Yahoo buying del.icio.us makes total sense. I have to admit that around the time Union Square invested in the company I didn’t really get it – I hadn’t understood the power of a user generated hierarchy. A few months ago I got a clue about it – late to the party, but at least there.

Congrats to Fred, Brad and to the del.icio.us team – nice work!

When I asked ealier this year how you view your news I didn’t exactly have this in mind, but now that I know it exists I can’t imagine any better way to stay informed.

Yes – those are your RSS feeds being printed out on toliet paper.  See the engadget link here.

Thanks to Ross for sending this over.

They guys at FeedBurner (note: Mobius portfolio company) have put up a great post entitled Feed for Thought: How feeds will change the way content is distributed, valued and consumed. The article is a great read – very thoughtful about where RSS has come from and where its going.

I was going to highlight a few points they made here, but the entire piece is a highlight and pulling stuff out won’t do it justice.  Click over and read it.

Last week a few of us played a little joke on our colleague Chris by putting a 6 foot tall inflatable lighted turkey in his driveway for him to find late one night as he came home.  He returned the favor a few days later by leaving it on my desk (fully inflated) early one morning.

See the pictures of what we’re now calling the ‘giant turkey’ below.

All this spurred a few turkey haiku’s which I thought in the spirit of the season I’d share with you (these were authored by me, Chris, my wife Greeley and friend Laura): great turkey surprise oh where will you show up next in some neighbor’s yard gobble gobble great turkey arrives each fall season here to all children’s joy giblets too large, hah! inflated turkey ego. pull the plug for now way too much turkey. tryptophan is kicking in. must go to sleep nowturkey day is near stuffing for the bird and me   better bring the TUMSwho cooked this turkey? so very dry and tasteless, please baste more often.

When I worked at Morgan Stanley in the mid 90’s we used to have a joke about the relationship between VP hours and analyst hours. The ratio of these hours was in the neighborhood of 7 to 1, so when your VP asked you to do an analysis or create something for a pitch book and said something like “ok – I know its 10pm, but this should only take you about an hour” you knew that you’d working until about 5am, give or take. I’ve found this relationship to be true of many lawyers as well (as in “I’ll get you this document in a few hours,” which typically translates to “I’ll get you this document at 11:59pm tonight”). I have the same problem on sell side M&A deals, which is to say that I’m always forgetting that they take longer than I expect them to. Mostly I forget that while I can control my side of a deal (at least to some extent), I can’t control the other side of a deal. Particularly when I’m working on selling a business, I tend to be more motivated to move quickly than the buyer (who obviously wants to do careful due diligence, may have other deals they are working on, etc.). While one still needs to push so a deal doesn’t drag on forever, I’d probably stress myself out if I remembered that deals always take longer than when I map them out in my head (ALWAYS) and that each deal has a different flow (most of which have some variation of a sine curve in terms of activity level, but each of which has both a different amplitude and frequency) and that sometimes one needs to just go with the flow rather than swim up stream.

I’ll put up a post in the next few weeks about things that you actually can do to keep a deal moving (starting with understanding what things you control and what things you don’t and spending your time working on the former rather than pounding your head against the wall on the latter), but I’m living through it right now and don’t have the stomach for much more on this topic at the moment. . .

See the other posts in my M&A series here.

Brad sent me an article a few days ago that described the very unplugged world of Warren Buffett (according to the article the most technologically advanced device he has in his office is a telephone, which he uses sparingly). It’s a pretty amazing read and reminded me of another article that was sent to me recently – this time by Dave Jilk – describing how technology is changing (negatively) the way people work (too distracted, shortening our attention span, ruining our vacations, etc.).

Rather than rant about people using cell phones in restaurants or checking e-mail in meetings, I’ll relate a personal story that reminded me that it’s not the technology that’s to blame, of course, its how you use it.

I was in the car with my wife one afternoon (I was driving) and my portable e-mail device (a Danger Hiptop) was buzzing with e-mails. I must have been expecting something that I really felt I needed to see right away because I started to glance down at my hiptop. My wife turned to me and asked if it would be helpful if she took the wheel (from the passenger seat) while I checked my e-mail. Clueless that she was 1) completely making fun of me; and 2) not even the slightest bit serious, I responded that this was a GREAT IDEA and went to pick up my hiptop and relinquish the wheel to her. My get a clue radar kicked in about that time and I realized that this was not what she actually had in mind .  Point well taken. . . .

I love the way the mind works. I spent years studying cognitive psychology, which was my college major (I was the psych geek who paid you $3 to sit in front of a computer for 10 minutes and take a test where what I told you I was testing for was not what I was testing for . . . ).

