Fred Wilson has a great post about his decision to no longer sit on public company boards – it’s worth reading if you are either on a public company board or considering being on one.

I’m playing around with ads in my feeds. I’ve enabled the Feedburner feature to insert Amazon ads in my book feeds and Overture “context based” ads in several (but not all) of my other feeds. The ads should appear at the bottom of the feed so they should be easy to ignore if you aren’t interested in them. I’m looking for both feedback (a) on relevance and (b) unobtrusiveness.

I just finished Joel on Software. It is fabulous! Joel Spolsky – CEO of Fog Creek Software – has written a must read book for everyone in the software industry. Joel has a popular blog by the same name as the book. While some of the book is a simple refactoring of his blog posts over the past few years, don’t be fooled – this is a well organized, often hilarious, and always insightful compendium of Joel’s thoughts. It’s fresh. And relevant. And – almost always dead nuts on. 

My NewsGator Keyword Search Feeds picked up a couple of new blogs from employees of two of my portfolio companies. I posted recently about a few new Mobius VC bloggers – it’s fascinating to see the spread of blogging to our portfolio companies. First up is Sandy Hamilton. I’ve known Sandy for several years – he’s worked at a couple of my portfolio companies. He’s currently the SVP of Sales and Business Development at NewsGator where he’s kicking butt. He just started two blogs – the first on his personal musings on business and life and the second on corporate applications of RSS.

Jeff Nolan beat me to it with his “Attn PeopleSoft Employees” post, but he’s right on the mark. Given Oracle’s announcement that they are laying off 5,000 people today, a lot of experienced IT folks will be hitting the streets in the next few weeks. Like SAP Ventures, we’ve got a number of enterprise software companies that would love to talk to experienced sales, marketing, and engineering ex-PeopleSoft folks. 

My friends at Return Path just released a book called Sign Me Up! : A marketer’s guide to creating email newsletters that build relationships and boost sales. We’re really excited about it – Matt Blumberg does a nice job talking about it in his post today. I read the final draft a few months ago – if you care about email marketing in any way, this is a must read. 

I love my T-Mobile Sidekick (powered by Danger’s hiptop platform) – which you can currently get for free on Amazon.com with all the rebates. Of course – since Danger is one of our portfolio companies – I’m supposed to love it. But – I really I do (I’ve been a handheld user forever and have a closet full of Palm’s and RIMs, including a Palm VII (yuck-o-loa – remember that dog?.)

BusinessWeek Online just launched a blog called Deal Flow – Inside the World of Venture Capital and Startups. It’s fun to see Main Stream Media get in the blog game.

In our series of posts on Term Sheets, Jason and I thought we’d take on a relatively easy one today. In our previous posts on Price and Liquidation Preferences, we discussed the key economic terms that VCs care about. In this post, we tackle one of the two primary “control terms” that matter to VCs. VCs care about control provisions in order to keep an eye on their investment as well as – in some cases – comply with certain federal tax statutes that are a result of the types of investors that invest in VC funds. One of the key control mechanisms is the election of the board of directors.