Just How Much Did VCs Pocket On Google?

via Burnham's Beat: "As it currently stands, both Kleiner and Sequoia have already distributed the vast majority of their stakes to their LPs. Thanks to the wonder of the SEC's Form 4, it's possible to go back and calculate exactly how much money the firms have made for their LPs to date. It's also possible to see how much the individual VCs have received (John Doerr and Mike Moritz) and even to make a realtively precise guess at the specific carried interests that each VC has in their respective fund.

In the case of Kleiner, they made their first big distribution of shares to LPs on 11/17/04 when they distributed about 5.7M shares, about a quarter of their total stake, at $172.5 a share which equates to about $983M. They made another distribution on 2/4 of 11.4M shares, about 54% of their stake, at $203.66 per share for a cool $2.3BN. On 5/2/04, they made another distribution of 1.1M shares worth $247M. In total, to date they have distributed shares worth $3.549BN. They still have another 2.6M shares worth $752M as of yesterday's close, so the total value of their stake is $4.3BN which represents a 344X return on their investment of $12.5M ... not too shabby."

Update.

Mixing open source and business

via CNet News Blog: "Optaros is different than most consulting and systems integration outfits in that the venture-backed firm builds custom applications using open-source software.

That requires the company, which launched at the beginning of this year, to have explicit intellectual property policies and clear rules of engagement regarding open source projects, said company vice president Stephen Walli, who authored the policy, in a blog posting on Wednesday."

David Foster Wallace - Commencement Speech at Kenyon University

via marginalia: "As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what 'day in day out' really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know "

Google sued over "click fraud" in Web ads

via Reuters.co.uk: "SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A seller of online marketing tools said on Wednesday it sued Google Inc., charging that the Web search giant has failed to protect users of its advertising program from 'click fraud,' costing them at least $5 million.

Click Defense Inc. filed its lawsuit, which also seeks class action status, on June 24 in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California."

Support The Troops

via Salon.com : "George W. Bush said Tuesday night that Americans should support the troops by flying a flag on the Fourth of July or lending a hand to the families of soldiers serving in Iraq. We've got another idea: How about making a responsible plan for taking care of injured soldiers when they come home?

That's the moral obligation of the administration that sent them to war in the first place, and it's not doing a very good job of it. Just before the president spoke Tuesday, his administration acknowledged that it's short on money for providing medical care to veterans because it vastly underestimated the number of soldiers who would need it.

According to today's Washington Post, the Department of Veteran Affairs predicted that just 23,533 veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan would need medical treatment this fiscal year. A more realistic projection? The VA now says the number is more likely to be 103,000.

We're not so hot at math, but the administration's initial projection was off by, what, a factor of four? How could they have gotten it so wrong? VA Secretary Jim Nicholson told the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee Tuesday that the initial estimate was based on data from 2002, which would explain a lot. Back then, Dick Cheney was telling Americans that their soldiers would be 'greeted as liberators' in Iraq, and Donald Rumsfeld was telling the soldiers themselves that the war 'could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.'"

Hoops in the MSL?

First rate suggestion via Celtic Quick News comments:

"People have talked for the last 10 years about two things - breaking into emerging markets and developing a feeder club(s). Now just this season a new team has started to play in the American MLS called Real Chivas (the nickname of a team from Guadlajara, Mexico) [actually he's mixing up the 2 separate expansion teams, but whatevs, Ed.], they based themselves in LA and tried to market themselves towards the MLS growing Latino fanbase. They are now attracting in the region of 27,000 to each game.

So the idea is Celtic buy an MLS franchise, base it in a city with a large Irish immigrant population (such as Boston), kit them out in the Hoops and use them as a feeder team. There would be all sorts of possibilities."

Not bad. But a couple things: First, Boston equals bad idea jeans, they already have a local team and people will just get confused with the basketball brand, and second, the wage structure, centralized contracts issues would likely make it difficult for the club to be a true feeder. But as a scheme to push the brand in North America, introduce the kids to the glorious and noble history and traditions of the club, I say solid idea.

Now, who has any money?

Patent absurdity

via Guardian: "If patent law had been applied to novels in the 1880s, great books would not have been written. If the EU applies it to software, every computer user will be restricted, says Richard Stallman "

The Military Industrial Congress

via Washington Post: "Rep. Randy 'Duke' Cunningham, a Vietnam War hero and 'top gun' fighter pilot, serves on the House subcommittee that appropriates money for the nation's defense. The California Republican also lives on a yacht berthed on the Potomac that is owned by the president of a local defense firm whose contracts Cunningham has supported."

The Latest Downing Street Memos

via The Nation: "A March 8, 2002, options paper prepared by Blair's national security aides noted that Iraq's nuclear weapons program was 'effectively frozen,' its missile program 'severely restricted,' and its chemical and biological weapons programs 'hindered.' Saddam Hussein, it reported, 'has not succeeded in seriously threatening his neighbors.' This paper also said the intelligence on Iraq's supposed WMD program was 'poor.' It noted that there was no 'recent evidence' of Iraqi ties to al Qaeda.

All of this contradicts what Bush told Americans before the invasion of Iraq. He and his aides claimed that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program, that Hussein was producing and stockpiling biological and chemical weapons, that Baghdad was in cahoots with al Qaeda, and that the intelligence obtained by the United States and other governments (presumably including the Brits) left 'no doubt' that Iraq posed a direct WMD threat to the United States.