My dad sent me the following link, which is pretty fun.

http://www.patmedia.net/marklevinson/cool/cool_illusion.html

I’m involved in a lot of capital raising conversations – companies looking for money. One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how narrow minded many companies are in how they approach this process. Forget the obvious stuff about doing research on local VC firms and their investment focus to make sure you are a match before sending them your “next generation toaster oven/microwave” business plan (yes –  I actually received this plan) or targeting VCs that are particularly knowledgeable about your industry or have made money investing in businesses with similar characteristics – I’ll assume (wrongly) that most people already do that. I’m talking about treating interactions with potential funders as relationships – listening to what they have to say in response to your pitch, taking notes about what whatever it is that’s on their mind when you’re meeting with them and then creating some kind of database to capture this information and plan regular follow-up. Many entrepreneurs treat a VC pitch as a one shot opportunity rather than the potential start to a relationship. Since the typical result of these meetings is a turn-down the relationship starts and ends there – perhaps taken up again when its time for the next round of funding or if you happen to bump into each other somewhere. This is a huge mistake. David Beisel correctly points this out in his recent post on the things smart entrepreneurs do when interacting with VCs. The kind of periodic follow-up that David talks about in his post almost never happens in my experience. It’s a shame, too, because some of my fondest entrepreneur relationships have started with me turning down an investment in their company. Venture deals can take time to come together and someone who turns you down for round 1 may be in a position to invest in round 2 (or in round 1 itself if it takes a while to come together). Reaching out to VCs that showed interest in a way that is meaningful (and as David points out aren’t overly intrusive) can only lead to positive outcomes.

In talking with the VP of Sales of a company that I recently turned down for investment I told him that he should treat his interaction with me like he would that with a sales prospect. I was extremely explicit that I was not shutting the door and gave him specific reasons I wasn’t going to pursue an investment in his company right now. I pointed out that he wouldn’t stop pursuing a sale if the decision maker said ‘interesting but not now” and he shouldn’t make that mistake with me or with other VCs that he was taking to. Hopefully I’ll hear back from him one of these days . . .

My wife and I live with a toddler and as a result are becoming more familiar with the concept of “NO” – which, incidentally, I can now assure you can contain anywhere between 1 and 5 syllables, depending on the desired effect and emphasis. It got me thinking about a VC pet peeve of mine which is how shitty a lot of VCs are at turning companies down. I’m not talking about the form e-mail that VCs send out to pass on something that they don’t want to take a look at (we all send out these e-mails, don’t we ?!?) – I’m talking about companies that we spend some amount of time with (say at least one meeting, but often several) and decide not to invest in. I’ve experienced this from the other side of the table with some of our portfolio companies, much to my frustration. I probably go too far on this one, but when I turn a company down I typically like to have either a phone conversation or a face-to-face meeting (depending on how much time I’ve spent with them) and outline exactly why I’m turning them down. I don’t break-up on e-mail or by voice-mail. More importantly, I try to give a real reason, not the VC bullshit reason, why I’m not interested (which is to say that I’m never “not comfortable with the market size” or “don’t invest in early stage deals” for example; and certainly never simply avoid phone calls so I don’t have to have the conversation at all). This has led to a few awkward conversations (telling founders that I didn’t think they were the right CEO for a business for example) and plenty of push-back from entrepreneurs who didn’t agree with my analysis of their opportunity/product/way of going after a market. But I’d rather that than honing my bs skills and coming up with new and creative reasons for not investing in something.

If anyone out there has had particularly amusing experiences with getting turned down by a VC I’d love to hear about them.

By all measures my “date” with Ben Casnocha was great (see my original post here, his here). As he points out, you skip a lot of the get-to-know you bs when you’ve had such rich interaction before actually getting together (particularly reading each others blogs, which really do provide nice insight and context). If you’ve ever read Ben’s blog, you already know that he’s light-years ahead of most high school students and remarkably well rounded and thoughtful. From the start this was all pretty apparent (he actually bought my coffee, which sounds like a small thing, but I can assure you probably wouldn’t have crossed my mind when I was in high school). We had a wonderfully wide ranging conversation (which interestingly included a bunch of “I wrote about (or read about) this on my (your) blog . . . “). Of particular note was the concept that perhaps Ben should give ‘life college’ a try rather than going to a school for four years. Not sure his parents are into this, but it’s a great idea and, while I was definitely jaded by my own experience (which leads me to believe that people should probably go to college but skip business school, perhaps because that’s the route I took), I actually think that given Ben’s goals this may be a pretty interesting concept.

I wish I was as clued into life as Ben is when I was in high school (or college . . . or after college . . .).

We could have kept going for hours but unfortunately I had to get to another meeting. I know we’ll get together again to continue the conversation.

If you get a chance to meet Ben you should – he’s definitely doing great things. . .