Hospital Corners

As the chill of the winter solstice creeps into our homes, am I the only one who likes to gather up the blanket around my body for warmth? We all shift positions at night, and I know that as my limbs wander, I need my down-feathered companion to effortlessly move with me. So who, then, was the demented Nazi that invented hospital corners?

Surely the evil goddess Insomnia herself cursed us mortals with those tightly tucked in corners that pin us down for the count, relentlessly pressing down upon our toes. And just as clearly, she has charged her minions in Hotel Housekeeping to prosecute the nightly terror. Euphemistically deemed a “turn-down service”, their mission is to (i) maximize tension in the sheets just prior to bedtime; (ii) heap layers of heavy bedcovers upon the real estate designated for our feet—defying us to handle the germy, never-been-washed bedspread ourselves; and (iii) deposit tasty (but caffeinated!) chocolate on our nightstands to pharmaceutically reinforce wakefulness.

What else is there to do but squeeze into bed and try to kick the quilted bed-weight off with our feet, racing to find some mobility in there before the maids’ handiwork crushes our lungs? And then the hardest part: wedging my whole body down as far as I can go for maximum leverage so I can execute the leg press of my life to separate the top sheet from those damned hospital corners. It’s actually a good workout, though I often fear that my femurs will snap in the process. “Did you break your leg skiing?” they will ask, and I will answer, No, I was subdued by linen.

Can technology save us? I have developed an extensive road map around this investment hypothesis but I have yet to encounter any new technology powerful enough to overcome the hospital corner. Not even a web2.0 travel site that ranks hotels for Flexible Bedding.

No, like any terrible plague, hospital corners can only be remediated through prayer. So please join me in this bedtime hymn…

“Oh merciful and all-cheesy Flying Spaghetti Monster!
Tonight, on the longest night of the year, your noodly children
beseech you to deliver us from Insomnia’s paralyzing clutches.”

Amen, and good night.

Blogged with Flock

SaaSy Security Suits SMB

In 2006, even as overall venture investing in the U.S. expanded 12% over 2005, venture investment in security startups that year plummeted more than 50% (Venture Source). It’s no secret that too many "best-of-breed" startups are chasing the ever more elusive enterprise IT security budget. And while hackers have shifted their sights to the juicier consumer segment--selling private credentials to ID thieves and renting bots to spammers--IT departments have resolved that their checklist of must-have security products is long enough. They no longer crave super-duper startup technology, turning instead to the large vendors (Symantec, McAfee, Cisco...) for integration, vendor viability, and security that's, well, good enough. A few pioneers like Arcsight and Tripwire have reached critical mass in the large enterprise market, but the majority of security startups today struggle to sustain field sales reps with less than a million dollars a month in sales. Now that the VCs have turned off the fuel tap, these babies just won't make it off the runway.

So why did my partners at Bessemer just last month let me cut the biggest check of my career ($24 million) in another business IT security company?

According to surveys conducted by the Computer Security Instiutute (CSI), employees of large corporations naturally enjoy far more extensive levels of information security than in businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees. Not only are the corporate PCs more rigorously updated with anti-spyware signatures, but IT locks them down inside a fortress of intrusion prevention systems, application firewalls, policy compliance agents, encrypted SANs, vulnerability scanners, VPNs, etc. Obviously, it takes a large IT shop to assess, integrate, deploy and manage that kind of infrastructure--the kind you don't find in a 200-person medical clinic.

And yet small and medium sized businesses (SMB's) own the majority of business PCs, inviting computer parasites that thrive in vulnerable hosts, armed with admin privileges! Doesn't it bother the SMB owners that they spoil internet hygiene for everyone?

Perhaps not, but contrary to what many believe, SMBs understand full well that they face the same risks and regulations as large corporations. In fact, the CSI survey included a surprising result: even though small businesses lack the IT resources to deploy most security technologies, they spend as much as 8 times what the Fortune 5000 spend for security per capita! I suppose it's because their product choices are limited by their VARs, and each invoice they pay represents a tiny fraction of the vendor's revenue, so SMBs enjoy no pricing leverage at all. Furthermore, the "scalable" appliances they buy (designed for 10,000 Citibank employees) don't amortize well over a law
firm's 300 PCs.

This unmet market need represents an enormous opportunity for the new generation of security companies developing on-demand solutions, or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Instead of deploying their own servers and infrastructure, SMBs can now subscribe to security solutions priced by the drink (so we can buy a quart of milk instead of the cow). The simpler deployment alllows SaaS vendors to replace their field reps with web and telephone sales, so now they can afford to sell smaller accounts.

Indeed, the first generation of security SaaS has fared remarkably well, and I've been fortunate to participate as an investor: Verisign's SSL business trounced Entrust, and Postini (now Google, as of yesterday) thrived in the densely crowded spam filter market. Qualys leads the market for vulnerability assessment, and Cyota quickly dominated the banking security sector (before RSA bought it). Counterpane pioneered security monitoring, but performed only moderately well because we focused on high end security instead of easy and affordable deployment. Meanwhile, several security SaaS winners I didn't fund, like Websense and Riptech, now populate my anti-portfolio of lost opportunities.

Unfortunately, I don't think we'll see too many more winners, because consolidation will come and go faster this time around. Even more than large corporations, SMBs will gravitate toward suites, rather than hire IT resources to buy subscriptions and manage portals from multiple vendors (Who Has Time For This?). They won't be easily sold on whiz-bang novelty.

That's why the vendor(s) who can integrate security services from soup to nuts will ultimately dominate the SMB security market. The winner(s) will pay once to acquire a customer but sell multiple services, pushing down sales costs as well as prices. Meanwhile, the incumbents (Symantec, Cisco...) are stuck in the licensed software world, and they can't patiently invest in building recurring revenue streams when Wall Street values them at normal software multiples (In his most recent earnings call Larry Ellison proclaimed that he can't justify investment in a SaaS business given the lower up-front margins.) So the field is open for new entrants to integrate on-demand services for SMBs who want a single portal to manage their security.

