I've spent the last year being rather busy and have ignored my contribution to the gajillion bytes of data and info that is the Internet. What with all of the new activity within PMV and the establishment of the seed fund, I think I'll use this space more and more.

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Debate on global warming is good

So long as we actually try a wide variety of remedies...but just blaming it on the sun sounds a bit too medieval Catholic to me. Click HERE to read the article.

Board Compensation

There exists never a more apt example of the old saying "you get what you pay for" than when it comes to compensating your Board of Directors. Companies, especially startups, need to look outside their own organizations for a fresh and different perspective on just about every aspect of running the firm. The most reliable manner to accomplish this is to be able to turn to a small group of motivated, objective, and (hopefully) smarter set of folks than the company employees.

You can call them an advisory board if the members are unwilling to take on the liability a corporate board position brings; nevertheless you need this group of folks to be motivated.

Since small firms don’t have the resources to compensate their board with cash (retainer, meeting fees, travel, and perks) the very least you can do is match the board’s fortunes with that of the firm by offering stock and/or options in the company. Treat the board stock (option) allocation just like the employee bucket (first right of refusal on repurchase, vesting schedule, etc). but don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ll engage quality people without motivating them. It’s axiomatic that if someone says they don’t need to get paid or compensated in any way, that you’ll get what you pay for.

From Donna Berg

Once again, the Washington Post has published the winning submissions to its
yearly neologism contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words. The winners are:

1. Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.

2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.

3. Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.

5. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent.

6. Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown.

7. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.

8. Gargoyle (n.), olive-flavored mouthwash.

9. Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.

10. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.

11. Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam.

12. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.

13. Pokemon (n), a Rastafarian proctologist.

14. Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.

15. Frisbeetarianism (n.), (back by popular demand): The belief that, when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and gets
stuck there.

16. Circumvent (n.), an opening in the front of boxershorts worn by Jewish men.

Terror in the U.S.

It turns out the U.S. government was concerned about a terror strike on U.S. soil years before 9-11. George the Pretender has done an amazing job of avoiding most of the recommendations of this five year effort. If you’d like to see the thinking behind what could happen in American, as well as the genesis of efforts such as the Department of Homeland Security, the Hart Rudman report can be found here (formally referred to as the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century).

The West Wing

I recorded the last 12 episodes of The West Wing, and finally got around to watching them over the last week.

It’s stupid and sentimental, but that show was always there for me over the last seven years, and I learned a lot.

I remember spending late nights up watching the program on DVD when I was in London, escaping what I thought was a monumental failure. It turned out what I thought was my failure was just part of the learning process.

It’s time to get back on the horse.

I’m ready.

Watch this.

Did you notice I skipped April?

Was it the tequila in Mexico?; or the personal drama?; or maybe the day to day grind?

I seem to have lost an entire month.

Anyone know what happened?

Bolt's Rule #1

If you find someone you love, you just make it work.

Job, school, family, friends, money, politics, religion, the price of tea in Missoula—none of that matters.

If you are fortunate to ever find someone you truly love, and they love you, everything else is just details.

Hysteria

What is the difference between Christians getting upset over the Da Vinci Code, and Muslims getting upset over some cartoons?

Nine Things I learned in Mexico

1. Be very careful when Cody suggests we have Margaritas for breakfast.
2. Mexico is about doing enough to just barely get by.
3. Paul burns easily.
4. The water taxi is always late.
5. Pay twice as much and you can use no protection.
6. Feed a dog and you have a friend for life.
7. A little sunscreen is better than none at all.
8. Tag team (good cop/bad cop) market negotiation works.
9. The only time locals leave Yelapa is when they’re under a death threat.

W. Does Something Good

W. Does Something Good? Too bad no one noticed.

All of the negative polls and press on George the Pretender actually obscured some very positive new policy by the administration.

The American Competitiveness Initiative, mentioned by W. during the SOTU address in January 06 was finalized in Feb 06. Click HERE to get your own copy of the report.

Counter arguments include that this is still unfunded, and likely will be chopped up by a congress more willing to line their own pockets than worry about our economy; and that the U.S. is not really falling down compared to the rest of the world.

Microsoft accuses Lucent of violating patents

The gall of some people!

MSFT, of all firms, should know imitation is the most sincere form of flatery
Microsoft accuses Lucent of violating patents

Baghdad Bob must be running communications strategy at the White House

The much maligned but always piercing words of Iraq’s former Minister of Information have found a new home. Given the drivel coming form the executive branch these days (with the exception of the State Department), it must be that Baghdad Bob is in charge.

Forget why we invaded Iraq, apparently now the reason we’re doing so badly is…you guessed it, the Press. It seems the press only reports the bad things (bombs, blood, bullets) and not the good things that happened every day in Iraq (bar mitzvahs?).

