As we start 2006, I thought it’d be fun to revisit my endless rant on PowerPoint as a hint and reminder to everyone that has to interact with me this year. We start with The Torturous World of PowerPoint and Chris Wand’s list of questions to address if you are insisting on presenting a PowerPoint presentation pitching a company to me. Seth Godin has a Special Bonus Tactic for Avoiding Really Bad PowerPoint in his book Free Prize Inside. Cliff Atkinson has a great blog on PowerPoint and a suggestion to simply Ban Bullets (or at least not read them to me if you insist on having them.) Finally Ted Dolotta sent me a PowerPoint presentation that – if Lincoln had used – would have easily prolonged the Civil War by at least a decade.

It’s been a little over a month since Jason and I wrote posts for our Letter of Intent series. We took a time out for our 409A series and for actually selling two companies (Commerce5 to Digital River and another that hasn’t been disclosed yet) rather than writing about selling companies. This is the first time in four years where I personally haven’t been actively trying to close the sale of a company over the holidays, so I thought I’d put some time in and finish up this series. 2005 was an awesome year for M&A and all the pundits think 2006 will be equally good (or better), especially after all the M&A bankers get their year end bonuses in January and receive a new dose of forward motivation. 

Fooled By Randomness was unquestionably the best non-fiction book I read in 2005. The author – Nassim Nicholas Taleb – is a magnificent writer, deeply intellectual, and delightfully blunt. While one could interpret his style as arrogant, I chose to view it differently, especially given his endless self-deprecating remarks. I don’t know Taleb, but I’m going to assume that he’s simply an enlightened guy that feels compelled to say exactly what is on his mind in the clearest way possible.

Christmas is long gone. New Years Eve is over. The only stuff left is New Years Day, football (especially college), and – well – the last day of Hanukkah. Last night, on the seventh day of Hanukkah, I learned something new. My brother Daniel and his wife Laura introduced me to sufganiyot. I’ve had 40 years of Hanukkah and not once has my mother mentioned to me that jelly doughnuts are an ancient Hanukkah tradition. So – apparently – jelly doughnuts are to Hanukkah as candy canes are to Christmas. We celebrated last night with a box of Krispy Kreme’s.

Amazingly, I’ve lived in Colorado for 10 years and haven’t ever gone snowshoeing. Since I lost my Pilates virginity this week, I figured I’d try a second kind of cross-training in two days. Dave Jilk took me up Long’s Peak Trail to try to get above treeline. I strapped on my brand new MSR Denali Ascent Snowshoe (awesome snowshoes) and took off after Dave. I settled into a groove in about 30 minutes – it was a completely different motion than trail running or hiking (if you’ve ever snowshoed, then you know what I mean when I say “hip flexors of the world unite.”) 

In the spirit of the New Year, I’m trying to blog the questions that I’m getting that I think could have broad interest. Here’s another one. Remember – I’m not a lawyer so this isn’t legal advice. I have a question regarding the valuation of a startup I’m in and when it takes affect. When I joined the startup in 2004, I was granted options at $.10 each. In Oct ’05, we received a term sheet as part our financing efforts which valued the shares at a multiple to the $.10. We ultimately didn’t sign for various reasons. I have 2 questions related to this. 

Every good marathoner knows he should cross-train. Most of the ones I know struggle with “cramming it in” as marathon training already consumes at least ten hours a week. Triathletes have it easy since they are already running, biking, and swimming (although they should cross-train away from these three also.) But – I’m a marathoner – not a triathlete – so I carry a special cross-training burden. My wife Amy is a yoga fanatic. While I love Shivasina, I have trouble keeping up with most yoga, especially Ashtanga Yoga. At the encouragement of Dave Jilk, I’ve done Bikram Yoga on and off for the last few years and – while it’s been helpful – I find the 90 minute sessions a little long (30 minutes, to be precise) and I’ve gotten bored of the rigidity of the practice.

Over the past year, I’ve regularly gotten questions via email on venture capital and entrepreneurship from readers of this blog. I always try to respond. A number of these questions were easily bloggable but for some reason I fell into a default mode of responding to the email rather than writing a thoughtful post. I’ve decided that – going forward – I’d try to be more diligent about posting my responses to these questions (which I encourage) as well as commenting on questions in comments (I was very inconsistent about that this year.) One can always improve, right?

I sat stunned this morning as I read that AT&T (the “new name” for SBC) is going to spend $1 billion on a branding campaign. For that? Now, I’m well known for hating money wasted on marketing, but $1 billion for that? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. I can imagine about 1 billion better uses for the money. Apparently, they’ve spent lots of high powered marketing energy (and money, I expect) replacing the “Reach out and touch someone” slogan with “Your world, delivered.” Excellent. If I’d been on the “branding committee”, I would have recommended “We Suck Less.”