Of course, no single company can develop a winning product in every category, and so the winner(s) will have to grow through acquisition, following in Symantec's footsteps. The early favorite in this race is my latest investment, Perimeter eSecurity. Slowly and surely, Perimeter has acquired and integrated nine SaaS companies, fully integrating a portfolio of over 50 services that the Company supplies to several thousand businesses. Their portal manages AV, anti-spyware, spam filters, content filters, VPNs, firewalls, application firewalls, IDS, IPS, remote backup, email archiving, Exchange hosting with encrypted web access, vulnerability assessment, monitoring, and many other services. Nothing else out there comes close, and customers like it. Perimeter's own organic growth has financed the acquisitions--all except the last one, USA.Net, creating the opportunity for Bessemer and Goldman Sachs to invest.

Whether or not this particular bet pays off, SaaS promises a major disruption for the industry and its investors. Starting new companies to develop more and more advanced technology will never solve the security problems of our local accountants, banks and realtors. The internet remains woefully insecure--not because our technology is insufficiently advanced, but because it's insufficiently deployed.

Blogged with Flock

Blogged with Flock

There Once Was A Founder Named Scott

I've been asked three times now for the text of my toast at last night's closing dinner for the Postini/Google deal. Here it is (the heroes mentioned in this ballad are founder Scott Petry, CEO Quentin Gallivan, board director Ryan Mcintyre, and lead investor John Johnston):

There once was a founder named Scott
Who invented a messaging bot
That filtered out spam--
be it virus or scam--
Now we never get spam (not a lot).

John, who led us with class,
Thought a quick IPO would be crass.
But Cowan kept cryin'
To Quentin and Ryan
Which gave John a pain in the ass.

For spam and archive retrieval
Google came, and caused upheaval!
Are we now Googlini,
Postoogle, Gostini?
All they told us is just: Don't Be Evil.

Congratulations and thanks to the Postini team for executing so well and for inviting Bessemer to be a partner in your business.

Blogged with Flock

A Carbon Footprint Reduction Plan

Today, my partners and I announced an extensive plan to:

• offset 100 percent of our firm's estimated 728 tons of carbon-dioxide equivalent emissions beginning this year;
• to purchase offsets for our young portfolio companies (the dozen or so with 15 or fewer employees, and probably 3 to 5 more startups each year); and
• to reduce our total carbon emissions 25 percent by 2013 (and continue to purchase carbon credits to offset the balance).

We follow in the tradition of our namesake, Sir Henry Bessemer, whose inventive process dramatically reduced both the carbon and the energy required to refine steel. The culture and values of a business most often take root early in its life cycle, so we will instill environmental awareness in startups at the time of inception. Our goal is to fund a new generation of companies committed to constructive carbon policies that reduce the harmful emissions which cause global warming. And our hope is that other investment firms will follow suit.

Justin Label (head of Bessemer's CleanTech practice):
 

"While we have set aggressive targets, we also recognize that energy is critical to the economy and that for the foreseeable future, most energy will have a carbon footprint. Therefore, being 'carbon neutral' is not our ultimate goal. Rather, we hope this initiative will serve as a way to stay engaged on carbon issues and add to the pool of capital available for creative solutions."

Blogged with Flock

Vimo's TV campaign

with real customer testimonials...

Blogged with Flock

Scratching the Surface at Microsoft

This morning I got to play with a prototype unit of Microsoft Surface. The new gadget addicts among you have already seen videos of it, featuring families and friends seamlessly sharing their digital content across cameras and phones. The concept intrigues, but the actual experience exceeded my expectations, in a Wow-I-Want-This! kind of way.

Infra-red cameras beneath the Surface track physical objects like fingers, mobile devices, paint brushes and "optical tags," so Surface can engage the user in new kinds of applications with physical movements and objects. But more importantly, those applications can be used by more than one person at the same time, enabling a level of collaboration and play that, psychologically, cannot be achieved through separate networked computers. For example, the paint program and the photo manager accommodate simultaneous actions on different parts of the Surface. I imagined an implementation of Flock on Surface where users branch off the same page in different directions, sliding their discoveries back and forth. The most fun example of a physically collaborative app was the video jigsaw puzzle, enabled by marked lucite tiles that trigger videos beneath them for assembly into a single image. Two of us worked together to identify the right position, orientation, and side of each piece (when the tile is on the wrong side, the video snippet is reversed).



I can also attest that the Surface handily withstands Coke spills. (What can I say? I was feeling naughty.)

The platform obviously does have challenges to overcome, such as initial manufacturing cost, security friction in pairing mobile devices to it, an immature developer community, and the lack of power outlets in the middle of our living room floors. But the Microsoft folks seem to have lined up enough retail and hotel partners to nurse the baby platform through its early growing pains. By Q4 next year, you'll have seen units deployed in public places (and, with any luck, my family room).

Blogged with Flock

How I Lost 160 Pounds

Yesterday I was free of Earth's gravity for 8 full minutes aboard G-Force 1, the airline of X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis that induces weightlessness through parabolic flight. Parabolic flights have been used for decades to train astronauts (and shoot film scenes like in Apollo 13), and G-Force has recently completed its 100th flight (an important milestone for me as I assessed the risk of this adventure).

Esther Dyson, an active supporter of commercial space filght and an investor in the business, had recruited Second Life founder Phil Rosedale and VC Chris Hadsell to try out this experience, and Chris in turn recruited me. I figured that if Stephen Hawking could do it, so can I. Still, I was quite anxious leading up to the flight, certain that I would spark a puke fest on board--but a single dose of scopalamine completely warded off the nausea. (Warning: scopalamine is also a truth serum, so never operate a blog while medicated!)

G-Force 1 is a hollowed out 727-200 with a re-inforced steel frame, cushy mats along the bottom, no windows, and 30 seats way in the back. After a brief training video, we boarded the aircraft and 15 minutes after taking off we reached air space off the coast where the FAA allows G-Force to swoop up and down like a roller coaster.

For the climbs, we lay down still on the mats, barely able to lift our limbs as the plane's acceleration exerted 1.8g on our bodies. I found the feeling quite restful--not unlike being pinned down by my kids sleeping on top of me. As the plane started to crest the first time, the pilots followed a course that induced "Martian gravity", or 1/3 Earth gravity. For the next 30 seconds, we all performed stunts like one-armed push-ups.

As Peter called out "Feet Down" we all found a place on the mat for the next climb. the next two parabolas were shaped to induce lunar gravity, or 1/6 that of Earth's. During these episodes we easily pushed ourselves to a standing position with our fingers, and leapt through the cabin like gold medal gymnasts.

