip to Burlington to visit the Ben & Jerry’s factory (and all the ice cream that entails.) One of the discussions we had was titled “The Montana Future.” All of us – except one couple – were living in Boston at the time. While the Internet was around (and all of had been exposed to it – including plenty of DEC-action), it was 1991 – pre-WWW, pre-Telecommunications Act of 1996 – where a 9600 baud modem was considered a pretty rocking thing.

When I read David Halberstam’s Summer of ‘49 recently, I thought of my dad many times. We talked about it one day and he told me about his brilliant Summer of ‘47. I told him to blog about it and he did. Life in America was different then. For a total of $3, he had an amazing summer based around the New York Yankees and the New York Giants. His day started at Geller’s Candy Store every morning at 8am and ended on his local baseball field in the Bronx each evening when it got dark. He tells the story well and it’s a great compliment to his story Jake the Pickle Man.

The WSJ has an excellent article titled The Secrets of Serial Success. The “serial entrepreneur” is a mysterious beast and entrepreneurship sociologists have been poking and prodding at it for some time. Most articles I read about the “motivation of serial entrepreneurs” falls short – this one nails a lot of the things I’ve observed and experienced. My friends Tim Miller and Ryan Martens from Rally Software both have parts in the article. Tim and Ryan had a nice success with their previous company (Avitek – acquired by BEA) and are now working hard at their next company. They typify the “serial entrepreneur species” (of the “entrepreneur genus”.)

After waking up from a nap dreaming about Social Graphs (ok – not really) I realized I’d never tried to integrate my Outlook contacts into “the other stuff I use on the web.” I figured I’d start with Facebook since it’s all the rage these days. I have 423 friends on Facebook. I’ve been pretty careful about only accepting folks that I know (although the “Facebook friend spam” has definitely increased in the past few weeks.) 

“Even on a slow day I can have a three way chat with two women at one time. I’m so much cooler online.” Unfortunately, Brad Paisley has turned his embed off but it’s worth a click through to Brad Paisley-Online (thanks Heidi.) There is hope for all of us. Or not. Just remember that the truth is out there.

Get ready to start hearing “Social Graph” as frequently as you hear “Web 2.0.” The construct of the Social Graph (and its friend – Social Network) has been around for a while. Now that Facebook has stolen our minds (and help us control our friends), we all are part of a social network. Or nine. Or 721 (that’s my best guess for the number of different services that have a social network that I’m a user of.)

Yesterday was a blast. The ten TechStars teams – which have been cranking away in Boulder for the past three months – all launched yesterday to a packed room of VCs, angel investors, mentors, and friends at the CU Boulder Atlas Institute. Don Dodge from Microsoft was in attendance and has a great summary of what each of the 10 companies do. TechCrunch has its own summary up along with links to several of the individual company reviews that it has done. 

I received a couple of comments my last post titled The Unbearable Slowness of Javascript Widgets including one from Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress and the founder of Automattic (which makes WordPress.com and Akismet.) Matt is another super smart dude and has thought hard about this stuff. He pointed me (and you) to a couple of resources, including: Mike Davidson on How To Keep Widgets From Slowing Down Sites: WEDJE Yahoo! Developer Network’s Exceptional Performance Wiki. Both are really useful. Thanks Matt.