My wife Amy loves to watch horse racing on TV (not bet, just watch the horses.) I’m lying on the couch resting from a very intense week (and catching up stuff.)

It just dawned on me that horse racing is “NASCAR for rich people” (just look at the stands.) That got Amy laughing (although I like NASCAR better.)… Read more

We just put an RSS feed up on our Mobius Venture Capital site for press releases. So – if you subscribe – you can get the press releases about our companies when we post them.

I got bitch slapped by some folks early on in my blogging career for simply posting press releases to my blog. This caused me to think hard about how to use my blog to promote my companies. I try to do it carefully, with context, and make it something more significant than a simple press release (e.g. tell a story around it, explain why I think it matters, personalize the experience, etc.). I’m always open to feedback on this as I try to balance information dissemination with shallow promotion.

If you are interested in seeing press… Read more

I’m going to be out of town on election day so I just filled out my absentee ballot (thankfully I got my ballot, unlike my 13,000 friends in Colorado that didn’t.)

The anarchist is me voted for Colorado Amendment 36 (proportional voting).  Last time I checked, we lived in a “one vote for each person country”, although I can’t ever remember whether we live in a democracy or a republic (and – after reading this link – I still can’t tell.)  Lots of folks rail against the electoral college – I took my mandatory semester of government in high school and couldn’t figure it out.  Colorado’s proportional voting amendment is retroactive, so if it passes, the 9 Colorado electoral votes will be allocated proportionally (making Colorado most likely… Read more

I’ve added a new NewsGator feature to my blog – Ratings.  If you are looking at my blog online or via NewsGator Online, you’ll see a new thing in the footer of each post that says “Rate” and has five stars next to it.

To rate each post, simply click on the number of stars.  If you have a NewsGator Online account (or create one), you’ll be able to see both your rating (red) and the aggregate rating (orange).

Look for announcements as to how to put this on your blog next week.  If you want a headstart on this, take a look at the thread on the NewsGator Support Forum.

If you have suggestions as to what we should do with the data (we’ve got… Read more

I discovered Danny Gregory this summer in Alaska when I read Everyday Matters.

I bought all of his books and tossed them in the to read pile. Today I read Change Your Underwear Twice a Week: Lessons from the Golden Age of Classroom Filmstrip. Remember filmstrips? I do. They sucked. I remember taking off my glasses in elementry and junior high school to make it “harder” to see them since they were so incredibly dull and banal.

Gregory goes deep in his analysis of filmstrips in this beautifully illustrated book. He concentrates mostly on filmstrips from the late 1940’s to the early 1950’s. The actual filmstrip frames form the core of the story with Gregory’s narration of each section dripping with sarcasm as well as insight into the… Read more

I finished Florence of Arabia by Christopher Buckley an hour ago. I am still laughing about it. It’s by far the funniest thing I’ve experienced in October – even better than the Jon Stewart Crossfire episode.

If you desire a “middle eastern comedy” written by a satircal god, you’ll enjoy this one… Read more

If you are a Neal Stephenson fan, there’s a great interview with him up on Slashdot.

Snow Crash remains one of my all time favorite books and losing myself in The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon was the only way I survived a two week safari in Africa (the seminal moment of the trip was captured on video tape by my brother – I was sitting in a chair looking sunburned, dirty, tired, and generally miserable at which point I said “if I ever talk about going to Africa again, show me this video.”)

I’ve been holding off tackling the The Baroque Cycle trilogy (Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1), The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2), The System of the World (The Baroque Cycle, Vol

I sat through about 20 PowerPoint presentations yesterday (feel free to snicker now.)

As I was sitting in the audience, I noticed one thing that kept annoying me. A number of the presentations said Copyright “SOMETHING_OTHER_THAN_2004″ in the footer. I’ve noticed this a lot recently, as footers seems to have “Copyright 2002″, “Copyright 11/02″ or simply “4/12/03″. You’d think that PowerPoint would have an autocorrect rule for “Copyright.”

