Crash Course on Venture Capital with Jason Mendelson of the Foundry Group

Last night Jason Mendelson of the Foundry Group taught a great crash course on venture capital dispelling many and revealing many of the "secrets" of venture capitalists. After the course, Jason answered an hour or more of good questions from the audience.

Below are some of the pictures that I took during the event.

Entrepreneurs Unplugged with Sue Kunz

Last week's Entrepreneurs Unplugged with Sue Kunz.

Robert Reich and Brad Bernthal led a lively discussion in which Sue gave an informative and lively discussion on her experiences with entrepreneurship detailing her cycles between working for small startup and large enterprises like IBM and Sun.

Below are some of the pictures that I took during the event.

Alinea Redux: 2009.02.22

Photos from my visit with Christina to Alinea on 2009.02.22!

First let me start by saying that my heart these days runs in cycles between "home style", "traditional style", and "new style" presentations and recipes. Right now I am in in a definite "home style" phase where my cooking at tastes reflect simplicity and the earth.

I have been trying to plot to make it to Alinea since the restaurant opened and have never been able to make my time in chicago work with a visit (family duty and what not). This time I made time to celebrate both Christina's birthday and Valentine's day :)

The service was impeccable. The dance they performed was what I have always imagined proper fine dining service to be and had not previously experienced.

The dishes hit the full spectrum of reactions from myself and Christina. Some dishes were sublime, some were intriguing, and some were not to our liking at all. Since everyone tastes food differently, I will limit myself to two comments about the dishes: first, the dishes that were not to my liking all seemed over done and did not celebrate the essence of the core ingredient; second, I feel that something is wrong if instructions are needed on how to combine the different elements on my plate.

That being said Alinea was an experience well worth the wait and the expense.

David Patterson: The Trouble with Multicore Software

David Patterson has an excellent short video outlining why writing general purpose applications (desktop,  workstation, and server) on multicore software is hard.  LineRate Systems in contrast has a networking specific approach that makes life easier :)

CUNVC Workshop: Writing a Business Plan: Promoting your Business

On February 5th, Frank Moyes (CU Boulder Leeds School of Business) led the CU New Venture Challenge workshop on writing a business plan. In this workshop Frank condensed his semester long course into a single engaging hour.

On February 24, Jason Mendelson (Managing Director at the Foundry Group) will be teaching us how to raise venture capital in the Silicon Flatirons Crash Course on Raising Venture CapitalPublish Post

Compensation? US Airways Flight 1522 on 1/14

So on January 14th I was traveling to Boston MA from Denver via Charlotte and we prematurely had to land in Nashville due to mechanical issues.

Yesterday, I got an email from US Airways' customer service department apologizing for the inconvenience.

The inconvenience was not trivial though I did make it to Boston some 5 hours or so late...

I ended up with a 4-5 hour layover in Nashville before hopping a plane to Philadelphia and then onto Boston.

Luckily I was one of the first people off the flight and was one of the first people into the reroute line... it still took an hour to get my new flights booked...  by the time I left 4 hours later the line still hadn't been fully processed!!!

When I got to Boston I found out that my luggage never made it out of Philadelphia!  WTF!

I found out a week later that Philadelphia is a luggage black hole and to never let one's luggage out of sight *sigh*  I could have easily picked up my luggage in Nashville had someone bothered to tell me.  The luggage finally made it around 10:30 the next morning.

(yes I am still grumpy)

For all of this, I get $75.  Worth it?  I dunno.

Luckily I was staying with family and my meeting wasn't until the afternoon, so I suffered no real harm other than an extra helping of annoyance at the general lack of preparedness of the customer service team and lame food at the Nashville airport.  I think feeding everyone lunch would have gone a long way towards smoothing over the annoyances.

Two bright points... They did go get my headphones from the seat back pocket when I realized that I'd forgotten them there...

And they did a remarkable job the following day with the successful ditching of flight 1549 into the river.

Performance via Optimization or Design?

Manish my co-founder at LineRate Systems and have been having discussions that boil down to the following question:

Should one get performance by iterative optimization or through clean design?

It goes without saying that there are strong arguments for both approaches as one simply has to look at the history or academic research and industrial business strategies.

The part of the question that I find fascinating is the balancing act that is needed when operating on a limited budget.

The iterative optimization philosophy argues that getting a product out the door is the most critical requirement for any endeavor as no product means no consumers.  Then if performance is insufficient, iteratively profile and optimize the system by removing bottlenecks.

The performance by design philosophy argues that the best way to hit a extreme performance, in terms of time and total resource expenditures, is to architect the system correctly the first time and then tweak the product.

Two examples of these approaches from the automotive world are rally cars (e.g., Subaru) in the iterative category and the Bugatti Veyron. (I'm a sube owner so I'll use them as an example).  Subaru's are great cars to drive around every day that can be tuned into exceptional race and overall performance monsters with significant effort.  However the iterative tuning approach simply cannot reach the upper echelons of performance - that takes a directed design.  The Veyron on the other hand has no attachment or history to street cars (though it is street legal) - it was purpose built to be the fastest production car ever.  To hit their top speed they had to shrink the side view mirrors (due to problems with aerodynamic lift) and the car needs to be dropped to hit max speed.  From Top Gear February 2007: James May: Getting close to the maximum, which means the tires will only last for 15 minutes. But that's okay, because the fuel will run out in 12 minutes!  Simply put, if you want the maximum performance, serious architectural design issues need to be factored into the base design.

So what does this have to do with  LineRate Systems?

Simple, our core technology for LineRate Systems allows us to build software based network appliances delivering "Veyron" class performance but in my opinion will require a custom software architecture not currently found in software applications or operating systems.

The question for the reader is, how do you make the decision to follow an iterative or design approach to building a high performance product?

For us the business decision is straightforward - current market conditions make it unlikely that we will raise the capital necessary for the custom solution before we run out of existing capital... that and we have a customer interested in the basic product today.