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.” 

When I saw my first demo of the World Wide Web at an MIT Athena Cluster in 1994 (it was Freshman Fishwrap – among other things – running on a very clunky version of Mosaic) I remember thinking something along the lines of “wow – this could be used for a lot of things.” Duh. Every now and then I run into an unintended consequence of the Web. I’ve been involved in many companies that were trying to create “intended consequences” (some succeeded, some failed), but I’m intrigued when I stumble upon an unintended consequence, especially if it’s buried deep in the fabric of the mainstream.

This is our last post on 409A until the IRS issues more guidance or accepts some of the comments it has received during the comment period. In other words, we are “done” with 409A until sometime between tomorrow and next year. While I was hoping to get to 10 posts so I could refer to this series as “My Top 10 Thoughts On 409A” to join in with the top 10 list of 2005 meme, we only made it to 9. We hope you’ve enjoyed this series (yes – that was sarcastic.)

Spam, Haiku and You Delicious, scary, nasty [Funny short movie](javascript:void(window.open(‘https://www.liquidviewer.com/cloud9/vidPlayer2.php?x=110', ‘cloud9’, ‘width=640,height=480,status=no,resizable=no,scrollbars=no’))) Thanks Alex, Matt, and Chris