Last month I did an interview for the Internet History Podcast, where I tell the story of my experiences as a co-founder of Excite.com, starting way back in 1993, ancient history in internet time. There’s a ton of great interviews on this site, so if you’re interested in history of the internet, I highly recommend it!

My partners and I released our second Foundry Group music video earlier this week.  My partner Jason wrote the music and directed the video, and he I and spent an afternoon poolside at a Holiday Inn Express (that’s how we roll) in North County San Diego (relaxing prior to dinner at the amazing Stone Brewing Company) earlier this year writing the lyrics for the song.  In case you are interested in the lyrics after watching the video (they are also accessible if you turn on the closed-captioning feature on YouTube), scroll down after the video and check ’em out.

Spoken Intro:

Man, things are so hard these days
Tell me about it. I wish we could go back to when things just worked
You know, those old guys don’t know lucky they had it with all their technology 30 and 40 years ago
Y’all, you straight. Let me drop a story on you

Verse:

I’m king of email, I craft a witty header
Anywhere, any time, life is so much better
Ninety unread emails. Inbox zero, hashtag #FAIL!
Life was better when we licked and stamped our letters

Gonna hit a new club with my favorite homie
Got GPS Satellites watchin’ over me
They got me to the spot, but they were off a block
Life was better when we trusted Rand McNally

Took 28 pictures of my gourmet dinner
I want to post them for all the world to honor
I shared on Instagram. No likes, I got no fans
My life was better with photos made of paper

I need a fact so I do a search on Google
All these results man, are giving me an eyeful
I see Viagra ads, That shit’s for older dads
My life was better using Dewey Decimal

Chorus:

These are the worst of times (repeat)

Verse:

So many videos, I could waste away my years
I’m rockin’ Gangnam Style, Harlem Shake has me in tears
Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, I got no time for you
Life was better with my TV and rabbit ears

Check out my new phone. Global connectivity
3G, 4G, I even got my LTE
So then I phoned my pop But still the damn call dropped
Life was better with faxes and a rotary

I found a website. Amazon, they sell it all!
Silk boxers, gouda cheese, they even got robotic balls
Addicted to “One Click.” Right to my house they ship
Y’all life was better fighting traffic at the shopping mall

I got my choice of every album ever made
iTunes, Spotify, anywhere I want it played
I just can’t choose between, Iron Maiden, Beiber, Sting
Life was better with my vinyl and mix tapes

Chorus:

These are the worst of times (repeat)

Just over two years ago, my partners and I released a somewhat preposterous music video.  We had so much fun with that, so we decided to do it again.  We’re not quite done with the final editing, so the full video is not quite ready, but we thought we’d put out a trailer / teaser.  Hope you enjoy!

My Foundry Group partner Jason Mendelson and I attended second annual Startup Iceland conference in June, expertly run by Bala Kamallakharan.  We had a great time meeting members of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Reykjavik and touring the other-wordly countryside.  Jason and I even got to meet the President of Iceland, who spoke at the opening session of the conference.  We also participated in a conversation about startup communities that Bala ably led.  Videos of the day’s sessions are now available, and you can see our session below:

Startup Iceland 2013 – Panel Discussion from Innovation Center Iceland on Vimeo.

Last year while I was at SXSW, I stopped in to do an interview for a documentary film project called Ctrl+Alt+Compete, produced by Ten100 in partnership with Microsoft Corporation. Some background info and a clip of my interview has been posted on the Ctrl+Alt+Compete website. There’s some great interviews up on the site, which I encourage checking out. And if you just want to skip straight to me, here I am:

Founder Dating, Feb 9th at 5:30pm.  If you want to start your own company but lack a co-founder, this is a great place to come meet people.  RSVP here.

Happy Hour, February 23rd at 6pm.  If you’re not sure if the program is for you, or you know you want to apply but just have questions, this is a great chance to come meet the staff, mentors, and alumni.  RSVP here.

Congress is trying to break the internet.

While I mean for the above sentence to be provocative, I’m not really indulging in hyperbole.

Please join me and my partners at Foundry Group in participating in American Censorship day tomorrow, Wednesday 11/16/11. There are two disturbing and potentially quite damaging bills making their way through Congress: the Protect IP Act (PIPA – S.968) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA – H.R.3261).

Like most legislation, neither bill actually does what their titles claim they do, and both basically amount to online censorship. These bills were fast-tracked through Congress with the support of Hollywood and Big Media, and stand a very real chance of getting passed unless members of Congress hear from their constituents.

Numerous organizations that support free speech and a free and open internet have come to oppose these bills, including the EFF, the Free Software Foundation, Public Knowledge, Demand Progress, Fight For the Future, Participatory Politics Foundation and Creative Commons. They’ve organized tomorrow’s American Censorship Day, which occurs tomorrow and will protest these bills. If you run a website or blog, check out the American Censorship site to see how you can participate.

