I’ve been completely negligent updating my music recommendations (drinking too much beer, apparently), but today I updated my music page where you can find what I’m listening to and check out some of my own tunes as well.

I promise to do a better job updating, so check back in over time. 

I wouldn’t consider myself a movie expert, but I’m excited about a new movie company – The American Film Company.  They have a really unique philosophy:  to create engaging, commercial, historically accurate feature films culled from America’s storied past.

When I first heard the idea, I thought “neat” but can Hollywood make a movie that is both exciting and historically accurate?  Then I thought of Apollo 13 and Frost/Nixon (some historical liberties).  I think there is a market here. 

The American Film Company will take this further using prominent historians, to assure that each production remains true to the history from which it is drawn.

Their first movie, The Conspirator, is directed by Robert Redford and stars James McAvoy, Robin Wright Penn and Kevin Kline.  The film tells the story of Mary Surratt (Penn), the lone female charged as a co-conspirator in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Against the ominous backdrop of post-Civil War Washington, inexperienced lawyer Frederick Aiken (McAvoy) reluctantly agrees to defend Surratt before a military tribunal hastily arranged by War Secretary Edwin Stanton (Kline).

Sounds great and I’m really excited to see this and their upcoming films.  They also just launched a site based on the theme of “Hollywood-History Showdown,” where experts and members debate the “10 Best American History Movies” and the “The Best American History Movies NEVER Made”, as well as the accuracy of films like “Seabiscuit” and “Black Hawk Down”. 

HHS 3-1-2010 from The American Film Company on Vimeo.

As a venture capitalist, I normally have a voracious appetite for “better and faster,” but I am coming to the conclusion that in some cases I want slower email.

Huh?

I want slower email, because I need to protect myself and others from me:  “Mr. Zero In-box Guy.”  It’s sad, but true that I can’t sleep unless I’ve gotten through all (or the vast majority) of my tasks. I, also, answer every email that I get, but for spam.  And I try to answer quickly.  I don’t think Brad or I would admit it, but I think that he and I have an unspoken contest to see who can reply to emails faster.

So let’s be generous and say I suffer from ECD – Email Compulsive Disorder.  It can be impressive to some, but also can annoy the Hell out of others, including myself.

Over the past 6-9 months, I’ve begun using the delay-send feature in Outlook.  It’s had a huge positive impact on me.  I’d encourage everyone (who is ECD like me) to try it.  You’ll be glad that you did.

The big picture is that use of delay-sending slows down the velocity of conversations. If you are ECD, then the velocities of all your email communications are equivalent, regardless of the parties involved, or the importance of the conversation.  End result for me?  Equivalent levels of stress related to emails across all spectrums of my communications because I’m constantly driving toward inbox zero.

So now, let’s introduce manual outbound delay.  For instance, instead of immediately responding to someone, I put an artificial lag on the send (and it can be 2 hours or a week or whatever) and I don’t immediately get a third email back.  Maybe my friend from law school is feeling “chatty” and I don’t have the time to interact.  I can hit delay send which one, slows down velocity, but two, satisfies my ECD by having the email out of my inbox.

It works great for weekends, too.  I get an email on Friday afternoon.  If I reply back, I’ll probably get something back Saturday, which means that I’ll spend more time on the weekend than I’d like doing email.  If it’s not urgent, why not delay send until Monday morning?

It makes my co-workers happy.  Let’s assume I have a partner named Brad Feld.  Hypothetically, he is on vacation in Detroit and he is trying to stay off grid to enjoy all that Detroit has to offer.  I have something that I want to ask him / forward him.  I can either one: send right away while he’s on vacation; or two: I can delay send until he is back.  Now you can say “Jason, if Brad is offline, what’s the difference?” but as a fellow ECD sufferer, he’s been known to cheat and I don’t want to feed his affliction.

And when I slip while I’m on vacation and check email (I have a hard time disconnecting), at least I can save me from myself a bit by delaying the response until after my return and slowing down the velocity.

So give it a shot.  See how it works.  You know there are frustrations with folks and situations that you feel the pace of conversation far outweighs the appropriateness.  This is my way to solve that and it’s having a real positive effect.

(Note to AT&T.  Me wanting slower email does not make your service performance a “feature.”)

*** After I posted this, Alex at Baydin reminded me about Boomerang – an Outlook plugin that makes emails in one’s inbox go away and come back later.  Another way for inbox zero with less velocity ***

I don’t post a lot of “this is so funny you must see it” stuff, but this ranks right up there.  I was a huge fan of The Landlord, also from Funny or Die.  This is a satirical and hilarious adaptation of the star hocking movie interview show, hosted by Zach Galifianakis who recently killed it on Saturday Night Live.  Enjoy.  Ben Stiller also is sporting a nice wanna-be Robert De Niro look.

