It’s 2007.  I was ready to go for my long run at 9am.  It’s 9:27am.  I’ve spent the last 27 minutes trying to get iTunes on my Vista-based laptop to sync my newly downloaded podcasts properly with my Nano.

10 minutes was spent fighting with iTunes before I gave up trying to get it to find my Nano (and then trying to close / restart iTunes.)  10 minutes was spent rebooting Vista (shut down / restart / reload everything.)  It’s finally now syncing properly.  Yes, I’m still living the iTurd life.

The age old solution of “turning it off and turning it back on” is the solution.  Egads.

Now – before you just say “switch to a Mac” – I have a whole series of things I do on a Vista box that don’t work well on a Mac, so I’m basically out of luck there also.  Maybe I should have been a luddite this morning and just gone run without my iPod and my Garmen Forerunner 305.  Or maybe I should just quit whining and accept that as long as this stuff is completely messed up, there’s massive opportunities for all the companies I like to invest in.  “Sucking less” continues to be an effective strategy.

Is it “whither” or “wither?”  I guess you’ll have to read the Onion article titled Even CEO Can’t Figure Out How RadioShack Still In Business to determine which it is (hint – both?)  I’m not a daily reader of The Onion – I rely on my friend Dave (who I think reads it cover to cover – or “every page” in webspeak) to send me the ones that will make me laugh.  This article is a perfect description of the anacronism that is RadioShack.  (Thanks Amy, Maureen, and Dave for the editorial, grammatical, and content help.)  And thanks RadioShack for all of those gold tipped cables and wide array of battery choices.

On this delicious three day weekend (I love three day weekends), what would be more fun than a new version of FeedDemon.  (Ok, I can think of a couple of things, but I’m the only one awake in my house at this point.) 

I’ve been a rabid FeedDemon user for several years.  I’ve tried every reader combination I could think of (web and desktop) and the FeedBurner / NewsGator Online combination is the way I deal with the 800+ feeds I read daily.  Nick Bradbury is an artist when it comes to crafting Windows-based software.  FeedDemon is his current work of art.

While FeedDemon has a pile of new features, Nick has his top five:

1. Synchronized news bins with shared RSS feeds – share a FeedDemon “news bin” (similar to a link blog) as an RSS feed so that others may subscribe to it. Simply copy a post from any feed into a shared news bin, and everyone subscribed to that news bin’s feed will get a copy of it. You can also drag-and-drop FeedDemon browser tabs – or even hyperlinks from an external browser – into a news bin to share those links.
2. Vastly improved offline support – including the ability to prefetch links and images in all unread items for offline reading.
3. Completely rewritten “Popular Topics” – view the most popular topics in all the feeds you’re subscribed to, alongside the topics that are popular with all NewsGator subscribers.
4. Embedded video support – video objects embedded in feed items can now be securely viewed inside FeedDemon.
5. “Who’s linking here?” – with a single click, find out who in the blogosphere is linking to a specific post in your subscriptions.

#2 – the offline support – is awesome.  Given all my travel I often read my feeds offline on an airplane when my brain is tired – now I get the whole feed including links and images. 

Great job Nick – again.  Gotta go – Amy just woke up.

In my first business, we didn’t have a line for EBITDA on our financial statement.  We went straight to Net Income.  We knew our cash flow from our statement of cash flows (and our bank account which we checked regularly since we were self funded.)  We never talked about EBITDA, nor did we ever feel the need to come up with things like “Adjusted EBITDA.” 

Now – I went to business school so I knew what an EBITDA was – I just didn’t care much about it at Feld Technologies because it didn’t matter.  Cash mattered the most.  Cash Flow mattered next.  Net Income mattered a distant third (as long as it was positive every month – it got more important if it was ever negative, but it was still third.)  The list continued.  EBITDA was not on it.  This was 1987 – 1993.

Earlier this week I looked at financials for a company I’m not involved in.  Cash has been vanishing at an uncomfortable rate so I was asked by a friend who is involved in the company to dig into the financials to try to understand what was going on.

The first financial presentation I saw focused only on adjusted EBITDA.  It was sort of defined, but not really very clearly (I didn’t know the dynamics of the elements of the adjustment well enough to have a good understanding at first glance.)  Cash flow was buried in one of the back pages of the financials (and not explained in the presentation.)  EBITDA wasn’t really visible; Net Income wasn’t really visible – it was all revenue and adjusted EBITDA.

Revenue was strong (it’s a good sized company – not huge – but nice growth.)  Adjusted EBITDA is positive.  Balance sheet cash is declining rapidly month over month.  Hmmm.  That doesn’t work.

