This product is going to really clean up. It’s way more interesting than an Ajax Reader. I can’t wait to get one. It’ll go perfectly with my craptop.

In the past, I’ve written about several of my CTO friends who are bloggers. Niel Robertson, the CTO / co-founder of Newmerix – now joins their ranks with his new blog titled Parallax: Calculating Technology’s Future. I first met Niel in 1995 in Cambridge, MA. He was an early employee of net.Genesis (I was the chairman, Raj Bhargava was the CEO / co-founder.) A year or so after Raj left net.Genesis, he connected with Niel and started working on a new idea. They cooked up the business that became Service Metrics, which I helped fund in 1998 and was then acquired by Exodus for $280 million in 1999. I fondly recall Niel bitching about having to move to Boulder from Boston (“Boston is so much better”) – Raj said the same type of thing; they both happily live in Boulder now (although they each occasionally go visit Boston to play and presumably get stuck in traffic.)

I wrote yesterday about Quova “becoming a company.” Return Path – which celebrates its six birthday today – also became “a company” this year. I’m incredibly proud of the team at Return Path – we invested in 2000 in a company (actually, “a product”) called Veripost which merged after a year with Return Path when both companies were pursuing their Series B financing. Each company was chasing the same market (ECOA – Email Change of Address), were ahead of their time, were really only “a product”, and had the potential to vanish when the Internet bubble burst. 

There are three words I’m starting to see regularly in the recursive world of blogs (blogs about blogs) and user-generate content (yes – there is an awful lot of user-generated content about user-generated content, including this blog post.) Trust Attention Relevance Unfortunately for my title to be cute, pithy, and remind us of a president who actually had a clue even though he couldn’t manage to keep his zipper up (oops, did I say that), I could only use one of the words. So – how about a haiku since when I get older I want to be like Yoda.

As you may know, I’m the chairman of the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT). NCWIT’s mission is straightforward – to ensure that women are fully represented in the influential world of information technology and computing. NCWIT has had an awesome fall, including accomplishing the following. Hosting a superb national meeting at Carnegie Mellon University. Establishing a partnership with Cisco on an awareness campaign that leverages Cisco’s national educator’s network to reach students, teachers and parents. Creating an entrepreneurial alliance in partnership with the Kauffman Foundation. Creating a K-12 alliance. Adding several new members to the Executive Advisory Council, including Linda Dillman (EVP & CIO Wal-Mart Stores), Charlie Feld (EVP of Portfolio Management, EDS), and Ruth Bruch (SVP and CIO, Lucent Technologies). It’s been an honor to work with Lucy Sanders, the CEO of NCWIT, and her team on year three of this incredibly vibrant organization.

Best Haiku of the Day (thanks Dave) terabyte disk drives software a mature market and Brad is forty Best Photo of the Day (thanks Chris) Best Introspective Thought of the Day (thanks Scott) I was watching Alaskan animals play around on Discovery channel while sitting in pizza place a few hours ago. Animals really know how to have fun. In spite of the fact that they always have to be on the lookout for predators, they run and wrestle with each other like it’s nobody’s business. I think, in that respect, our superior brain power is a liability. I hope you’ll have a really fun 2006.

I’ve strongly encouraged my portfolio companies to incorporate “philanthropic activities” into their businesses early in their life. I don’t advocate any particular focus – I simply encourage founders and leadership teams to think about what they can do to make a difference. Historically, most large public companies have some amount of philanthropic focus, but this is often missing early in the life a company. I’m proud of a number of my portfolio companies that have incorporate philanthropic programs into their businesses early, including Rally Software’s 1% Fund, StillSecure’s 1% of Revenues to Lance Armstrong Foundation, and NewsGator’s 3% of Revenues to Hurricane Katrina Relief Efforts.

One of the challenges with early stage companies is determining whether the thing you are creating is a “feature”, a “product”, or a “company”. Of course everyone aspires to create “a company” and most business plans eloquently describe the $50 million company that is going to be created in five years. Since that rarely occurs, early stage VCs are constantly asking “is that a feature, product, or a company?” When Raj Bhargava and his co-founders came up with the original idea for Quova, it was unclear whether IP geolocation was the basis for a feature, product, or company. In the first few years of Quova’s life, we spent most of our time inventing the IP geolocation technology, getting some early customers, and evangelizing why IP geolocation mattered. After a couple of years, it was clear that IP geolocation (and Quova) was “a product”, but it wasn’t clear whether or not we had created something that had big enough reach to be classified as “a company.”

Are you a company with between 50 and 250 employees, located in a major city (e.g. New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Dallas), in any industry, that wants to participate in a compensation benchmarking project? Matt Blumberg – CEO of Return Path – is spearheading this and looking for up to 20 companies to participate. You’ll get excellent comp data for a fraction of a price of a normal comp survey. If you fit the parameters and are interested in finding out more, email a note to comp.benchmark@gmail.com.