blog.payne.org

A common provision in venture funding agreements (it’s usually in the term sheet) is that the company pays the investor’s legal bill.  It’s annoying, but quite typical.

Let’s say you’re raising a $1m round, and have to pay the investor’s $25k legal bill.  So, in effect, you’re raising only $975k, but you’re giving up $1m worth of the company to get it.  Why doesn’t the investor just give you $975 and pay their own expenses?

By passing the expense through the company (by investing first, then having the company pay), the investor is getting additional equity for the expense, or equivalently, a small discount on the pre-money valuation (about 2.5% in the example above).  For this reason, investors are generally incented to pass as much company-related expense as they can through the company.

In most cases, the amount reimbursed by the company can be capped.  (And a low cap can help keep the investor focused on keeping the investment terms simple and the legal bill reasonable).

Well this is interesting:

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts says it will become the first health insurer to participate in Google Health, a medical records initiative by the online search engine.(from this article).   

(I’m an HMO Blue of MA subscriber.) 

I’ve wondered for a while why, with all of the technology available, someone hasn’t finally figured out how to make health care and health insurance more efficient.  (And I’m sorry to say that I’ve developed a small set of forms my family uses to streamline replies to incoming HMO paperwork).

I’ve got mixed feelings about Google handling medical records, but if they can help stop my HMO premiums from going up 10-25%/year, I’m interested in learning more. 

Well, I’ve now got three decent options for video on demand:  Hulu, iTunes movie rentals, and the Netflix/Roku set-top box (which just arrived a few days ago).  

Hulu is free, ad-supported, with mostly TV content.  Netflix’s “watch instantly” has old-run DVD content (movies and TV shows) with no ads, free for existing subscribers.  And iTunes has newer movies and content for a pay-per-view (err, “rental”) model.

I think we now officially have a competitive market for on-demand TV and movie content.

I’m starting to choose (or avoid) hotels based on the broadband speed.

Between Web apps (like Gmail) and streaming-only content (like Hulu), hotels with crappy bandwidth are downright painful.

I was cleaning last weekend, and came across my college 12Mhz PC/AT. It has a 40Mb Seagate hard drive ($425, new!) and monochrome Hercules graphics. We used that computer into the late 90s; eventually, it’s sole purpose was to run DOS Quicken. We still miss that version — it was fast, minimalist, focused, and did the job very well. If they had added Internet statement downloads, we’d probably still be using it.

Now, Quicken drives me nuts — we’ve “upgraded” a few times, only because Intuit has stopped supporting our old versions. Rarely have we gotten any features we actually want; usually all I get is Kellie’s (justified) complaining about learning a new UI.

This is the core problem with the old software model: the publisher is incented to keep selling you new versions, even if you don’t really need them. I’m still using Office 2000, and in my view, it’s “feature complete”. Office 2008 doesn’t have anything I need or want.

Adobe’s PhotoShop Elements is the worst offender: I bought 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 an then gave up. In successive versions, there were few new features, lots of gratuitous UI redesign, and in some cases, features taken out!

Subscription models are the future, clearly.

In this post from Valleywag:

At Google, executive chef Josef Desimone scrambled cruelty-free eggs by the truckload. Now Facebook has hired him to replace steam-heated trays of takeout with the kind of free food Googlers are used to. For engineers, Facebook is the new dreamland, and a company cafeteria is the kind of perk they’ve come to expect.(from: Facebook hires away Google’s top chef [Josef Desimone] ) 

Am I alone in feeling that this is a really ominous sign, it’s all gotten way out of whack, and is going to come crashing down?

Great products rarely come about through committee design.  I’ve never seen it myself — behind every great product, there’s always been one or two obsessed people.

And it’s not enough just to be obsessed, you’ve got to be obsessed about details.  Most people can’t or won’t get into the details.

 From time to time, I send feedback to friends about their products and Web sites, some of it really really specific.  One recent one was about date selection from a calendar:  on a two-month-wide pop-up, they could have optimized the “end” date selection a bit better based on a chosen “start” date, when the start date was at or near a month boundary.

Are you rolling your eyes yet? 

This is how great products happen, one little bit of obsessed detail at a time. 

Yesterday, I was at a gadget “demo day” with some friends and got a hands-on, up-close view of Apple TV and the Slingbox client running on a Windows Mobile phone.  This past weekend, my daughter got addicted to Hulu content on her EEE PC.

I’ve written before about IP video.  I keep repeating myself, but it feels like 2008 will be the tipping-point year for full-on IP video:  full-length, full-quality TV and movie content (not 10 minute clips at sub-NTSC quality).

The iPhone SDK party in Cambridge on Monday was a little disappointing.  It was much more networking than substantive content.  The iPhone store has a tough layout for large crowds + presenters.  Jonathan Zdziarski spoke about the genesis of the open SDK, but I think it’s pretty much dead given Apple’s official SDK release. There were a few demos, but if you’re relatively current on iPhone development, there was no new data.

But hats off to the organizers; there’s always risk in organizing events like this.  Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t.  

(But it was good to catch up with folks!  I saw:  Antonio Rodriguez, Beth Winkowski, Ted Morgan, Ryan Sarver, Daniel Cozza, Dan Slavin, Jeff Glass,  Michael Campbell, Dan Allen, Ajay Agarwal, John Keyes, and others.)

I’ve written before about the future of television being just a fat IP pipe into your house. “What’s cable TV, daddy?”

We’re another small step there with Hulu going public tomorrow, with a bunch of content. This could be the tipping point for the “classic” network content providers to do a good job with on-line delivery.

And they have Alfred Hitchcock.