Jeff Clavier's Software Only

Pick Your VC Carefully... If You Can

Jeff, from SAP Ventures, has recently written an interesting post: Pick Your VC Carefully. A number of BlogoVCs have made reference and added interesting comments to it (Ed, Brad, Fred, Marc, Stephen).

I would tend to agree with most of Jeff's points, and they are certainly very valid for entrepreneurs to be aware of. The issue of alignment across investors (or lack thereof) is typically a critical problem that has sunk companies that might have had a chance to survive otherwise. However, when I read this post, I had to think a couple of times "Yeah right, that is true but only if have the luxury of picking your VC".

Patently amusing

Good Morning Silicon Valley (itself a must read - via email) points to an amusing opinion from a Texas judge denying a motion for reconsideration in a trademark case.

That led me to discover Patently Obvious, a blog focusing on intellectual property (patents, trademarks,...) which has the great merit of being easy to read, and mind you, understand (at least a bit). Very useful...

And I had never seen a device to remote control a horse...

Colo facilities: don't trust those generators, and backup your backup plans

OK, I should now be in bed. But as I was browsing my blogroll, I noticed Dave Sifry's post relating his not-so-cool week-end spent fixing Technorati's infrastructure due to a fire at his colo. Unusual ? Unique ? Hardly so...

This must be the tenth story I hear about a colo facility that had (supposedly) all the required redundancy to "insure" reliability, including the (infamous) Diesel generators that kick in to take over short term UPSs. The issue is that those generators never seem to kick in (I hope that hospitals use a different brand than buildings and datacenters).

One of my former portfolio companies, an ASP, that did not go public on the issue but wrote to its rather unhappy clients, faced exactly the same issue, and the note from the CEO contained very similar statements to David's. Here is a brief excerpt, in which I only removed named references:

On Monday morning at 9.45am there was a complete power outage at ..., our datacenter provider. Although our Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPSs) were triggered and ran, ...’s diesel generators failed to start before the batteries in the UPSs ran out. As a result, all our servers abruptly lost power. The power was restored by 10.45am, but some severe damage had been done to our infrastructure by the abrupt power failure, and the surge which took place when power was restored.
[Pages of detailed explanations deleted]
On behalf of the whole ... team, I would like to apologize most sincerely to our clients for this severe lapse in our service. Rest assured that we will be working extremely hard in the coming days and weeks to review every aspect of the resilience of our service, and to ensure that an incident like this cannot happen again.

Interestingly similar, ain't it ?

As to the underlying issue, the disaster recovery plan, it seems to be a common mistake to believe that having some level of redundancy leads to reliability... which means that a lot of time is generally spent on designing a technical infrastructure (comms, power, servers, disks, backups,...) that will "always" work, as opposed to defining the processes and procedures that will be applied if the s..t hits the fan, the database is completely corrupted, and servers aren't able to restart. Ie when Murphy's law kicks in (aka the "buttered slice of bread theorem" - or "Theoreme de la Tartine Beurree", which states that if you put some spread on a slice of bread, and the slice falls, it has a %$@^%*$ tendency to repeatedly fall on the wrong side).

Carpe cookiem

Joe Kraus, one of the co-founders of Excite, and then DigitalConsumer.org, has been welcomed to the blogosphere by a number of A-list bloggers (David, Jeff, Ross) so you should be aware of his blog if you are interested in entrepreneur/VCs anecdotes.

His latest posts (Take a Cookie, and Persistence Pays Part 1 and Part 2) are extremely relevant (and so true!) for (first time) entrepreneurs. Even though one can always say that things are different now compared to 10 years ago, some of these lessons still hold true:
- Raising money is neither easy nor quick, especially the first time you go about it (18 months in Excite's case - and they did sign customers and got revenues along the way). And if it is available, the money might come in a different form, structure, pre-money and terms than you had dreamt about. Unless you have another choice (like bootstrapping with consulting gigs), you'll have to accept how the market perceives (and prices) your idea.
- Schmoozing and tactical flip-flops don't replace a business plan and a solid value proposition, but they are also part of the toolset of an entrepreneur. Starts never align quite right and therefore a lot of flexibility, and ability to seize opportunities as they present themselves, will be required. And when someone recommends you meet some he or she knows, and you don't see why you should take the meeting, take the meeting (or the cookie) anyway...
- As we say in French, "as long as there is life, there is hope": it takes a lot of courage and tenacity to be an entrepreneur, and assessing when a "No" might not be the end of it is necessary. Though, at the same time, being honest and knowing when to stop and get back to the drawing board is critical for VCs AND entrepreneurs (hey, we never said that his stuff was easy).

