A few days ago, Gil Dibner posted what he called a VC code of conduct. I read articles all the time where VC’s write about how venture capital “should work” and the vast majority of the time I either disagree or find them a waste of time. I feel that most of these articles are…
Category
Frustrations
Venture Summit | West: Wrongly Charging Entrepreneurs to Pitch VCs
What is old is new. Entrepreneurs are stil being asked to pay to pitch. It’s WRONG. Two and a half years ago, I wrote a post about a Boston group trying to charge entrepreneurs $4500 to pitch venture capitalists at an event. Many in the startup community were appalled by this especially folks like Jason Calacanis who created…
Boulder It’s Time to Get Serious About Our Energy Situation – Call City Council
As many of you know, Ballot Measure 2C, to “explore” municipalization, passed by 1.8% of the vote in November 2011. The idea is that Boulder would investigate taking over responsibility for our energy needs and terminate the relationship with Xcel. I can’t claim that I’m an expert on all such energy matters, but it sounded…
How LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbel are Running a Lawyer Ratings Scam
I am deeply disgusted to report that the good name of LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbel is officially worthless. This institution which has built its reputation on providing accurate information to lawyers and the general public about lawyers is now nothing more than a marketing organization. Their ratings can not be trusted. How do I know? Simple, they recently…
A Sure-Fire Revenue Raiser (Tax Increase) That Everyone Will Love
In this day and age where Democrats and Republicans both do their best to distort any real facts in the tax and deficit debate, I think that I’ve come up with a way to increase revenues (yes, increase taxes) that everyone should love. Kill IRS Section 409(A) and allow companies to issue stock to employees…
Declaring Victory – VRBO / Home Away Changes Their Review Policies
Recently, I posted about how I believed VRBO’s online reviews were worthless in that they allowed landlords to manipulate renter feedback. My article was picked up and expanded upon in a column by Maureen Farrell in Forbes. There were literally hundreds and hundreds of link backs, retweets and comments regarding my blog. What…
Brightleaf Automates the NVCA Model Documents (a.k.a. Why Brad Feld will Succeed)
If you are a reader of this blog, or Brad’s you know that we are keenly interested in the ideal that we should be able to arrive at a model document set for venture financings. Whereas, I argued that he’d never succeed in coming up with a standard set of seed documents, I used the…
Who’s Suing Whom?
Great picture of who’s suing whom in the Telecom world. Man, I love patents…
Bilski Redux and Why You Shouldn’t Believe Everything You Read
The Bilski decision came down yesterday and I’m still in a state of complete denial. Basically, the court punted on the difficult issues and while denying Bilski his patent, they didn’t do anything to help the horrible state of the patent ecosystem that we have today. (For a great summary of the case, check out…
Control Your Most Important Asset – Your Brand
Last week I wrote a blog about Atomic PR and their illegal spamming of folks trying to generate buzz for their clients. [Note: they’ve since apologized and have agreed to stop doing this and let folks opt out – see the comments area for the CEO’s reaction post]. One of the most interesting things to…