I had the following conversation recently. Entrepreneur: “Brad, I just got an offer for my company for $15 million from Company X.” Brad: “Awesome. Who’s Company X – I’ve never heard of them.” Entrepreneur: “It’s a private company funded by Venture Firm Y.” Brad: “Cool – $15 million – is it a cash deal?” Entrepreneur: “No, it’s all stock.” Brad: “Hmmm – are you getting preferred or common stock?” Entrepreneur: “Common stock – why?” Brad: “How much money has the company raised?” Entrepreneur: “$110 million” Brad: “What’s the liquidation preference? Is it a participating preferred? What’s the valuation of the company?” Entrepreneur: “Oh – I’m not worried about that stuff – the valuation is $300m and they say they are going public soon.”

Wired Magazine has a great article this month on Tim O’Reilly. The first time I heard Tim’s name was in 1994 at NetGenesis when GNN appeared on the scene. I remember when it was acquired by AOL for $11 million and I thought to myself “holy shit – there could be real dollars in this Internet stuff.” I’ve never spent any time with Tim, but the article reflects the way I think of him and the business he’s created.

FeedBurner just completed its second hackathon. Eight hours of focused hacking generated the following features: PodMedic: podcast cleanup tool Subscribe to FeedBulletin via Email Reporting Exporting: Get your reports into Excel or CSV Self-Help Error Messages: Cryptic error messages no more More Splice Options: Stock tickers turned into meta-data, My Web 2.0, Digg, and Webshots FuenteClara: FeedBurner in Spanish Excel Stats: Get all your FeedBurner data into Excel StatsTracker Konfabulator Widget: In case you are stats obsessed Eight hours, eight new features into production. Nice job guys.

I periodically get questions from readers of this blog about business plans. I was pondering the best way to work through a “business plan series” (similar to the Term Sheet series and Letter of Intent series) when Dave Jilk – my partner in Feld Technologies (my first company) – dropped a few documents on my desk, including the original Feld Technologies business plan. A scanner, Adobe Acrobat PDF maker, and a little OCR later, I had the document in electronic format. 

So Brad was pretty bored by my first two reviews so I figured I’d tackle something a bit more complex this time around, the Roku PhotoBridge HD. In short the PhotoBridge HD allows you to stream audio, video, and pictures from PC’s connected to your network to your television/home theater – all in high definition, or at least that’s the idea. I got my PhotoBridge back in June while I was recovering from surgery. I was excited to get it as I’d been following this class of product for quite a while. I specifically wanted the PhotoBridge as it was the first (and only at the time) device that would stream video in HD – something that was key to me to use with my new plasma TV.

An MIT study delves into the reality of Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanies. Is it a great innovation? Is it a government plot? Is the FCC involved in some way? Or – is mind control in our future?

Dave Jilk passed on this article by Dominic Humphries explaining why Linux is Not Windows. The analogy that starts off the article is perfect: Linux <=> Windows is like Motorbikes <=> Cars: Both are vehicles that get you from A to B via the roads. But they’re different shapes, different sizes, have different controls, and they work in fundamentally different ways. They are not freely interchangeable. They have different uses and different strengths & weaknesses, and you should pick whichever is appropriate, not pick one and expect it to do everything that the other can do.

Dick Costolo – the CEO of FeedBurner – sent me a link to this great photo last night. FeedBurner exhibited at the Portable Media Expo & Podcasting Conference 2005 this weekend in Los Angeles and invited publishers using FeedBurner to sign the banner in the booth. This is what it looked like after the first day. I love it. These are just a few of the 139,039 feeds (including 24,669 podcasts) from 92,068 publishers that FeedBurner manages as of mid-week last week (11/09/05).

As a kid, my parents used to have a monthly gourmet group with a group of friends (they are still doing it monthly 35 years later) where they got together, cooked a fancy meal, and sat around late into the night talking. We joined up with about 15 friends several years ago and started a similar tradition in Boulder – we get together about six times a year for a fantastic evening we call Chez Gourmet.