The next dozen parabolas all simulated zero gravity. For the first one we simply enjoyed the serenity of floating. In the second parabola we released M&Ms in the air and floated around trying to catch them. Another time we squeezed globs of water out of our bottles, and watched them float around--some of them into our mouths--like levitating soap bubbles. Once we played catch--with other passengers, who curled up into balls as we tossed them through the cabin. Once I launched off the bulkhead to fly like Superman through the cabin, and another time I just sat on the ceiling. I completed a full circle by crawling up the walls and over the ceiling, and I accomplished a quintuple somersault in the air. And each time we heard "Feet Down" we'd play a variation of musical chairs, scrambling for floor space before gravity kicked in.

The afternoon was thrilling and eye-opening. I had the chance to experience something I had only dreamed of, and without the risk of a rocket launch. It was fun, pure and simple, and I highly recommend you try it.

Blogged with Flock

Experiencing Nature

My family didn't pick the Big Island of Hawaii to be adventurous--it was supposed to be a relaxing vacation. But this morning our jet lag awoke us before dawn to see meteors relentlessly pelt the earth's atmosphere. During the day we couldn't venture outdoors as high winds rehearsed for tomorrow's visit by Hurricane Flossie with 120+ MPH gusts. And then about 15 minutes ago, an earthquake registering somewhere between 5 and 6 on the Richter scale jostled our dinner, chasing us out onto the windy lanai.

We find ourselves in mortal danger from meteorites, earthquakes, flash floods and high winds. But as Maxwell Smart always said, "And loving it!"

Blogged with Flock

Arnold's Angels

Driving up scenic highway 280 yesterday reminded me of my first, glorious day ever in California, when my friend Ken Rudin recruited me to Oracle. (Ken, who was also my T.A. in CS141 Hardware Architecture, now runs Lucidera a SaaS B.I. startup.) Ken confessed to me that on his first day in California, he had mis-understood some advice that if he wanted to take the highway, "he could drive up to 80."

So that's what I was doing in the fast lane when suddenly my car started shaking as though I was driving on rubble. I tried changing to a non-rubbly lane but my car still shook like the '89 world series. It finally dawned on me that the problem might not be the road, so I pulled onto the shoulder as wisps of smoke drew my attention to the few remaining shreds of tire that had once protected my rear left wheel.

I smoothly finished the phone call I was on, yielding no hint of a problem and steeling myself to change the tire as traffic whizzed by. But just as I said my goodbye, a shining white tow truck pulled up behind me. At first I thought I was in for a negotiation. I certainly didn't need a tow, but perhaps I could enlist some assistance...

Well, there turned out to be no need for negotiation. The driver Steve Pauley politely introduced himself and the Freeway Service Patrol--a fleet of 83 contracted tow truck operators patrolling 550 miles of Bay Area freeways during peak traffic for motorists in need of assistance. Sponsored by C.H.P. and Caltrans, the Freeway Service Patrol tows disabled vehicles, supplies gasoline to poor planners, and tapes hoses and refills radiators all for free. When Steve saw my problem, he immediately descended from his chariot, jacked up my car, and installed my spare tire faster than I could say, "Now what does this doo-hickey do again?"

The good Samaritan accepted my thanks, but refused to accept a gratuity. I couldn't have been more impressed by the whole experience. It was yet another wonderful day in California, as glorious as my first nearly 20 years ago. Maybe this year I really will file those state tax returns!

Blogged with Flock

SPIT and SPAM

As a guest today on Talk of the Nation, I covered a variety of topics relating to spam, which is growing faster than ever.

Responding to a call-in question about open source software, I speculated that Firefox is no more secure than IE. I based this on theoretical arguments that might apply if Firefox were as popular a target as IE, and if the settings were as flexible, but in reality what I said is wrong. Contrary to the suspicions of one angry podcaster (who issued a fatwa on my head!) I have no financial motivation to "lie" about Firefox. In fact, as an investor in Flock which builds on the Mozilla code, I am happy to be corrected about the security of Firefox.

I guess I also provoked disagreement from the other guest, Dechlan McCullagh of CNET, who was articulate, well-informed, and clearly more comfortable on radio than I. I made the prediction that one day email spam will pale in comparison to SPIT (SPam over Internet Telephony). With free VOIP calls, spammers can now use computers overseas to generate voice messages that they broadcast to every 10 digit telephone number in North America.

"Press 1 to join Party Chat! Sexy Singles are standing by..." "You've been pre-approved for a low-rate credit card! Press 1 to complete your application..." "Why pay so much for prescriptions? Press 1 to get a free month of medicine from Cayman Islands Pharmacy..."

They needn't pay for the calls, the human reps, or the lists of valid phone numbers (so unlisted cell phones are vulnerable). Email spam is bad enough, but when our phones ring constantly, the intrusion on our lives will be profoundly greater, and unlike email spam, SPIT will carry payloads that cannot be examined until after we accept the call.

Anyway, I predicted that one day we'll be forced to turn off our ringers altogether, marking the end of real time telephone conversations. Dechlan pointed out that we could simply choose to ignore calls from people we don't know, as one of his buddies does. Good idea, except that the spammers will use our friends' and family's phones to call us, just as they do today with email.

Blogged with Flock

Business Weak

I hate to poke at a well-read journalist (again), but I must take issue with the way in which Aaron Ricadela mis-quoted me, obviously to support the hypothesis of his recent Business Week article titled "Fogeys Flock to Facebook."

Here's what I said to him:

"Clearly, Facebook has lots of traffic and a lot of that traffic is from the same group of users as on LinkedIn. But Facebook is a social application--it doesn't offer the same professional tools that make LinkedIn so popular, and so we see very little effect on the usage and growth at LinkedIn. In fact, LinkedIn continues to grow beyond the numbers Reid had projected at the time of our investment."

Here's what he wrote:

Even Facebook's competitors acknowledge change is afoot. "Clearly, Facebook has lots of traffic and a lot of that traffic is from the same group of users as on LinkedIn," says David Cowan, a managing partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, a LinkedIn investor (see BusinessWeek.com, 1/29/07, "LinkedIn Reaches Out"). Yet during Facebook's most recent growth spurt—it has added 1.3 million visitors since May, according to ComScore—LinkedIn's audience hasn't declined, Cowan says.

