Brad Feld

Month: April 2006

Geek Chic

Apr 19, 2006

Amy told me that I dress like the guy on the cover of The Onion Style Magazine.


I ran in the Boston Marathon on Monday.  I was an official entrant – #20778.  I did not time qualify – instead I ran in the charity program for the Michael Lisnow Respite Center.  Several of my friends made financial contributions as did Amy and I.  This “disclaimer” is an “asterisk” for those of you out there who don’t feel that those of us that run for charity are “official runners” in the Boston Marathon.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I had an amazing time.  In my quest to run a marathon in every state by the time I’m 50, Boston was the seventh marathon that I’ve run and the third in the past six months.  I’m beat and have decided to take the summer off to recover fully, train, get a deeper base (my base is currently 30 miles / week – I want to get it up to 50 miles / week), drop some more weight, and get mentally psyched up for the next one.  Of course, knowing me, I might just sneak one in this summer.

I treked out to Hopkinton the night before with my friend Ilana to spend the night at her friend’s the Gould’s.  I feasted on Annie’s Mac and Cheese and waffles (Ilana’s pre-meal dinner), watched the West Wing, and then went to bed early.  The Gould’s house was comfortable and quiet (thanks Hunter) – I got a solid night’s sleep and was up around 9am.  The marathon didn’t start until noon (and I was in the second wave that didn’t start until 12:30) so I had a nice leisurely morning.

Cathy took us to the Hopkinton State Park where we grabbed an old yellow school bus to the starting line.  The race was extremely well organized – all of the charity runners were in the back of the second wave so we started behind everyone that had qualified by time.  I crossed the starting line around 12:45.

The day was perfect – 50 degrees and cloudy.  The sun broke through occasionally, but there was a cool breeze so it never became uncomfortable. 20,000 runners is a lot – there was a solid wall of people in front of me making their way down the two lane road through Hopkinton and Ashland before finally opening up a little bit at Framingham.  Everyone talks about the downhill start of Boston – it’s more like a hard downhill followed by five miles of rolling hills with a net elevation loss of about 400 feet.

I’m slow to warm up on my long runs – I usually start feeling good at six miles.  Unfortunately, I fell into the trap that so many do at the Boston Marathon and went out about a mile a minute faster than I expected for the first 10k.  When I hit the Framingham train station, I felt tight and uncomfortable and forced myself to slow down for a few miles.  The second 10k is always the best for me and I cruised through to the halfway point.  The Women of Wellesley lived up to their billing and made Amy (my wife the Wellesley College alum) proud.  I couldn’t help but speed up as I high fived 1000 or so screaming / cheering women. 

The third 10k is my toughest – I end up in a lonely zone no matter how well trained I am.  I was catching up on Coverville episodes on my iPod Shuffle when Show 190: The Covered Side of the Moon started.  As I hit a good groove, a young kid (probably about 5) jumped out on the course with a hand full of pretzels at exactly the right time.  The combination of the pretzels and strange versions of Dark Side of the Moon got me to the base of the Newton Hills.

I’m not sure what got me to the top of Heartbreak Hill.  I don’t really remember it.  I do remember seeing Art Mellor of the Accelerated Cure Project for MS and I’m sure I surprised him when I stopped and gave him a big hug.

There was one more nasty hill after Heartbreak around Cleveland Circle.  The words that went through my head are not safe for PG-rated blog posts (thankfully this one isn’t PG rated – but I’ll spare you what went through my brain.)

Around mile 23 I saw the famed Citgo sign (which Amy and I lived under for three years when we lived on Bay State Road near Kenmore Square.)  I looked up five minutes later and it was still out there in the distance somewhere.  At this point my brain was mush, the people on Comm Ave were an abstraction of human life forms, and their cheers were like wind at my back, and the Citgo sign didn’t seem like it was getting any closer.

I eventually passed the Citgo sign.  As I went under Mass Ave and then turned onto Hereford I felt a seventeenth wind and kicked it around the turn on Boylston Street and the last 200 yards across the finish line.  Official time – 5:07:40.  Given that I ran Miami on 1/29/06 in 5:00:53 and never feel like I really recovered, I’m very pleased. 

Congrats to everyone that finished, including many friends like John Greff (Sequel VC partner – 3:42), Tom Mullen (frat brother – 3:15), Lon Sunshine (frat brother – 3:40), Sue Burke (Amy’s tennis coach – 5:41 – running for Multiple Sclerosis), and of course – my marathon buddy Ilana Katz (Feld Technologies employee #7 – 4:15 – running for Liver Cancer.)  Oh – any everyone else!

The Boston Marathon is an incredible experience.  I’m proud to have been part of the 110th running, and am honored to have been able to run for the Michael Lisnow Respite Center – thanks Nick and Shana for your initial sponsorship.


