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.

I ran in the Boston Marathon on Monday. I was an official entrant – #20778. I did not time qualify – instead I ran in the charity program for the Michael Lisnow Respite Center. Several of my friends made financial contributions as did Amy and I. This “disclaimer” is an “asterisk” for those of you out there who don’t feel that those of us that run for charity are “official runners” in the Boston Marathon.

I got the following email from someone a few minutes ago. I’ve been a reader of your blog for some time now, but will follow it no longer. Even though I don’t understand why someone would want to do it,sliding in the back door to run the Boston Marathon they way you secured your number is your business – you have to live with yourself. Bragging on your blog that you are using your influence, and the influence of your friends to essentially buy a place in that race is demeaning to you, and the great race itself, and this is why I’ve lost respect for you. I know many people who have dedicated years to their running, have not met the qualifying standard, but don’t have the money or know friends who can help them buy their way into the race. Trust me – these are the kind of people that don’t have the resources to build a “treadputer,” nor would they want to. But they are the kind of people who truly understand what the Boston Marathon is all about, and would not go unless they met the qualification standard.

Barry Eisler is one of my favorite mental floss writers. Barry writes thrillers about a bad-ass named John Rain. Rain is half-Japanese, half American assassin who specializes in making his kills look like natural causes. Oh – and he’s good with the women. His books, in order, are Rain Fall, Hard Rain, Rain Storm, Killing Rain, and (in June) The Last Assassin, Now, Barry has a blog called The Heart of The Matter. I no longer will have to wait a year to read the next batch of his prose.

I spoke on a panel last week at the Silicon Flatirons Telecommunications Program titled “Re-examining The Patent System.” My panel was the last one and came after a few hours of stimulating discussion about the problems with patents, the problems with patent reform, and the reason our government is struggling so much with what to do. When I was at MIT in the 1980’s, copyright and patents were just starting to be a major issue in the personal computer software business. I vividly remember attending a lecture in one of my classes by the general counsel of Lotus who was suing Borland for copyright infringement between Quattro Pro and Lotus 1–2–3. This was around the same time that Apple vs. Microsoft / Xerox vs. Apple lawsuits appeared, as well as the nonsense Ashton-Tate vs. Fox Software lawsuit. Forget about patents – this was about copyright! 

Jason sent me a quote that was on the first slide of a 409A presentation from one of the major law firms we work with. “409A is the tax law that ate the world. Every day we discover another 12 issues.” —– Senior US Treasury Department Tax Official, March 13, 2006 Maybe Jack Bauer will start paying attention to 409A in tonight’s episode of 24.

As my Microsoft Web Only diet continues, I found myself using Live.com Image Search today to put together a presentation. I hate text heavy Powerpoint presentations so I try to go to the Seth Godin school of Powerpoint and limit myself to six words per slide (e.g. lots of pictures.) Historically, Google Image Search has been my friend when I put a presentation together. I loved Live.com Image Search – it’s substantially better than Google’s. The actual image search is about the same, but the UI is dramatically better. It’s very Ajaxy – resize bar, mouse over to enlarge image and get image detail, drag and drop image to other apps, infinite scroll (rather than next, next, next), and overall nice / fast presentation. Someone on the Google Image Search team needs to take a look.

The rumors about someone buying JBoss have been bouncing around for weeks. As I was working on a presentation titled Commercializing Open Source for Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation conference this week, I went to Red Hat’s page to pick up their logo and saw that they announced the acquisition of JBoss this morning. This is a huge success for everyone involved, especially Marc Fleury (JBoss CEO and founder) and the primary investors – Accel, Intel, and Matrix. JBoss only did one disclosed round of financing for $10 million about two years ago. Red Hat acquired them for $350 million with an additional $70 million earn out. This is about 10% of Red Hat’s market cap.