I know this borders on “nerd pet peeves”, but there you have it. There’s only one correct way to copyright something – it’s “© YEAR Company_Name.” If the presentation contains multiple years of work, then you should include both the first year of copyrightable material to current day (e.g. © 2002-2004 Company_Name).

Consider my pet peeve vent satisfied… Read more

EDS put a big stake in the ground by declaring friends and foes yesterday when they created the EDS Agilty Alliance.

• Foes: IBM and HP.
• Friends: Cisco, Dell, EMC, Microsoft, Sun, Xerox (listed in alphabetical order presumably not to indicate any preference.)

When EDS acquired The Feld Group at the beginning of the year, Charlie Feld became EVP Portfolio Management – think of it as a role where the CTO and CIO report to him and he defines and builds both the product / service strategy and the internal systems to support the strategy (massive in EDS’s case.) One of Charlie’s classic moves whenever he becomes CIO somewhere is to lock down a finite set of well defined technology relationships to act as the backbone for all future buildout… Read more

NewsGator released a new version of NewsGator Online – their web-based RSS aggregator.

This version is free to consumers and includes new features including folders (manage all your feeds the same way you do in Outlook), per-post rating system, feed recommendations based on what you read, clippings (to save your favorite posts with one click), and smart feed enhancements including converting email-based alerts to RSS.

NewsGator Online includes subscription level synchronization with NewsGator Outlook Edition, allowing you to manage one set of feeds across multiple machines (I have four different computers, plus the web version with synchronized feeds.) As a result, I don’t have to worry about making sure my feeds are the same on all machines – whenever I change something on one machine (in Outlook or on… Read more

I screwed up.

I was involved in a merger of two companies in Q4 last year. Post merger, I let both companies slip on completing their audits. I figured we’d do the 2003 combined audit after audit season. In an attempt to save money, the company let it slide into the fall. This isn’t a governance issue – I’m comfortable that both companies are clean – it’s a timing issue – we figured we’d get it done later in the year to save money and just hadn’t gotten around to it.

Recently, this company was approached to be acquired. Due to their concern about SOX, the acquirer is insisting on a 2003 audit (not a surprise). However, their accountants also want final 2002 independent audits through close and 2002 combined stub period… Read more

According to my mom, this is a “brag”, not a “blog”.

Deloitte & Touche has an annual “Colorado Technology Fast 50” ranking. They rank the top 50 technology companies in Colorado based on their revenue growth over the previous five years. This year four Mobius-related companies made the list. I’m obviously proud of all of them.

#2 ServiceMagic: 5500% growth. IAC acquired ServiceMagic in July. We invested in 1999 – ServiceMagic had “a little” revenue then. ServiceMagic was every VCs dream – they defined “hockey stick growth” – once they found it (in 2002) there was no stopping them.

#4 Raindance Communications: 3044% growth. We invested in Raindance when it was three guys, an idea, and no revenue. Raindance went public in 2000 and survived the dotcom implosion to be the… Read more

Amy and I spent the weekend in New Hampshire. We stayed at a Stepping Stones – a bed and breakfast we used to stay at regularly when we lived in Boston – and hung out, read, slept, and looked at leaves.

Once we crossed the New Hampshire border (from Boston – where we spent the night at XV Beacon – one of my favorite hotels in the world), we saw plenty of pumkins, corn, and leaves (yellow, orange, and red). However, my Sidekick immediately stopped working since apparently New Hampshire doesn’t have any cell phone towers (according to the locals.) Our B&B didn’t have high speed Internet either, so I decided to punt on email for the long weekend and read instead.

I had started Another Bullshit Night in

I gave a lecture on “Profitable Exiting” at the 30th Annual Venture Capital Institute in Atlanta on Tuesday. This is the major professional education event for the venture capital industry, co-sponsored by the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and the National Association of Small Business Investment Companies (NASBIC).

I had never been to a VCI event and didn’t really know what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised – I sat through several high quality lectures from very credible folks – aimed at an audience of 180 or so VCs. Most of the attendees were younger and/or relatively new to the venture business, although there were a number of corporate VCs in the audience also. The VCI event was extremely well organized and the content was substantial… Read more