If you’ve read my reviews on the deProef Signature Ale and Saison Dupont – Brasserie, this beer fits right in the middle of them. It’s the most complicated Belgian that I could recommend to a friend worried about accessibility. You’ll note that many of my reviews will talk about “accessibility” as I find that while I’m a total whore for Belgian beers, many are not.

This is a really special beer that is unlike anything that I’ve tasted. This is a mellow / sweet beer (not too sweet) that has a stronger finish that one might guess from the initial taste. There are hints of citrus, but my palette is not refined enough at this point to tell you what type. Still super yummy. I’ll make sure that I always have one of these in the beer fridge.

(Super cool – there is a Facebook Fan Page for the beer)

Mendelson Rating: 9/10

My partner Brad recently wrote a blog post commenting on the proliferation of standardized seed financing documents.  The post was motivated by the highly-publicized release of the fourth instantiation of such a standard series of documents, this time by Ted Wang at Fenwick & West with collaboration from a group of bay-area early stage VC’s and angel investors.

If you are keeping score at home, there now exist the following sets of standards that have been made public:

• TechStars Model Seed Funding Documents (by Cooley);
• Y Combinator Series AA Equity Financing Documents (by WSGR);
• Founders Institute Plain Preferred Term Sheet (by WSGR); and
• Series Seed Financing Documents (by Fenwick & West).

(**Disclosure: I had participation with the TechStars set**)

Brad noted that it seemed silly to have four different versions and decided to invite everyone together in a room to come up with one, universally accepted set of model documents.  The immediate response was tremendous.  33 comments to the post and countless more emails from lawyers, entrepreneurs, VCs all praising the effort and wanting to know how they could get involved.

And all I could think was “Feld, you haven’t a clue what you’ve gotten yourself into.  This is going to end badly.” (and then the second thought was “Damnit, I bet all of these emails end up in my inbox too,” which they did, but then gave me fodder for this blog).

Why? Because there will never be a standardized set.  Not because there shouldn’t be, but rather once you introduce humans to execute the task, it simply doesn’t work.

And those humans are called lawyers and venture capitalists (and not entrepreneurs).  Despite all the handwringing about “doing it for the entrepreneur” I don’t think these two sets of humans will ever get their act together well enough to do what they say they want to do.  Here is why.

Lawyers:

Lawyers are like congress people.  If they aren’t involved in something, it’s nearly impossible to get their vote.  If they are involved then they are obliged to be “value additive” to the process.  In other words, the more lawyers, the more support and the more bloated of a document set, because everyone needs to get in a point to save face.

If you don’t believe me, see the NVCA model documents (I’ve been in the room while they have been drafted).  While the documents are great in that every potential scenarios has been imagined (and even more importantly to show you what should never be included in financing documents by their omission), the documents are too complicated for 90% of the folks out there doing the deals.  And then you add in the east-coast / west-coast differences (I think many east-coast terms can be entrepreneur unfriendly) and now you have a treatise as opposed to streamlined set of documents.  (As an aside, I don’t want this to turn into a east coast / west coast debate.  If you want to see what I think about terms, read this series).

Many of Brad’s email responses included this not-so-veiled threat: “you need me as part of your syndicate, or I won’t sign off on the documents and you’ll not have broad support.  My firm is important [insert canned marketing paragraph here].”  At the end of the day, Brad would have had 50+ lawyers in the room and we’d be right back to where we started with the NVCA project.

Even more importantly, however, lawyers are driven by more important things (to them) than helping entrepreneurs save legal costs.  Lawyers are driven by fees and thus they want to acquire more clients.  Releasing a set of documents that get you on the cover of peHub and Techcrunch is good for business.  You may streamline some hours, but you are betting on more clients.

Therefore, you have no incentive to join other groups, as it’s your name that is getting all the good publicity.  Why be a part of “working group X” when you can be “Joe Smith, super lawyer to the entrepreneur?”  While I can’t disclose the particular emails, rest assured that this paragraph is much more than an assertion, but a fact.

Lastly, there is also pride of authorship, by lawyers, even in situations where the documents should be boilerplate – as the case is here.  Every firm has their set of documents that they consider “better” than others.  Are they?  Or are they lazy and haven’t even read the other firms’ (or maybe they don’t have access).  I haven’t read them all.  I don’t want to either, but I can tell you that I’ve only seen a few firms out there that actually have better forms.

Bottom line:  Too many cooks spoil the soup, while the celebrity chefs don’t even want to cook with you.

Venture Capitalists:

Let’s not let the lawyers take all the blame, though.  While I do think the incentives of the VCs are good here, we have our own issues.

First, we, as the business drivers of the provisions, can’t necessarily agree on the basic terms.  That is problem one.  I don’t have a way to fix this one.

Secondly, most VCs aren’t lawyers and their level of deal comprehension varies greatly.  (Note: there are plenty of non-lawyer VCs that can take me to the woodshed, so this isn’t a statement that all lawyer-VCs are better).  So what do we, as an industry do?  We hire lawyers to produce a standard set of forms that we might not completely understand ourselves.

The end-result is our trusty lawyer tells us “our forms are better” and we take it for granted never minding the misalignment of incentives (lawyers want to make money, we want to save money for the entrepreneurs).  In fact, if you ask some of the business people around the table of these four sets, they really can’t tell you how any of these documents differ from the others.  They will always refer you to their lawyer.

Want more proof?  The latest set of documents from Fenwick and supported by a number of investors has a provision allowing for $10k of investor counsel fees.  If the investors really understood everything in the documents and were prepared to take them “as is” I would expect that number to be zero.  In fact, the three other sets of standardized documents have $0 fees for investor counsel.

Bottom line: until the VCs truly understand everything in these documents, they are going to continue to rely on the forms of their favorite lawyers and not those generated by others.

So which of the four forms are better to use?  I don’t know.  I’ve only read half of them.  And I don’t really have the burning desire to read more of them, as I predict even more proliferation.  That being said, here are a couple of interesting factoids.

1.  Yokum Taku has a nice post and matrix comparing the documents; and

2.  I heard from one name-brand law firm that working with one of these standardized sets (which I won’t name either for professional courtesy reasons) is a horrific experience in spell checking, capitalized term mismanagement and sloppy draftsmanship.  So just because they are released and publicized doesn’t mean they are necessarily any good.

So my prediction?  My dear partner Brad, while heart in the right place, will fail to come up with one set of widely used seed documents.  Sad, but true.

Of course the horrible irony is that none of this is intellectually difficult.  Maybe I’ll just come up with my own set of documents and…. oh wait……

I’m happy to report that Slice of Lime’s redesign of my blog is complete.  I’m very pleased with their efforts and invite y’all to comment.  Let me know what you think.

While the site has been redesigned, I am sorry to report that the writer’s brain (mine) has not.  So this is all style over substance, but if it works for Hollywood….

(Thanks for your continued support)

Is it just me or are you receiving a lot more emails that look like this:

Hi Jason,

Wanted to make you aware of the below funding announcement just released regarding a new [BLAH-nothing I care about]. Happy to make any introductions to the CEO, [John Smith] or any of the  below individuals for further comment, if interested in learning more.

Any questions or additional information you may have, I can be reached at 212-867-5309 or jenny@randomprfirm.com

Thanks,

Jenny

Then this is followed by a large press release about something that I don’t care about and I usually get two copies to boot.

And, of course, none of these folks are complying with the law by offering the ability to unsubscribe, so I bitch back and ask them to take me off the list, which about half the time they don’t respond.

So, I take their name and numbers down and make sure that when my companies need PR help, they won’t be using these spammers.  I realize that folks have a job to do, but why would I want my companies paying for a PR firm that is just carpet bombing information?  I can find ways to do that MUCH more cheaply than hiring a PR firm. Use some creativity, target your audience and if you can’t – at least follow the email spamming laws.

One more thing – not all PR folks are bad.  I’ve worked with some really great ones who don’t behave like this, but it feels like the velocity of those that do is increasing.

Rant over.

The guys over at Legal River emailed today and let me know about a new product offering that they’ve come up with called Attorney River.

Attorney River is trying to help improve upon the lawyer directory model, i.e. Martindale, which has not seen a lot of innovation in the last few decades. Attorney River allows lawyers to post a request for other lawyers – whether it be for outsourcing work or to find a specialist for a client in a different state. Interested lawyers can then respond to the posting. The system takes the onus off the lawyer who is currently wading through directories cold calling other lawyers.

They tell me that creating an account is free and posting of issues is also free. 

The CU New Venture Challenge finals are this Friday, 3/12 beginning at 2pm in ATLAS 100 on the CU-Boulder Campus and are open to the public. Don’t miss the watching the top four teams pitch their business plans to a panel of judges including venture capitalists, angel investors and serial entrepreneurs.
Prizes include:

• 1st – $6,000
• 2nd – $3,000
• 3rd – $2,000
• Judges Choice – $250

Now in its second year, the CU New Venture Challenge is a campus-wide initiative connecting students and faculty with teammates in a broad range of disciplines and with mentors from the business community. The goal is to provide knowledge and experience making entrepreneurship accessible to anyone with the enthusiasm and creativity required to start a new business.

Highlights of the 2010 CU New Venture Challenge include:

• $15,000 in cash prizes
• More than 20 teams in fields ranging from information technology and Internet to music and outdoor recreation
• Dozens of mentors sharing their entrepreneurial experience with competition entrants
• Seven workshops and “crash courses” on topics such as intellectual property, economic sustainability, and how to build a company from concept to completion
• Networking events connecting CU students with employers and building a sense of community among Colorado entrepreneurs
• 145 Facebook members and 463 followers on Twitter
• At least one CU student, employee or faculty member per team