I recently discovered an outstanding article by Dennis Jaffe (Saybrook Graduate School) and Pascal Levensohn (Levensohn Venture Partners) titled “After The Term Sheet: How Venture Boards Influence The Success Or Failure Of Technology Companies.” Written in 2003, this is one of the best articles I’ve ever seen of the issues and dynamics surrounding the board of a venture backed company. The paper covers a lot of ground. It starts by exploring how the board adds value to the enterprise (through social, intellectual, and interpersonal capital) and then describes in details the attributes of successful boards, which include:

I’m on an airplane for the first time in the last few weeks (from Anchorage to San Francisco). My choices are limited, so I decided to fly on Untied. The plane smells like it needs a shower (nope – that’s not me). The next time you are on an airplane, open up the cover to the food tray and take a good look – yuck.

David Cowan – a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners – has started a blog called Who Has Time For This? Frighteningly, David and I have known each other for almost 20 years. We met in college when David was at Harvard and I was at MIT. He had written a piece of software called DataRoute for his dad’s law firm and I had started a software consulting company called Feld Technologies (first client – a fraternity brother step-father’s dental practice in California; another early client – my dad’s medical practice – see a trend – thanks Dads!) I think I placed a stupid advertisement for our consulting services in some magazine (an early “Boston Tech Journal” type of thing) and got one phone call – David. We got together and eventually cut a deal (which included a legal document – I think drafted by David’s dad – which I think I read carefully about 30 times) for Feld Technologies to resell and support the DataRoute product and pay David a royalty. I think we sold about 10 copies at $500 apiece (although I fondly remember trying hard – it even found its way into an article in Legal Information Alert). Our motto for the product was “Today is the day to route with DataRoute!” Eek.

I had good intentions earlier this week to try to crank out the balance of the term sheet series, but it turned into a busy week. Since I’m still muddling through the set of terms that either don’t matter much and/or are hard to negotiate away (e.g. chose you battles wisely), I didn’t expect anyone would be waiting on the edge of their seats for these. However, for completeness, it’s worth going through the stuff that shows up on the last few pages of a standard VC term sheet. Jason and I aren’t quite done, but with this post, we are one (tedious) step closer.

EDS recently started a blog called “EDS’ Next Big Thing Blog.” The first post – Mania and the Next Big Thing – sets the tone for the blog. Written by EDS Fellows, the blog is “dedicated to the exploration of these and other questions as we pursue the identification, investigation, analysis and understanding of the “things” that will manifest themselves as the next big thing in information technology.” It’s a real blog – comments are open – and some of them are pretty interesting and relevant to the articles. So far they are writing about three posts a week – most of them in essay format – on a variety of corporate IT thoughts and issues.

Alaska picture of the day.

Dave Winer connected the dots yesterday that Philip Greenspun was up in Homer, AK (as am I). I didn’t know Philip, but took a quick look at his site, vaguely remembered ArsDigita, made the MIT connection, and dropped him an email. In perusing Philip’s blog, I noticed that he had flown up here in his Cirrus SR20. My close friend Paul Berberian flew up here last summer (pretty Alaska pictures here) in his Cirrus SR22 and I dropped Paul an email about Phil. He responded immediately that he was a silent Philip Greenspun blog lurker / fan – I connected Philip and Paul – I imagine they’ll have some bizarre email exchange about airplanes. 

If you like to read, think, or even breathe, you must read Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. After Amy finished it the other night, she told me it the was best book she had read this year (and she reads more than I do.) I think she was being understated. I’m sitting here looking at the ocean and the mountains in the late evening Alaska dusk. When I think about 9/11, or the recent London Bombings, or any number of other tragedies that humans perpetrate on each other, I am grateful to be alive and relatively sane. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and, most importantly – you’ll feel – as you read this book.

I manage feeds (using FeedBurner) for three blogs – Feld Thoughts (my stuff), Mobius Venture Capital (headlines from our companies), and Thoughts in Random Patterns (the blog of the most incredible woman in the world – she told me not to be so smarmy, but I can’t help myself.) I’ve wanted to put the Mobius headlines on my site for a while, but I didn’t feel like figuring out how to deal with it. Fortunately, FeedBurner did it for me – today they announced BuzzBoost – yafs (“yet another free service”) which – in addition to being super cool – shows off how easy it is to put together stuff now that their Feed Awareness API is out.