A few days before NewsGator released their plug-in for the new version of Yahoo! Messenger, I was at NewsGator for a board meeting and sat in on their Friday demo hour (one hour of rapid fire demos from stuff people are working on or things that got built “under the radar” during the previous week.) I saw some neat stuff, especially around a major release / announcement that I believe is coming in the next two weeks. I also saw a bunch of cool “small things” like new UI stuff being rolled into the products or long term features (such as filter by category) that are functional and just waiting for the right release cycle for each of the products.

Amy and I were co-hosts for Mark Udall’s summer solstice party today. Mark has become a friend and is one of the few politicians I’ve really come to admire. The quote of the afternoon was from Winston Churchill – “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.” Mark reminded all of us that one of the great American traits is optimism. Right on my friend.

I’m really proud of my friends at Rally Software. Their business continues to grow very rapidly and they appear to have nailed the intersection of a couple of key trends – the growth of the Agile software development combined with the trendy but important reality of SaaS (“Software as a Service” for those of you living under a rock or in Alaska, like I like to do occasionally.) Last week Rally closed an $8m financing led by Vista Ventures – this should fund them through profitability. Earlier this week, Ryan Martens – Rally’s founder and CTO – was named a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in the Rocky Mountain region. While I don’t usually put a lot of stock in awards, I’ve been a judge for the Rocky Mountain region in the past and recognize the high level of quality among the various nominees for this particular award.

I’ve noticed a pattern in many of the VC and entrepreneur blogs I read – very few people ever talk about failure. Failure is a key part of entrepreneurship. As an entrepreneur, angel investor, and venture investor, I’ve had lots of success, but I’ve also had lots of failures. So has everyone that I know that has accomplished much of anything. While it’s often difficult to talk about failure, there are a lot of lessons that can be learned from it. The cliche “I learn more from my failures than my successes” applies directly to entrepreneurship and creating companies. It can be difficult to be self-reflective, but I’ve personally found it very cathartic to study my failures, understand what I did wrong, learn as much as I can from them, and move on. Occasionally I’ll have a similar failure a second time or a third time – hopefully I learn eventually.

Nick Bradbury, one of the great programmers that I know, has a post up about his approach to working out new ideas. He also has a few hints about things he’s playing with for the next version of FeedDemon. I’ve gotten to know Nick over the past year or so since NewsGator acquired Nick’s company and love his style and his products (I use FeedDemon all day long on several machines – it’s my primary newsreader.) 

Yesterday was my 13th wedding anniversary. Amy and I went out to dinner at the Flagstaff House with Seth and Greeley who were celebrating their 3rd anniversary. We had a wonderful time – I wouldn’t trade the last 13 years with Amy for anything (and I suspect Seth and Greeley feel the same way about each other.) We spent a lot of time talking about how satisfied we are with our respective existences on this planet. It’s a huge pleasure to be able to sit quietly at a nice dinner, looking out over one of the most beautiful views of any city that I’ve ever seen (Boulder from the top of Flagstaff is special), and enjoy the company of a few of the special people in my life. 

When Niel Robertson – the founder and CTO of Newmerix – started talking about his idea for a set of “next-generation software quality assurance” products aimed at packaged application vendors, he regularly listed several packaged application vendors, including PeopleSoft, Siebel, Oracle, and SAP as candidate packaged applications to target. Newmerix focused their development initially on PeopleSoft products and has released three products – Automate!Test (automated software testing), Automate!Change (change management), and Automate!Program Manager (product management and regulatory compliance) – all for the PeopleSoft platform. 

A blog reader pointed me at the new JWP creative ads that are up on The Huffington Post web site. I think they are absolutely brilliant, although Amy suggested that the Scruffs ad was simply an excuse for pornography. It’s pretty wild what you can end up when you don’t have to worry about the FCC.

One of my portfolio companies – Klocwork – has started a blog called g2zero: better code = better business in conjunction with New Rowley – a technology research and analysis company. If you are a software developer or a business person who cares about software quality, take a look. A similar blog – On Be(come)ing Agile – run by Rally Software (another portfolio company) – on Agile software development – has been well received.