C'mon, Aaron. Next time please just report what I really said, instead of paraphrasing it to suit your story.

Blogged with Flock

Is BVP too Flashy?

When Henry Phipps established his family office a century ago, he kept his name off the door, choosing instead to honor the scientist Henry Bessemer who invented the technology that he and Andrew Carnegie had commercialized. Ever since, Bessemer has followed a tradition of quiet privacy, settling in the shadows of our entrepreneurial partners. We’ve had no PR agent. No splashy sponsorships. No publication of our results. (And no promotions for our blogs.)

But for those entrepreneurs who consider sharing their dreams with us, we need to share our story with them. As early as 1998 we published a web site celebrating our entrepreneurs’ successes (and lamenting our failures) in a graphical motif that evoked our turn-of-the-19^th-century roots. Since then, BVP.com incrementally sprawled, as web sites do, into an aging maze of unmarked avenues and back alleyways. Pre-occupied with our portfolio companies’ online presence, we neglected to renovate our own internet lobby.

But recently we crossed the point where we invest more venture capital internationally than we do domestically. Engaging new communities of entrepreneurs curious about our practice, we asked our IT Director Fred Shilmover to streamline our web site with 21^st century technology and a Googlish respect for the web user.

Our design objective was to tell our story without getting in the way of what a visitor wants to find. Even with 6 offices around the world, 100+ IPOs under our belt, and 96 years of history, we strived, above all, for clear, simple navigation.

With help from web designer Twig Gallemore, we crafted a tight site map around three simple menu options (TEAM / PORTFOLIO / CONTACTS) and filtered portfolio search options, to deliver quick answers. But to satisfy the entrepreneur who wishes to stroll around and browse, we also incorporated sliding photo albums in the header, as an alternative navigator through our history, team and offices. (Technical kudos to Flash god Erik van der Neut.)

There are clear tradeoffs to building our site around a Flash element. We have critical performance issues to resolve, browser support varies (it’s best viewed in Flock!), much of our content lies hidden from search engines, and we still need to redirect many links.

But I think that the newly launched www.BVP.com achieves our design goals. Do you agree? Is it what you’d want to see from your venture capital partner?

Blogged with Flock

Three Sealed Envelopes

BVP Operating Partner Christopher Risley recently had to relocate 3,000 miles for family reasons, forcing him to resign a CEO position and leave the company in the hands of its very capable President. Chris jokingly tells that (in the spirit of psychohistorian Hari Seldon of Asimov's Foundation) he left his successor three sealed envelopes to open each time he found himself at a complete loss as to what to do.

In the first envelope, the note reads, "Blame me."

In the second envelope: "Cut your burn and re-structure."

In the third envelope: "Prepare three envelopes."

(Before anyone cries plagiarism: Chris did disclose that it's an old joke.)

Blogged with Flock

Dinner with Dawkins and Hitchens

On Saturday night I had the great pleasure of pulling together a small dinner in which there were no Blessings or Grace recited. But we did have tri-tip, halibut, peach pie, Clos Du Bois PInot and probably the world's two most influential living atheists--Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. (The rest of my Top Ten list would include Pinker, Harris, Jillette, Shermer, Randi, Sweeney, Kurtz and PZ Myers!)

The dinner brought the two bestselling authors together for the first time--a chance for them to collaborate on responses to their common critics (see image right, courtesy Jurvetson). For example, just two hours earlier following his address at Kepler's Bookstore, Dawkins had been asked , "Weren't the worst atrocities of mankind perpetrated by atheists like Stalin and Hitler?"

Dawkins had responded that not only is there substantive debate regarding the faiths of Stalin and Hitler, but there are good and bad atheists and good and bad believers--there is no historical correlation between atheism and atrocity any more than there is correlation between faith and atrocity (and probably less so). A stronger correlation can be shown between heinous dictators and mustaches. Is a flexible worldview based on evidence and reason, Dawkins asked, more or less likely to incline someone to murder than a religious approach based on a holy book from a divine authority? "The question answers itself."

During dinner, Hitch (as his beautiful wife endearingly calls him) offered an additional rebuke: faith and church aligned the German and Russian populations behind Hitler and Stalin, while a skeptical , evidence-oriented population would have likely resisted the quasi-religions of their atrocious leaders.



The dinner capped off a successful event at Kepler's Bookstore in Menlo Park, where Dawkins once again filled the house. Watch the video of his address, and the Q&A session that followed.

Blogged with Flock

Buy Gringott's Bank Promissory Notes by Tomorrow!

As the Deathly Hallows beckon, wizards and muggles alike count down to Friday night with giddiness and panic (Stephen King says it best).

Celebrate the final three hours before the witching hour strikes with Dumbledore, Lucius Malfoy and the rest of Hogwart's at Kepler's Midnight Magic and Wizardry. It's the ultimate Harry Potter gala! Practice catching the snitch amid Quidditch World Cup Booths featuring fortune tellers, henna artists, magicians, and jugglers. Prowl for treats in the Death Eaters Enclave (catered by Cafe Borrone). Hear Hagrid tell stories in the Gryffindor Common Room, and vie for prizes in the Potter Trivia Contest.

But the midnight stash of Potter books can be redeemed only by holders of the Gringott's Bank Promissory Notes, available here or at the store until Friday morning. (After midnight Friday, available inventory will be sold on a first-come basis.)

Blogged with Flock

Flock is Back, Baby!

OK, we had disappeared for a long time. Version 0.7 was chock full of cool web2.0 features but it was too complicated and buggy for anyone other than technical early adopters. With the mission of delivering powerful social functions to everyone on the web, we had to re-tool our team with folks who know how to make great software drop-dead-simple to use. And so we resolved not to release another version until we could make it impressively intuitive and reliable.

The day has come! This morning Flock releases Beta version 0.9, a major new release that (the early reviewers say) doesn't suck.


“Flock is a very elegant and well organized browser... virtually every Flock task can be completed in one or two clicks... an old IE user like me learned more advanced features and functions over 3 or 4 days, than I probably know about IE in years of use”.



“The look 'n' feel of flock remains as slick as ever, and is possibly the nicest ’skin’ for a browser out there. But this isn’t style over content and the UI’s most significant overhaul is its emphasis on improving discoverability”



“Flock 0.9 features a redesigned interface, and it feels significantly faster than the 0.7 version did: The first thing you want to do to fully utilize this browser is add the blogs, video, photo and social bookmarking sites you use. This is ridiculously easy to do in this new version."


The features I use most are the blog editor, the real-time search, and the news reader, but I also often find myself browsing the media bar. There are still some major features in the works for version 1.0 later this year, but version 0.9 is sufficiently better than other browsers to justify the switch.

Blogged with Flock

Return of the Devil's Chaplain!

This Saturday at 3pm, Oxford University Professor Richard Dawkins will return to Kepler's Bookstore to reflect on the world's reception to his blasphemous bestseller, The God Delusion. 

Like his last visit to Kepler's, I will have the great honor of introducing him. If you want a seat for Dawkins' talk, you probably have to come early and hear what I have to say, since last time (see image right) it was standing room only!

And if you missed last month's book signing at Kepler's by the brilliant Christopher Hitchens, bring your unsigned copy of God Is Not Great with you to Dawkins' event, because I hear you'll find Hitchens among the audience. I'm delighted to note that both God Is Not Great and The God Delusion became #2 NY Times Bestsellers the month following their authors' respective appearances at Kepler's (naturally).  

Blogged with Flock

I Want a DUMP Button

Last week my family made a post-school season pilgrimage to our nation's capitol. What a splendorous city of Parisian architecture, clean streets, warm air, Southern greenery, and magnificent monuments (soiled only by the requisite portraits of our President). We hit the major landmarks and monuments, but here are some highlights:

• The FDR Memorial.

Completed 10 years ago, this riverside walkway pays tribute to the 32d president through sculpture, water features, and stones engraved with Roosevelt's stirring words.  

• Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

See a bill printed start to finish in a quick, easy 45 minute tour. ($700 million printed every day!)

• The Spy Museum.

Spy history, gadgets and techniques.

• Simthsonian National Air and Space.

Always an inspiration. I wish we had set aside a whole day for it.

• Library of Congress.

In the largest library in the world, you won't see any books--they are safely locked away from the public, but anyone (not just Americans) can enter the reading room with a request. The foyer is incredible, graced with sculpture, murals and engravings such as "Ignorance is the Curse of God." (Isn't it the other way around?)

• "The Awakening".

Sculpture of a buried giant struggling to the surface, along the Potomac. Climbable!



Private attractions, if you know someone...

• Central Intelligence Agency
  

I wish I could tell you about it!

• National Public Radio

Thanks to my friend Barrie Hardymon (asst. editor for Talk of the Nation and principal contributor to Blog of the Nation),  my son and I got our daily dose of Neal Conan right there in the control room, standing beside the call-in screeners.

NPR broadcasts live with a 6-second delay, and so Barrie pointed out the DUMP button that radio hosts press to instantly delete 6-second spans containing objectionable expletives. After DUMPing the dirty words, NPR then broadcasts without delay while DSP software works for several minutes in the background to imperceptibly slow the transmitted conversation until it re-builds 6 seconds of latency.

"What happens if you need to DUMP it again before it's ready?" my 8-year-old asked. Barrie conceded that it is indeed a problem on rare occasion. "If you build up 12 seconds of delay instead of 6," the boy suggested, "you can press DUMP again if you need to." I thought it was a Capitol Idea!

Blogged with Flock

Bessemer Bamboozled?

Valleywag is delighting in a string of negative press accounts this week about Lifelock, a company we funded late last year. The online gossip column goes so far as to say that Bessemer and our co-investor Kleiner Perkins Caufied & Byers were shamefully bamboozled by the company's founder Robert Maynard.

Normally I don't respond to vicious personal attacks--after all there are so many, Who Has Time For This? But to the extent that anyone questions Lifelock's integrity and consumer utility, I feel obliged to weigh in as an insider with some answers...

Is Lifelock founder Robert Maynard a bad guy?

Robert suffers from bipolar disease, a serious mental health disorder that invariably leads to impaired thinking and erratic behavior when untreated. Sufferers of bipolar disease commonly have manic episodes that end with dire financial and legal consequences. Anyone experienced in bipolar (as I became years ago, when someone close to me was diagnosed) understands the negative behavior for what it is--a treatable medical symptom. It is no more a character flaw than President Roosevelt's polio.

With a diagnosis and proper treatment, Robert has built his third company responsibly. Self-aware, he recruited a professional team and an independent board of directors from which he disqualified himself. To protect the company, Robert retained no control through ownership, board participation, or office. During my time as an investor in Lifelock, Robert has impressed me as a brilliant, creative thinker whom other Bessemer entrepreneurs continue to call upon for advice. Robert is kind and thoughtful, and after 15 years as a VC, I haven't seen a founder more loved and respected by his company's employees. (A former U.S. Marine who champions liberal causes, Robert reminds me of another great entrepreneur, Dan Farmer.) Though it would be more profitable to distance myself from such a controversial figure, nonetheless I am proud to call Robert my friend.

Was Bessemer bamboozled?

Yes, many times. But not by Lifelock.

During our investigation of the company, the CEO was up front in every way, including disclosure of Robert Maynard's past, his bankruptcies, his medical condition, and the FTC order against his participation in the credit repair industry (where Lifelock doesn't play). I understood the baggage Robert Maynard has been carrying with him--he isn't the first entrepreneur treated for bipolar disease whose startup I have backed, and he may not be the last.

Furthermore, we feel anything but bamboozled. The Company's financial performance has more than doubled the revenue and cash flow forecasted in Lifelock's business plan. Customer churn is way below any subscription service I have seen, and persists at less than half the rate Lifelock had projected.

Was I embarrassed, as Valleywag insists?

Yes, many times. But not by Lifelock.

It's actually funny (and a little flaterring, really) to see Valleywag go after me so personally in their column, but I'm surprised they couldn't dig up any better dirt on me (really, they just missed the whole atheist angle). Yes, it's true that I'm a director of the "troubled Flock", and it's true that Flock is behind schedule releasing the best browser software in the world (which you'll all get your hands on later this year). It's not true that I'm leading a round in TechCrunch (but I'd like to, Michael, if I can).

Can consumers trust Lifelock?

As a veteran investor of Verisign, Postini, Counterpane, Cyota and several other security service providers, I know what a challenge it is to overcome the suspicions raised by sensational journalism, and the allegations of competitors who covet success. Lifelock embraces every practice we can to operate transparently and in the best interest of the customer--including ISO 27001 certification of our call center and data infrastructure--and surely we still have many lessons yet to learn. But even when we do, we will always have to endure conspiracy theories.

