Embracing Chaos

I’ve submitted a talk for the next Ignite Seattle about some common terms in venture capital financing deals. I’ll be talking about why pre-money valuation is not nearly as important as most entrepreneurs think it is when considering a VC term sheet. I’ll explain how things like liquidation preference and cumulative dividends can have just as much impact as valuation on who gets paid in the end. I’ll touch on one point here, but for the full 5-minute explanation, come to CHAC on August 8th. Briefly, liquidation preference is the idea that when a company becomes liquid (generally through acquisition)…

...full article

I went to watch the latest Harry Potter movie last night with some friends. One of the previews was for a new Bourne movie, The Bourne Ultimatum. Typical lots of cars getting smashed and then at the end, on the text page, a URL: www.google.com/bourne From across the theater I heard a “Woah!” I think from Brady. Why? Because even without touching a web browser, this constitutes an apparent change in policy for Google. Advertisers with enough money can now buy marketing URLs on the highly trusted and respected google.com domain. In other words, they’ve sold out. People intrinsically trust…

...full article

I’m gonna make a guess at to what Apple’s going to announce in August. I’m thinking of the next gen iMacs with huge high-res touchscreens. They’ll support apps like the iPhone has with draggable windows and the cool 2-finger resizing thing and all that. It’ll merge Microsoft’s Surfaces technology with the iPhone’s UI and end up with something closer to the UI from Minority Report than anything we’ve yet seen. Or maybe they’re not there yet, and it’ll take another year or two. But this is what I think they should do.

...full article

Like a number of other developers, I’ve been beating my head against a wall for the last couple of weeks trying to figure out how to set up a facebook app using ruby on rails. I finally figured out at least one major problem I’ve been running into — the standard library for writing facebook apps in ruby, rfacebook, has a bug in its latest version 0.6.4. I haven’t figured out exactly what’s wrong yet, but I’ve figured out how to avoid it. If you’re getting this kind of error message: You have a nil object when you didn’t expect…

...full article

A number of folks have been courting me for positions as a software development engineer recently. Many of them sound really fun. I love writing code, and even though it hasn’t been my professional focus for years, I think I’m still alright at it. But I’ve had to come to a sober realization that I simply cannot take a job where writing code is my primary function. I’m just not physically capable of it. I just about cried during a job interview once when explaining this. People come in my office and say “that’s a cool keyboard.” My response is…

...full article

“The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!” -Steve Martin in The Jerk Steve Martin was very excited to get the new phone book because his name in it meant he was somebody. But in 2007 when 10 pounds of dead tree show up on my front porch, I’m just annoyed. The phone company wants to deliver this to me because their advertising rates are based on the number of phone books they deliver. It doesn’t matter that there is zero chance I will even open the thing. I take it straight from my porch to…

...full article