I encourage delving into the full text of these bills, but if you lack the time (or intestinal fortitude) to wade through them, here’s a short video that summarizes the potential impact and second order effects of this truly bad legislation:

PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

My partner Brad Feld has written a good post on this topic, as has Fred Wilson, who appropriately writes that these bills undermine the architecture of the internet and threaten to destroy the innovation and entrepreneurship occurring on the internet, one of the few bright spots in our nation’s economy, and certainly where the future lies.

Please join me and my partners in speaking out against these terrible pieces of legislation.

We had a (thankfully brief) scare in our portfolio last week: one of our companies temporarily lost control of its domain. An overseas third-party “bad actor” was able to convince the company’s domain name registrar to transfer control of the company’s domain without the company’s knowledge. Fortunately, our company was able to regain control of its domain before any actual changes to its DNS settings were made.

After speaking to some people in the network security business and polling our own portfolio, it turns out that this sort of occurrence is far more common than one might suspect. In today’s world, a company’s domain name is literally its crown jewels. If a nefarious party gains control of a company’s domain, the potential damage is massive and it could literally destroy a company’s business if a cyber criminal were to implement a large scale phishing attack or simply shut down the company’s site. Every minute of downtime equates to lost revenue and an erosion of customer trust.

To further underscore the vulnerabilities around DNS, I noticed this morning an article on hackers in Brazil using a technique called DNS cache poisoning attacks on major ISPs in Brazil to redirect users headed to brand-name sites like Google, YouTube and Hotmail to malware-infected sites. DNS is crucially important to the functioning of the net, but unfortunately it remains vulnerable to various exploits, including the hardest to eradicate, “social engineering”.

Some attacks (like DNS cache poisoning) are not anything a single company can protect against, but there are internal controls and procedures a company can put into place to make their domains safer. One simple example is to conduct an audit of all your domains: are they controlled by a single individual within the company? Are there policies and procedures in place around renewing domain names, controlling DNS updates, etc.?

Many times, founders buy domains on their personal credit cards early in the life of their company. Often, this is forgotten about until there is some reason to make a change to DNS settings. Clearly this is an untenable position — a founder could depart the company, have their credit card on file with the registrar expire, simply miss the renewal emails, get hit buy a bus, etc., leaving the company scrambling to deal with this after the fact.

While many early stage companies are a bit allergic to “big company” process and procedures, this is one area where every company should exert some process discipline to make sure domains are controlled by the company, that the contact email addresses filed with the registrar are carefully monitored, that automation is in place to detect unexpected transfers of domain, etc.

I’ll follow up in a later post with a more exhaustive list of best practices around domain name management, but in the meantime take a moment to reflect on how your company controls its domains and whether your internal safeguards are sufficient to prevent what could be a catastrophic loss.

Update: turns out my partner Seth Levine also posted about this incident this morning. Read more here.

I’ve been very distracted and unproductive today since reading yesterday’s news of Steve Jobs’ death, on my iPhone, of course. While not at all unexpected, it still somehow felt quite sudden to me, and I’ve been spending my time since I heard the news watching the amazing outpouring of emotion and reflection on his life and his impact on the world in my news feeds on Twitter and Facebook. He was an icon, and I’ve certainly haven’t felt this emotional at the passing of a public figure before. I guess he was my generation’s John Lennon or even John F. Kennedy, but I’d argue his ongoing impact on the world is broader reaching and more profound than either of those two.

I never met the man – the closest I got was brushing past him in the tight aisles of the Whole Foods Market in Palo Alto, but still I felt like I knew him (clearly I was not the only one) and I was inspired by him as an entrepreneur, a product visionary, a technologist, a showman, a marketer, a designer, an artist, a filmmaker, a CEO, and a fearless icon of what’s possible when you have an unswerving commitment to excellence in all things.

While I doubt I’m adding anything fundamentally new here, I do feel compelled to add my views to the torrent of thoughts that have been flowing since October 5th’s news.

My first Apple computer was the Mac SE 30 that my parents bought me (thanks Mom & Dad!) when I started school at Stanford in 1989. Prior to that, I taught myself to program BASIC and learned about hexadecimal notation, shape tables and basic 6502 assembly code on the Franklin Ace 1000 my parents bought when I was in junior high school, which was an Apple ][ clone. Since then, I’ve owned dozens of Apple devices, and take quiet pride in the fact that all my partners at Foundry Group now use Macintosh computers, which was not the case when I moved from California to Boulder, CO to help get Foundry Group off the ground. Happily, they all freely admit their computing lives have become dramatically simpler since they made the switch.