So rather than fight the storm of bad press, Robert Maynard simply resigned from the company this past Monday. It's a shame to lose the vision and day-to-day involvement of a great founder, but I share Robert's hope that his past will no longer be a lightning rod for Lifelock's detractors.

I subscribed my own family to Lifelock long before I invested. From 1995 to 2005, there were over 8 reported breaches of personal credential data for every American adult, and so it's reasonable to fear ID theft. As I've explained, nothing protects me better than Lifelock's rigorous maintenance of fraud alerts for my credit profiles.

Blogged with Flock

Venture Capital Really Heats Up

Apparently, the power grid along Menlo Park's Sand Hill Road has failed. As the mercury hits 93 degrees, thousands of VC's are roasting in their offices.

Haunted by Blackberry Buzz

The incessant noise follows me everywhere--computer speakers, conference
room phones, even my car radio--like the constant whine of a
mosquito buzzing around my ears, except you can't swat
it. Turning down the speaker volume doesn't help. Moving the damned thing
several feet away is equally ineffective--you've got to actually hurl
it into another room.

RIM's only apparent fix for the problem has been to harden the case so
it doesn't break when I throw it (both a plus and a minus). Perhaps an exorcist would help.

The silver lining: in conference rooms with a speakerphone, the
horrible buzz forces blackberry users to turn off their devices and focus on the meeting.

A Sky Spectacle

I don't know precisely where I am, except that I'm roughly six miles from the Earth and heading west. Several miles to the north, and perhaps 2 miles beneath, a brilliant electrical storm illuminates a cloud formation. The sparks fly at the surprising rate of one or two every second, as the light strobes in fiery spectacle.

I had thought this morning that the day couldn't get any better, tickled as I was to be golfing the legendary Augusta National course. The Georgia air was a balmy 70, the fairways greener than Al Gore, and my new, used woods from eBay swinging smooth. (Still, Jim "800-Flowers" McCann bested me by a stroke.) The setting was pastoral and glorious, but Nature's outdoing herself tonight with a fireworks display that barely resembles my normally grounded view of lightning.

It's humbling that physicists today know little more than Ben Franklin did as to the root cause of this thunderous phenomenon. (According to my favorite prevailing theory, Earth-bound solar winds carry starry particles that ignite the atmospheric explosions.) I recall that Ben Franklin's son had assisted his father with his daredevil experiment (don't try this at home--stormy kite-flying is not a good family activity), which reminds me of a conversation I had with my own 7 year old several months back as we drifted off to sleep in his room.

I had just answered--to the best of my ability--his question about what options people have for fuel sources. I thought that my list had sedated him for the night, but after some silence he asked me whether lightning can be a fuel source. Good idea, I said, but you can't harvest the power in lightning because you don't know where it will strike. But aren't there places, he asked, where you're likely to get much more than average? I supposed that there are, but I also reasoned confidently that the power is too bursty for any equipment to safely capture in a sustainable way. Okay, he said, but couldn't you attach a lightning rod to a bunch of other rods that branch out further and further, until the current spreads out enough to safely collect?

Yikes, I had no clue. But his idea's intriguing--at least as feasible as some of the technologies I assess for investment. (Action item: I must introduce him to my Cleantech partner Justin, just as soon as the boy graduates from second grade.) In my final moments watching the sparks flash through the clouds, they suddenly resemble the charged, frenetic neurons of a 7 year old mind.

I still don't know precisely where I am, but I do know exactly where I want to be.

Goodbye Kurt. So it goes.

On Thursday, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., one of my favorite authors, died at the age of 84.

Vonnegut had succeeded Isaac Asimov (my other favorite) as Honorary President of the American Humanists Association. Like Asimov. Vonnegut mastered the communication of complex ideas through simple prose. When Vonnegut eulogized Asimov, he joked that Asimov is up in Heaven now.

If you haven't read Vonnegut's books, it's time to start! Sirens of Titan was a personal favorite, but Slaughterhouse Five is the book he's most famous for (and the literary reference behind "So it goes"); it's a fictional derivative of his experience as a World War II prisoner of war in the aftermath of the Dresden bombing. In his last book, Man Without a Country, Vonnegut laments the lack of direction and leadership in our nation, decrying our government's religious crusades and eco-terrorism with the grumpiness of an old man who just no longer gives a shit. But if you have an issue with commitment, start with the short stories in Welcome to the Monkeyhouse.

I think that looking back on his death, Vonnegut would be pleased that the cause of his expiration was a head injury from falling. Even thirty years before he published God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian, he had written that his sister's dying words, "No pain," was a recurring theme of his works.

Kurt is up in Heaven now.

Crashed Your Car in Bay Area?

I always saw the dings and scratches on our minivan as a badge of honor. But despite my stingy inclinations, Nathalie decided that after 6 years of heavy industrial abuse, our Honda Odyssey deserved a facelift. Though I expected to be ripped off as usual, we had such a good experience this time that I had to blog it, for the benefit of all those reckless drivers like us who collect streaks of paint on their vehicles.

Now if you only like to pay dealers for service, you may not wish to hire Louis, because he doesn't even have a garage. BUT, Louis makes house calls from his well equipped van, repairing your car over several days right in your driveway. And without the overhead, he charges what you think an auto body mechanic should actually charge. In our case, Louis replaced the entire rear of our van (including the brake and signal lights) and a side mirror, and he banged out and painted all the dents on the sides and front for $1300.

Louis obviously has no office telephone or email, but you can reach him on his cell at 408.230.5440.

Blogged with Flock

Yoggie: Silly Name, Serious Protection

If you're the family IT guy, I recommend you install a Yoggie Gatekeeper. This credit-card-sized gizmo (designed for mobile protection of road warrior laptops) can be inserted between your router and LAN switch to protect all downstream PCs in your home from just about any kind of attack. You don't have to install security software at each PC, and you can set the security settings for each PC centrally, so your 7-year old can't bypass the filters (don't get me started). By vesting the security functions in a separate processor the way that enterprises do, your network is much safer from exploits (in fact Yoggie won the Innovation Station competition at RSA this year). But more importantly, the out-of-box experience is iPod-like, and the whole installation takes less than 5 minutes unless you gawk for too long.