The British memos are further evidence that Bush overstated the main reasons for the war. They also show that his key line of defense is bunk. When confronted with questions about the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Bush and his allies have consistently pointed to bad intelligence. But the previously released Downing Street memos and the new ones indicate that the Brits--who had access to the prewar intelligence--saw that the WMD case (based on that intelligence) was, as Jack Straw observed, weak. One might ask, why did they have such a different take than the one Bush shared with the public?"

Gaggle Got Ya, Scott?

via First Draft: "Q Yes. Is there any idea how long a last throe lasts for?

MR. McCLELLAN: Go ahead, Steve."

The Post-Mortem Post-Mortem

via Salon : "The results of Terri Schiavo's autopsy are in, and they make one Senate Majority Leader look very foolish. According to Pinellas-Pasco, Florida medical examiner Jon Thogmartin, Schiavo's brain had suffered massive and irreversible damage; it 'weighed 615 grams, roughly half of the expected weight of a human brain.' Thogmartin also refuted assertions from Shiavo's parents and some members of the GOP that Schiavo could have recovered: 'This damage was irreversible, and no amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons.' But the kicker for those who tuned in to the footage of Schiavo seeming to follow the movement of helium balloons with her eyes is that the autopsy results show that 'the vision centers of her brain were dead.' In other words, Schiavo was blind."

Protecting Soft IP

via
electronic design: "Software-only solutions have been the norm, but the more-available hardware-based encryption is gaining in stature. It addresses problems that software can't solve alone.

Keep in mind that hardware-based security actually pinpoints two parts of the puzzle. The first involves secure storage and manipulation of keys needed for encryption on which authentication is based. The second is hardware acceleration required to perform the necessary encryption and decryption in a reasonable amount of time.

A number of different products are available. Atmel's Secure Memory devices store small amounts of information (typically only the keys themselves) in an EEPROM and perform password and authentication protection. M-Systems' DiskOnKey and DiskOnChip implement security to protect flash memory that may contain applications and data. Going even further is Cirrus Logic's ARM9 series of microcontrollers. Its security on-chip uses the Maverick Key memory and the MaverickCrunch encryption engine."

Change or Die by Alan Deutschman

via Fast Company: "What if you were given that choice? For real. What if it weren't just the hyperbolic rhetoric that conflates corporate performance with life and death? Not the overblown exhortations of a rabid boss, or a slick motivational speaker, or a self-dramatizing CEO. We're talking actual life or death now. Your own life or death. What if a well-informed, trusted authority figure said you had to make difficult and enduring changes in the way you think and act? If you didn't, your time would end soon -- a lot sooner than it had to. Could you change when change really mattered? When it mattered most?
* Article Tools
print Print this page email Send to a friend
Article Tools Sponsored by FedEx

Education Center

Hiring Center
* Newsletters
Fast Take: FC's weekly newsletter
First Impression: daily insights
FC Now: staff blog
Transit Authority: business travel tips

* FASTCOMPANY.COM SPONSORED LINKS

* License Symantec Software Today - Fast and Easy!
Symantec's Value Program makes it easy to enjoy a streamlined pricing structure for your company's ...

* Make your customers (and your CFO) happy
Concerto Software contact center solutions help you deliver a superior experience across multiple c...

* Free Trial: BPM Process Modeling for your Business
Savvion's Process Modeler provides comprehensive BPM from modeling to process execution and managem...

* Need More Traffic? - Mamma Classifieds PPC
Get results with Mamma Classifieds Pay Per Click. Be in the Top Three on Mamma.com, plus on Coperni...

* How are you getting to the next level?
You have the vision. You have the desire. But do you have the credit score to get your business to ...

Buy a link Now
* Featured Services

* Find an Online Degree
* Business Directory
* Research Companies
* Find Biz Software

Yes, you say?

Try again.

Yes?

You're probably deluding yourself.

You wouldn"

A Handful of Timely Tips and Tricks

About Money:

Last week I was invited to speak to a group of 200 students at Duke University. The organizers gave me pretty much free rein in picking my topic, so I decided to talk about this:

How to make a million dollars is: a) something students are interested in, and b) something I am qualified to talk about. And the talk went really well. So well, in fact, that I have received requests for copies of the presentation.

I did not make a tape, so what I have done here is lay the talk out in writing for you to read at your leisure. I hope that it is helpful to you, and and that it shows you how to begin walking down the path to wealth.

Let's get started on making your first million dollars...

Productivity:

Once people got organized and they can handle tasks well, usually they want more out of their time. They want to accomplish more things. When I present an introduction on time management in the organization I am working for, I got these questions a lot from people: “How can I really can more done?”. In my opinion, there are six tips that I had to assist you on getting more done:

The Internets:

30 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do on the Internet: The Web is learning new tricks every day. These surprising sites and services will help you solve problems and save time--and one might even make you a star.

Digital Photography:

The New York Times’ David Pogue offers 10 suggestions for better digital photography. Some notables:

* Extend the camera’s battery life by turning off the screen display and use the old-fashioned viewfinder.
* Pre-focus action shots by “half-pressing” the shutter to bring the camera into focus before your kid jumps in the pool.
* Turn off digital zoom. It only gets you grainy photos. You’re better off using optical zoom on a high-quality picture setting and cropping the photo in an image editor on the computer after the fact.

Lifehacks

Silicon Valley bosses get 57% pay rise

via Guardian Unlimited: Onlineblog: "The Mercury News tracks salary, bonuses, options gains and other forms of pay collected by local executives, and its latest What the Boss Makes reveals that the valley's top executives saw their pay rise 57% last year to a collective $2.1 billion."