More of a warning so you know where not to go, I suppose… I’ll be on a panel at the “Future of Funding” event in San Mateo on February 18th. More information here: The Growth of Small Firms February 18, 2010 11:00-12:00pm Description: There are an increasing number of venture capital firms with smaller and smaller fund sizes. More

“The foundation of cooperation is not really trust, but the durability of the relationship.” – Robert Axelrod More

Turns out that Yahoo! search can’t find the Pirate Bay. Between moves like this and forcing page inclusion instead of crawling, I as a user, have moved on from Yahoo!. The other day I needed to go back to Yahoo! search to use their backlink checker, and instinctively did this… (see image) More

The economic stimulus is a farce, as should be obvious to anyone who cracked open their Econ 101 textbook or ever ran a lemonade stand. Where is the $150B going to come from? Reduced spending elsewhere (wash), increased taxes (same as reducing spending from the private sector – worse than a wash), borrowing from abroad (raises the price of capital for private businesses, or causes inflation, resulting in a wash), or printing more money (inflation / reduced purchasing power, which depending on what it does to inflation expectations, can be worse than a wash). More

When going through hell, keep going – Winston Churchill More

The option pool shuffle: beat the game and raise your valuation: Summary: Don’t let your investors determine the size of the option pool for you. Use a hiring plan to justify a small option pool, increase your share price, and increase your effective valuation. Focus on your share price, not your valuation Summary: Focus on your share price and the number of shares you own — metrics like valuation and percent ownership can fool you. More

When I was young, I thought the point of the body was to protect the brain. Now I realize it’s the other way around. The brain exists to protect the body. There are two kinds of animals – those who move and those who don’t. Animals who don’t move count on a stable and predictable environment and replicate like crazy to compete for scarce resources, and to outlast environmental changes. More

Vast.com has launched a new category, Credit Cards! Why waste your time doing comparison shopping, when you can get what you really want, free stuff! Our “deep” crawler now recognizes and extracts credit card numbers accidentally posted all across the web, and enables you to shop with them. What’s the business model, indeed! More

Puzzling Evidence, already one of the funnier and most interesting blogs out there, knocks it out of the park: “Rael Dornfest and Tim O’Reilly heard about it and, not to be outdone, declared Web 4.0 over pizza last night at Il Fornio.” As they say, read the whole thing. More

For anyone who wants to chat with me or with anyone else looking at this page, I’ve added a Mobber bar to the top of the site – it’s pretty slick. Talk to each other or ping me, or stick Mobber on your own site by pasting the following HTML into your blog or page:  <iframe src=’http://www.mobber.com/embed/ajax?v=c’ width=775 height=115 frameborder=0 scrolling=no></iframe> More