EndurancePlanet put up an interview with me about running marathons. If you are a runner, or just want to hear me talk about something different than entrepreneurship and venture capital, enjoy the roughly one mile (10:46) of interview.

Another GooglePark episode is up and it’s hilarious (as usual.) And – as a special bonus – I discovered EllisonPark which I have no idea how I missed before.

If you haven’t tried Technorati in a while, go take another look. At their birthday party, they rolled out a new major upgrade to the service. Dave Sifry – the CEO / founder describes it in detail. My quick scan around the blogosphere pundits showed consistently strong positive feedback. I often get asked how I manage to keep up with as much information as I do – especially about the companies I’m involved with. Part of my secret weapon is Technorati, NewsGator Online search feeds, and FeedDemon. Plus – they all work really nicely together.

We hit a rainy stretch the past few days – good for reading; not so good for getting a sun tan. In addition to The Big Six, I managed to finish four other books this week. All of them were good, but for different reasons. Hayduke Lives! was the funnest (and the only one that was fiction.) I read The Monkey Wrench Gang a few weeks ago – it was my first introduction to Edward Abbey (thanks Dave.) I loved it, so Amazoned Hayduke Lives! which was published posthumously, but was a continuation of the characters and stories in The Monkey Wrench Gang. I had a difficult time getting into Hayduke Lives! (I imagine if Abbey had been alive he would have worked it over a few more times), but I was deeply hooked after 100 pages. Abbey’s characters are insane, beautiful, hilarious, and brave – in an insane, beautiful, and hilarious way.

I read less this week than I read last week (mostly because it was a busy week) but I still managed to get through five books. Looking back on the week, four of them were business books, which is unusual for me – I think I was stalling reading the last Dennis Lehane book for as long as I could (it’s up next.) The best book of the week – by far – was The Big Six. I’m generally grumpy (that’s a nice euphemism) with the accounting industry these days, especially the Big Four. The combination of the accounting scandals of 2001 – 2003, which led to extensive new government regulations such as SOX, had the unintended consequence of making the Big Four more arrogant, lazy, ineffective, and non-responsive to entrepreneurial companies. In the late 1990’s, these firms would do practically anything to get audit work with early stage companies, promising that they would “grow with them.” Today, not only do they have no interest in working with young companies (“we don’t have enough time – we are too busy working with our large public company clients, helping them deal with SOX and other regulations”), they behave incredibly inappropriately with regard to any sort of client transition activity (I have a long list of stories here – ranging from requests for $185,000 to transfer work papers to a new auditor (a 10 hour process) to cover “cumulative discounts over the past four years” to holding up merger accounting for a public company for 12 months “because we don’t have time”, resulting in the public company having no way to get the SEC to approach an S-3 registration statement.) I could rant for a while about this – I suppose that should be the topic for another blog post (or seven).

Fred Wilson has a great, thoughtful post up titled “Scars From The Last Bubble.” If you are a VC or an entrepreneur, I recommend you read it slowly. Remember, it’s not a success until you can buy beer with the cash.

Will Herman has (yet another) great post up about failure in his first startup. His company – DataWare Logic – looked like it was on a path to success – until it ran out of money and – in Will’s words – “… didn’t have time to get new customers while supporting my existing ones and my company virtually augered itself into the planet in an instant.”

I guess it’s my week for having people email me clever things on YouTube and ifilm. Bill Gates and Napoleon Dynamite spend some time together in their apartment and on the Microsoft campus. Priceless.

I was pondering the early days of Feld Technologies tonight, thinking about what mistakes we made (and boy did we make a lot of mistakes.) I wound the clock all the way back to the beginning (sometime in 1987) and tried to figure out what the first major mistake we made that could have killed the company. Both Dave Jilk and I started working full time on Feld Technologies in the summer of 1987. I had just gotten my undergraduate degree from MIT and Dave had recently quit Viewlogic to help start Feld Technologies. We decided to rent an office across the street from our fraternity (the fourth floor of 875 Main Street) and go for it.