I got the following email from someone a few minutes ago.

I’ve been a reader of your blog for some time now, but will follow it no longer. Even though I don’t understand why someone would want to do it,sliding in the back door to run the Boston Marathon they way you secured your number is your business – you have to live with yourself. Bragging on your blog that you are using your influence, and the influence of your friends to essentially buy a place in that race is demeaning to you, and the great race itself, and this is why I’ve lost respect for you. I know many people who have dedicated years to their running, have not met the qualifying standard, but don’t have the money or know friends who can help them buy their way into the race. Trust me – these are the kind of people that don’t have the resources to build a “treadputer,” nor would they want to. But they are the kind of people who truly understand what the Boston Marathon is all about, and would not go unless they met the qualification standard.
 
If you read this before you line up, I hope you take a look around on the starting line and really take a look at the people surrounding you. The overwhelming majority of these individuals made the sacrifice, did things the right way, and deserved to be there. You can learn quite a bit from them, Brad. If you are reading this after the race, I hope you realize where you fit in on that starting line. 
 
You are a young man, and certainly should be able to qualify the right way. You are not doing this the right way, but I have a hunch you know this.  If you are willing to accept and go ahead with this short cut, I no longer have respect for you as a professional, or as a person.
 
Having spent the last few days getting my head into the idea that I was about to run 26.2 miles on the oldest marathon course in the US, in a city I lived in for 12 years, for a charity that I’ve supported, this really bummed me out.  I took a deep breath and wrote the following response.
 
I’m sorry you feel this way. 

I have enormous respect for the Boston Marathon.  Having lived in Boston for 12 years, I’ve followed it my entire adult life.  I have always known about the qualifying time and never expected to run Boston – I’m a slow runner (PR of 4:05) and I expect that – while I could qualify now that I’ve turned 40, I’ve decided instead to have a goal of running a marathon in every state by the time I turned 50.

I was pleasantly surprised on my 40th birthday by a friend who sponsored me by contributed to a charity affiliated with the race (Michael Listnow Respite Center).  I’ve subsequently contributed to the charity, as have some of my friends.  I expect you are aware of the relatively new tradition of charity runners at the Boston Marathon (and other marathons.)

I don’t believe this is a backdoor thing.  I have an official number and am an invited part of the race (rather than a scab running without an entry.) I didn’t use any special influence – anyone can raise money for the charity to be part of the race – it’s not a matter of “buying a number”, but committing to raise a certain amount for the charity.

The Boston Marathon officially supports this as you can see on the web site “There are eighteen official charities participating in the 2006 Boston Marathon. The charities have fund-raising requirements and give a limited number of runners an opportunity to run Boston while benefiting a locally-based charity or chapter.”

I’m proud to run and contribute to a charity that is affiliated with the race.  I have several friends who have qualified to run this year – they have all actively encouraged me to run even though I didn’t qualify by time.   Finally, the marathon now segments the start.  Charity runners are automatically put in the Second Wave which starts at 12:30.  I’ll be lining up in the back so I don’t clog the way for any faster runner.

 Again – I’m sorry this has caused you to feel the way you do.  We live in a free country so you of course can feel anyway you want.  However, I was surprised and saddened to get this email as I didn’t feel like my commentary on my blog about the marathon was disrespectful in any way.  In fact, this is the first negative comment or lack of encouragement from anyone that I’ve interacted acted with – including many runners I don’t know – who have encouraged me, including my coach, Bobby McGee, who has coached numerous Olympic and world class runners.

As John Bingham says, “Waddle on, friends.”


Barry Eisler is one of my favorite mental floss writers.  Barry writes thrillers about a bad-ass named John Rain.  Rain is half-Japanese, half American assassin who specializes in making his kills look like natural causes.  Oh – and he’s good with the women.

His books, in order, are Rain Fall, Hard Rain, Rain Storm, Killing Rain, and (in June) The Last Assassin,  Now, Barry has a blog called The Heart of The Matter.  I no longer will have to wait a year to read the next batch of his prose.


I spoke on a panel last week at the Silicon Flatirons Telecommunications Program titled “Re-examining The Patent System.”  My panel was the last one and came after a few hours of stimulating discussion about the problems with patents, the problems with patent reform, and the reason our government is struggling so much with what to do.

When I was at MIT in the 1980’s, copyright and patents were just starting to be a major issue in the personal computer software business.  I vividly remember attending a lecture in one of my classes by the general counsel of Lotus who was suing Borland for copyright infringement between Quattro Pro and Lotus 1–2–3.  This was around the same time that Apple vs. Microsoft / Xerox vs. Apple lawsuits appeared, as well as the nonsense Ashton-Tate vs. Fox Software lawsuit.  Forget about patents – this was about copyright! 

