Brian Kellner, my victim VP Product Management at NewsGator, writes a great timeline of “his view” of Product Focused Venture Capital. Look for the TypePad widget soon. NewsGator released the beta of their Toolbar for IE and Firefox. While it’s beta, I’ve been using it for a few weeks and it’s pretty solid. A toolbar is long overdue, not just for auto-discovery (there are lots of plug-in options for NewsGator’s products – going back to 2004 – but you’ve got to work harder than necessary to find them or get them installed.) You can get the Toolbar here and – once it’s out of beta – it’ll be on the home page and in the product builds. 

On April 7, 2007 I’m going to run the North Pole Marathon. I’ve increased my marathon in every state goal to include the Marathon Grand Slam Club which is a marathon on every continent and on the Arctic Ocean in the North Pole Marathon. I’m super excited – in my “you only get one shot at this life thing” philosophy, this is a trip. Tom Heinrichs, the Associate Director of the GINA Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, is the instigator of this madness. I met Tom last year on my trip to Fairbanks to talk about venture capital and entrepreneurship. He’s been a regular reader of my blog and we’ve corresponded by email over the past year about a variety of things. A week ago Tom asked me if I was interested in having the University of Alaska Fairbanks send me to the North Pole to run this marathon as part of International Polar Year. After doing a little research, I determined that IPY is a huge deal in research for the issues surrounding the Earth’s climate and – given all the focus on global warming (scientific, political, entrepreneurial, and otherwise) – it’d be fun to dig into, learn about, and participate in the real research side of things. In addition to UAF, a number of research groups in Boulder are going to be involved in IPY, which makes it all the more exciting and relevant for me. Today, Tom sent me a note saying that UAF has approved doing this and I said I “game on.”

Bill Venema sent me a copy of his book The Strategic Guide to Selling Your Software Company. If you are a founder of CEO of a software company and you’ve sold less than three companies in your career, this is a must read book. If you’ve sold three or more companies, it’s probably still worth having it on your bookshelf to pull down and look at when you are gearing up for the next sale you are involved in, or to be able to quickly hand it to one of your partners who has sold less than three companies.

I love to invest in companies where I can be actively involved as a user of their products. One of the benefits of actively blogging over the past two years has been an opportunity to play / work with numerous entrepreneurs in my own “lab” (my blog) to understand how their technologies and products work, how the ecosystem around them evolves, and what seems compelling (vs. just interesting or clever.)

Amy grew up in Anchor Point, Alaska until she was 8 years old. We still own the land and make an annual pilgrimage when we are out here. Following is the view (of Mount Redoubt) from what used to be her living room window. It’s 18 miles from our house in Homer. I know because it’s my run on Friday.

David Cohen, a Boulder-based entrepreneur and angel investor who I’ve done a few angel investments with and am now working on an interesting project with, has a great post up on how angel investors make investment decisions. If you are raising angel money, it’s worth a read.

I grew up with tornados (I lived in Dallas) so I never experienced many earthquakes. My first one was in the middle of the night in Walnut Creek, CA while sleeping in a hotel in the late 1980’s (Ramada Renaissance, I think). I’d taken a late night flight from Boston to California and was sound asleep in preparation for an early morning meeting at one of my California clients (Contra Costa Endocrine Associates.) I woke up, noticed the ceiling moving in the opposite direction of the bed, then noticed it going the other way, then noticed it going the other way, and thought I was having a heart attack or an aneurysm. About 15 seconds later it stopped and I laid in bed for a minute or so trying to figure out what was going. “Earthquake?” popped into my head, I called down to the front desk, and got a busy signal. Yup. “Hmmm – what do I do?” I didn’t know, so I went back to sleep. The next morning I read in the paper that it was a 6–something and one person died when they got disoriented and jumped out a window.

JB pointed me at Dilbert’s comic on 8/3/06 that does a perfect job of explaining the problem with most PowerPoint presentations in 10 seconds.

A while back I wrote one of my periodic rants against PowerPoint. I’ve sat through so many horrible PowerPoint presentations that I’ve ceased to be patient with them. When I occasionally get a good one, I stand up and cheer. Of course – the problem isn’t PowerPoint – it’s the person that created the presentation in the first place. After my rant, Cliff Atkinson sent me a copy of his book Beyond Bullet Points along with a nice note that said: