One of our friendly neighbors – Webroot – is hiring a CIO.  Description is below.  If you are interested, the email contact is below.  And if you move to Boulder and take this job, you might owe me a beer. 

Chief Information Officer and SVP, IT – Boulder

The CIO / SVP of IT will be responsible for defining, implementing and maintaining the vision and strategic direction of Webroot’s business-critical enterprise-wide IT infrastructure and applications. Working collaboratively across the organization, the CIO will partner with R&D, Data Center Operations, Sales, Professional Services, and other teams to support the IT needs of these respective business groups. The successful candidate will have proven expertise with Enterprise Applications, including selection, implementation, and integration. We seek a seasoned technology leader who has a proven track record of delivering highly visible, customer-facing projects on time and within budget.

Responsibilities

· Provide executive-level guidance and counsel to senior management on Information Technology matters.

· Provide the technology roadmap for future growth.

· Analyze the Corporation’s needs with regard to information access, storage & control, and the appropriate-to-the-business use of the latest computer and telecommunications technologies.

· Develop, communicate, and implement an overall integrated IT strategy, framework and philosophy that includes a uniform Systems Development Methodology that is responsive to the needs of the company’s growth and evolving objectives.

· Proactively work with the Webroot user communities to ensure timely identification and correction of application system deficiencies

· Oversee the design, development, and implementation of new enterprise applications as well as changes to existing computer systems and software packages.

· Develop and establish relevant IT-specific operating policies, programs and procedures.

· Ensure that all projects are implemented on time and within budget and that they provide the appropriate solution to the user’s needs.

· Identify and assess emerging information technologies to be assimilated, integrated, and introduced determining their potential value for the company.

Requirements

· An innovative, results-driven technologist with 15+years of leadership experience in a senior- level IT executive role with a demonstrated track record of implementing and managing information technologies in a growth business.

· Proven ability to motivate teams with experience providing quality deliverables within tight timelines, simultaneously managing multiple projects.

· Experience in strategic planning, contracting, negotiating and change management.

· Knowledge of information technology life cycle, including budget and resource allocation; experience with implementation of information technology application integrations in a large division/company.

· Must be analytical with strong business acumen and problem solving skills.

· Demonstrated ability to identify, establish and track key performance metrics and key indicators providing reports and analysis for executive management review and action. .

· Prior experience in a fast-paced, growth environment highly desirable.

· An undergraduate degree in a technical or business-oriented discipline with an MBA from a top tier business school highly desired.

If you would like an opportunity to work with this widely recognized worldwide leader in technology security, send your resume to rcirulli@webroot.com for consideration.

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 come out of the post, however, was an article by Mike Melanson on Read Write Web entitled “Does your PR Firm Need a PR Firm?”  It’s a really thoughtful piece and had one piece of advice that is critical: 

“Remember that allowing a PR firm to run free with your brand is essentially allowing it to have control over how your startup comes off to the rest of the world.”

In other words:  Control your brand.  Always.  It’s your most important asset.  Your brand is made up of your goodwill, reputation and public perception.  It’s hard to have a good brand and it’s very easy to have a lousy one.  It’s also easy to have a good one ruined and very hard to go back the other direction. 

One can come up with many examples of companies with good brand equity who have made missteps with products and have lived to fight another day (although you can’t have too many mistakes).  But companies with bad brand equity seem to always be behind the eight ball.  For instance, Microsoft, which allowed Apple to rebrand themselves with the “I’m a Mac” commercial series, can’t buy a break despite Windows 7 being a really good product.  And my bet is that Toyota, which had tremendous brand equity figures a way out of its quagmire as well. 

And startups, which have even more fragile brands, hire PR firms at prices that are equivalent to executive salaries and basically hand over the keys to their brand.  And some do the same with their lawyers who interact with their VCs. This also holds true for all service providers that companies hire that deal with the outside world.  All of this can build or damage a startup’s brand.

Even in AtomicPR’s case, they outsourced their brand to a email database called Cision.  They claimed that they don’t spam because they subscribe to a database that gives them contact information of journalist and bloggers in the technology space.   From the word’s of Andy Getsy, CEO of Atomic PR:

“Jason has an active blogger profile on Cision, which lists him as a VC covering venture capital topics. He blogs on tech products and companies from time to time. I suspect that this is partly how his info popped up again”

AtomicPR decided to blindly trust a database that claims it contacts bloggers for inclusion on their lists.  Well, for at least two of them – myself and my partner Brad, we’ve never heard of them or been contacted.  And I’m not a blogger or reporter who “covers” technology, as Cision claims.  I’m just a dude with bad grammar that occasionally writes things that people read. 

