Fred Wilson has a good answer up to a question that was posed to him the other day about VCs and fees. Our startup company recently started seeking funding and the first firm we presented to has shown some interest. However, they have now sent us a Due Diligence Agreement and are requesting a “one time good faith due diligence payment of $9,000”. Is it standard industry practice to charge the entrepreneur a fee for the due diligence? We are obviously short on cash – paying $9k to every VC who shows an interest in us sounds counterproductive.

John Funk, an entrepreneur (I’m an investor in John’s newest company – Evergreen IP) and friend has a innovative proposal up concerning changing the rules on the current patent system. I’ve been on both sides of the patent aisle with John – we like to joke that early on in our relationship John’s company sued one of my companies (and then my company sued John’s company back) for patent infringement (the companies settled several years later for a cross license and $1 – much to the delight of the lawyers who got all the bucks.) Fortunately we got past all that crap and have developed a nice friendship.

Anil Dash – who I only know through his blog – has an awesome post up this morning titled “Making Something Meaningful.” If you are a blogger, it’s definitely worth reading.

I got an interesting question from one of my friends / readers that applies to both athletes and entrepreneurs. Can you share with me what kind of mental “training” you undertake before, during and after competing in a marathon? I understand that training for a marathon involves a lot of physical training. But how do you mentally prepare to run 26.2 miles? And how do you maintain your mental “stamina”during such a long run? Finally, how do you mentally “cool down” after competing?

I got several emails from folks at Microsoft in response to my post titled *#)$()@#$% Internet Explorer offering to help me with the problem I was having and suggesting solutions. Several of these came on July 4th – within hours of when I wrote my post. While I wish I hadn’t had the problem in the first place (and – as my first partner Dave Jilk suggested (and I summarize) – “hey Brad, it’s beta software – don’t bitch”), I was impressed by how quickly several folks at Microsoft responded, especially on their (and everyone else in America’s) day off.

At dinner I was pondering the answer I gave on the post How An Entrepreneur Can Protect Himself Post-Funding. Something was bothering me about it and I thought to myself “do I practice what I preach?” (Amy suggested that I should be bothered by my title of the post, which should have been “… Can Protect Himself or Herself …”) My first reaction was that I had never had an employment agreement with any company that I’ve worked for. As I thought about it a little harder, I realized that I’ve had a few employment agreements, but they never gave me much protection – in each case they protected the company I was working for more than they protected me. In addition, these agreements were either tied to a non-compete associated with an acquisition or as part of my role in a public company.

On this spectacular fourth of July (at least in Homer – it’s 60 degrees and not a cloud in the sky), I was enjoying disk 2 of Atlas Shrugged (I’m about 300 pages in) on my run today. I’m deep into the section where all the competent people are quitting and walking off the playing field and the looters are ratcheting up the rules, which have the unintended consequence of destroying the world as they know it. Hank is still fighting it out trying to hold everything together in an increasingly bleak world and Dagny is on her quest to find the inventor of the motor as she naively thinks that will solve everything. The contrasts of the section I’m listening to lingered in my mind long after my run, especially as I pondered the state of affairs (good and bad) in our country 230 years after our birth.

My post on talking more about failure resulted in a surprisingly large amount of email and positive feedback. In addition to plenty of private emails and a few comments, Andrew Fine emailed that he was inspired to write about the recent failure of his company Cryptine Networks. He’s just put up a post titled Key Lessons From Cryptine Network’s Failure. While I don’t personally know anything about what happened, Andrew writes a balanced and thoughtful summary of what he thinks went wrong. Praise to Andrew for being brave enough to write publicly about this in a way that is instructive.

I know I’m in a bitching about my computer mood. I’m particularly grumpy because I’m on day two of the update / reboot cycle, which is just stupid. Among other things, my Microsoft Outlook config in Homer isn’t connecting to our Exchange server because we modified our email configuration about six months ago. Ross is on vacation until tomorrow so I don’t want to bother him, so I figured I’d just use OWA, which works fine. However, I noticed that I was running the IE 7.0 Beta 1 (which I must have installed 10 months ago – we are just now on beta 3) so I decided to try to upgrade to IE 7.0 Beta 3 since there are lots of noticeable bugs (and a weak feature set for IE 7.0 Beta 1.)