Happy reading, I hope that you'll find it worth your while.

A work around for the "HTTP protocol violation" error in NewsGator

If you are, like me, a user of NewsGator, and, like me, an avid fan of the Gillmor Gang, you have not been able to read the Gang's blog (or the blog of the producer, Doug Kaye) for a while due to an "HTTP violation" error.

Having checked that those blogs actually contained new posts, I have found this work around on Andrew's blog:

Create a file called outlook.exe.config in the same directory as Outlook (on one of my machines, this is in c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11). Then add the following text to this file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="Windows-1252"?>
<configuration>
  <system.net>
    <settings>
       <httpWebRequest useUnsafeHeaderParsing="true" />
    </settings>
  </system.net>
</configuration>

Stop Outlook (make sure it's really stopped - Outlook takes a few seconds, at least, to truly stop), and restart it.

Note that you might get a popup stating "This operation failed" the first time you try to restart Outlook. The following attempt works. This worked for me on Windows 2000 and Windows XP (latest SPs), and Outlook 2003.

His post actually contains an explanation of the issue (but I doubt you care). Thank you Andrew!

Should NewsGator change its name because of a potential "Gator" association? Not sure...

Greg Reinacker, the CEO of NewsGator, is asking feedback as to whether the "Gator" connotation is negatively impacting the image of his business, and whether he should consider changing the name of his company. As too many of us already know, Gator was the previous name of Claria, the company known for installing some "spyware" on your computer at the same time as (supposedly) useful tools like weather alert managers, calendars, etc... Anybody interested about reading more on the subject can visit this information center (which includes information about the removal of such "tools"). Net net, Gator is a "loaded" name and certainly one that does not lead to users' confidence.

Geico might make a bundle by suing Yahoo and Google (Are Amazon and others watching ?)

Update: Google actually won a key ruling in this case (via John Battelle), whilst Overture/Yahoo opted for an out of court settlement (of an undisclosed amount as I write this).

Cnet has reported on the decision of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to allow Geico to move to trial a trademark infringement lawsuit it brought against Yahoo (actually Overture) and Google. The issue at stake is the fact that competitors of Geico bought "Geico" as a keyword through both sites to place ads for their products.
This is certainly not a novelty, since Google has been battling this issue in other courts (including German and French ones).

Excellent (and Gentle) Google Satire

Like many, I am happily resting from the overdose of Google IPO news, commentary, rants, praise'm, burn'm... and the continuous stream of information that was broadcasted, RSS'ed and printed for our benefit over the past few weeks.

However, John Battelle is pointing to a very funny piece from Paul Ford: The Banality of Google. It is worth relaxing for 5 minutes and reading it...

An Ultra reliable DNS is key to your web infrastructure (and Amazon seems to agree)

It is with great personal satisfaction that I have spotted that Amazon.com's DNS entry was now pointing to UltraDNS servers (like softtechvc.com, linkedin.com, and 8000 other companies and 26 TLDs). The press release just came out, announcing that Amazon had selected UltraDNS to optimize its Web site infrastructure.

Why is DNS important ? Because, as most of you know, it is like the door knob to an Internet presence. If it does not work, you can't get in your web site (the famous error 404 that you get when a browser can't reach a page) or receive emails. Unfortunately this happens more often than one would like to think: DDOS attacks, operational errors, and simple mistakes lead to unavailability of Internet resources for minutes, hours or even days (in the worst case, it can take up to 48 hours to update one's DNS entry on all Internet name servers).

Let me put some money in my Skype account!!!!

Like Loic , I have had trouble crediting my SkypeOut account with my credit card. My issue was that I was trying to use my US credit card whilst travelling in France. The payment system rejected it on the basis that users connecting from France (through a French IP range ?) should not use a US credit card, according to a very polite online help desk rep.

Too bad Skype seems to have a glitch in this piece of back-end system, key to converting their users into paying customers. However, I am a big fan and will try again later... or make sure people I want to call move to Skype as well.

Update: Skype has fixed a buffer overrun flaw in version 10.0.100 of its Windows software. Make sure to download and install this fix (i.e version 10.0.100 and up).