And while their intent might not have been to spam, that’s what they did.  They outsourced their contact list and then furthered outsourced their brand to junior associates who did not respond to my polite pleas to be taken off the list.  So in the end, AtomicPR’s brand was tarnished by their outsourcing and eventually one person who took issue (me). 

Morale of the story:  Be hyper careful about your brand and reputation.  It’s your most important asset.  And it’s a bitch to fix.  If you don’t believe me, Google “AtomicPR” and see what comes up on the first page. 

If you have followed our investment in Oblong, you know that it is one of the most innovative companies that we’ve ever invested in.

They spoke at TED this year and the video is now available.  Witness the future of computer user interfaces and collaboration.

Today, we announced our investment in Sifteo.  It was also picked up in PEHub. 

I’m really excited to be a part of the team.  Founded by David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi, out of the MIT Media Lab, we believe that Sifteo is developing the next popular generation gaming platform that will go beyond the early successes of the Nintendo Wii and Apple iPad/Pod/Touch. 

I addition, it’s another investment that we’ve made with the fine folks over at True Ventures, so that only adds to the happy factor. 

Check our their TED talk for a great demo of what they are working on.  And if you ever happen to meet Dave, let him know that you really like his shirt that he wore that day. 

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 ***

Google is planning to launch an experimental fiber-to-home project that will be 100 times faster than most connection – an amazing 1 gigabit per second!

Boulder is working hard to try to be one of the cities chosen for this experiment.  Google wants to hear from us and why we should be included.

Check out BoulderFiber.com and become part of the movement.  It takes about 1 minute to fill out your support form.  The more community involvement we get, the more likely that we’ll be part of this groundbreaking experiment.

Lately, I’ve had the “pleasure” of lying in bed (most of the time in traction) recovering from hip surgery.  Given the liberal doses of Percocet and other pain meds, I’ve refrained from doing any work-related emails.  But it’s boring as crap and I can only read so much (poor attention span due to drugs) and watch so many bad movies (Max Payne was one of the worst ever).  I relegated myself to surfing around the Internet and getting caught up on all the cool stuff that I’m behind on.

One site that I’ve neglected the past 6 months has been Facebook.  Besides playing Zynga games Poker and Mafia Wars, I had stopped updating my status, uploading pictures and maintaining my profile.  Whereas, I used to be on FB a couple of times a day, I was now spending all of my social media time on Twitter. I figured that with my copious amount of free time, I’d rediscover my interest in FB and get sucked back in.

Surprisingly to me, it hasn’t happened.  And it’s day 4 of trying.  I’m not sure that I need FB anymore.  What I perceived as the value before has clearly changed.  And when I look at the value proposition then, versus now, I can’t imagine what FB would have to do to win my social media time away from Twitter.

Here is why Twitter is better than Facebook (in scorecard fashion):

1. Meeting and / or reconnecting with friends.  I have 1,110+ friends on Facebook. I have about 1,700 on Twitter.  But there are two factors that must be considered above quantity: quality of friend and velocity of friend acquisition. 

Quality-wise, my networks are probably about equal with a mix of real friends, acquaintances and folks that are just network builders.  I find this interesting, as on FB I have to allow folks to be my friends, but on Twitter people can essentially befriend me unilaterally.  (I accept all FB friend requests, by the way).  I’m very much overweighted with high school connections on FB and over weighted with business  friends on Twitter.  (This is a good thing, nothing against my high school friends).

Velocity, however is no match.  While FB started strongly, I’ve only added about 200 friends in the past 3 months.  I’m adding about 250 a month in Twitter.  Just this week alone, I’ve added several dozen Twitter followers and only a couple new FB friends. 

Winner:  Twitter

2. Relevant Information. This one isn’t even close.  Besides knowing when a birthday occurs, the information stream inside Facebook sucks.  It’s 90% noise.  Yeah, I know that I can go and configure the info stream, but the interface stinks and it’s always changing.  Twitter?  Simple.  I follow those who provide me interesting information and can always check out “@jasonmendelson.”  If someone is creating too much noise, I can unfollow them with one button.  Plus, for those in my life whose opinions I really trust, I can pay attention to who they are retweeting and pick up others to follow. For this reason, friend discovery is better on Twitter, as well. 

Winner:  Twitter

3. Activity.  So which network sees more activity from those that I care about?  This one is mixed.  It’s all over the map, so let’s punt on this analysis. 

Winner:  Tie

3. Fun.  So life isn’t all work.  Fun matters.  Which one is more fun?  I think FB still wins this one with the games, applications and photos that Twitter doesn’t have.  Plus the persistence that exists with content is nice, as well.  That being said, Twitter is catching up and some of the Facebook fun is moving off the FB platform.  One of our recent investment, StockTwits shows that a great application can be built on top of the Twitter platform and game makers like Zynga have more and more standalone offerings (like Farmville). 