This is not a plug for a Bessemer portfolio company, but I do happen to know the CEO Shlomo Touboul, because he founded Finjan. In fact, years after Shlomo first left Finjan, I recruited him back as CEO. (Contrary to what some bloggers tell you, not all VC's want to get rid of the founders.)

Blogged with Flock

My TED Highlights

I had a blast at the Technology Entertainment Design conference of 2007. Four days of brain camp with the most remarkable people. There were great scientists, like Murray Gell-mann, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Widom, E.O. Wilson, Paul Ewald, and Carolyn Porco from NASA’s Cassini Probe team, who brought photos of Titan’s landscape. Bill Clinton was there to solicit help for his foundation work in Rwanda. (He still has great speechwriters: “The terrorists in London were home-grown citizens who valued their differences from other British citizens more than their common humanity,” said the President. “That’s the central psychological plague of humanity in the 21st century.”) Kareem Abdul Jabaar talked to us about growing up in Harlem (but why did all 7 feet and two inches of Kareem have to sit in the front row)? Dean Kamen shared his development of a prosthetic arm for Iraqi veterans that has 14 degrees of freedom, temperature sensing, and fine motor movements. BMW unveiled their Hydrogen 7 car at a lunch where the water was served in bottles labeled EXHAUST (but they evaded the tough questions on hydrogen extraction and distribution), and I got to test drive a prototype of the 2008 Lexus hybrid LS600 (smooth). Thomas Dolby, Paul Simon and Tracy Chapman all performed (Peter Gabriel just listened), as did a great R&B vocalist/guitarist named Raul Midon. Microsoft architects showed off Virtual Earth, and another mapping tool that actually links photos on the web based on the content, with the intelligence to stitch them together into landscapes. (Think of the thousand photos one might find online of the Eiffel Tower—this software synthesizes those photos into a 3D rendering of the tower, where you can zoom into the detail of any one of the photos.) Still, Google won the day by serving free coffee, drinks and snacks throughout the week. Meg Ryan, Goldie Hawn, and Forrest Whitaker represented the thespian crowd. The Disney Imagineering team brought a pimped out Segway driven by muppets who elicited laughs at my expense when their contraption spritzed me. We heard from Jok Church the children’s science writer, Emily Oster the Harvard economist, Jamie Nachtwey the war photographer, and Lost writer JJ Abrams. Silicon Valley was represented by Alan Kay, Kevin Lynch, Bill Gross, Jeff Skoll, Lawrence Lessig, Sergey and Larry (with a retinue of friends and family), John Doerr and a herd of other VC’s. I had lunch with Saul Hansell (I recommend it--New York Times makes him pick up the tab), and I hung out for an hour with the great James Randi, as he wowed us with his conjuring. During his talk, Randi wondered why the cold readers who channel the dead always seem to find our loved ones in Heaven—why aren’t any of them ever in Hell? He tested homeopathy by downing an entire bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills. We saw two robotic demonstrations, both of which featured evolutionary learning (the beach dweller on the right, powered by wind, uses wind and water sensors to avoid drowning). Richard Branson shared renderings of his tourism space craft. It was designed by Philippe Starck, who started his presentation by summing up what the rest of us felt: compared to the speakers he just heard, “I feel like a shit.”

TED TED2007 Clinton randi pinker jabaar lessig
Blogged with Flock

Follow-Up for TEDizens

As promised, here are the resources I recommended in today's TED course on Raising Children Without God:

Online Materials

Richard Dawkins' letter to his 10-year-old daughter on "Good and Bad Reasons for Believing."

Video of Richard Dawkins' talk at Kepler's Bookstore (with my introduction).

Atheist Advisements for review and collaboration.

Background on Time Banks USA, whose member communities are popping up everywhere as a nexus for people to pool their time and assistance.

Reading for Grownups (with links to Kepler's Bookstore for online ordering)

Why People Believe Weird Things
by Michael Shermer

This book helped me understand my mind's vulnerabilities to infection by superstition and scams.

A Devil's Chaplain
by Richard Dawkins

A series of clearly written essays for the layman on the theory of evolution, intelligent design, evolutionary psychology and parasitic, religious memes.

God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins

A no-holds-barred deconstruction of faith. Chapter 7 exposes some barbaric Biblical passages that my rabbis forgot to mention.

Letter to a Christian Nation
by Sam Harris

A concise and compelling call to action. No other bathroom read will provoke you to change the world like this one.

Skeptic Magazine

A monthly dose of superstition debunked, featuring columnist James Randi.

Reading for Kids (with links to Skeptics Society Store)

Skeptic Jr. Magazine

Each issue tackles a paranormal phenomenon, and shows where the thinking went wrong.

Maybe Yes, Maybe No
by Dan Barker

Adventures of Andrea, a skeptic. Cartoon strip style. How to check out extraordinary claims.

Sasquatches from Outer Space
by Tim Yule

Covers Astrology, bigfoot, the Bermuda triangle, ESP, corp circles, Loch Ness Monster,Vampires, and UFOs and aliens. A “Try This” section encourages critical thinking skills. (Ages 10-15)

The Magic Detectives
by Joe Nickell

30 mysteries encourages readers to think for themselves before the solution is offered. (Ages 9-14)

Mythbusters
by Mary Packard

Borrowing from their Discovery Channel TV show, Adam and Jamie evaluate and test claims, with lots of hands on fun for the reader.

Blogged with Flock

Net Neutrality is Politically Correct

"People who demand neutrality in any situation are usually not neutral but in favor of the status quo." -- Max Eastman

Andy asked me in the comments of my last post about net neutrality--what is it really and who cares?

The Internet Protocol treats all packets equally, but there are various reasons why someone might want a "fast lane" for packets. Content publishers and VOIP carriers deliver media streams whose packets expire if they arrive late. E-commerce vendors lose money when impatient shoppers abandon carts due to router congestion caused by all those media streams. So demand grows for express services, and a number of technology vendors, ranging from startups to Cisco, increasingly offer ISPs technologies for delivering them.

Net neutrality arose from a concern that these new services would change the nature of the internet. Privatize the highways, people worry, and only the wealthy will drive. Rich incumbents will control the pipes, while innovative challengers must compete for the scraps of spare bandwidth. Proponents of net neutrality would therefore impose regulation on tier one ISP's so that they cannot deliver any services that discriminate among packets. (Readers of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. will recognize this line of thinking from his story Harrison Bergeron in Welcome to the Monkeyhouse.)