His incredible accomplishments are covered in detail all over the web, but they bear mentioning here, albeit briefly. He started the PC revolution from a Palo Alto garage. He brought the mouse/windows GUI paradigm to the masses with the Macintosh. He ushered in the desktop printing revolution by adopting Adobe’s Postscript technology in the Apple LaserWriter. The Macintosh was long the platform of choice in the world of professional audio and video. After getting kicked out of his own company, he left to create NeXT, which ultimately became the foundation of Mac OSX and brought (stealthily) UNIX into the lives of millions of consumers. He transformed Hollywood and computer animation with his rescue/purchase of Pixar. He mainstreamed portable digital audio music players with the launch of the iPod and transformed Apple from a computer company to a consumer electronics company. He brought the music industry into the digital age with the iTunes Music Store and made his company a force to be reckoned with in the digital media landscape as the largest online retailer of music.

Amazingly, at this point, the pace of disruptive technologies and products that came out of Apple accelerated. The iPhone launched, breaking the wireless carriers’ stranglehold control over phone hardware and software, unleashing a huge amount of innovation that the carriers had been preventing, which not only enable Apple to succeed in this market but also paved the way for the success of Android. The iPhone was unlike any smartphone yet seen, and as Mark Andreessen has said, it was as if it had dropped through a wormhole from five years in the future. Competitors like RIM actually reacted to the launch of the iPhone in disbelief and denied that it could possibly do what Jobs claimed in his unveiling of the original iPhone. And while Jobs & Co didn’t envision the potential of an app ecosystem on the initial iPhone, they were smart enough to recognize the obvious demand as developers and end-users started jail-breaking iPhones, and they moved to open up the system and allow third-party developers a seamless and lucrative way to make their apps available to a huge audience of willing customers. The iOS app ecosystem is now a profoundly important part of today’s technology landscape and unleashed a new wave of innovation and investment opportunity.

And, finally, the iPad. I will admit that this was the product launch I was most dubious about. Even as an Apple fanboy, I was not convinced the world needed a device category between smartphones and laptops. I was skeptical and thought the iPad might wind up a jackalope-type product that didn’t fit any real market need. Of course, my family now owns three iPads, and I use the device daily. Once again, Jobs’ instincts and “no focus groups” orthodoxy nailed it and created a hit product which established a new category, one in which Apple is waiting for a truly worthy competitive product to emerge, even after they launched their second-gen iPad 2. What’s the next act? Maybe the rumored Apple Television will one day emerge – if any company can rethink the fundamental challenges around the living room “lean back” remote-control user experience, it is Apple.

In the end, a few core principles guided his approach to the world, which made him perhaps the greatest CEO of all time and brought Apple to its current position as the most valuable technology company it the world. Steve elevated Design (with a capital D) to a core value in all Apple products and brought beauty to the previously often ugly world of technology. He focused relentlessly on user-centric design and understood the value of editing a product down to his essence, and that choosing what to remove from a product was at least as important as choosing what to put in. He had the courage to cannibalize his own successful products by introducing newer models at that obsoleted the old at the height of their popularity. And he actively resisted dogmatic thought. Apple is the only truly vertically integrated consumer electronics company out there: they design their own chips, their own hardware, do their own industrial design, build their own firmware and software, and created an ecosystem of services surrounding their devices. It is because of this that they have been able to design such elegant products that no competitor has been able to touch. Yet, particularly in Apple’s darkest days, conventional wisdom said that Apple was failing because of its vertical integration. They were failing because they hadn’t left the chip design to Intel, the OS to Microsoft, the hardware to the likes of Dell and the software to 10,000 independent ISVs. Apple’s current market dominance must have been sweet vindication of Jobs’ long-view thinking and core beliefs.

Jobs was a true iconoclast and his impact will be felt for years to come. The world and the future won’t be the same without him shaping it. I’ll miss you Steve.

As a final note, I leave you with Steve’s now famous (and perhaps best ever) commencement speech he gave at Stanford in 2005:

My partners and I have been cooking up this video over the summer, and we’re finally ready to release it to the world. Jason and Brad recently released a book called Venture Deals, and Jason decided that releasing a music video was the best way to market the book. (Isn’t that obvious?)

Jason (my bandmate for over a decade) wrote the music and lyrics for this (very) tongue-in-cheek song, and I have to say, it is rather catchy. Despite my general skepticism about parody, Jason’s songwriting skills won me over.

After he put the instrumental tracks together without touching a single real instrument, thanks to the power of Apple’s GarageBand, we headed to Jason’s recording studio, where Jason laid down the lead vocals and the rest of us laid down the backing vocals. Then we proceeded to shoot the video on location in Boulder during a day-long photo shoot in late June, also under the direction of Jason “Auteur” Mendelson. I have to say, I think Seth steals the show with his beard and blue suit.

Hope you enjoy it. Here it is:

If you’ve read this far, you might even want to read the lyrics. Here they are: