Month: April 2009

Last week we heard that the founders of Skype are putting together a financing to buy back their company from eBay.

And yestesterday the founders of StumbleUpon announced they had bought their company back from eBay after they sold it nearly two years ago.

I love the fact that the founders are so passionate about their product & company even after a successful sale of the business. It’s not just about the money. They have a vision and want the company reach it’s fullest potential. It’s in their guts.

Yesterday, my friend Eric Marcouiller offered this tweet that we should try and buy back his company MyBlogLog which Yahoo bought back in 2007. I loved that product and was dying to invest in the comany before the sale. But now the all three founders have moved on from Yahoo. Yahoo never really allowed that product to meet it’s fullest potential which is a total bummer.

There are other examples as well. The founder of Dodgeball after selling to Google left and recently created FourSquare which is essentially Dodgeball on steroids. It’s well known that the Dodgeball founders were upset with Google’s handling of the product post acquisition.

I’ve been saying for some time now that this is the perfect time to start a company. Maybe it’s also the perfect time to buy your company back too!

I’ve been carrying around two devices since the end of December.

My main squeeze is the Blackberry.

And I’ve been using the iPhone essentially as a glorified iPod and as a portable browser.

A few days ago, the trackball on my Blackberry became stuck. I tried pushing it down, shaking it, singing to it and threatening it. No joy.

It’s an unlocked Tmo BB 8900 that I’m running on the AT&T network. I wonder if AT&T will even help me with it. Hmmm.

So I’m back to using my iPhone as my main squeeze for the last few days.

Some observations:

1 – The camera on the 8900 is better than the iphone. I already miss it. But looking at photos on the iphone is dreamy. Last night we went to a friends surprise 40th bday party. It was fun showing off my kids photos on the iPhone.

2 – My kids always grab my iphone to play games. My fault I know. But it drains the battery really fast.

3 – Does the iPhone have autotext (vs autospell). For example I’ve got my blackberry set up so when I type in “xx” it automatically converts that to my mobile phone number. I’ve got about a half a dozen of such shortcuts on blackberry. any ideas?

4 – I love using the Boxee iPhone app.

5 – Just downloaded Runkeeper on my iphone. went for a 4mile run this morning. it worked great.

6 – I can’t believe that you can’t do an email search on the iphone. my work around is to have all my work email sent to bijan AT sparkcapital dot com also forwarded to gmail. If I need to find a specific email I goto gmail on the iphone and do a search there. Clunky but at least it works.

7. Yelp on the iphone is simply stunning. Its exhausting on the blackberry.

8. I’ve got the blackberry set up to remain in silent mode when receiving tweets via sms. But it vibrates when I receive a txt from friends/family/close colleagues. I can’t do that on the iphone.

9 – I like how iPhone deals with calender invites better than the blackberry.

I’m missing the blackberry and will need to get it fixed. But I will definitely give the iPhone another try as my primary machine when iphone 3.0 OS comes out this summer. 

If you live here in Massachusetts then I encourage you to write and call your local state representative and tell them you support Massachusetts House Bill 1794.

This is the bill that would end employee non compete agreements (it would not impact non-disclosure agreements or non solicitation agreements. those are quite different and should be protected).

Our firm, Spark Capital, endorsed this bill. Xconomy has the full story here.

I hope the Boston Globe writes about it as well.

Spread the word!.