Can you read this?

Fair and Balanced Reporting...You Decide

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 18:51:09 -0600

To get the most out of this blog post, you have to commit to listening to an audio and watching a video clip. First, here is your tax payer supported PBS, The News Hours reporting of the Senator Ted Kennedy’s request that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts change an interesting law. Listen starting at the 50% point. The audio segment lasts less than sixty seconds.

Next, here is your private enterprise, Fox News’s reporting of the same news item. The relevant video segment lasts fifty percent longer than the PBS audio report. The entire video drills beyond the interesting request by Sen. Kennedy and into a portion of today’s healthcare debate.

Which reporting is more fair and balanced? How should the Commonwealth of Massachusetts respond to Senator Kennedy’s “request”?

Digging into SVB’s Funding and exit analytics

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:15:11 -0600

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) has posted a treasure trove of graphical data on various metrics associated with the financial performance of venture-backed companies. The charts cover the timeframe from 1994 to 2008 for the semiconductor, software, biopharmaceuticals, electronics and hardware, communications and networking, and medical equipment and devices industries. There are five interesting charts for each segment.

Exit Volume by Year: Number of companies that had an exit in a particular year. Exits include those that went out of business, M&A (Exit Value Not Reported), M&A and IPO.

Exit Multiples by Year: Value of Company at Exit / Total Capital Invested in the Company.

Months-to-Exit by Year: Number of Months Between a Close of the Series A and the Exit.

Capital-to-Exit by Year: Capital Invested in the Company to get it to Exit (Series A + Series B +...)

Value-at-Exit by Year: Pre-Money value of IPO, Value reported at acquisition or “zero” for a company that went out of business.

Data for each year and metric is provided via a median, 5%, 25%, 75% and 95% percentiles.

There are several caveats to keep in mind. The documents do not specify if the data is US or global. It also does not appear to include capital invested prior to a “Series A”. There’s no mention of if and how non-institutional (i.e. angel, corporate) investment is treated. On a similar note, it is not clear if companies that never took institutional capital are included.

Keeping all of this in mind...There are numerous interesting takeaways from the graphical data. I created a chart from scrapping data from the SVB charts.

Spring and Summer 2009 Angel Activity: Kozio & DataStor

Mon, 3 Aug 2009 15:00:03 -0600

Asteroids, The Movie

Sun, 5 Jul 2009 17:17:00 -0600

The Register reports that Universal Studios is preparing to bring Asteroids to the big screen. Ignoring that the video game’s plot line was not much more than: See rock, spin, shoot, repeat. The studio is creatively moving forward. But, my interest might be elsewhere.

Asteroids, the video game was a leading edge use of vector graphics. While the game was initially released in 1979, it took a while for it to reach Denver. During the early ‘80s in Denver, those of us that lived on the west side of town had to venture “all the way” over to Celebrity Sports Center on Colorado Boulevard to see the latest, greatest video games. My high school and ALF Products friends would make fortnight trips east to play video games and check out the latest Star Wars or Indian Jones movie at the Cooper Theater.

One of my early firmware projects at ALF Products was to write a demonstration project of their graphics co-processor mated with an 8086 co-processor board for the Apple IIe. The 8086 co-processor allowed customers to run a new operating system called, CPM-86 on an Apple. Our graphics co-processor allowed developers to leap ahead of the Apple IIe’s limited raster graphics.

I recall writing an 8086 assembly language program that utilized the co-processor card to create a moving 3D trapezoid that ALF used to demonstrate the graphics card. “it is so easy, a high school senior (circa 1982) can do it”.

The Asteroids screen shoot recalls great memories, my good friend Bryce, with whom I made numerous pilgrimages to The Hill in Boulder to play video games in ’82/83 and my lifetime tech mentor and co-investor, John Ridges, who set me free to code bleeding edge graphics for the Apple IIe.

City of Boulder Considers Increasing Useless Carbon Tax

Thu, 9 Apr 2009 09:09:59 -0600

The Boulder Daily Camera has an article today attempting to document the current Boulder City Council discussions related to the City’s “Carbon Tax”. The existing tax was sold to the citizens as a mechanism to reduce carbon emissions in the city. The City has admitted that they cannot determine if the current tax is meeting this goal because of their inability to accurately measure carbon emissions. Regardless of the inability to measure the effectiveness of the Carbon Tax, Boulder’s leaders are exploring further increases to the Carbon Tax.

The City uses the ~$1M in tax revenue from the Carbon Tax to fund an increase in carbon reduction “education”. Note that the City did not reduce any other tax to make up for the new tax, thus increasing the overall tax rate in the City, with no identifiable positive results and the growth of the bureaucratic infrastructure in the City government. Here’s a comment I posted on the Daily Camera website this morning.

I am generally very supportive of using a so called "carbon tax", if and only if there is an offsetting, dollar-for-dollar reduction in tax revenue from other sources (business property and sales taxes). This approach allows the community to continue to live and grown and avoids an overall increase in taxes.

As opposed to the City's approach, where "carbon tax" revenue is used to fund the growth of a bureaucratic governmental organization. The City's approach is the worse choice of several alternatives, the tax rate is too low to affect behavior and the tax revenue is wasted.

I believe a better approach is to systematically migrate the City's tax structure FROM one based on business property and sales taxes TO one based on Carbon-use...NOT the development of an additional source of revenue to fund bureaucratic growth.

Lastly, one anecdotal means of determining if the Carbon Tax is "working" is by monitoring, so called bad energy behavior. My favorite is counting the number of businesses on Pearl Street who leave their front doors open during all business hours, regardless of outside temperature. We'll know we are making progress when energy costs are high enough to reduce this wasteful behavior.