Winner: Facebook (but, isn’t a guaranteed long-term advantage)

4.  Efficiency.  Putting aside all jokes about Twitter’s infrastructure aside, the cumbersome nature of FB, plus the ever-changing and poor UI make this one no contest.  Plus, I think 140 characters is a better format for folks to connect up, instead of the three page dissertation from the girl from high school telling me about her high school crush on me.  And don’t even get me started about FB email and chat – two more complete time sucks in my life that I see no benefit to.   

Winner: Twitter (In a landslide, but please scale your infrastructure)

5. Privacy.  Let’s see… On one hand we have a founder (Facebook) who believes privacy is dead and on the other hand we have a really simple platform that allows me control over what the public sees.  Even more inscrutable is knowing what Facebook’s du jour policy on privacy really is. 

Winner:  Twitter

6. Spam. I’ve had to defriend folks on Facebook due to spam (mostly politicians) and I’m sure we’ve all made a mistake or two where we’ve invited our entire address book to something that we weren’t aware that we were doing.  With Twitter, I only follow those whom I enjoy, it’s easy to audition folks by following / unfollowing, where the “Remove Friend” button seems to change location often. 

Winner:  Twitter

7. Ability to Network.  connections / help:  At one point, I thought that FB would replace Linked In.  I was wrong, Twitter did.  I sent out a tweet and almost instantaneously whatever I need is addressed.  Instead of spamming folks on FB, I just send out a 140 character missive and folks decide whether or not they want to help or not.  With FB, I’d have to create an email and send to everyone and annoy them as they would at least have to go delete the message or forever show new messages in their inbox (especially annoying on the iPhone client). 

Winner:  Twitter

8.  Sharing.  I think FB still wins.  Granted, if you want to share each and every part of your life, there is no substitute for posting pictures and letting everyone know which Sex in the City character you are most like. I think the novelty of this wore off on me a while ago and I prefer sharing information and content that I find find interesting and I find Twitter to be the perfect platform to do this.  That being said, I may not be norm.  And perhaps those that rank sharing as their top attribute for participating in a social network will always flock to FB, but I’m not sure how many people feel this way. 

Final Score:  Twitter: 5  Facebook: 2 Ties: 1

Now that Twitter has effectively taken over friend discovery, connection, networking and information for me, the only real use that FB has if for fun.  And I’m finding more fun in the Twitter platform everyday.  Given that I only have so many hours a day for social media, I’m allocating my hours to Twitter (and blogging, of course).  I wonder if others are finding the same thing? Or is sharing the killer app?

I’ve recently installed Ghostery on my PCs and am fascinated by the information that I’m getting as I’m cruising around the web, or even visiting my own website. 

In short, it alerts you about the web bugs, ad networks and widgets on pages that are tracking you.  Seems to work better than any of my spyware stuff does, too.

Perhaps best of all, it was born from the hard work of David Cancel, a new friend of mine and therefore I’m totally cool letting him monitor my results so that he can make the product even better. 

I mentioned to some friends today that I’m going to see Avatar this weekend, but was worried if I could make it through the show without taking a bathroom break.

No worry, they said, just get the iPhone app RunPee.  Here’s how it works: you’re watching a movie and need to take a break, but you don’t want to miss anything important. The RunPee iPhone app has a timer letting you know when it’s safe to take a break, and gives you a summary of what you missed upon your return.

Brilliance.  They also have a web version.  I now know that I can break at 56 minutes into the movie or I have to wait until 1:57, 2:13 or 2:25.

I’m all set now.  I love technology. 

Several of my Seattle friends pointed out that Senator Dodd has proposed changes to the regulations that govern angel and VC investments.

Every time a VC or angel investor participates in a venture financing, there is a Reg D statement that is filled.  Currently, it’s a federal file that you file with the feds and then each of the states involved (company domicile, investor state, etc.) accepts the Reg D form. This is good because companies only have to pay to comply with one set of rules, rather than many.  The Dodd legislation would repeal the existing federal preemption of state regulation over “accredited investor” securities offerings. States would then, presumably, have to come up with their own rules and standards. 

It is important to have uniform regulation of securities offerings.  Otherwise the costs increase for everyone as startups are required to comply with differing state-by-state laws.  As state laws drift away from each other, eventually this might include startups having to hire multiple legal counsel.  It’s simply a waste of good capital, unless you are a lawyer who wants to make more money.  (In all fairness, the folks who pointed this all out to me ARE lawyers and aren’t concerned with billable hours, rather their clients). 

I am not sure why Senator Dodd would want to change this.  I have no experience in anything going “wrong” with the current regime.  It has been around for decades and the system works well.  There is no compelling reason to add these new costs to the companies and their investors.  I’d like to know what is driving this proposal. 

If you agree, there is an online petition.  Please sign at http://gopetition.com/online/32354.html.