Ryan McIntyre pointed me at a car that gets 3.14k miles per gallon.  Now, if it only ran on pi.

I received a lot of interesting and positive feedback on my post on talking about failure.  There’s no question that enlightened entrepreneurs get the value of failure and generally enlightened people have noticed the absence of VCs (and entrepreneurs) publicly talking about it for a variety of reasons.

Adam Green pointed me at a podcast he did with Adam Bosworth (now at Google) discussing his lessons learned from the failure of Reflex.  I hadn’t thought of Analytica / Reflex for a long time (I had an original copy and loved it) – and subsequently discovered this useful essay about it on the web.

Thankfully I no longer get fedexed binders of board packages from my portfolio companies in advance of a board meeting.  Through the modern miracle of email, the board packages show up in my inbox – hopefully a few days (rather than a few hours – or even minutes) before the board meeting.  The board packages tend to show up in three different formats – one that is easy to deal with, one that is ok, and one that sucks.

• Happy Version: The entire board package is in a PDF file, formatted nicely, and easy to either read on the screen or print out.
• Ok Version: The entire board package is in a PPT file.  While this is ok, there are often pages – such as financials, board minutes, or other Word documents - that are weirdly formatted or missing lots of info as they’ve been “transcribed” to fit in a PPT.
• Bad Version: Each subdocument (Word, Excel, PPT, and occasionally a PDF file) is simply attached to the email, in no particular order.  Just try to print this out, especially the Excel spreadsheet that doesn’t have any print areas set.

Having dealt with this across lots of board meetings, I much prefer that the whole shebang be incorporated into a PDF file.  This is easy to do, gives the CEO complete control over how the information is presented, and makes it easy for board members to deal with, especially if they just want to forward the email to their assistant and say “print out the board package for me.”

Periodically FeedBurner gets all their engineers in a room, turns over tech support to the business team for the day, and cranks out a bunch of features.  Hackathon III occurred a week ago on Friday and generated a healthy list of new things for all the friendly neighborhood FeedBurner users, including:

• Map It FeedFlare: Link to Google Maps if you have address info in your post.
• BuzzBoost Brush-up: Spiffy new BuzzBoost features, including subscribe to feed.
• Download Tracking Tweaks: UI cleanup on Download Tracking.
• FeedBulletin via Email: Get email alerts (instead of RSS alerts) for your FeedBulletin feed.
• IP To Location: Live hits page now displays countries where your items are being viewed.
• Mobile Feed Stats: Check your stats on a mobile web browser.
• FeedFlare Scratchpad: Play around with and test out new FeedFlare’s easily
• FeedBurner Module for Netvibes: See a bunch of FeedBurner stuff in Netvibes.
• New Email This FeedFlare: Email This webpage instead of mailto: (for non-nerds – this works better).
• FeedBurner Help: Lots more help.

I love this approach to pushing features out.

Boulder was highlighted in the June 26, 2006 Fortune Magazine as the best place for outdoor addicts to retire.  My friend Kimbal Musk’s superb restaurant – The Kitchen – was listed as the place to eat dinner on a “typical Friday night.”

A few days before NewsGator released their plug-in for the new version of Yahoo! Messenger, I was at NewsGator for a board meeting and sat in on their Friday demo hour (one hour of rapid fire demos from stuff people are working on or things that got built “under the radar” during the previous week.)  I saw some neat stuff, especially around a major release / announcement that I believe is coming in the next two weeks.  I also saw a bunch of cool “small things” like new UI stuff being rolled into the products or long term features (such as filter by category) that are functional and just waiting for the right release cycle for each of the products.

While getting my ass kicked by Greg and Karyn German at foosball afterwards (I beat them once, but I had the secret Brian Kellner weapon on my team – once it was me and Seth, we got crushed), I reminisced with Greg about the very first time we met.  I asked him if he “still had that presentation that didn’t have any numbers on it.”  He did and sent it to me later that night.

I smiled when I saw this.  I don’t remember exactly what I said to Greg when he showed me this slide, but it was something like “er – Greg – what are the numbers on the Y axis?”  After a few moments of him sizing me up, he told me.  His long term product vision came earlier in the deck, but it was remarkably prescient.

It’s obviously evolved in the two years since I’ve invested in NewsGator, but when I look back, it’s clear that the trajectory we are on is very consistent with the vision Greg showed me in 2004.  His cover slide to the presentation says it all.

Amy and I were co-hosts for Mark Udall’s summer solstice party today.  Mark has become a friend and is one of the few politicians I’ve really come to admire.

The quote of the afternoon was from Winston Churchill – “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.”

Mark reminded all of us that one of the great American traits is optimism.  Right on my friend.

I’m really proud of my friends at Rally Software.  Their business continues to grow very rapidly and they appear to have nailed the intersection of a couple of key trends – the growth of the Agile software development combined with the trendy but important reality of SaaS (“Software as a Service” for those of you living under a rock or in Alaska, like I like to do occasionally.)

Last week Rally closed an $8m financing led by Vista Ventures – this should fund them through profitability.  Earlier this week, Ryan Martens – Rally’s founder and CTO – was named a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in the Rocky Mountain region.  While I don’t usually put a lot of stock in awards, I’ve been a judge for the Rocky Mountain region in the past and recognize the high level of quality among the various nominees for this particular award.

I’ve said this before, but I don’t think I can say it often enough.  If you develop software for a living, take a look at Rally’s stuff.  A wide range of companies, from venture-backed companies (such as several of mine like NewsGator, Oxlo, Return Path, and Gold Systems) to large ISVs are now using Rally’s products.  I’ve watched the adoption of Rally’s products spread through other VCs portfolio’s – such as my friend Scott Maxwell’s at Insight – it’s pretty fun to see the enthusiasm that Rally’s products coupled with the Agile methodologies can create.

I’ve noticed a pattern in many of the VC and entrepreneur blogs I read – very few people ever talk about failure.  

Failure is a key part of entrepreneurship.  As an entrepreneur, angel investor, and venture investor, I’ve had lots of success, but I’ve also had lots of failures.  So has everyone that I know that has accomplished much of anything.

While it’s often difficult to talk about failure, there are a lot of lessons that can be learned from it.  The cliche “I learn more from my failures than my successes” applies directly to entrepreneurship and creating companies.  It can be difficult to be self-reflective, but I’ve personally found it very cathartic to study my failures, understand what I did wrong, learn as much as I can from them, and move on.  Occasionally I’ll have a similar failure a second time or a third time – hopefully I learn eventually.

I’m going to start writing more regularly on failure.  For those of you that have been involved in failed businesses with me, I’ll be careful about confidentiality – so many of my examples and stories will have the names changed unless I feel like sharing the posts with the people involved in advance.  I’ll try not to self-censor the stories, although the “personal denial / rewrite history impulse” is a often a tough one to overcome.

I also encourage my fellow entrepreneurial and VC bloggers to talk more about failures, alongside their successes.  Entrepreneurship is really hard and the lessons come from both sides of the equation.

Nick Bradbury, one of the great programmers that I know, has a post up about his approach to working out new ideas.  He also has a few hints about things he’s playing with for the next version of FeedDemon.  I’ve gotten to know Nick over the past year or so since NewsGator acquired Nick’s company and love his style and his products (I use FeedDemon all day long on several machines – it’s my primary newsreader.) 

Back when I was one of the world’s best Basic programmers (self proclaimed, although my partner at the time liked to remind me of this random outburst on a regular basis), I used a very similar approach – just start coding for a while, bang into some of the real issues, and – when I feel like I’ve figured out the right approach, but well before I’ve put the final touches on everything, throw it all away and do a design / code process.  As I’ve been able to work with some great software developers (and plenty of not so great ones) over the past twenty years as well as helped build companies like Rally Software that are working hard to help spread new approaches like Agile Software Development, I’ve seen – over and over again – that there there are a few key techniques that make all the difference in the world, especially early in the design phase of a new project or feature set.