The Post Money Value

Comodo and Other Free Goodies (CeBIT)

I've been seeing some interesting things on laptops in the various booths that are manned by folks from the various countries around the world here at CeBIT.  In many countries, buying mainstream software is somewhat out of the question because of cost or sometimes the export restrictions of various nations.

Here are three such observations:

Comodo was on lots of machines at the virus/firewall product of choice.  Products are free and seem to have reasonable reviews.

EULAlyzer.  This was pretty funny, actually.  A guy in the LinuxPark area (Hall 5) was using a Windows machine and this weird product to show evil licenses that corrupt companies use.  Sure enough, this product exists in a free and pro version.  The OMG antics were hilarious but the product might be useful to you.

Buzzword. Maybe I need to get out more.  Am I the only guy who didn't know Adobe wants to prove you can do word processing in a flash app? They do and the folks from Serbia showed it to me. Not bad.  I would have expected this to be done in Flex but they bought these folks so, who knows.  It's interesting.

More CeBIT stories coming up.

For the Road Warrior

I've placed my order.

Via PC Mag read on Zino and clipped using the snipping tool on my ASUS Tablet Laptop PC.  (Because everybody asks!)

Gary Gygax - RIP

Dungeons & Dragons.  It got me hooked on a number of interesting things in the world of computers and gaming. Gary Gygax, the co-creator of D & D, passed away at age 69.  You can read about him and his contributions to computing in a great article by Will Greenwald here.  Many of you 'kids' probably don't know just how important this stuff was in the early days.  As I walked around the CeBIT gaming hall, tons of this stuff simply would not have been possible but for the early folks like Gary.

You've earned the rest, sir.

Just Say No (Nicely)

With the No Harm, No Foul meetings in full swing for 2008,I am in a position of saying no quite often. The one thing I've found in the seven years of doing this gig is that saying no, while not particularly the fun part of the job, is sometimes just as important as the yes.

Consider this no from last week:

"Sorry for the delay in responding. Thank you for coming by JLA to let me see what you are up to. I was impressed with you and your presentation. I did speak to my partners about this during our Partners Meeting and we are going to pass. I think you are a very good CEO. Where I got hung up was on the business focus as we discussed. I’m not at all suggesting I’m right, just being transparent [....]. It’s cool, interesting, but it has the issues we talked about.

Again, thanks for thinking of JLA. Hopefully, I’ll be wrong and you’ll get filthy rich.

>R<"

The company was interesting and the CEO was pretty sharp. We had a difference of opinion on what the execution and focus should be. I said, here is what would excite me as what you are doing, today, doesn't do it for me. The email above didn't re-hash the conversation rather it was relating the why back to the meeting.

The key points I want to make here are these:

1. The CEO had a plan and was looking for money to support that plan. I wasn't it, for sure, we because I didn't buy into the plan.
2. I could be wrong and really the decision point belonged to management and not some suit (aka me).
3. This happened within days without the 'let's continue the dialog' nonsense and with some mutual respect all around. I got a nice note back.
4. I could be wrong. I'm a user group of one. It's not my area of expertise. I play with cards I'm dealt.
5. We stayed away from "change to this and I'll fund you nonsense" as that is a bad strategy for both sides.
   

Venture Capital types often times make the ugly mistake of trying to be serious know it alls. Some would call it an over abundance of arrogance. You, as management, need to get data points/feedback and then drive the bus. I am not supposed to be driving the bus. I was impressed with this guy's ability to have a very engaging conversation with me while at the same time staying on message showing a true belief in his ideas, the strategy, execution, etc. In the end, our firm decided to pass but we gave our detailed feedback (not it the email above, I know) which hopefully was useful. The no was 'fast' and the CEO was invited to come by anytime, etc.

The no part of this job can be helpful if we, as VCs, take the time to cough up some meat around the no which might actually be useful.

[side/random note: This blog post is coming to you via Firefox on my iMAC using the scribefire plug-in. Pretty cool, actually, but how on earth do MAC people type/compose text without the use of the home/end keys taking you to the end/beginning of a sentence. Painful.]