When Jason and I last wrote on the mythical term sheet, we were working our way through the terms that “can matter.” The last one on our list is vesting, and we approach it with one eyebrow raised understanding the impact of this term is crucial for all founders of an early stage company. While vesting is a simple concept, it can have profound and unexpected implications. Typically, stock and options will vest over four years – which means that you have to be around for four years to own all of your stock or options (for the rest of this post, I’ll simply refer to the equity as “stock” although exactly the same logic applies to options.) If you leave the company earlier than the four year period, the vesting formula applies and you only get a percentage of your stock. As a result, many entrepreneurs view vesting as a way for VCs to “control them, their involvement, and their ownership in a company” which, while it can be true, is only a part of the story.

I attended the MIT $50K Competition Final Awards Ceremony last night. The MIT $50K competition is one of the oldest entrepreneurship competitions in the country – it was started in 1990 well before the term “entrepreneurship” was mainstream. I was involved early on as a judge (from 1993 to 1998). Looking at the Alumni company list, it’s clear that 1995 was the year I was doing angel deals, as I became an investor in (and chairman of) NetGenesis and Thinkfish and fondly remember Firefly (Softbank ended up investing) and Silicon Spice (damn – that was a huge success). Webline was a big winner in 1996 (a Highland deal that Cisco acquired). 1998 saw two big companies emerge – Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM) and Direct Hit (acquired by Ask Jeeves for $500m+).

No – I’m not referring to Ken Lay. One of my favorite local newspapers (ok – I have three of them – I don’t want to have to choose) wrote an article on Addicts for Gadgets highlighting the Crackberry. I challenge you to find your friendly neighborhood VCs (me and Seth) in the article who readily fess up to Sidekick addiction. But, but, but – we solved a problem – really. I guess when stories like this appear it’s time to go old school in board meetings and crack out the college ruled paper and a pencil. Fortunately for me, unlike Notebaert – my Sidekick doesn’t work at my house – making marital bliss easier to maintain.

I surprised Amy with a trip to the Kentucky Derby. She’s a horse lover (I’ve yet to met a girl that doesn’t at least like horses) and – while I know how to spell Derby – she can recite the history of not just the 131 Run for the Roses but can gracefully explain the meaning of “Lilies for the Fillies” (hint – the day before the Derby is called the Kentucky Oaks and is all about girl horses.

Feedburner is releasing a new set of features on Monday. I got a note from Dick Costolo – CEO – saying they were all set to go but were going to adhere to the “don’t be an idiot and launch a product on Friday” policy. This was eerily reminiscent of our release policy at my first company (Feld Technologies) in the late 1980’s. We had a policy that we’d only release on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. We were a custom software company and had clients around the US – in the age of pre-Internet, Carbon Copy / PC Anywhere, and Fedexing disks around, if you screwed up on a Friday, you were miserable. In addition, if you weren’t ready to go by Friday for a Monday release, your weekend sucked. So – we solved the problem by limiting the release window. I don’t think our clients ever really noticed this in the affirmative sense, but we certainly sucked less because we didn’t ruin their Friday nights, weekends, or Monday mornings.

My mom step-sister just sent me a “Palmer for President” bumper sticker and a “Counter Terrorist Unit / USA” coffee mug. If you don’t get the reference, you need to start watching 24.

NewsGator and Factiva announced a partnership today. As part of this, Factiva customers (and there are a lot of them) will be able to transform their existing “Factiva Track Folders” into RSS feeds and view them via a NewsGator Business Subscription. Also – all NewsGator premium subscribers will start receiving Factiva’s Editor’s Choice Feeds. If you don’t know of Factiva, they are a Dow Jones & Reuters Company that provides content from over 9,000 sources, including Dow Jones and Reuters Newswires and the Wall Street Journal. NewsGator has a long series of partnerships like this queued up – more coming soon.

I’ve been reading Friedman’s The World Is Flat but I keep getting distracted by mental floss as all of my favorite writers release their summer junk. I got sucked into Stuart Woods’ Two Dollar Bill on a flight home on Friday; today it was Robert Parker’s latest Spenser (and Hawk) novel Cold Service. I like Spenser, I adore Susan, but I want to come back as Hawk in another life (combining Hawk, Jack Bauer, and Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar would be sweet.) Cold Service is way more about Hawk than about Spenser, which is fun for a change. Denver to Seattle and back equals one book and it was fun. Time to go brush my teeth, eat my Wheaties, and finish off The World Is Flat.

I hooked up with Dan Bricklin last week when I was in Boston. I met Dan in the mid-1990’s when he was starting up Trellix (which I was an early investor in). I still remember the day I cracked open my copy of Visicalc for the Apple II (I think it was copy 200–something. It was the actual copy used in Triumph of the Nerds as Dan didn’t want to risk losing one of his few remaining copies. We got it back eventually from some Oregon Public Radio dude, but that’s another long story.) I adore (and worship) Dan – Visicalc and my Apple II had a huge impact on my life as it was an integral part of my first real introduction to computers (beyond a high-low game I wrote on some mainframe somewhere and a day of APL in front of a Frito-Lay computer with my Uncle Charlie.) I remember /SL and /SQY like it was yesterday. Of course, this led to a thousand hours playing Ultima and Choplifter, but that was more an issue of lack of self control as a teenager.