The mere fact that the traditional media took the bait, and is now devoting significant airtime to the questions of “do we (the media) only cover the bad news in Iraq” means the administration has won…by again diverting the debate away from real issues to false issues.

TiVo Worthy

Discovery Science has many interesting shows, but only one gets recorded each week at Casa de Entrepreneur.

How It's Made shows how items as varied as aluminum foil, contact lenses, and food products are manufactured. Although almost like the film strips we were showed in grade school science, the depth is considerably more, and the detail fascinating.

Check it out each Wednesday evening at 8 and 8:30 (check your local listing for times).

One I Like

Check out Sales Voodoo...great product, cool people, excelent customers.

www.salesvoodoo.com

Help Thyself

I've had three meetings with folks involved in startups in the last 24 hours. In two cases, neither team could tell me what the heck they did nor why anyone should care. All I wanted was a series of short, concise statements.

I’ve been there…but I was 25 and had no idea what I was doing. These two teams had supposed “experienced management” that had no idea how to articulate the value of their product, who they wanted to buy their product, nor how they were going to find those folks.

In case anyone wasn’t paying attention:

Investors buy stock in your firm because they think you can make money. This means you have to completely understand your prospective customers and how your product will help those people.

Companies don’t acquire technology (except in very rare cases) so you have to have customers, lots of them, to get anyone interested in buying you out.

Investors make money off your risk profile. If the profile of your company doesn’t exactly meet the investor’s pre-determined risk profile, you’re out. Investors can always find more reasons not to do a deal than reasons to do a deal.

Focus doesn’t mean myopic. How do you want your firm to look in five years? How will you compete against the existing folks in your space? What happens if the genius that invented your product gets arrested for accidentally killing a hooker after a week-end bender? How will you go on? Why are you different? Why should anyone care?

Why I'm Not afraid of the Chinese

Pizza Hut China Salad Architecture

This one is for brother Bill

Effectiveness of Aluminum Foil Hats

Deaf, Dumb, AND Blind

Impossible to believe, but El Presidente stated today that he would veto any bill prohibiting foreign ownership of firms entrusted to guard U.S. ports.

This just may be the incident necessary to get Congressional Republicans off their collective butts to do what’s right. G.W. has never vetoed a single bill, but now, for what can only be his own selfish interests, he is standing on “principle” to allow a Dubai-based firm to purchase the company that guards six major American ports, including Baltimore, NYC, and New Jersey.

I don’t have anything against folks outside the U.S. having an equity stake in U.S. firms (I wish U.S. firms would actually incorporate in the U.S. instead of some Banana Republic in order to avoid paying income taxes), but this entire episode proves just how politically blind G.W. is…in addition to being deaf and dumb.

At least Tommy was cute.

Scandal

Scandal
(Noun) an action or event regarded as morally or legally wrong and causing general public outrage

(Synonyms) wrongdoing , ignominy , disgrace

Illegal wiretaps on U.S. Citizens
Dubai running ops at 8 major U.S. ports
Abu Grab Torture
Weapons of Mass Destruction
Iraq will pay for the war with oil sales
Plamegate
Hurricane Katrina
Halliburton No Bid Contracts in Iraq reconstruction
Tom Delay (too numerous to mention)
Bill Frist (see above)
Cheney's Energy Task Force
Jack Abramoff
Halliburton overcharged the U.S. Army for fuel in Iraq
Harriett Myers for the U.S. Supreme Court
Imigration Policy
Halliburton doing business with Iran while Cheney was CEO
Wiretapping the United Nations
Medicare and Student Loan Cuts
Tax Breaks for the Top 2% Income
The EPA claiming NYC air is safe after 911
John Ashcroft's illegal campaign contributions
G.W. AWOL during the Vietnam War
Guantánamo Bay Torture
Iraq: The Case for War
Mishandling North Korean Disarmament
Mis-judging Palestinian Elections
Iran-just about every aspect
Karen Hughes US undersecretary of state for public affairs
Cheney's Got a Gun
Uranium from Niger
Cutting the NREL budget days after saying the U.S. needs to reduce oil imports
Selling off public lands for mineral and tree mining

New Mexico Dilemma #1

In New Mexico, you must have a physical postal address in order to get a voter registration card. Since nearly ONE-THIRD of the people living in the state do not have a physical postal address, the electorate could be unbalanced and swayed one direction or another. State House Democrats will propose a method to fix the problem by allowing the use of map coordinates as physical addresses for not only voter registration, but emergency responders and disaster coordinators as well.

See Brad Feld's excellent Patriot Act Nonsense article for other ramifications of the federal government over-reaching under the guise of fighting terrorism.

Stupid Stupid Stupid

UC Awarded LANL Contract

Announcment of Los Alamos Contract Decision

NEWS MEDIA CONTACT: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Rebecca Neale, 202/586-4940 Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Media Advisory
Secretary Bodman to Announce Los Alamos Contract Decision

WASHINGTON, DC – Tomorrow, Wednesday, December 21, Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman will announce the selection of the new management and operating contractor for the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

Feng Wu-chun Does it Again

Too bad he's leaving the Lab.

Researchers find 10 Gigabit Ethernet as speedy as customized interconnects

Safety Rule #6

From Forky:

Don't throw rocks at Bears

See: Summer of 1986 at Philmont

Safety Rule #49

From Cody:

Don't give explosives to visitors.
Read about the Accident at LANL

The Holidays

I've been thinking a lot abut the holiday season today. Christmas has always been a time, the only real time, my family spends together. We have never been apart on Christmas until this year. My friends can’t imagine spending 41 holiday seasons together with their entire family—something always seems to come up…but not us. We’re together. Period. End of story. No matter what.

While we’ll all be together in Virginia, this is the first Christmas since Dad passed away last summer. I never really got along with Dad, and he never understood who I am, or what motivates me, but we are all family, and he will be missed this year.

Rules of the Road #11

Mobile Telephone: If a call is dropped the person who initiated the call has the responsibilty to re-establish the commnication link.

The Income & Education Gap

New Mexico has one of the largest income gaps in the nation. Los Alamos county was recently recognized as having the highest median income in the U.S. (see Los Alamos County Wealthiest in Nation: http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/35676.html). What to do about this disparity is not a new topic, but is fraught with a cultural and economic divide wider than the Rio Grande.

Traditionalists are under the impression that New Mexico can stay an agriculture/artisan centric state, while the reality is that the state’s number one employer is government. The love//hate relationship with tourists in parts of the state further complicates and increases the income gap, as most folks love the tax dollars (or at the very least what can be afforded because of those revenues) but hate the seasonal crowding, low-paying service sector jobs, and what they see as a dilution of local cultures by those tourists who come and stay, instead of just leaving.

New Mexico has a wind-fall this year of an extra $1 billion from oil and gas leases which can only be spent on capital improvements, and upwards of an extra $100 million per year for the increase in the gross receipts tax (GRT) that will come from changing the Los Alamos National Laboratory operating contract from a non-profit (the University of California) to an limited liability corporation (LLC). No matter who wins the operating contract, UC-Bechtel or University of Texas-Lockheed Martin, the new LANL operator will be an LLC.

So, what to do with all of this extra money?

My modest proposal is to use the capital funds to bring all state K-12 facilities up to a higher standard of quality, along with building three regional science and math magnet high schools (one north, one south and one in the middle of the state). As for the increase in GRT, the state should spend the $100 million per year on the state’s K-12 teachers.

Although many tactics have been attempted in raising the per capita income in specific regions, the one tactic that consistently produces higher personal income is to increase educational standards (which is not to be confused with standardization through testing, but actual higher standards in facilities, curricula, and quality teachers). New Mexico has hovered for years in the bottom five of the fifty states in terms of education quality. This is an unbelievable abomination considering that New Mexico has the highest concentration of Ph.D.s, computing power, and government facilities of any state in the U.S.

It’s time the state higher education institutions and federal labs rub off on the general populous. These are easy answers to be sure, but difficult to implement unless the state legislature, the Govenor, regional stakeholders, parents, and lobbyist don’t commit to real change.

2005 Fortune Innovation Conference

30 Nov & 1 Dec New York City
Fortune magazine’s annual conference has focused the last couple of years on the topic of innovation. The first Fortune conference I attended was in NYC back in 2001, just a couple of weeks after the 911 attacks on New York and DC. That conference was all about the busted tech bubble, and featured Gary Hamel, who at the time was heralding Enron as a prototype for a wildly successful firm, one that moves quick to totally dominate new market opportunities.

You don’t hear much from Gary any more…wonder why?

In any case, back to innovation. The event was in the new Jazz Centre at the Time Warner building on Columbus Circle; much better than a hotel ball room. The Fortune staff went out of their way to ensure the two days stayed on time, that all the attendees had fun, and all were well fed. Not an easy feat with 1,000 people in attendance. The topics surrounded every conceivable aspect of innovation, but the speakers themselves could have been much better.

Here’s some of what I took away:
Sir Ken Robinson (http://www.speakers.ca/robinson_ken.aspx) pointed at that all successful organizations put innovation at their core; that when young, people believe much more in themselves and are less self conscious about being wrong; and that everyone is or can become creative (your job title might not make it sound that way, but that’s up to you to rectify the situation).

Change is being driven by technology and demography (the free flow of ideas and of people), and that the hard part of creating an innovation organization is to make these (and other valuable) concepts operational. Ken also said the most obvious but, for some unknown reason hard to grasp in the U.S., concept: education is the key to innovation and one must be careful to not confuse raising standards with standardization (such as standardization through testing).

