I just got a call from Morgan Stanley. Apparently the account that I have there – which has a P.O. Box as an address – now needs a non-P.O. Box mailing address. According to the account service rep that I talked to, this is due to the Patriot Act. Now – here’s the conundrum. I do not have a “non P.O. Box address”. While my house theoretically has an address, the USPS will not deliver mail to me since I live behind gate at the back end of a state park and they won’t deliver mail to me. If one sends mail to my home address, it ends up at the post office where I have my P.O. Box, at which point the postmistress stamps it with a message that says something like “Not A Valid Address” and returns the mail (ok – sometimes she breaks the rules – she likes us – but we still get the stamp.)

I’ve been closely watching the saga of AOL’s dance with Microsoft and Google as it’s akin to seeing an aging quarterback take the field during the playoffs and charge down the field one last time (sorry for the football analogy – there was a lot of it on TV yesterday.) As the clock on this deal runs out, it looks like the deal is going to go to Google. The best analysis of this – by far – is from the Googlepark episode “The Battle for AOL.”

Alan Shimel has a good post on a recent release of a formerly “open source” product called Nessus. With the version 3.0 release, the authors abandoned the GPL license and effectively made it closed source. While one can debate the rationale of the parties all day long, the fundamental issue surrounding the migration of “successful” open source projects to “closed source” as part of a commercialization phase is one that I think both vendors and customers be thrashing around with for a while. 

While we’ll be spending plenty of time talking about 409A in the abstract, Jason and I thought we’d give you a real life example of the analysis for one of our portfolio companies. Following is the essence of an email I received from one of my colleagues last week about a company of his that went through a formal valuation process for 409A. For those of you who have portfolio companies going through an external valuation analysis as a solution to 409A, we are just completing the process with Company X and wanted to let you know about some of the issues that you may want to be aware of. While the analysis still has not been finalized, the price per share that was determined by the external consultant went from $0.43 after the first iteration, down to $0.10 in the most recent turn. Clearly this process is as much art as science and can have a meaningful impact to both the company as a whole and the individual shareholders. With respect to the analysis:

In the category of “duh – that’s been there for a while”, I got a nice tip from TheOfficeWeblog about Outlook’s ability to automatically generate a map from an address. As a member of the “endlessly directionally impaired” category of humans, I’m lost without either a GPS or driving directions. Stupidly, my VW Touareg doesn’t have a GPS in it and even though Garmin could make my life easier, I’ve been irrationally stubborn about buying a GPS from them. While maps.yahoo.com and maps.google.com are spiffy and nice, it’s always annoyed me that I had to enter the address manually from my address book. Voila – go to Outlook, bring up the contact in question, and click on the little yellow arrow on the standard toolbar. This is a simple, but nice, demonstration of integrating Office with a webapp.

On the heals of TypePad’s 18 hour outage this week, there’s been (and will be) a lot of continued discussion about how to build scalable and reliable online / web-based applications. This is not a new problem (I not so fondly remember major and systemic outages in large services such as eBay and Amazon in the late 1990’s) but it’s gotten new attention as some of the emerging applications have scaled up the point as to have an interesting numbers of regular users (e.g. – it sucks if their service goes down for more than 15 minutes). For example, as far as I can tell, del.icio.us has been down for the last four hours (“del.icio.us is down for emergency maintenance. we’ll be back as soon possible.”) and on 12/15/05 Bloglines acknowledged that “Bloglines performance has sucked eggs lately.”

You may ask yourself “why are Brad and Jason so hung up on 409A – it just seems like yet another accounting thing my CFO is going to have to deal with.” Wrong – it’s going to impact every employee in your company that gets stock options and is something every board member and the CEO needs to understand clearly. We’ve been entertained several times in the past two weeks as we’ve heard stories from board meetings where outside company counsel (from reputable law firms) have said such absurd things as “don’t worry about 409A – just grant all your options as ISOs – 409A doesn’t apply to ISOs.” We’ll explain later why this is such a stupid statement, but for now we still have some work to do to set up the plot.

Once again JibJab absolutely nails it. 2–0–5 is perfect.

Or – do you know one? Gold Systems is looking for one. Terry Gold writes eloquently about what he’s looking for. He’s also looking for experienced support engineers and a director of product management. If you are interested, you can learn more about what Gold Systems is up to from this Microsoft Case Study on Gold Systems IVR Solution for ServiceMagic based on Microsoft Speech Server.