Shortly after I sold my first company, I got a call from Len Fassler – my new boss (the co-chairman of the company) – who asked, “Can you start sending me your DOC (pronounced “dock”) report?” I had grown to like Len during the deal process – he seemed to understand me, my general flakiness about whether or not I wanted to sell my company at the time, and was patient with my overall business naivete. However, at that moment, all I could think of was the cliche “the honeymoon must be over” since I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.

Amy and I went to our little local movie theater in Homer tonight. The two movies showing are Farentheit 9/11 and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. We saw Farenheit 9/11 on Sunday. It was as advertised and we were delighted that it made it to our town of 5,000 people. My only simple comment – independent of your politics – is that it’s a must see movie. We saw Anchorman tonight. My only simple comment – independent of your politics – is that it was hysterical. Will Ferrell has been making the rounds of the Internet in his ACT sponsored White House West. The dude is seriously funny (in that slapstick, cheesy, stupid, juvenille, John Candy inspired, teenage boy way.) I often have to drag Amy to movies like this and I rate them based on her reaction (ranging from hysteria to leaving in the middle of the movie.) Even though she’ll never admit it in public, she was laughing so hard at moments that if she was chewing gum she would have swallowed it. Her funniest moment was an ode to F 9/11 where – at the end of the movie – the narrator did the proverbial “where are they now” voiceover and the “stupid weatherman guy” (IQ 45) had 11 children and was a senior advisor to the Bush administration.

I’ve been having a good summer running in Alaska gearing up for my next marathon. I was considering doing the Salt Lake Marathon in mid-July but I didn’t manage to make it down to the lower 48. I’m now eyeing the Duke City Marathon in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the end of October. As I’ve been running up and down the monster hills in Homer I’ve been wondering why I’m not getting any faster. I used to be a much faster runner and while I’ve adjusted for age, it’s still frustrating to feel like you are plodding along when you used to be able to cruise at three minutes per mile faster with no discernable difference in effort.

I put this in the “only in Alaska category”, although it’s a brilliant idea that I’m sure will catch on in Atherton, CA with a slighly higher entrance fee. A couple in Anchor Point, Alaska (15 miles from us in Homer, where my wife Amy lived until she was eight) is running an essay contest where the prize is their house. The entry fee is $100 and a 100 word essay that starts “If I could do anything I wanted …” The owners will select the top 100 essays and a panel of independent judges will pick the winner and the runner up. The deadline is August 25, 2004, although the owners reserve the right to extend the contest for up to a year if they don’t get enough entries (they need 1,100 to get to the $110,000 investment they have in the house.) They also reserve the right to cancel the contest and will send back $99 of the $100 if they do this to cover postage and handling.

Return Path just issued an Email Delivery Index research brief based on data they collected from 16,000 email campaigns representing 3.4m email messages over a four month period. They discovered that the best day to do an email campaign is Monday as delivery rates can be up to 10% greater. Apparently much of Google’s IPO information will be disseminated via email. The expected concern about emails being blocked and spoofed immediately come to mind, as I’m sure all the phishers are out in force trying to figure out how to scam people on the back of Google.

StillSecure’s new product – Safe Access – just got an outstanding review in the August issue of Information Security. The punch line of the article is: “Safe Access’ agentless architecture is brilliant and simple to deploy. This endpoint security solution gets straight “A’s” for enforcing policies to keep infected and vulnerable PCs off the network.” – George Wrenn, Information Security Magazine The explosion of spyware, adware, and insecure client software (e.g. Windows XP, IE) has brought intense focus on endpoint security. StillSecure came up with a unique, agentless way to provide this security, building on the vision and expertise from their other great products, Border Guard and VAM. Anti-virus and anti-spyware products help, but if you don’t have your entire network locked down (which usually implies either high security overhead or limited end-user functionality) or control over the folks accessing your network (e.g. home users, remote users, visitors), these products are difficult to keep updated, hard to manage, and often annoyingly slow to use. Given how insidious the various attacks are and how quickly they morph, having an agentless solution is a great approach. It’s technically difficult to create software that works this way – StillSecure has come up with a product that addresses this problem in a unique, exciting, and cost-effective way.

My friend Paul Berberian – the co-founder of Raindance Communications – flew us from Homer to Anchorage for a sushi dinner tonight. Paul and his friend Paul Wareham were up at our place in Homer, AK visiting for the weekend. They flew PaulB’s Cirrus SR-22 up from Boulder, CO – it took them 15 flight hours over three days. We had a great weekend hanging out and showing them around Homer. Originally we were going to fly to Valdez for lunch, but the weather was shaky and Valdez is a tough airport to land at.

The two guys that work with me in Colorado – Chris Wand and Seth Levine – are visiting me in Alaska this week. We started joking about all the ridiculous things we (VCs) say on a regular basis. At the risk of exposing “super secret VC information”, I thought I’d write up a few of these phrases along with what they actually mean. Oh – and on the topic of “giving away state secrets”, Matt Blumberg has a great post up on How to Negotiate a Term Sheet with a VC. This is a must read for anyone doing a venture financing. Matt – thanks a lot – look for my upcoming post on “How to give one of your star CEO’s a pay cut.”

Today was a perfect Alaska day. Amy and I have friends up to our place in Homer (Chris, Seth, and Ed) – the five of us went bear watching today. We chartered a plane from Smokey Bay Air. The five of us crammed into a Cessna 206 for the 30 minute flight over Cook Inlet to Lake Clark National Preserve. As we approached land, the Iliamna Volcano loomed large (10,016 ft). We landed on the beach – which was a first for all of us (but apparently the 9,342nd time for the pilot who appeared to do the landing with his eyes closed.)