Amy and I go out together for “life dinner” on the first day of every month. We spend dinner reflecting on the previous month, thinking about the month to come, and grounding ourselves in our relationship in the midst of our active lives. A friend of ours sent the following list of questions that he and his wife sit down and talk through every year. It’s a great list and will be the subject of at least one dinner next week (ok – the reading question might need its own evening.) I thought it was worth sharing.

Charlie Feld’s latest leadership article for CIO Magazine is about How to Inspire Your Team. It’s a quick read that explains the value of trust (table stakes – you’ve got nothing without it), hope (fuel for achievement), enjoyment (sustenance for high performance), and opportunity (individual growth is required for people to work at peak levels.) It’s well worth reading and sending around to your leadership team.

I’m been in Hotchkiss, Colorado with Amy the past few days enjoying the run up to Christmas. Amy has family here (on the western slope of Colorado near Grand Junction) and we’ve been hanging out in this town of 800 doing what you’d expect. It’s pretty useful to head over the continental divide every now and then and remember what small town America is like. The houses do NOT have high speed Internet (so – I’m typing this at Weekender Sports – the local sporting good store owned by Amy’s uncle – surrounded by all the snowmobiles and guns one could ever want.) I managed to find the local coffee shop which does a nice Starbucks imitation, but I’m yet to find any democrats. That said, the people here are delightful and I always am welcomed as family, which takes the edge off this cranky jewish boy at Christmas time (years of therapy haven’t managed to cure me of my annoyance at not getting gifts on December 25th and I’m too stubborn to just accept fate.)

I find online blog-related survey’s peculiar since they have so much selection bias built in (e.g. the bloggers are going to be the ones responding, who pass around the surveys, just like I’m doing here.) However, as my mother says, I’m shameless, so it’s with little trepidation that I make it know to readers of my blog that Fast Company is doing a survey on best venture capital blogs. Vote early and often.

In my first company (Feld Technologies), we wrote customer software for medium sized businesses. This was back in the late 80’s / early 90’s – pre client/server (remember dbase, Paradox, Access, Clarion, and DataFlex.) It was hard – and our goal – as I’ve said before on this blog – was to suck less. I just had an email exchange with one of my companies where I said “if this takes ZERO engineering on our side other than packaging and support and ZERO licensing fees” then I’d support chasing after a specific opportunity in the near term. The answer back was “there is potential for SOME engineering.” The debate ensued.

Jim Lejeal just wrote a good post on his thoughts on what qualities make a good independent director. It’s worth a read. I’ve served on several boards with Jim and on the boards of two of Jim’s companies – he knows of what he speaks.

I was at a Rally Software board meeting where we spent a chunk of time finalizing and approving the 2005 operating plan. A big part of the discussion – not surprisingly – was on the sales ramp and the corresponding expense base (and timing of opex growth throughout the year based on a prediction of sales growth and performance.) Rally started shipping their product in mid-2004. So – 2005 is their first full year of product ship. They have a nice, active customer base that is growing as expected. The growth curve is ambitious (but achievable) for 2005 – f they make plan, they’ll have a great year. However, their operating expense ramp (pre-board meeting discussion) assumed they made the sales plan. The guys running Rally are responsible and know how to sandbag a plan, so we’re confident that they won’t pull the trigger on hiring if they don’t see the sales ramp happening. The going in proposal (and plan) assumed they hit their numbers relied on management backing off hiring if they missed their numbers.

Feedburner continues to impress – they just announced some new features, including FeedCount. Dick, Eric, and crew have taken “Keep It Simple and Sloppy” to heart – they release early, often, and incrementally – trying lots of stuff to see what works, how it works, and why it works. If you have a blog and don’t use Feedburner to manage your feed, you should take a look immediately. It’s by far the best feed analytic engine and – with all the new functionality they are adding – quickly become a core part of the blog management infrastructure. FeedCount is an example of how they can quickly leverage what they’ve built – with a single HREF, I can add a chicklet to my blog listing the current number of subscribers.

I got the following question via email today: All things being equal and all things being perfect, is it better to have more or less ‘angels’ in the mix? I can come up with reasons for both more and less. Also, it seems to me that more and less are very relative – but, in this case, Ohio has a limit of 25 investors before exemptions no longer apply (we’re still investigating that one), so that is the absolute upper limit. I’m thinking “more” is in the range of 4 – 10 and “less” is in the range of 3 or fewer — allowing more growth later, if needed.