A friend of mine and active angel investor asked me the following question recently*: “I thinking of getting involved in a ‘base hit’ type company, but one that feels like I could really help. It probably won’t be a huge win, but then again I feel confident it will at least work and be viable. I’m just struggling with committing my time, which is of course my most valuable asset. I guess I fear the opportunity cost of not being able to focus on things that could potentially be bigger. How do you reconcile this sort of stuff as an investor?* I sent him a long answer which – after I sent it – realized it was a blog post. Following is what I wrote him.

NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand just went Beta 2 and has 100 customer slots available. Charlie Wood eloquently describes why he thinks it is important. If you are a fan of acronyms and great software, you’ll understand why I think this product should be code named NGOD instead of NGEOD. If you are interested in road testing NewsGator’s Enterprise RSS-reader in an On-Demand environment (which also works with all of NewsGator’s client side apps – FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Go!, Inbox), go sign up for the beta.

Sometimes (actually often) “truth is stranger than fiction.” Nik Cubrilovic – the founder / CEO of Omindrive – has an incredible post up describing “A November I Will Always Remember*.”* As he says in the teaser – “here is a story about cross-feed fuel valves, space heaters and wisdom teeth.” It’s also about work life balance, unintended consequences, and the value of having a great attitude no matter what is going on around you.

Lest I neglect another one of our portfolio companies, Klocwork also received an Infoworld 2007 Technology of the Year Award for the App Dev category (for Best Source Code Analyzer.) Congrats guys.

Well – that’s a nice way to start the year. I just saw that Infoworld chose NewsGator Enterprise Server 1.4 as their 2007 Technology of Year for the Data Manager – Best Enterprise RSS Manager.

Last August, I stumbled into the idea of running the North Pole Marathon. Early in December, I realized it was a dumb ass idea – at least for me – as I’d never be ready for it given the inconsistent training I did in the fall. So – I decided not to run it (at least not in 2007.) As Kenny Rogers once said, sometimes you’ve got to “know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, know when to run.” I’m not running this time – I’m going to fold ‘em instead. 

Jason Mendelson and I have started a new blog aimed at entrepreneurs called AsktheVC. We’ve started this blog to discuss relevant issues in the venture capital and entrepreneurial ecosystem. As you may know, we’ve spent a lot of time over the past three years writing about venture capital and entrepreneurship on Feld Thoughts. We’ve had great feedback regarding our regular posts on matters that effect people in our industry, as well as our blog series on topics such as term sheets, letters of intent, and 409A. We’ve also had a lot of fun and learned a lot from the questions that people have asked us.

I’ve been enjoying my experience with Vista on my Lenovo X60 over the holidays. It’s stable, fast, and mostly behaves as expected. I’ve only had two required reboots in 10 days, which I view as a major victory. But – Vista has more than it’s share of stupid little oversights. For example, the Calculator app. Microsoft has included a Calculator in every version of Windows that I can remember. I extremely good at doing simple math in my head so I don’t keep a calculator on my desk, but I occasionally need a mildly advanced calculator to figure things out. While I could run Excel, that seems stupid (ok – it is stupid) for the type of math problems I need a calculator for.

Welcome to 2007. You did make that copyright notice thing a variable or an include, didn’t you?