We’re down to our last two sections on a typical VC term sheet. Since they are both things that most entrepreneurs simply live with as part of a financing, we decided to combine them into one post. The first clause is indemnification and usually looks as follows: “Indemnification: The bylaws and / or other charter documents of the Company shall limit board member’s liability and exposure to damages to the broadest extent permitted by applicable law. The Company will indemnify board members and will indemnify each Investor for any claims brought against the Investors by any third party (including any other shareholder of the Company) as a result of this financing.”

Matt Blumberg posted about his switch to FeedBlitz the other day (from Bloglet). If you receive my blog via email, you’ll notice that you are now receiving it via FeedBlitz also (instead of Bloglet). After my post on Blog Analytics describing the various technologies that I’m using on my blog, I received an email from Phil Hollows, the guy behind FeedBlitz, suggesting that I give it a try. I’ve been frustrated with Bloglet for a while (it’s up, it’s down, it’s up, it’s down), I’ve received several other “try my RSS to email” delivery services, and we’ve been talking about the best way to incorporate this capability into FeedBurner (partner, acquire, engineer ourselves) so my brain was open to trying a new service. 

One of my pet peeves is the trendy overuse (and misuse) of certain words. I’ve railed in the past on the endless use of traction and space by my VC and entrepreneurial brethren. “World class” no longer means anything to me and I wish more people would use the word “fuck” in casual conversation since it’s so versatile. When I received the following email from Richard Matthias today, all I could do was smile.

I just IMed a colleague who recently completed a Herculean task. I asked him how it felt to be done. He responded “About like a fish feels as he passes through the shark’s teeth on its way to the digestive tract.” Meditate on that for a while. Wait – is that a metaphor or a simile? Where is Amy when I need her?

A short spot on National Public Radio today titled Computer Science: Calling All Women does a super job explaining why I’ve been working with Lucy Sanders on the National Center for Women & Information Technology. In three minutes and thirty seconds, you’ll hear what the issue is, why we care, and a few of the things we are doing.

ePartners – one of my larger portfolio companies – announced today that they have closed a $25 million financing led by Needham Capital Partners. As part of this financing, Howard Diamond became the CEO. I was a (very happy) investor with Needham in Howard’s prior company – Corporate Software (now Software Spectrum) – which was acquired by Level 3 in 2002. ePartners is one of the largest Microsoft Business Solution (MBS) partners and my investment was the result of a merger between EYT and ePartners in mid-2004. With this financing – which Howard has been working on for several months – ePartners is well capitalized and positioned for another major round of growth. We like to think that our timing is good as many of the investments that Microsoft has made in MBS over the past few years is starting to pay off – and our strong second quarter results reflected this.

Part of the beauty of the contemporary Internet application is the notion of an open API (Application Programming Interface). NewsGator released their NewsGator Online API today. FeedBurner released their Feed Management API last week and their Feed Awareness API several weeks ago which are both documented in depth on the site under FeedBurner for Developers. Last week, Technorati released their Technorati Blog Post Tags API. APIs have been around forever, but they historically have been complex, proprietary, difficult to use, and require tight coupling with a desktop application. Back when I first started writing commercial software, I used Btrieve (made by SoftCraft at the time) as my database engine and spent a lot of time messing around with the API to figure out how to make it work the way I wanted to. Of course, whenever I upgraded my programming environment, I had to wait for the API library upgrade, which never worked correctly with my legacy applications, which then caused me to waste even more time messing around with the API library.

I can’t remember who recommended Planetwalker to me (if it was you – thanks – please post a comment) – but I bought it immediately after finishing Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk which was a truly remarkable book that I read in July. There’s a forest fire nearby so Homer has been “smoked in” all day (there’s basically a complete white out at our house – like heavy fog but with ash mixed it) so we sat around reading in an agitated state all day since we didn’t really want to be outside. My day was tinged with irony as I read about the amazing journey of Dr. John Francis, Ph.D., the founder of Planetwalk.

Over the past two years, I’ve learned a lot about Agile development methodologies as a result of my investment in Rally Software. Today – Tim Wolters – CTO of Collective Intellect and previously co-founder / CTO of Dante Group (we were investors – webMethods acquired Dante Group for a nice price six months after we invested) has a great post on how he thinks about Agile software development. I know Tim’s been playing around with Ruby on Rails, so my fascination there also continues to grow.