Jeff Maurone

Welcome to Friday

Brett Morgen is getting hit hard by the pundits on Chicago 10.  But you have to at least give credit to the chance-taking semi-animated approach.  Into the Netflix queue it goes.

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Brian Williams, to quote Gawker, with the gloves off.  I found this video quite hilarious and worth a minute.

Reading Ulysses

I've been chomping on a bunch of great literature since 2008 began: Camus, Capote, Pirsig, Kazantzakis, Sinclair, Wolfe.  I've loved them all, but I've been feeling a bit under-challenged as of late.  And goodness have I compensated.

I've been passing glances to our copy of the twentieth century's best novel for months now.  Any look inside incites fear: stream of consciousness, portmanteau words littering every page, a veritable panoply of literary allusion and a closing sentence that runs for, yes, four thousand, three hundred ninety-one words.  Every time I've tried opening the book....

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead..." THWAP!  Closed went the book.  Too difficult.

But I've come around and now can officially say I've endeavored to finish this thing in less than two months.  With some folks aiming to do the same in a year and fizzing out, I'm certain I've been off as much of if not more than I can chew.

First, some tools:  the Vintage edition of Ulysses complete with annotations marking the original 1922 page numbers.  Next, a trusty Irish lit. professor captured on paper: Harry Blamires's The New Bloomsday Book.  And an occasional reference to Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated for the most esoteric of allusions.

The Blamires book has been enormously helpful.  It's not a silver bullet, though, as the content is nearly as recondite as Joyce's tome.  But it's key to understanding this enormously incomprehensible work.

So, where am I?  I've just met Leopold and am cresting past episode four (of eighteen, page 70 of 750).  "Bidding farewell," posts like this remind me of that classic Moby-Dick quote...

Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.

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Image credit: Flickr User nikkorsnapper.  Licensed under Creative Commons.

Ten Steps to Angel Financing

At Venture Lab, we're rolling through our Ten Steps spring series with the second even in the season coming up next week.  We'd love for you to join us next Thursday at Union Square Boardroom.  As usual, the marketing text is below and you can register here.

Thursday, March 6th, 2008
6:00 to 8:00pm
Doors open @ 5:30

"Ten Steps to Angel Financing"
(Part two of the Ten Steps series)

One Union Square Boardroom
600 University St., First Level
(Lower lobby, 6th Avenue level, behind the escalator)
Seattle, WA 98101

Angel financing is often the most critical step in a company’s early development.  If you are thinking about, planning or in the process of raising an angel round of financing this step-by-step information will be extremely useful.

Join Venture Lab speakers Christopher Hurley, Principal, Beacon Law Advisors, and Shawn Englund, Founder and CEO, LearnLive Technologies as they identify and explain ten steps to angel financing.

Christopher Hurley – Principal – Beacon Law Advisors, PLLC

Chris is a co-founder and principal of Beacon Law Advisors, PLLC,  and represents technology start-up companies and the people and entities that finance and acquire them in Seattle, the Bay Area, and Southern California. 
Having begun his career in Palo Alto in 1993 (Gray Cary now DLA Piper) and moving to Seattle in 1998 (VLG now Heller Ehrman), Chris has worked on over a hundred startup companies, countless buy-side and sell-side merger sand acquisitions, hundreds of private placements, dozens of joint ventures, several fund formations, and nearly a dozen public offerings (company and underwriter representations).  

Prior to co-founding Beacon Law, Chris was CFO and COO for a mobile software platform company  (ultimately sold to a Canadian public company) and was responsible for raising $8.5 million of venture and angel financing.   Chris received his J.D. (cum laude) from Boston College Law School, his MBA (Finance) from Boston University’s Graduate School of Management, and completed his LLM in Taxation from the University of Washington School of Law.  Chris is licensed to practice in California and Washington.

Shawn Englund – Founder and CEO – LearnLive Technologies

Shawn Englund founded LearnLive Technologies in November of 2003. LearnLive is the leading provider of e-learning delivery platforms servicing the Continued Professional Education (CE) markets of Legal and Accounting. LearnLive Technologies focuses on providing Accounting Firms and Law Firms a live and on-demand e-learning platform that automates the CE certification process for internally and externally delivered content while creating and engaging learning experience for participating professionals.

Prior to starting LearnLive, Shawn was the VP of Sales for Pro2Net. Pro2Net, a Seattle-based company, started in 1997 and whose business model was to become the “online Wall Street Journal” for professional vertical markets. Shawn started the online education division at Pro2Net. In 2001 Pro2Net was sold to SmartPros Inc., a New York-based publicly-held company.

The Richardson phones are a'ringin

"Hi Bill, err, I mean, Governor.  This is Barry Obama.  Just checkin' in from San Antone." [Link]

Obama wins the neomarxists

With this piece from Barbara Ehrenreich.  You know where I stand (officially a Hillary supporter but more likely than not to vote for whoever wins the Democratic primary) but, even so, I found this quote particularly poignant: "Clinton can put forth all the policy proposals she likes – and many of them are admirable ones – but anyone can see that she’s of the same generation and even one of the same families that got us into this checkmate situation in the first place. True, some people miss Bill, although the nostalgia was severely undercut by his anti-Obama rhetoric in South Carolina, or maybe they just miss the internet bubble he happened to preside over."

I wanted to pen this big piece about how out of line Bill was that week but then Robert Reich did and then the pile-on began.  Luckily Bill apologized.

Valleywag isn't journalism

But you love it anyway. 

I admit, one out of every ten posts on Valleywag grabs me enough to have me forwarding the link with an email subject like, "OMG!!!!111!!!!1."  And one of out ten posts is more content than even the most resigned sinecure can  handle.  Add Gawker and my feed reader is boiling over ever two hours.  Two recent events reminded me that whatever these sites are, they aren't journalism.

Numero uno: New York Magazine gets ahold of the Valleywag/Gawker style guide and runs with it.  Valleywag achieves a marvel here, slimming my stately, plump AP stylebook down from 419 pages to a single square.  No doubt easier than it sounds when you can just shhrrrrrrrrrrrrrrred the pages on libel.  From the guide: "If someone screwed up in business, find something nice to say about them: 'The charmingly incompetent CEO,'" and from today, "Today's layoffs likely provided a convenient excuse to get rid of Ismail, a suavely incompetent liar."  Can you feel the curtain being pulled back?

Numero dos: Valleywag posts this from-the-hip chunk on the fate of MSNBC.com if Steve Ballmer captures Yahooistan.   I read this and, overreacting as usual, said, "never reading Valleywag again," to the confusion of those sitting around me on the plane.  Others felt the same way, though, and Valleywag quickly backpedaled.  Good thing, too; I didn't want to switch US Weekly.

And yes, I switched the order of these events.  But you'll have to audition to comment to remind me.