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Memeo

Yesterday Memeo announced an $8.1m Series B funding led by Foundry. Memeo offers simple, elegant, but extremely powerful backup and synchronization capabilities for both the Windows and Macintosh platforms. I couldn’t be more excited about the Memeo opportunity, about the Memeo team or about our co-investor, G-51 (with whom we’ve teamed up with in past investments). And while I rarely judge the merits of an investment based on my personal experience with a product, I can say that having installed the product as part of our due diligence process I’ve been amazed with how powerful and simple to use the Memeo’s Life Agent. It’s one of those things you add to your technology stack and quickly realize that you can’t…

Sales is a science, not an art

Andy Blackstone had a great comment to my post yesterday on Atul Gawande’s New Yorker article about explicit behavior (in the case of the article, doctors using checklists). I’ve edited the comment slightly for clarity. An important concept in the article is that the checklists are not aimed at a specific condition but at an overall process in the ICU. One of the objections I often encounter in my consulting practice is “my business is different” – I’d contend that at the process level that’s most often not true. The resistance to adopting these checklists often comes from doctors that think the “art of medicine” is being threatened by the regimen of the checklist. In my practice, I see sales…

Skinny Songs!

My partner and friend Heidi Roizen has just gone public with her new venture. No – it’s not another tech start-up.  It’s Skinny Songs – a collection of music that she wrote and produced as a soundtrack to inspire those trying to lose weight.  Its part country, part rock, all attitude and extremely catchy (there are sample tracks on the site linked to above – my personal favorite is I think I’ll go to Saks). Heidi joked that she’s going to have to start wearing all black with lots of bling and air-kissing her friends now that she’s a media mogul.  In all seriousness, however, I’ve watched how hard Heidi has worked on this project over the summer and through…

I’ve given up on IM

Someone asked me today if I use IM any more – the answer is a resounding NO. Make that NO WAY. I used to think that IM was useful for short conversations but have completely changed my view on it and dropped using it altogether about 18 months ago. Here are some of my reasons for jumping off the bandwagon: As the number of connected devices I use increases, it became harder to keep my ‘status’ up to date. At any given moment I have at least one laptop online (sometimes two), my office tower and a mobile device. With my IM client on each of these, 1) it always looked like I was online somewhere and 2) I seemed…

Echo . . . echo? . . . echo??

No . . . I didn’t die . . . I just stopped blogging for about two months. This wasn’t part of a master plan or some kind of anti-social experiment. I got incredibly busy, was traveling every week and got behind. Something had to give and unfortunately it was blogging. Ok – enough excuses. I’m back. I’m as opinionated as ever. I’m going to tell you what I think about things (even if you don’t ask). Thanks for hanging in with me.  

Setting the record straight

But the limits of Y Combinator’s model remain unclear. A typical young tech company should be spending a little less than $40,000 a month, says Seth Levine, a venture capitalist at Foundry Group. Y Combinator gives companies a fraction of that, leaving entrepreneurs “eating ramen and not paying themselves,” he says. And 6% is a huge amount of equity to give up for such little money, he says. Although Levine has shared his expertise with TechStars, a new Colorado program that’s similar to Y Combinator, he says it’s rare to find a business with serious long-term prospects in such a program. While it’s great to get quoted in the national press, I actually laughed when I read this article in…

Is this an ad?

Plenty has been made of Google’s recently announced pay-per-action beta (where advertisers pay not for a user clicking over to their site, but only if they take some defined action such as filling out a web form, downloading a whitepaper or purchasing product). Few people (notable exception TechCrunch, although for some reason the thread doesn’t seem to have been discussed widely) are talking about something that was buried in the release: With this new pricing model, advertisers can create text or image ads in addition to using Google’s new text link ad format, which are brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher’s page. [emphasis added] So basically you can now disguise your advertising to look like…

The start-up office

I visited a company the other day that had a classic start-up office.  One big room with a ¾ wall separating out two workspaces, two guys, plastic folding tables for desks and a bookshelf that served as the printer stand, kitchen, library and server rack.  I love it!

Venture Capital at Altitude

Every year the Colorado Venture Capital Association (soon to morph into the Rocky Mountain Venture Capital Association after combining with similar associations in a few neighboring states) puts on the “it” conference for Colorado venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and the lawyers, bankers, search firms, etc. that support us – Venture Capital in the Rockies. I love this event – it’s a great chance to see the best of Colorado deal flow and it concentrates pretty much everyone in the region who has anything to do with venture in one place for the better part of two days with plenty of opportunities to connect, catch up, share ideas, gossip, etc (oh – and did I mention that the conference is in Beaver…