I ' ve said it many times before, but people make or break any company... My " foxhole " post highlighted that teams grow in importance during the tough times... However, team cohesion doesn ' t just happen, it takes work... When I first left college as an engineer, I ' ll admit, team building exercises at IBM seemed hokey and hardly worth the effort... As I grew into management roles and then moved into venture capital, the value of team building became more obvious... As a VC I ' ve had the pleasure of witnessing over 40 different entrepreneurs and senior managers build teams and I can honestly say the most productive teams, after exceeding 10 people, came from concerted senior management attention to build familiarity, values, vision and passion among teammates... What have you done this year to build team cohesion, and, in particular, what have you done since October, when the economy injected fear and uncertainty into your team?... … View Post »

"I will be watching you and if I find that you are trying to corrupt my first born child, I will bring you down, baby... -- Jack Byrnes, Meet the Parents A San Jose, CA hosting company, McColo Corp, that many security experts claim is linked to spam, botnets , cyberattacks and child pornography; was taken offline yesterday by its internet access providers... Another spammer going down wouldn ' t be big news, but the sheer magnitude of McColo ' s impact caught my eye... McColo servers are said to host botnets including Mega-D , Srizbi , Pushdo, Rustock and Warezov ; and manage Torpig and Sinowal trojans, among others... According to MSNBC ' s coverage : "Multiple security researchers have recently published data naming McColo as the host for all of the top robot networks or "botnets," which are vast collections of hacked computers that are networked together to blast out spam or attack others online... Collectively, these botnets appear to be responsible for sending roughly 75 percent of all spam each day, according to the latest stats from Marshal, a security company in the United Kingdom that tracks botnet activity" Since being taken offline, security experts (and internet users) are reporting significant drops in spam activity... I ' ve always liked the investment potential of internet security and network management, the value of that sector just ticked up again..... … View Post »

If you didn ' t catch the Southeastern Medical Device Association ' s event earlier this week at Mercer, another is right around the corner, closer to home... SEMDA ' s event description states: "Physicians accepting large sums of money for their consultative roles with life science companies have become headline news, resulting in national guidelines, proposed regulations and new state laws... (via Synogen) Let ' s get to know each other, Join FVB , my venture capital blog community!... … View Post »

By now you should have read plenty of entrepreneur/VC advice on surviving in the post-mortgage crisis world... I won ' t rehash it here, but 2009 will be tough and today ' s difficult decisions will separate the next batch of startup winners and losers... One topic I haven ' t seen covered much is the interpersonal opportunity that these tough times bring -- for entrepreneurs and investors... During that time I worked with a diverse set of entrepreneurs and co-investors... This is when the age-old question "Who do you want in your foxhole?"... has real-life implications... An entrepreneur whose only thought is to request more funding to bridge the tough market, can be deadly... Investors or entrepreneurs who can ' t pick up the phone to each other and grow their relationship during times like these, never will... … View Post »

just noticed some slick Halloween icons float thru my twitter feed and chased down these tweets from J. Adam Moore: " Whoa, I just shat a bunch of halloween icons all over my twitter page... 18 minutes ago from web 19 minutes ago from web 20 minutes ago from web I feel like 21 minutes ago from web " It looks like various character patterns will result in icons in your tweets... UPDATE: It appears Hajime KOBAYASHI is involved somehow, as the Halloween twitter image table is hosted on his site... Let ' s get to know each other, Join FVB , my venture capital blog community!... … View Post »

Guest Post by: Mike Schmitt, MD Life Science Analyst and Editor of the Florida BioDatabase Mike can be reached at M2Schmitt@aol.com Free Money for life science entrepreneurs with up to $100,000 in cash and services!... For those not familiar with this organization, SEBIO is a non-profit public/private partnership to promote the development of the life sciences throughout the Southeast... One of the exciting events at this conference is the announcement of the winner of the annual Bio/Plan Competition... This is intended to identify and support newly created venture-fundable entities in the life sciences (the majority of the applicants are from research universities and research labs throughout the Southeast)... the SEBIO website): The principal investigator/entrepreneur completes a short application outlining their concept and the associated opportunity in broad terms... A selection committee chooses 10 semifinalists and pairs each with a team of seasoned professionals who will serve as mentors to the principals... The group ' s goal will be to further develop the concept and surround it with a first-class business plan... In the past, the application process began in February... … View Post »

Google ' s better-than-expected 3rd Quarter earnings last week was welcome news to a nervous market and a valley on the verge of panic... A: Across all categories of expenses people have been very diligent.....I... am not aware of a change on the ad partnership side that would result in a margin change... While there may not have been a noteworthy AdSense partner margin change this quarter, the longer-term trend is eye-opening... Gross margins of 25% are already considered low in technology circles, shave off another 5% and I start wondering if something important is happening in GOOG ' s Network (e.g. competition for publishers)... The largest is probably eBay, although EBAY provides much more marketplace transparency for its participants... Therefore sellers are getting 91% of each sale and EBAY is getting 9%... Note, although EBAY may use other terms for gross or net revenue, using Gross Merchandise Sales provides the best apples-to-apples comparison to Gross Network Revenues in an advertising marketplace like Google -- one marketplace sells physical goods, the other sells advertising... … View Post »

"Celsia Tehnologies is developing new coolers that will send conventional heat-pipe technology into oblivion" I like the sound of that, and it ' s not even my words... The announcement was also covered by Anton Shilov at X-bit labs ... Celsia CEO, Joe Formichelli, had this to say about the AMD efforts: "Working with AMD, we were able to meet all of the design criteria for a new GPU cooler... Setting aside all the technology details, Celsia ' s vapor chamber innovations mean higher performing graphics processors, which means better graphics, virtual worlds and gaming... Although Moore ' s law suggests we ' ll continue packing more processing power into chips, keeping that power from burning up your chips, graphics cards and laps will require comparable advances in cooling... Let ' s get to know each other, Join FVB , my venture capital blog community!... … View Post »

When I first invested into IZEA , I liked the parallel between Google ' s sponsored search (pioneered by GoTo/Overture) and IZEA ' s sponsored content... Google ' s sponsored search pays for all the other cool free stuff they offer, and is the foundation for much of the internet ecosystem -- it ' s arguably the most successful online business model to date... However, there was always a missing piece in my comparison -- sponsored search was offered on a performance-based model and sponsored content was offered on a pay-per-post model... Although pay-per-post is a natural for the blogosphere, with many blog jobs paying on that model, it ' s most appropriate for a subset of marketing goals -- brand and media/buzz... I also happen to believe performance marketing will continue to take a larger and larger share of the marketing buy -- particularly as the broader markets tighten and marketers want more bang for their buck... IZEA just announced SocialSpark Affiliate Opportunities -- sponsored posts that are compensated on a cost-per-action basis ... For that I ' d share a dirty little secret about blogosphere affiliate marketing -- despite all the uproar about disclosure on pay-per-post sponsored content, multi-billion dollar affiliate networks have ignored reader disclosure to date... All of this is delivered within SocialSpark ' s existing blogger/advertiser marketplace, including advanced segmentation and analytics... … View Post »