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