My friend Ron Schmelzer – the CEO of Zapthink and co-founder of Channelwave – pointed out an upcoming MIT Enterprise Forum (Cambridge, MA) conference called “Rated R for Revenue: Selling and Marketing Your Next Great Thing.”  The conference is on Saturday February 12th at the Newton Marriott and looks super.  My frat brother Colin Angle (iRobot CEO) and his iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner are the morning keynote speakers and the day is finished off by Reid Hoffman, the CEO of LinkedIn.  The agenda looks great and is full of strong entrepreneurs and – ahem – a few venture guys.

My favorite line from Colin is “15 years running a robotics company plus my MIT education and I’m just a vacuum cleaner salesman.”  If nothing… Read more

Tom Bartel – a long time colleague going back to the early days of Email Publishing in the mid-1990s and a hardcore privacy advocate currently working at Return Path – mentioned a powerpoint presentation by Simson Garfinkel titled Remembrance of Data Passed: Used Disk Drives and Computer Forensics.  While I don’t know Simson, we were both in the same year at MIT (87) and I remember him as the guy that always had articles and photos in a variety of MIT-related publications and I’m reminded of it every time I see an article by him in Technology Review.

If you care about data security and privacy, it’s worth downloading the powerpoint and scanning through it.  Simson bought 235 used hard drives between 11/2000 and 1/2003… Read more

ProSavvy – a company I’ve been on the board of since 1996 – announced this week that they have merged with eWork.  The combined company (called eWork) is the leader in consulting project and contracted workforce services procurement, management, and payment and is a $42 million, profitable company.  We continue to be significant investors in ProSavvy and Seth Levine – who works with me at Mobius in Colorado – has joined the eWork board.

Seth has a comprehensive post on the merger, some history, the rationale, and the strategy of the go-forward business.  We’re very excited about the transaction and the prospects for eWork going forward, as ProSavvy was a solid, but slow growth company that needed a bigger overall platform to achieve its full potential.  We’ve… Read more

I had a great board meeting today at Quova and a near perfect board meeting at Rally last week.  While it’s a pleasure to be involved in both companies since they are both performing very well, the structure and tempo of each board meeting really turned me on.

I had started to notice a disconcerting rhythm to some of my board meetings.  On the positive side, several of my CEOs have done a spectacular job of putting together comprehensive board packages that we’ve replicated throughout much of our portfolio.  As a result, we have substantial, detailed board packages that come out around a week prior to the board meeting.  This gives me plenty of time to read through the board package, ask specific questions of the CEO in advance of the… Read more

Fortunately for my wife Amy, she’s aware that I’m a 15 year old boy trapped in a 39 year old’s body.  So – when Netflix delivers Caddyshack to us, she let me watch it on a Friday night after I’ve worked much too hard, exercised too much (and still struggled to get all the weight off), and been entirely too serious for the past five days (ok – as serious as I get about anything – which isn’t that serious since I am really a 15 year old after all.)

In 1980, I saw Caddyshack about 10 times (I think the only movie I saw more frequently was Star Wars, but I was only 12 then so I can be forgiven since I hadn’t yet matured enough to have… Read more

We had a good day yesterday at Mobius VC as MCI announced they were acquiring NetSec for approximately $105m. 

My partner Rex Golding has been involved since NetSec’s first venture round in mid 2000.  As this investment was done at the peak of the bubble, we – like many other venture firms – were investing heavily in the promise of companies that provided “managed services” and were labelled “managed service providers (MSPs).”  In many cases, post-bubble, the outcome of these companies was disappointing.  NetSec – which specializes in managed security services (being one of the notable “MSSP’s”), built a very strong government practice, and has a deep, experienced leadership team.  Things were challenging for the company in the 2001 – 2002 time frame, but everyone was patient… Read more

As Jason and I continue to work our way through a typical venture capital term sheet, we encounter another key control term – the “protective provisions.”  Protective provisions are effectively veto rights that investors have on certain actions by the company.  Not surprisingly, these provisions protect the VC (unfortunately, not from himself.)

The protective provisions are often hotly negotiated.  Entrepreneurs would like to see few or no protective provisions in their documents. VCs – in contrast – would like to have some veto-level control over a subset of actions the company could take, especially when it impacts the VC’s economic position. 

A typical protective provision clause… Read more

RSS and Blogging are starting to permeate mainstream media.  It’s both a blessing and a curse when something makes the front cover of the major business rags.  In this case, we’re still so early on the adoption curve that these major press mentions are good early indicators that RSS / Blogging is growing real roots.

CNBC’s segment is two minutes long and was at the tail end of Closing Bell a week ago.  The segment was an introduction to RSS and features NewsGator / Greg Reinacker and Yahoo! / Scott Gatz.

The Fortune article – Why There’s No Escaping the Blog – is a big one full of good stuff including mentions our of companies Technorati and NewsGator.  In the “best quote in the article” category… Read more

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.… Read more

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.  … Read more

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. 

If you are a software developer, I expect you’ll roll around on the floor in empathy while simultaneously gleaning new insights into why the world are you is so bizarre and the marketing people in your company are so stupid.  You’ll gain a deeper… Read more

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.

Next up is Jason Groshart, one of the software engineers at Gold Systems.  Gold Systems CEO – Terry Gold – recently started blogging.  It’s neat… Read more

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. 

Email me if you are ex-PeopleSoft and are looking for a new gig and I’ll hook you up with some of our relevant companies.… Read more

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. 

Writing a book is a bitch.  I was involved in one of the first books on the web called Build a Web Site: The Programmer’s Guide to Creating, Building and Maintaining a Web Presence (Practical Programming).  I was chairman of Net.Genesis at the time – we managed to get a book contract with a publisher called Prima (who now… Read more

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?.)

I’m not alone.  Danger just announced that over three billion (3B!) IMs were sent and received over the hiptop wireless platform in 2004.  For perspective, there were 22.8B SMS messages sent across ALL OF the carriers in the US last year.  If you’ve ever sent an SMS message on a cell phone and had the opportunity… Read more