Many of the speakers, including Fred Smith, FedEx founder & CEO and Scott Cook, Intuit (Quicken and QuickBooks) founder, innovate in the most simple manner. No rocket science nor engineered life forms were required for FedEx to talk the USPS into flying the overnight mail (and saving the Postal Service $300 million a year to boot).

I think the one thing all true innovators have in common is curiosity and a thirst for knowledge…about anything. So think about that the next time one of you guys tells me I’m boring because I know how the best Kona coffee beans have been trained to grow on vines like grapes.

The Fortune conference has inspired me to make innovation something that can be modeled and, more importantly, repeated. I’m fond of saying that marketing is a rigorous science with intentional inputs and predictable outputs. The idea of now modeling the process of innovation fascinates me.

I’ve been going to NYC for business for the last 15 years but, until this trip, hadn’t spent more than a day there in three years. Observations:

New York City isn’t a melting pot, it’s a blender;
The people there work very hard;
It’s as expensive as London (food, transportation, martinis);
New Yawkers are more paranoid than ever (especially after 911).

MIT Venture Capital Forum

I’m attending the MIT Venture Capital Forum this week-end in Cambridge, MA. Unlike other VC fests, this one is organized by the grad students at the MIT Sloan School of Management (http://mitsloan.mit.edu/). It’s not an opportunity for companies to pitch potential investors, but rather a chance for the regional venture capitalists to get together and chat about the state of their industry. Two observations are noteworthy:

The East Cost VCs seem to suffer from a bit of envy regarding their Left Coast brethren. Many comments and even a few discussion points focused on the lack of Left Coast funds making investments in East Coast companies. You would think the regional VCs would want a deeper pool from which to drink instead of having California interlopers come in and drive up the price (and therefore lower the returns) of the deals, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. This is example number 724 of the “grass is always greener” theorem espoused by Erma Bombeck.

The community around MIT has spawned some 10,000 firms, and the immediate area is ripe with biotech firms, but MIT and the Sloan School in particular still continue to look for ways to get more complete technology in the market place, to train entrepreneurs in business skills and knowledge, and to reinforce these facts with the investment community. Sloan has a small entrepreneurship program office that coordinates student and faculty activities, in many cases focusing on the large body of Sloan alumni…which they continue to educate and, more importantly, network with in order to place Sloan and MIT grads. None of this is original, but MIT does have enormous momentum.

Russell Siegelman, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (http://www.kpcb.com/) spoke at dinner Friday night about Kleiner reaching out to Asia for investment opportunities and about globalization/the “flat earth” in general. Russ made the point that they are two reasons to look overseas for business opportunities: 1. the quality of tech talent (and their associated one-third cost); 2. the emerging and potentially enormous market opportunities. While I can find as many examples of bad labor output from India, China, and Asia as good, I was struck by Russ’ optimism that the Asian workforce is getting better at producing engineered products and IP with higher and higher quality. (I’ll save my diatribe concerning whether earth really has, or is about to become, economically “flat” for another time.)

Russ said that venture funds can reach out to Asia in three ways: 1. spend a lot of time flying there (not sustainable), 2. hire someone on the ground and in country to help recruit and manage portfolio firms (risky, and of minimal use in extending the fund’s brand), 3. move someone from the firm to the country or region in question. Russ’ overall point is that he would “rather increase the firm’s awareness of emerging hot labor and market opportunities than not.”

I Hate Flying

I don’t so much fear flying as fear crashing. What I hate is being crammed into an aluminum tube and hurled across the country at 500 miles per hour. My flight today had a female pilot, which I much prefer. I don’t give in to stereotypes, but am pretty sure that unlike their male counterparts, female pilots are: 1. Much more nurturing, so one assumes less likely to blow off some critical task on the pre-flight checklist 2. less likely to have a drinking or habitual drug problem 3. much less likely to have a heart attack (but more likely to have a stroke) 4. Probably won’t be distracted thinking about whether their spouse will find out about last night’s indiscretion with a flight attendant.

Speaking of which, how much less can these in-flight waitresses do? Since the airlines have cut service back beyond the bone, flight attendants don’t have anything to do on a 4+ hour, cross country flight except toss out soft drinks and stand in the back complaining they don’t get paid enough and griping about their customers. Really, being a stew these days is akin to training someone to be a firefighter, then having them spend all of their time running a paper towel machine in a public restroom, waiting for it to catch on fire.

The in-flight movie was computer animated abomination that had Tom Hanks acting about 37 parts against a green screen …which was then animated to tell the story of a kid who gets yanked out of bed in the middle of the night by a Hanks character on the promise of being taken to the North Pole. Much too NAMBLA for my tastes…