I’ve read eight books since my last book review – none were notable enough for me to write about (although What the Dormouse Said came close, but Fred Wilson covered it.) I just finished Wayne McVicker’s book Starting Something: An Entrepreneur’s Tale of Control, Confrontation & Corporate Culture. It was fantastic. Wayne was the co-founder of Neoforma – a pre-bubble startup that was one of the early 2000 B2B IPO’s. It’s peak market cap was over $3 billion – today it is a publicly traded company with a $150m market cap, $3m / quarter of revenue, negative gross margins, a $15m loss last quarter, and about $25m of working capital – basically, a small-cap Internet bubble survivor that has a questionable future. Wayne left Neoforma in 2001 and spun out a new company called Attainia. 

Greg Galant – who does the Venture Voice podcast – just posted an interview he did with me on Monday. We did it over Skype which – while noticeable – was really effective. Greg gives good interview – we covered a lot of ground which Greg did a nice job of summarizing in the show notes. We had a short discussion about the difference between a consulting business and a product business and the corresponding challenge of transforming a consulting business to a product business. We also talking about the transition I made from entrepreneur to investor and I found – as I listened – that these situations were eerily analogous.

By now, everyone has probably heard that Google is doing a secondary offering and selling 14.2m shares of stock. It turns out they are actually selling 14,159,265 shares. Of course, anyone who loves numbers like I do will immediately recognize this as the first eight digits of pi after the decimal point. What a delicious cheap thrill for all the numerologists in the world.

Bernard Moon – a VP at GoingOn (a new company recently launched by AlwaysOn / Tony Perkins and friends) – has written a good post on building a team from an entrepreneur’s perspective in a startup. While VCs can blather on – well – almost anything – I think the “really good stuff” comes from entrepreneurs who are living their current experience and are self aware enough to write (or talk about) it. Ironically, I’m chewing down Wayne McVicker’s (co-founder of Neoforma) Starting Something: An Entrepreneur’s Tale of Control, Confrontation & Corporate Culture (I read half of it tonight – it’s a great in the trenches story), so my mind was particularly prepared for Bernard’s post. Buried in both is the age old adage that gets re-learned every day – “trust is essential.”

Quova has started a blog on “the impact of real-world geography on the way business is conducted on the Internet” called The 37th Parallel that is hosted on AlwaysOn. I posted an article titled IP Geolocation – Investing in Insight that talks briefly about my first encounter with the notion of “IP Geolocation”, the origin of my investment in Quova, and the evolution of IP Geolocation from a clever, gimmicky idea in 1999 to a technology that is now at the core of a wide variety of Internet-based applications.

I’m participating in a half day event on 9/28/05 from 9am – 1pm put on by IBD Network and hosted at the Fenwick & West office in Mountain View, CA called The Dealmaker Forum. The quick overview is: If your company’s strategy involves a merger, acquisition, or strategic partnership, The Dealmaker Forum is where you need to be. The Dealmaker Forum brings together expert dealmakers – CEOs, corporate development executives, VCs, and M&A experts – for an exchange of strategy, ideas, and best practices. Through an interactive, roundtable format, participants can delve into topics of critical interest for the growth of their businesses.

I’ve always loved numbers (especially primes and multiples of 3) – that partially explains my interest in web analytics and my fascination with looking at data trends. Over the past year, I’ve created my own little data laboratory – my blog. When I started blogging on 5/4/04, I obviously had 0 subscribers via RSS (by 5/8/04 I had 4, by 5/31/04 I had 60, today I have 3500 according to FeedBurner). Thanks for contributing to my laboratory (hopefully you are getting some benefits from it also!)

As I’ve said in the past, I’m a long term fan of Warren Buffett. Many of you are also as I’ve received over 500 requests for the Annual Letters of Buffett Partnership, Limited, 1957 – 1970 over the past few months. As the Q205 filings roll in, I happened to notice the disclosure for the stock holdings of Berkshire Hathaway, which are as follows. Company Class Value Shares Coca Cola Com $8,350,000,000 200,000,000 American Express Co. Com $8,070,237,000 151,610,700 Gillette Co. Com $5,112,617,000 100,980,000 Wells Fargo & Co. Com $3,476,090,000 56,448,380 Moody’s Corp. Com $2,158,080,000 48,000,000 Wesco Financial Corp. Com $2,053,111,000 5,703,087 Washington Post Co. Cl B $1,442,736,000 1,727,765 M&T Bank Corp. Com $705,493,000 6,708,760 Shaw Communications Inc. Cl B $456,940,000 22,000,000 American Standard Cos. Com $440,072,000 10,497,900 First Data Corp. Com $346,208,000 8,625,000 Gap Inc. Com $304,826,000 15,434,243 Comcast Corp. CLA SPL $299,500,000 10,000,000 USG Corp. Com $276,250,000 6,500,000 Gannett Inc. Com $245,228,000 3,447,600 Costco Wholesale Corp. Com $235,011,000 5,254,000 Sun Trusts Banks Inc. Com $231,500,000 3,204,600 Nike Inc. Com $214,300,000 2,474,600 Iron Mountain Inc. Com $155,100,000 5,000,000 Tyco International Ltd. Com $146,000,000 5,000,000 Pier 1 Imports Inc. Com $113,520,000 8,000,000 Outback Steakhouse Inc. Com $82,283,000 1,818,800 Servicemaster Co. Com $75,195,000 5,611,600 Lexmark International Cl A $64,830,000 1,000,000 Sealed Air Corp. Com $55,431,000 1,113,300 Petrochina Co Ltd. ADR $48,404,000 659,000 Home Depot Inc. Com $36,760,000 945,000 Proctor & Gamble Co. Com $33,232,000 630,000 Mueller Industries Com $23,084,000 851,800 Comdisco Holding Co. Com $22,784,000 1,518,978 Lowe’s Cos. Com $22,706,000 390,000 Dean Foods Co. Com $13,233,000 375,500 Total Value $35,310,761,000

We just had the biggest earthquake of the summer – a 4.7 at 12:57pm our time – about 38 miles from Homer. Following is the map (hint: look for the big red box.) We have lots of little earthquakes nearby all the time – this time it was big enough to notice. At first I thought Amy had snuck up on me and was shaking the back of my chair to get my attention. I said something like “hey babe” but the shaking continued. I turned around and Amy wasn’t there. I then noticed that my computer monitors were bouncing around at which point “EARTHQUAKE!” entered my brain. I rolled with the last five seconds (it was about 10 seconds long) and then went up stairs to announce the event. Amy thought I was slamming doors down stairs, so she didn’t make the connection until I told her.