One of my oldest (as in “known for the longest time”) friends – Dave Jilk – recently started a new company called eCortex with his business partner, CU Boulder Professor Randall O’Reilly. I – along with several other friends and The University of Colorado (through their Proof-of-Concept Investment program) – participated in the angel financing. I’ve known Dave since my second day at MIT. I was a lost and lonely freshman during the madness known as MIT Rush (MIT used to have fraternity rush the first week of school – this has since been modified for a variety of reasons – some good, some not-so-good) when Dave walked up to me and said something like “hey, want a beer?” (this was probably one of the “good” reasons since I was 17.) This started a 20+ year friendship that includes starting a successful company together (Feld Technologies), marriages and divorces, moves (we both ended up in Boulder), an unsuccessful entrepreneurial adventure (Wideforce Systems), several salvage operations (planetU, Xaffire) and lots of time spent exploring and learning new things. Dave was always one of the most intellectually capable people in the room (a 4.9/5.0 in Course 6 at MIT means something – I think the B was in psychology) and – while the startup company thing suited him well, he was never in love with the thing he was working to create.

Barry Eisler – one of my favorite authors – made me laugh out loud this morning. Amy and I had a legendary dinner at Guy Savoy last night with our friends Warren and Ilana Katz (more on that later when enough blood returns to my brain from my stomach to write about it) and we had the experience that this language was designed for. Barry’s blog has moved up into the list of “read the full post every day rather than skim” category.

There was a gang of bloggers at SAP’s SAPPHIRE conference that was organized by SAP’s Jeff Nolan. The wiki has a bunch of context and links to the various folks that were part of this gang. Niel Robertson – the CTO of Newmerix (one of my portfolio companies) – has started to trickle out missives from the conference. Ross Mayfield – the CEO of SocialText – covered the keynote nicely (eliminating my need to be there) and – well – if you just had to see some pictures of the conference, they even existed on the web.

I received the following question recently: Just want to ask you a question. I’m looking to bring in a couple of advisors for my startup, how much stock and the approximate % of equity should I give that’s fair to the advisors for their invaluable advice? I was thinking of 100,000 shares each that equates to 1% company equity. Can you advice me on what’s the norm? 1% is rich. In the past, I’ve given some ground rules for equity grants for directors – 1% vesting over four years is at the top end of the range. Advisors typically (although not always) contribute much less value to a company than directors and their equity grant should correspondingly be less. Of course, the amount you give depends on a number of factors, including things like your expectation of what the advisor will provide, how much you value this involvement, and the existing capital structure of the company (e.g. larger grants if you are younger, smaller grants if you are a more mature company.)

In Munich, der Lowe has eaten La Vache. The Munchner Lowenparade (Lion Parade) was out in force. I snapped about 50 pictures of beautifully painted lions like the one below with my favorite lioness. Amy informed me that the female lions do all the work while the male lions lay around all day.

Amy and I had a great few days in Munich earlier this week. The highlight was teaching Joachim Henkel’s class at Technische Universitat Munchen on the topic of “Why Innovations Often Come From Startup Companies.” I met Joachim through Eric von Hippel – they’ve worked together on some Open Source research that’s part of Eric’s Democratizing Innovation theme. The class was very engaged and humored me by speaking excellent English. Rather than stick to a tight topic, I did a lot of story telling and Q&A, which I always expect is a nice change of pace for a class like this from the more standard academic lecture (at least they seemed to have fun.)

Congrats to my friends at Gold Systems for winning the “Best Outbound Solution” as part of the Microsoft Speech Server Partner Spotlight Awards that were announced on Tuesday. Terry Gold and his team have been working closely with Microsoft on their new Speech Server product and have done some really cool stuff with it, such as the Gold Systems Password Reset Solution that Microsoft is highlighting on the Microsoft Speech Server website.

John Funk, a partner in Evergreen Innovation Partners, recently had a nice summary of the minor victory eBay just had in at the Supreme Court in the universe of defending against software patents. As John points out, it’s a minor victory, but helps reinforce that an injunction and system shutdown is not an automatic outcome when a court finds a company to be infringing on a patent.) John and I have been colleagues (I was an investor in Exactis (fka Mercury Mail / Infobeat – his first company), adversaries (Infobeat sued a company I co-founded – Email Publishing – for patent infringement – which was eventually settled for $1 and a cross-licensing agreement between Exactis and MessageMedia (the company that acquired Email Publishing)), and once again friends and colleagues (I’m an investor in John’s latest company, Evergreen IP.) 

I had a superb run this morning through the English Garden in Munich. This is only the second time I’ve ever been in Munich – the first time was with my friend Bruce over 20 years ago. While it was cloudy, it was a lovely morning, the park was fresh, green, and hidden from the city, and there were some wackadoodle surfers practicing in the small river under a bridge with a water pipe. I discovered the incredible value of the map function of my new Garmin Forerunner 305 – without it I would have been lost in the park and would have never been able to find my way back, especially since none of the signs made any sense to me except the ones that said “GaragePark” which weren’t of much use and I forgot to leave myself a trail of bread crumbs.