The call for net neutrality is superficially appealing, in the same way that it's easy to oppose free trade in defense of your countrymen's jobs. But just like regulating imports, regulating ISPs with rules on net neutrality is short-sighted and, in the long term, terrible for both businesses and consumers. It's politically incorrect to say so, it's likely to get me flamed, and Google won't like me for saying it, but it's true.

Market forces will, as they always have, drive innovation on the internet. ISPs will find ways to accelerate and guarantee delivery with all sorts of interesting new services, and businesses who can deliver more value to their consumers through better internet performance can afford to pay for them. Should Fedex have been prohibited from competing against the Post Office, so that "big corproations" wouldn't have an advantage over the little guy? Of course not.

Proponents of net neutrality would counter that Fedex doesn't hurt the performance of old-fashioned mail, while express lanes for packets will necessarily slow down "free packets" pushed to the back of the line. On the contrary: allowing ISPs to profit from delivering express services for special classes of traffic will directly lead to the rapid development of additional internet capacity. There is no limit to the number of lanes one can build on the information highway, unless of course you regulate and cripple the only entities capable of building those lanes.

So far, this may sound like a reasonable technical issue to debate. But the campaign for net neutrality has transcended logic, manuevering instead to prevail upon Congress with an emotional appeal to the voters. "If we are silent, if we don't stand up for Internet Freedom," warns Hollywood star Alyssa Milano, "corporations will take away our right to choose!" As always, it's easy and popular to demonize corporations.

In his letter to the public (a great PR play, and a nice pander to regulators who look for reasons to work), Eric Schmidt wrote that net neutrality is needed to prevent broadband carriers from controlling what people say or do online. As I have blogged before, Eric is certainly a genius (I can pander, too), but this call to fear is wrong on so many levels, not to mention egregiously hypocritical. (Remember China?)

For one thing, accelerating a stream of packets, even at the mythical expense of some random packets, does not "control what people do online." Also, ISPs are not public utilities; they are businesses whose owners--including individual investors and pension funds--have no legal obligation to amuse Eric with whatever internet sites he craves. (Should AOL and the mobile environments of AT&T and Verizon be legally forced to provide access to outside content?) Having said both those things, the market will not reward ISPs who effectively block or even slow access to the full array of web sites--there is demand for express traffic and free traffic, so both sevices should and would exist.

Finally, it isn't simple to decide what kinds of acceleration services count as neutral. Is Akamai style acceleration neutral? What about Netli style wormholes? What about monitoring services? Okay it's easy to say these don't count. Now what about treating video streams differently on an unpaid basis, to enhance customer satisfaction and better control traffic flows? What about building out IMS networks with ENUM servers for quality VOIP? How about blocking access to sites that are pornographic, violent, hateful, illegal (casinos), or ridden with viruses? What about selling IP service that can withstand DOS attacks? What about simply selling higher quality service plans that give more bursty bandwidth when needed? Who will authoritatively model the complexities that emerge to determine whether these upgrades are good or bad for overall network performance--Alyssa Milano??

Engineers have done pretty well so far building the internet without regulatory oversight. If we now erect a glorious bureaucracy of regulators who painstakingly review every upgrade to a broadband carrier, the one thing I am sure of is that US carriers will immediately lose market share to their competitors. The state of the U.S. internet backbone itself will freeze both in capacity and technology as the rest of the planet leapfrogs our creaky, petrified infrastructure.

"The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people." -- William Orville Douglas

netneutrality ISP Vonnegut ericschmidt google maxeastman net-neutrality
Blogged with Flock

Lessons in Online Marketing, from Spago's

We often try to bring our portfolio companies together to network and learn. So this week about 25 Bessemer companies gathered at Spago's in Palo Alto for 7 hours to share best practices for search engine marketing (i.e. buying keywords) and optimization (i.e. prominence in search results).

Mostly, the veterans from Blue Nile, Postini and LinkedIn shared war stories and lessons learned with upstarts like Lifelock, Wize, Sparter and Zopa, but all had interesting experiences to share. I recall seeing folks from Revver, Wikia, Flock, Vimo, Delivery Agent, Gerson Lehrman Group, and Pure Networks. A testament to the broad appeal of online marketing, we even had eager marketing execs from chip companies (Zensys, Summit) and software companies (T3Ci, Endeca and Nominum).

Punctuated by servings of warm goat cheese pizza, we learned about demographic, geographic and time-of-day targeting. We also learned about negative campaign filters on dynamic keyword insertion (e.g. shoe stores should pay for clicks on "shoe XXXX" unless XXXX = fetish).
While munching on crispy cones filled with tuna tartare we listened to Bessemer EIR Geoffrey Arone share tips on community marketing, mostly through social networks.

We also set aside some time for best-of-class (non-Bessemer) vendors to present (videos here). While we dined on a scrumptious salad with fruits and nuts, Did-it presented on SEM techniques (slides). Andreas from Bloofusion deconstructed the sites of three of our startups to illustrate what they can do improve their PageRanks and prominence in search results (slides). Offline, Andreas shared this tip with an enterpreneur looking to hire an SEO consultant: search the consulting company's name on Google, and make sure they come up first in the search results!

The entrees largely disappointed (mine was salmon with bok choy), as did the even less tasty news we digested that there are no lasting shortcuts in SEO--the best "Google Juice" is a fresh, relevant, and easily navigated site (so much for the Cliff Notes approach).

For dessert we indulged in mousse cake and shmoozing, which, as usual, was cited as the most popular segment of our portfolio gathering (is it the chocolate or the company?). All in all, the feedback forms ranked the event a 3.6 out of 4, another sign that online marketing is top of mind for growing businesses.

SEM SEO bessemer marketing linkedin vimo deliveryagent spago wize
Blogged with Flock

Wormhole is Itself Swallowed Up

Congratulations to the founders and management team of Netli (previously referred to herein as the Wormhole Factory) on their acquisition by Akamai.

In addition to delivering some pretty big web applications for HP, SAP, Motorola, etc., Netli also accelerates several Bessemer company sites (including its own).

Netli Akamai wormhole acquisition acceleration bessemer
Blogged with Flock