Author: Seth Levine, Mobius Venture Capital Brad’s given me permission to co-opt his blog for the day. I work for Brad (and had a great time recently up in Alaska “working”) which gives me an unusual vantage point from which to consider some of his posts on the world of VC. After reading several of these posts (and of course living in this world with him) I came up with the great idea of suggesting to Brad that he write a post about deal splits and the notion of what investing “pro-rata” actually means. Brad had an even better idea which was to have me write the post (which, of course, made my original idea seem not quite so brilliant). 

My friend Jim Lejeal just launched his blog. Jim is a very accomplished entrepreneur. His first company – Link-VTC – was acquired by Frontier Communications (now part of Global Crossing). His second company – Raindance Communications – went public (I was an investor/board member in Raindance). Jim’s current company is Oxlo Systems – I’m also an investor/board member. In addition to being a successful entrepreneur, Jim has also been an active angel investor and board member for early stage companies. One of his angel successes was Dante Group (now owned by webMethods), which he introduced to us and helped guide the founders through a venture financing. He’s also on the board of a couple of my companies (Gold Systems and Rally Software).

I’m a cell phone junkie. For years, I switched every six months or so as the newest thing came out and I had to try it. I’ve been in love with my Sidekick since the first one came out. Now – it’s one of our investments – so I was obviously biased to liking it – but I loved it. Nine months ago I got an early beta of the Sidekick II. I’ve been using it since and it’s incredible. My beta model has a lot of miles (and minutes) on it and it’s held up extremely well as both a phone and a data / email device. I’m still in love (to the extent you can be in love with an inanimate object, which the nerds in the crowd understand, but my wife Amy doesn’t and just looks at me with amusement whenever I say something like that.)

MessageCast announced that its LiveMessage Blogger alert service has gotten 10,000 subscribers in its first week. Some cool blogs such as Bink.nu are using it. To see how it works, you need to have Microsoft Messenger running on your computer. Go to a site running LiveMessage and click on the appropriate link (e.g. Bink.nu has a LiveMessage button, Flexbeta has a Flexbeta Alerts button, Feld Thoughts has a LiveMessage button, and OnlyOnce has a LiveMessage button.)

Paul Berberian, chairman and founder of Raindance, wrote a provocative post today called Free Conferencing is Theft. Paul knows this business extremely well – I was an early investor in Raindance (I left the board two years ago and am no longer involved in the company – but I continue to be a strong supporter and fan of it). While Paul’s position is influenced by his role as a major investor in a leading web conferencing company, he describes clearly how the regulatory economics of the conferencing business works as well as the loophole that free conferencing companies are taking advantage of. He makes the point that someone is paying for this and – eventually – if the cost gets big enough – “someone” will notice and the dynamics will change. 

We’re back home in Colorado. It’s radically different to wake up in Eldorado Canyon instead of Homer, but equally beautiful, in a different way.

Last month Mediathink published a White Paper title RSS: The Next Big Thing On Line. It’s the best starter piece that I’ve seen so far for people – especially in a business context – that are trying to figure out the answer to the question “what is this RSS thing and why do I care.” It’s a short piece (seven pages) – about a third is an intro to RSS, a third talks about aggregator technologies (and gives my favorite – NewsGator – a great review), and the final third talks about implications of RSS on marketing, email, messaging, search engines, and rich media.

I was on a board call for a company today that pays their employees bi-weekly (every two weeks). At some point in time there was a rationale for this since this company has a lot of hourly employees and there was a perception that folks would want to be paid every two weeks. So – presumably this was a logical decision at the time. However, it creates havoc with our monthly reporting and forecasting as we have at least two months per year with three pay periods. This adds an extra pay period to our expense structure for those two months (and lowers it correspondingly for the other months where we only have two pay periods). As a result of this, we are constantly backing out expenses (or adding it back in) to get “apples to apples” monthly comparisons.

Fred wrote two stories on the cliche “if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.” I saw it right after I responded to a few comments on my To Participate or Not post and was chewing on the notion of the behaviorial dynamics and mismatch that often occurs between investors and entrepreneurs, even when both sides are behaving as rational actors. Amy and I have a saying that “The fantasy is better than the reality.” It comes up when incongruent situations appear in our life, where something that hasn’t yet happened appears irrationally magnificent in comparison to something that already either exists for us or something that is also a good thing and more achievable, but not as magnificent. After we chew on it for a while and think about the unintended consequences and side effects, we often conclude that we’ll stay with what we have, but enjoy thinking about the fantasy. Now – I’ve never been accused of not “going for things”, so you need to imagine “big fantasies” here.