Fred Wilson has a great weekly series called VC Cliche of the Week – this week’s post is on meeting the numbers. It’s worth a slow and thoughtful read. I have one constructive thought to add. I’ve been involved in over 100 startups at this point and have seen many more. I can only remember a few instances where the company exceeded its revenue numbers in its first year of product ship. Many companies make their expense, EBITDA, and cash forecasts by adjusting spending, but that’s fundamentally different than making the top line and the bottom line numbers early in the life of the business (again – let’s focus on year 1 of product ship – not after the company has had several years of products in the market.) I’ve found that for year 1, the correlation between the sales plan and reality is completely random. 

On Monday, Gold Systems announced the release of the Gold Systems Speech-Powered Password Reset product, based on Microsoft Speech Server 2004 R2. This is a product Gold Systems has been working on for a while, building on their experience with speech, password reset, and call center applications. Microsoft has been putting plenty of energy behind their new Speech Server products with a recent unveiling at SpeechTEK this week. The idea of automated password reset has been around for a while as the cost of staffing a help desk to deal with password reset issues within a company can grow to be silly pretty fast. Speech-based password reset is a highly secure and inexpensive way to address this issue. I’ve been close to the development of Gold Systems’ product and I think it’s awesome, especially given the tight integration with Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP.

Some fun nerd facts for you on this gloomy Wednesday morning in Homer, Alaska (where is the fucking sun?) How many punch cards would it take to represent a 3–minute MP3 file? 40,960 (or 5’ 9” of punch cards – two inches shorter than Jack Bauer). Can I listen to your conversation in your car and or talk to you if you have a bluetooth enabled car? Um – yes. Is Jack Bauer going to be on 24 this season? Looks like it! (and thank god he’ll have a new girlfriend). Which does Brad care most about: 1, 2, or 3? I wonder if Jack is going to use the cool bluetooth car hack in the upcoming season.

Dave Sifry – the CEO of Technorati – has published his latest State of the Blogosphere in two posts: Part 1: Blog Growth and Part 2: Posting Volume – that looks at the growth of the Blogosphere over the past six months. Some fun facts (as of July 30, 2005) follow: Technorati tracks 14.2m blogs and 1.3m links, about double what it tracked six months ago Technorati tracks 80,000 newly created blogs each day (a blog every second) Technorati tracks 900,000 blog posts each day (10.4 posts a second) 55% of the blogs Technorati tracks has a post in the past three months. 18% of the blogs Technorati tracks has a post in the past week. The weekend posting average is 5% – 10% less then the daily posting average. Dave has more coming this week (Part 3 – coming tomorrow – includes the growth of tagging).

I’m fascinated with a Google Maps mashups (I prefer “mashup” to “hack”). Having recently read 109 East Palace (yet another very good history of the Manhattan Project), pondering nuclear (and other) holocaust in the brilliant Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and listening to Amy talk about “the great concavity” (the result of a nuclear explosion that is a central part of the geography on the eastern United States in Infinite Jest) – I’ve had explosions on my mind recently. I can’t say the Google Maps High-Yield Detonation Effects Simulator is particularly comforting, but it is enlightening.

Jason and I are planning to finish strong with some serious stuff in our term sheet series, but we figured we’d put one more term in that has us sniggling whenever we see it (a “sniggle” is a combination “sneer-giggle” – sort of like how I reacted to Kidman / Ferrell in Bewitched last night). The last sniggle term is as follows: “Initial Public Offering Shares Purchase: In the event that the Company shall consummate a Qualified IPO, the Company shall use its best efforts to cause the managing underwriter or underwriters of such IPO to offer to [investors] the right to purchase at least (5%) of any shares issued under a “friends and family” or “directed shares” program in connection with such Qualified IPO. Notwithstanding the foregoing, all action taken pursuant to this Section shall be made in accordance with all federal and state securities laws, including, without limitation, Rule 134 of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and all applicable rules and regulations promulgated by the National Association of Securities Dealers, Inc. and other such self-regulating organizations.”

Greg Reinacker has a tease up about NewsGator Enterprise Server, which is currently in beta and marching quickly toward release. Pretty (and satisfying) graph) We’ve gotten a lot of help from Microsoft in their test labs – thanks guys.

Anyone that knows me knows I love to talk (I also love to sit quietly and ponder things – ah – the duality of being me.) Another duality – I hate to sit and listen at conferences (I learn by reading, not by listening) but I love to speak at them. I end up doing random speaking things when it’s convenient for my travel schedule (rather than deliberate ones that I have to travel specifically for.) I just got the invitation for a panel I’m going to be titled Putting it All Together: Business Structures and Financing New Media Ventures at the Law Seminars International Regulatory and Business Issues for New Broadband Services conference on September 26 / 27 in San Francisco (man – that’s a lot of words to describe a conference.)

A few days ago, I wrote some thoughts on the war on spam. Today Matt Blumberg has an insightful post up on what’s going on in several state legislatures concerning so called “Child Protection Acts” which are actually just children to the mess that almost occurred at the state level at the end of 2003 which resulted in the federal CAN-SPAM law.