Some of the research I did when I was a doctoral student at MIT was around the sources of innovation in the software industry.  In the late 1980’s, the three primary mechanisms for protecting innovation were copyright, patents, and trade secrets.  Copyrights (as evidenced by the legal action above) was the most active area and I – among many others – thought that copyrights were a problematic way to fundamentally protect software innovation, especially around look and feel (which was all the rage at the time.)  Of course, with the widespread emergence of the GPL and open source, the dynamics of software copyright have changed radically in the past decade, which is likely part of the reason the focus has shifted to patents.

I personally think software patents are an abomination.  My simple suggestion on the panel was to simply abolish them entirely.  There was a lot of discussion around patent reform and whether we should consider having different patent rules for different industries.  We all agreed this was impossible – it was already hard enough to manage a single standard in the US – even if we could get all the various lobbyists to shut up for a while and let the government figure out a set of rules.  However, everyone agreed that the fundamental notion of a patent – that the invention needed to be novel and non-obvious – was at the root of the problem in software. 

I’ve skimmed hundreds of software patents in the last decade (and have read a number of them in detail.)  I’ve been involved in four patent lawsuits and a number of “threats” by other parties.  I’ve had many patents granted to companies I’ve been an investor in.  I’ve been involved in patent discussions in every M&A transaction I’ve ever been involved in.  I’ve spent more time than I care to on conference calls with lawyers talking about patent issues.  I’ve always wanted to take a shower after I finished thinking about, discussing, or deciding how to deal with something with regard to a software patent.

I’ll pause for a second, take a deep breath, and remind you that I’m only talking about software patents.  I don’t feel qualified to talk about non-software patents.  However, we you consider the thought that a patent has to be both novel AND non-obvious (e.g. “the claimed subject matter cannot be obvious to someone else skilled in the technical field of invention”), 99% of all software patents should be denied immediately.  I’ve been in several situations where either I or my business partner at the time (Dave Jilk) had created prior art a decade earlier that – if the patent that I was defending against ever went anywhere – would have been used to invalidate the patent. 

When I made the assertion that we should simply abolish software patents entirely, I noticed a lot of lawyers heads moving vertically up and down.  I took this as a good sign, especially since a number of them had gray hair (and a few were on the earlier panels and sounded very intelligent and experienced, especially for lawyers.)

After wrestling with software patents for the past 15 years, I’ve concluded that there simply is no middle ground.  If we continue on the path we are on, patents will continue to increase in their overall expense to the system, everyone will feel compelled to continue to apply for as many (and as broad) patents as possible, if only for defensive reasons (one of Fred’s VC Cliche’s of the Week was “Patents are like nuclear bombs, you just got to have some.”)  Let’s take a page from geopolitical warfare and focus on global disarmament, rather than mutually assured destruction.


Jason sent me a quote that was on the first slide of a 409A presentation from one of the major law firms we work with.

“409A is the tax law that ate the world.  Every day we discover another 12 issues.”
—– Senior US Treasury Department Tax Official, March 13, 2006

Maybe Jack Bauer will start paying attention to 409A in tonight’s episode of 24.


Live.com Image Search

Apr 10, 2006
Category Random

As my Microsoft Web Only diet continues, I found myself using Live.com Image Search today to put together a presentation.  I hate text heavy Powerpoint presentations so I try to go to the Seth Godin school of Powerpoint and limit myself to six words per slide (e.g. lots of pictures.)  Historically, Google Image Search has been my friend when I put a presentation together.

I loved Live.com Image Search – it’s substantially better than Google’s.  The actual image search is about the same, but the UI is dramatically better.  It’s very Ajaxy – resize bar, mouse over to enlarge image and get image detail, drag and drop image to other apps, infinite scroll (rather than next, next, next), and overall nice / fast presentation.  Someone on the Google Image Search team needs to take a look.


The rumors about someone buying JBoss have been bouncing around for weeks.  As I was working on a presentation titled Commercializing Open Source for Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation conference this week, I went to Red Hat’s page to pick up their logo and saw that they announced the acquisition of JBoss this morning.

This is a huge success for everyone involved, especially Marc Fleury (JBoss CEO and founder) and the primary investors – Accel, Intel, and Matrix.  JBoss only did one disclosed round of financing for $10 million about two years ago.  Red Hat acquired them for $350 million with an additional $70 million earn out.  This is about 10% of Red Hat’s market cap.

Oracle should have stretched a little harder for this one.


Josh Kopelman has a thoughtful post on why he prefers preferred equity instead of convertible debt in seed-stage investments.  I agree with everything he says – definitely worth reading if you are involved in an early stage financing.