A close friend of mine is spending a year traveling around with world with his wife and 11 year old daughter. They are in China right now and he’s been sending me missives from the front lines of his trip. Most of what I read these days about China is either highly political, technology-oriented, or about the venture capital industry’s fascination with China. My friend’s emails have been decidedly different (while he’s a successful technology entrepreneur, his trip is about a personal adventure that his family has embarked upon.) I confirmed with him that I could blog some of his rants – enjoy.

I finally got around to downloading my Boston Marathon data from my Garmin 301. I thought the GPS based data was extremely interesting, especially when compared to the official course elevation map. Following is the official elevation map: Following is the map from my GPS post race: Notice all the hills that get smoothed out in the official map, especially between miles 15 and 23.

Since it’s a Saturday morning, I thought I’d cover a topic in our Letter of Intent series that my wife Amy would never agree to. Signing a letter of intent starts a serious and expensive process – for both the buyer and seller – as you both work to consumate a deal. As a result, you should expect that a buyer will insist on a no shop provision similar to the one that we discussed in our term sheet series. In the case of an acquisition, no shop provisions are almost always unilateral, especially if you are dealing with an acquisitive buyer. 

I haven’t been out to see a movie in a while (I don’t know why – Amy and I love movies at the theater.) Last night we saw Thank You For Smoking. It was brilliant. I thought the Christopher Buckley book Thank You for Smoking was an absolute riot when it came out. The movie is based on the book and does a superb job of telling the same story while updating it a little. Aaron Eckhart was phenomenal as the main character (a cigarette lobbyist) and William H. Macy continues to be the sleeper actor of the universe for his portrayal of the Vermont senator who wants to put poison labels on cigarettes.

Roger Fillion has a very instructive article in this week’s Rocky Mountain News about the closing of the Colorado Institute of Technology. I remember when CIT was launched in 1999 with great fanfare by Colorado Governor Bill Owens with the vision of creating “the next Caltech or MIT.” I remember feeling that while the vision was huge – it was nonsensical and not particularly well informed about what created the underlying and sustainable basis for something like Caltech or MIT.

When you are asked “Hi – it’s been fun to date. Will you marry me?” you usually don’t expect the person asking the question to say “Oh – and it’ll only happen if my mother says it is ok.” (although I expect this happens occasionally, especially if the person asking hasn’t had enough therapy.) Buyers are like this and will normally include certain conditions to closing in the LOI. These can be generic phrases such as “Subject to Board approval by Acquirer,” “Subject to the Company not having a material adverse change,” or “Subject to due diligence and agreement on definitive documents.” They can also be phrases that are specific to the situation of the seller such as “Subject to the Company settling outstanding copyright litigation,” or “Subject to Company liquidating its foreign subsidiaries.” We generally don’t get too concerned about this provision, because any of these “outs” are very easy to trigger should the buyer decide that they don’t want to do the deal.

Today must be an Onion day. I don’t read The Onion anymore – I rely on my vast network of friends to send me relevant stuff. The other day Matt Blumberg sent me a very disturbing article about Robot Hazing that a Fraternity at MIT was accused of. As a member of the fraternity that one of the founders and CEO of iRobot lived at, I can assure you that we took robot hazing very seriously whenever we heard about it, frowned down on it, and did everything we could to stand up for the rights of the robots involved.

As my body recovers from my recent marathon, my brain turns back to Letters of Intent. Jason and I left you hanging for a while in our Letter of Intent series – we plan to tromp to the finish line in the next few weeks. In an effort to mix metaphors, while Jack Bauer tries to always look out for other people at CTU (except for say – in Ryan Chappelle’s case), it’s not always true that management is playing the same role in an acquisition. In public company acquisitions, you often hear about egregious cases of senior management looking out for themselves (and their board members helping them line their pockets) at the expense of shareholders. This can also happen in acquisitions of private companies, where the buyer knows he needs the senior executives to stick around and is willing to pay something extra for it. Of course, the opposite can happen as well, where the consideration in an acquisition is slim and the investors try to grab all the nickels for themselves, leaving management with little to nothing.

Amy told me that I dress like the guy on the cover of The Onion Style Magazine.