At a board meeting last week we were discussing the dynamics of keeping VC’s informed that expressed interest in “being kept up to date” on the company for the purpose of being somewhat up to speed when the next financing came around. We ended up talking through a list of about 10 different VC’s and at one point one of the other board members muttered “this sounds like the shits.” I gave him a perplexed look and he said “you know – “Signal High Interest Then Stall.” Yeah – well – we’ve all experienced the shits at one time or another.

Jonathan Schwartz – the president and COO of Sun – just posted on his great trip to Sun Mexico and raved about their recent performance. He posted a picture of “the winning team” – my first reaction was “where are the women?” I know Sun is a member of the National Center for Women & Information Technology Workforce Alliance so I was a little surprised. I decided to dig a little more and discovered that two of twenty three senior execs are women and two of nine directors are women. Unfortunately I had no easy way to go any deeper in the organization – it’s certainly conceivable that there is a higher ratio of female engineers at Sun than female executives – although if history is a guide this probably isn’t the case.

Confronting Reality was awful. The celebrated authors of this book – Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan – should consider confronting the reality that the world does not need yet another tepid, uninspired business book that tries to create a “simple” construct (in this case, the notion of – tada – a “business model”) to “confront reality” and improve you business. The construct is lame. The examples, while somewhat interesting (EMC, Cisco, Sun, Home Depot, 3M, and Thompson) and by far the best part of the book, are still incredibly light weight stories of the transformation these companies went through recently.

Earlier this week I was enjoying myself at an Oxlo board meeting (the food was “ok” – at least there was food) and I realized that a number of people in the room were folks that I had met randomly. I’ve had a long standing “random meeting” policy – I try to set aside time to get together with people that are referred to me by someone I know. While I don’t do coffee, breakfast, lunch, or other time consuming things, I’m always happy to spend 15 minutes meeting someone for the first time, hearing their story, and seeing if I can connect them up with something I’m involved in.

Earlier this week I wrote that Tim Wolters – CTO of Collective Intellect had starting posting on terms associated with VC financings. Yesterday – Niel Robertson – CTO of Newmerix (who just closed a follow on to their Series B financing) just wrote an extensive post about his experience with early stage venture financings. Great insight from the entrepreneur’s point of view (in the case that you are sick and tired about hearing about things from a VC point of view.)

If you are into 24, Slate has an excellent interview with Michael Loceff – one of the key writers for the show. Thanks Rick.

I’ve been to zillions of board meetings (and lunch meetings) over the past decade. The food at 98% of them is shit. We had a board meeting at FeedBurner today. Lunch was – nope – not “yet another soggy sandwich.” Dick and crew treated us to Thai food – yum. It took virtually no extra effort (or cost) to shift from “generic unhealthy roast beef and ham sandwiches that the vegetarian board members (me) had to avoid and settle for a bag of potato chips instead” to “sumptuous, fun, exciting, hot, spicy, and stimulating food. Oh – and NO cookie plate laden with 500 calorie bombshells that no one wants but those with poor impulse control and sugar addiction (like me) can’t avoid gobbling down.

As part of my running habit, I typically run on a treadmill in the winter when I travel to a cold city (it’s just a lot easier than schlepping warm clothes around and finding my way around a strange city in the dark.) I woke up in Chicago today, headed downstairs to the “fitness room”, and spent some time on the treadmill. Usually I’d watch a movie or MTV, but neither was happening on the TV attached to the treadmill so I ended up being stuck with CNBC. Closed captioning was on because of the little sign on the TV that said “get headphones from the front desk” which was five floors below me and I was already a minute into my run when I figured out that a headset wasn’t going to magically appear (I guess I wasn’t the first person to be perplexed that there were no headphones easily available.)

A few days ago a Technorati watchlist for Quova turned up an article by The Register about their November 2005 circulation numbers. While The Register announced that they crossed the 4m unique threshold for the month (as audited by ABCe), I was more excited to see them quote their distribution of readers by country according to Quova. While this is a very simplistic use Quova’s technology, it made me think back to the mid-1990’s when I was on the netGenesis and I/Pro boards and I first pondered the analog analog of magazine circulation as applied to the web. At the time, this was really hard data to pull together with any accuracy, especially at the geography level, and I remember talking about different approaches beyond simply parsing HTTP_REFERED to get the country code in the URL.