Seeking Alpha has started a new interview series on their site. Dick Costolo – the CEO of FeedBurner – has an excellent one up. Seeking Alpha readers have a window to ask questions online and then Dick (or the interviewee) answers them. Dick’s interview is a superb window into the mind of the brilliant, creative, and often hilarious guy running FeedBurner and writing the Ask the Wizard blog. It’s not quite Being John Malkovich but close.

I picked up the following Dr. Seuss quote on a piece of paper laying around in the conference room I was in earlier today. You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.

One of my most popular blog series ever was on Term Sheets. I’ve been pondering another series for a while and a reader inspired me this morning to start one on Financial Statements. I think your post this morning opened up a subject area you might wish to develop further. Your point was start with the cash flow because of the confusing nature of GAAP. In fact almost all sophisticated readers of financial statements start with the balance sheet or the cash flow and read the P&L last. I think some posts on balance sheet and cash flow analysis techniques or working capital management for a startup would be useful, for the following reasons:

Bill Burnham has an excellent rant up on GAAP accounting titled Is It Just Me or is GAAP Completely Broken? In case you don’t know, GAAP stands for “Generally Accepted Accounting Principles” and is a term regularly thrown around when staring at an income statement, balance sheet, statement of cash flows, or any other “supplemental information.” I’m not a public market investor so I don’t have the twisted experience that anyone that deals with a public company has with GAAP since I don’t really care about understanding the financial statements of public companies (in any great depth.) Bill is – and he does a nice job of covering why GAAP has become such a mess in the public arena.

Every great investor has made some investments that he wishes he’d never made. Occasionally he’ll make another one like it. And another one like it. Eventually you learn. Or maybe you don’t. I heard the following quote today attributed to an extraordinary successful investor (I’ve editorialized a little.) “I’m fascinated with airplanes and the airline business, but every time I invest in them I regret it and lose money. I finally set up an 800 number, and every time I feel like buying an airline I call it, and it is a recording of me, telling me not to do it.” 

April 23, 2007. Another 24 fanatic just came in my office and announced that to me. Unfortunately I agree. I watched it last night with Amy, Jason, David, and Jill and we all had that ho-hum look on our face when it ended. Oh well – it’s rare that a show makes it six years anyway before it loses it. At least GeekSugar has great pictures of Chloe.

I love Leland – he totally cracks me up. Nothing like having a rock star on staff at NewsGator that likes a video camera. Knowing Leland, he did this in one take. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpXH1GdfDYU Not quite the RSS in Plain English video, but much more melodic.

The Common Craft Show has a brilliant 3.5 minute video called RSS in Plain English. If you’ve ever wondered what RSS is and why you should care, it’s a phenomenal explanation. Of course, I wish they had used NewsGator as the example (instead of Google Reader), but the explanation is superb and you can still give NewsGator a try.

The Wall Street Journal has a long article today titled Microsoft Embeds Sleeper in Business Software. It positions SharePoint clearly in the collaboration battle that is emerging with Oracle, Adobe, IBM, EMC, Cisco, and Google and then goes on to mention “lesser-known players” such as Zimbra, Alfresco, Plone, and Socialtext. According to the article Microsoft has sold 85 million licenses of SharePoint across 17,000 companies. Say that again slowly: 85 million licenses across 17,000 companies. I don’t know how many are “free” (according to the WSJ Microsoft has to be careful about giving SharePoint away due to their antitrust settlement) and while I used to tease my friends at Microsoft about simply giving away SharePoint and not caring who used it, this clearly was an effective strategy.