Ben Casnocha is hard at work at his book titled “My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley”; which Jossey-Bass (part of John Wiley & Sons) is publishing this spring.  I read a draft over Thanksgiving and I predict this book will end up becoming a New York Times bestseller – it is extraordinary (just like Ben.)  Ben has asked a number of his friends to write short essays (called “Braintrusts”) to include in the book.  I was honored that he asked me to write one on Mentors.  Following is my “Reflections on Mentors” which hopefully will make it into the book when it’s published this spring. 

My first mentor was my Dad. I remember going for a long walk with him near… Read more

As chairman of the National Center for Women & Information Technology, I’m enjoyed observing the regular evolution of how we describe the organization.  My friends Larry and Pat Nelson just interviewed Lucy Sanders – the CEO of NCWIT – and I think Lucy did a particularly crisp job of describing what NCWIT is about and why it’s important… Read more

Om Malik has a great post up titled Alexa can be injurious to your wealth that describes a number of flaws with Alexa as a ranking of a web-based service.  I have never taken Alexa data very seriously – while Om points out some flaws there are lots of others that anyone with a basic understanding of web analytics will be able to determine quickly.  While it’s potentially useful for either long term trends or very rapid variance effects (e.g. The First 25,000 Users Are Irrelevant problem or – as Josh Kopelman more succinctly put it – 53,651) I’m always very careful about how I interpret the data (and I usually don’t give it much weight.)

Om’s parting comment is “In closing, if you are a startup that brings… Read more

Matt Blumberg pointed me to a post about the Boulderites recent decision to raise taxes on themselves by passing a carbon tax.  The feds can’t seem to get around to doing it, so the Bouder locals just took it on themselves as an effort to fill the federal governments gap on climate policy.  … Read more

I’ve become obsessed with “Networks” – I’ve learned an enormous amount from coordinating the FeedBurner Venture Capital Network and the Colorado Entrepreneurs and Technology Network.  Look for lots of interesting things to come to this in the next few months, including some “Intelligence Amplification” stuff that my friends at FeedBurner aren’t even aware of yet (heheh.)

While the FeedBurner Network concept is a “user-organized” network approach (although in this case the “user” is a single publisher coordinating a network of other topically similar publishers), there are now many other well known blog networks that are being driven by commercial publishers.  Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis started this off with Gawker and Weblogsinc respectively, Mike Arrington and Om Malik followed with highly visible “new tech networks” TechCrunch

A few months ago NewsGator released a Windows Mobile feed reader called NewsGator Go! I’ve been using it on my T-Mobile Dash and it’s fantastic.  Today, NewsGator Go! for J2ME just went Beta.  If you have a Blackberry, Palm Treo or Tungsten, Sony Ericsson (P800, P900, P910), Nokia, Motorola (V400, V551, V600, RAZR), Samsung, LG, or other Java phone, you can now run the NewsGator on it.  It automagically syncs with your NewsGator Online account (and any other NewsGator products you are using.)  Kevin Cawley – one of the big brains behind much of the NewsGator mobile stuff – has a nice post up about it.

My current configuration is FeedDemon on my PCs, NetNewsWire on my Macs, and NewsGator Go! Mobile on my Dash.  The… Read more

My partner Ryan McIntyre has a nice, detailed follow up post on Intelligence Amplification.  Stan James – founder and CTO of Lijit (one of our investments in the Intelligence Amplification theme) – calls it the “Digital Cortex.&rdquo… Read more

Our friendly neighborhood Supreme Court is having some fun discussing the current legal definition of “patent obviousness.”  It sounds like there were some entertaining snippets in the conversation as the Supreme Court considers rewriting it.  A change here would have a wide ranging impact which – in my mind – based on my previously stated view on software patents – would be a hugely positive thing.  At the minimum, it’s provocative to think about the potential impact.  The best line of the day – offered apparently with complete ironic intent – appears to be Chief Justice Roberts asking an attorney: “Who do you get to be an expert to tell us something’s not obvious?  The least insightful person you can find?”… Read more

I got a bunch of great suggestions on online chess from y’all - thanks!  I’ve decided – at least for now – to play on Red Hot Pawn (my handle is bfeld) since I want correspondence style rather than real time.  I hope I’ll be able to avoid the mate in one blunder that Vladimir Kramnik made against Deep Fritz yesterday (thanks to Craig Wilcox for pointing it out.)… Read more

I hate the phrase Web 3.0.  I’ve never really liked the phrase Web 2.0 either, but I didn’t notice that I didn’t like it until after it had become used in almost every conversation I had with anyone about what they were working on.  As I started making new investments in companies that tried to deal with the TAR problem (such as Me.dium, Lijit, Collective Intellect, and HiveLive), I realized I wanted a name for this.  I came up with the lame name “dynamics of information” as a placeholder.

I’ve been searching for a new name for this and my partner Ryan McIntyre came up with the phrase “Intelligence Amplification” which I love.  It’s especially sweet if you catch the mildly ironic reference to “Artificial Intelligence.” While… Read more

In the “if you can’t beat them, join them” category, following is a hilariously ironic story by Mark A. Stein from the 11/19/06 New York Times Openers section.

“Tyson Foods, the world’s largest chicken producer and meat processing company, blamed high corn prices last week for its third consecutive quarterly loss. It said that the recent excitement over corn-based ethanol fuel sent the price of that grain soaring, raising feed costs and compounding the effect of a meat glut that depressed prices. “This is either corn for feed for corn for fuel,” Rich L. Bond, president and chief executive, lamented in a statement.

Well, if fuels are where the money is, Tyson will be there too. As Mr. Bond was releasing the disappointing results, Jeff Webster of the corporate strategy department was… Read more

The Immortal Game inspired me to play some chess again. I was having trouble sleeping tonight so I hopped online to find an online chess game. Not surprisingly, I was completely overwhelmed by options. Any suggestions for good places to hang out and play online?… Read more

One of my favorite things about going dark for a week is that I get to consume a bunch of books.  Since we’ve been back from Alaska, my reading pace has been slower than normal, so it was nice to have plenty of uninterrupted time to lay on a couch and read.  I usually manage to read a book a day on vacation – this time I only gobbled down five.  All but one was great.

I started off with The Cure.  Every entrepreneur should read this book. I can’t remember who recommended it to me (someone at the Return Path board dinner?) – it’s the extraordinary personal and professional story of John Crowley, his wife Aileen, their three children (two of whom have Pompe disease), and John’s creation of… Read more

I just gone done with my quarterly week off the grid.  Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays – Amy and I spent it chilling out in Keystone.  I had a little trouble disconnecting – finally shutting off all of my computers on Wednesday morning.  Even though lots of folks took the long weekend off, a few of my portfolio companies pushed out some neat new stuff.

• NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand: NewsGator just went beta with their new Enterprise On-Demand RSS product.  Enterprise RSS – but via a SaaS model.  Its code name was NGOD, but apparently my marketing friends decided to be non-religious and call it NGEOD.
• Lijit Identities: At our last board meeting, we spent a lot of time talking about people, identities, and content linked to a particular

David Cohen has a great post up about the failure of one of his startup - iContact.  Even though iContact failed, David and his partners still managed to return 78% of the investment to their investors.  His two lessons: (1) control the distribution of your product and (2) start small and prove something before you start to scale up… Read more