I punted on the financial presentation (e.g. please don’t send me your explanation – just send me your cash flow statement, balance sheet, and income statement – by month for the last twelve months – as it comes out of your accounting system.)  Easy to do – I had it quickly.

EBITDA is very negative.  However, it’s still not as negative as the cash flow.  This is an equipment intensive business so about 50% of the delta was “adjustments associated with customer acquisition”, 25% of the delta was capital equipment (CapEx) investments, and 25% of the delta was “other things that got rationalized as adjustments to EBITDA.”

Not only was adjusted EBITDA pointless, it completely obfuscated what was going on.  However, the CFO of the company was spending all his time focusing his CEO and investors on adjusted EBITDA to explain how the business – while losing piles of cash – was really doing just fine on an operating basis “if you just didn’t count these couple of things.”

Last week the WSJ Journal has an article titled Profit as We Know It Could Be Lost With New Accounting Standards.  There is a potential massive overhaul in financial reporting coming (the accountants and the AICPA will need something to do in 2008 now that everyone is finally figuring out how to deal with SOX) – you can see some before and after examples here.  They are actually pretty interesting (as interesting as accounting gets – not up there with Lost or 24).  However, the first step is banishing all of the “adjusted stuff” in the financials.  Not helpful.

The motto for my first company was “We Suck Less.”  It’s one of my favorite lines and I think it’s a valid aspiration for many tech companies since so much that’s out there sucks.

Apparently today Mel Karmazin – the CEO of Sirius – told investors at his annual meeting in response to XM that “we suck less.”  Brilliant.  (Thanks Bill for the link.)

I just hit my airport tipping point for 2007.  I’m sitting in squalor at LaGuardia Gate B6 waiting for my Frontier flight home.  I guess Spirit controls these gates and no one seems to give a shit about anything here.  Everyone at LaGuardia was surly (boarding on intolerable) tonight.  Maybe it’s my Boston Red Sox jacket.

From a mug found in Fred Wilson’s office.

It’s important to have a sense of humor in this business (and in every business, and in life.)  The coffee was great.

Ben Casnocha’s book My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley is at the top of Amazon’s Movers and Shakers list today.

Daily rank of #127 (up 18,848% from yesterday as of 4pm Eastern Time.)  Congrats Ben – that’s really cool.  Updated – at 4pm, it was actually ranked 94 and up 29,131% from yesterday.

Last week the CEO of one of the companies that I’m an investor in asked me why all the companies I was blogging about were Web 2.0 companies.  I despise the Web 2.0 label so this made me cringe and I asked him to give me more feedback.  We talked for a few minutes and he helped me see my blogging through a different filter than my brain.

I’ve always been a “thematic investor.” I pick a theme that I’m interested in that I think has a long term (greater than ten year) investment horizon, hope I’m a couple of years (vs. a decade) ahead of the curve, and then go to work with great entrepreneurs to create some companies.  Themes that you may have heard me talk about here including email, RSS, and the Implicit Web.

Over the last dozen years, I’ve refined my thinking about how this works and am confident that I’ve got an approach that will serve me well over the balance of my investing career (I figure I’ve got another twenty years in me.) 

One of themes I’ve mined successfully in the past is one I call “IT Management.”  As I’ve watched the shift to SaaS, Microsoft’s 2007 product release cycle, the rise of the Enterprise 2.0 meme (gack), and the reinvigoration of corporate IT spending, it’s clear that there are lots of nifty new product / company opportunities in this arena. 

However, I think there is something more profound going on.  Rather than invest in “security” or “application management”, I take a top down approach that is a result of my secret weapon, a person I call “The Architect” (the reference to The Matrix is deliberate.)  I’ll try to channel him more frequently on this blog to distract y’all from Web 2.0.

Over the last few years Amy and I have become close friends with Ben Casnocha.  We adore the guy.  Ben started his first company – Comcate – at age 14.  As of today (age 19), he’s now a published author as his first book – My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley – is officially available. 

As an early reader / reviewer of the book, I highly recommend it.  The story is oriented around Ben’s experiences as a teenager trying to deal with the pressures of both teenage and adult “business / entrepreneurship” life simultaneously.  He does a magnificent job of articulating the characteristics of a startup without being preachy and weaves in a number of vignettes from experienced friends and colleagues.  It is simultaneously personal, educational, and emotionally deep.

If you are an aspiring (or existing) entrepreneur, My Start-Up Life is required reading.  If you are a TechStars entrepreneur, Ben will be out in Boulder in June – pick up a copy so you can pepper him with questions

In addition to recommending that you buy the book right now, Ben and I are going to do a giveaway on this blog of an autographed copy of the book to the commenter who has the best haiku with the word “start-up” in it.  Join in the fun – now!