While it’d never play out the way it did in today’s TSA / Patriot Act world, the next time someone says “you’ll never be able to do that”, simply refer them to David Cowan’s magnificant story of his trip to Athens in 1991. I remember David telling me the story in – well – 1991 – and it holds up well 14 years later. Back when you could be “the last person on a flight” and still make the flight, Amy was constantly annoyed at me when we travelled together. Whenever I cut it too close, I simply reminded her of David’s story. Now I can simply point her to his blog post.

My partner Heidi pointed out that the analogy (or is it a metaphor – I can never remember – another one of my brain quirks) that I used in my Letter of Intent: Structure – Asset vs. Stock post could have been better. An asset (or “artichoke” deal) is actually like eating the artichoke heart and leaving the leaves untouched since the heart is the good part and the leaves have thorns.

The recurring theme of the power of word-of-mouth marketing came several times for me yesterday. My day started out with an email from Raj Bhargava, the CEO of StillSecure, that pointed to an unsolicited positive review of StillSecure’s StrataGuard product on an end-user’s blog. Later in the morning, I had a meeting with a new consumer product company with a cool invention that was created by a friend / neighbor. They had built 25 prototypes and had 24 of the 25 users of the prototypes rave about the product. At the end of the day I had a meeting with a $400k two person software company that is trying to figure out how to accelerate their growth.

While price is usually first issue on every seller’s mind, structure should be second. While there only two types of deals (asset deal vs. stock deal), there are numerous structural issues surrounding each deal. Rather than trying to address all the different issues, Jason and I decided to start by discussing the basics of an asset deal and a stock deal. In general, all sellers want to do stock deals and all buyers want to do asset deals. Just to increase the confusion level, a stock deal can be done for cash and an asset deal can be done for stock – don’t confuse the type of deal with the actual consideration received (if you start getting confused, simply think of an asset deal as a “artichoke deal” and a stock deal as a “strawberry deal.”)

Have you ever wondered how the splits between selling shareholders in a secondary offering get negotiated? Tom Evslin covers it flawlessly in Chapter 7 of his blook Hackoff.com: An Historic Murder Mystery Set in the Internet Bubble and Rubble. I’m loving Tom’s blook (which will eventually be a real book) you can pre-order hackoff.com at Amazon (Tom promises that it will be a signed copy). If you are only interested in how the secondary works – hop online and read Chapter 7 – Episode 1, 2, and 3. Alternatively, if you are interested in a potential view of how – if you buy DSL from SBC, they will someday, if they can, charge you or Google extra if you want to Google over that DSL connection – then take a look at Tom’s blog.

Today the Houston Chronicle went live with FeedBurner’s feed management service. When I invested in FeedBurner, one of my premises was that traditional media would rapidly adopt RSS for content distribution and – as part of this adoption – would aggressively look to outsource part (or all) of the feed management activities to a company (e.g. FeedBurner) that had built out a broad series of feed management tools and services. I had real conviction about this (as did Dick Costolo and the FeedBurner team) so I didn’t bother calling anyone that I knew in traditional media – given how early things were with regard to the adoption of RSS, most of the people I knew would have said “tell me what RSS is again?”

Several weeks ago, Postini announced a new product called PTIN Access – enabling enterprises, solution providers, and OEMs to have access to the Postini Threat Identification Network. PTIN is Postini’s real-time sender behavior analysis for email threat prevention and is the core for Postini’s remarkable email security service (which I like to refer to as “magic” as this is what it’s like to go from a spam-filled inbox to no-spam at a flip of a switch.)

I ran the New York Marathon with Matt Blumberg yesterday. We started together, finished together, but only ran about 3 miles total together. This was my fifth marathon as part of my quest to run a marathon in every state by the time I turn 50. Since the first or second question I get asked is “how did you do” (the other one is “how do you feel”), I feel surprisingly good today (only a little “extra soreness”) and finished in 5:06:45 (place 27,811, although I came in first in the “brown haired jewish guy from Eldorado Springs, CO 39 year old category). It was a little slower than I was shooting for (my marathon PR is 4:05 and I’m usually around 4:30) as it was hot, humid, deceptively hilly, and I was a little undertrained for this one.

A few weeks ago I wrote about web design mistakes. One of the things that stuck in my head was that Google (and now Microsoft and Yahoo) have trained us to use a [blue black green] design. It’s interesting to run into sites that use search and observe how I react to either (a) this design or (b) a different design. Today I saw a demo of Indeed.com which was positioned to me at “the Google for job search.” A quick search for jobs for firemen in Colorado brought up that [blue black green] thing. In contrast, when I looked for jobs in Colorado in delicious (no fireman jobs, so I had to drop that tag) the [blue black green] UI was now [blue light_blue red_highlight]. My brain definitely reacted differently – on the Indeed site I knew exactly what to do based on the colors; on delicious I had to think a little (not much) harder.