While normally I avoid participating in chain-letter type things, for some reason this one caught my imagination when it showed up in my Facebook news feed this morning. It is spreading like an extremely infectious disease on Facebook, and I’ve been amused and surprised about the things I’m learning about friends of mine, so I decided to be a vector in the epidemic. I’d also love to find out who patient zero is, though that might be hard to determine. Anyway, I published this on Facebook originally, but for those non-Facebook users among you, I am re-publishing it here on my blog.

1. I spent a summer working on an assembly line in Munich building 3-Series BMWs.
2. I have played guitar onstage at The Fillmore  in San Francisco and the Cabo Wabo in Cabo San Lucas.
3. My wife almost bailed on our first date after she found out I was taking the Concorde to London with a buddy – she thought it was a ridiculous expenditure. Luckily, I got to fly supersonic (while it was still possible on commercial airlines) AND marry her.
4. I was a slugger (batted clean-up) on my little league baseball team for several years running.
5. I was born in Wiesbaden, Germany.
6. One summer, I was a roadie for the Colorado Springs Symphony.
7. Years ago, I saved a Super Shuttle van full of people on the way to the airport (including myself) from rolling into the tracks of an oncoming SF Muni train.
8. I once served Rosa Parks dinner. Yes, that Rosa Parks.
9. A band I was in performed Stevie Wonder’s Superstition with Thomas Dolby sitting in on keyboards.
10. I think Golden Grahams is the best cereal ever. Even when those delectable grahams scratch the roof of my mouth.
11. If there’s a chocolate chip cookie within 5 feet of me, I will eat it, no matter what. This has become a problem as my metabolism has slowed with age.
12. I am by no means an athlete, but I’m a halfway decent skier and racquetball player.
13. I stole two Herman Miller office chairs from Oracle in 1993. Sorry Larry.
14. I played the trumpet for seven years.
15. I’ve only broken two bones in my life: my pinky (left hand) and my toe (right foot). Both stupidly.
16. I rear-ended two vehicles (one was parked, both while in the snow) within a few months of getting my driver’s license at age 16. Haven’t had an accident since.
17. I attended the 1995 New Year’s Eve Phish show at Madison Square Garden. At one point, the band began implanting a device in my brain in order to control me, which was very alarming, given I had previously thought they were a force for good. Or maybe it was the acid.
18. The last time I cared about professional sports was when the Redskins won the Superbowl back in the Joe Gibbs, Joe Theisman, Art Monk and John Riggins era.
19. I’ve won two things in my life in raffles/drawings: a stuffed animal named Filbert T. Squirrel from my savings and loan when I was eight years old and opened an account, and, two years ago, a Toshiba HD DVD player after visiting a booth at CES. I miss the squirrel.
20. I was once briefly engaged to another woman before meeting and marrying my wife (she called it off, I’m the lucky one).
21. The best song lyric I’ve yet written rhymes “Don Quixote” with “booty”.
22. The only time I was ever grounded was in seventh grade when I threw a water balloon at a passing delivery truck and it shattered the side view mirror. I fled from the scene and was later picked up by the police and had to be driven home though my neighborhood in the backseat of the cruiser. This happened while I was supposed to be babysitting my little brother.
23. I’ve never been in a fist-fight.
24. My favorite band of all time is Steely Dan.
25. I’ve probably seen Trading Places more times than any other movie, with the possible exception of the original version (the Gene Wilder one, not the Johnny Depp one) of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Go ahead, publish your own list too. You know you want to.

File the newly enacted FAS 157 under “stupid accounting tricks”. In addition to making investments and representing Foundry Group on the boards of companies we’ve invested in, my partner Jason Mendelson also runs our back office and is responsible for overseeing our audits and financial reporting to our investors. Jason is knee-deep in audit season right now, and he has a great and detailed rant up at Venture Beat about the stupidity of FAS 157.

FAS 157 is theoretically designed to make the valuation of our portfolio more transparent to our investors by requiring us to value our investments at “fair market value”. Sounds like motherhood and apple pie, right? Who could have a problem with this? Well it turns out that valuing early stage private companies like the ones we invest in is more art than science and valuations are open to interpretation (and discretion), thus opening the whole system to valuation related liability and false comfort from false precision. In the good old days of VC, one basically (with a few exceptions) set the valuation of a company to the price of the last round of financing. While there were situations in which this could produce misleading valuations (particularly when the market was going down), it worked pretty well and in my opinion, and didn’t create busy work that leads false precision around company valuations.

While FAS157 arguably makes sense when valuing public companies (and perhaps formerly public companies that were taken private and have the scale for public market comps to make sense), for the early stage venture world, it creates a process that wastes resources and money and helps no one but the accounting firms — and perhaps law firms down the line when valuation lawsuits start inevitably springing up.

I am constantly amazed by the the creativity and initiative the accounting industry has shown in the wake of scandals like Enron and Worldcom. While they were complicit in these frauds, they somehow came out the other side as beneficiaries when laws like Sarbanes-Oxley and rules like 409A were enacted, essentially creating entirely new lines of business and mandatory employment for themselves. And now they’ve come up with FAS 157, finding yet another way to bill ever more hours to produce an end result that has little meaning and helps no one. At least not in my corner of the universe, the early-stage VC world.

I made my annual pilgrimage to Vegas last week for CES 2009. While the CEA claimed only an 8% decrease in attendance this year at the opening of the show, I’m thinking they came up with a non-obvious means of measurement to whitewash what must have been a much bigger drop in attendance — perhaps they measured sign-ups instead of how many people actually showed up, for instance. Given how much less crowded it felt there — in previous years, taxi lines at the major hotels were at least 30 – 45 minutes long, and it was difficult to get a dinner reservation — I’m thinking the attendance drop had to be much bigger than 8%. And some articles out today peg the decline in attendance at 23%. Bad for the show and a troubling sign of the times, to be sure, but it sure made the overall experience as an attendee much nicer.

Several of my partners attended this year as well and we just posted some of our observations about the event over on the Foundry Group blog. One thing we didn’t mention on that blog, probably because we are all smitten with the iPhone, was Palm’s announcement of the new Palm Pre. I have to say, it looks pretty damn intriguing to me. My wife still uses her Sidekick, but wants a new phone, yet can’t get her head around using the iPhone’s virtual keyboard, so I may suggest that she become our household’s Palm Pre guinea pig. The Pre claims some great features: true multi-tasking and multi-service contact and event sync (as well as the real keyboard and cut and paste) plus an app store all sound pretty good to me. Palm did a great job of commanding media attention at CES this year, partly because the Pre is a hail-mary pass for the company. And I have to say, based on how the ball looks in the air right now, it is conceivable the wide receiver might actually catch the pigskin in the end zone. Apple’s introduction of the iPhone has forever changed the smartphone market by breaking the carriers’ hegemony over the software stack and has caused everyone in the mobile market to raise their game. Consumers benefit, as will app developers who will have several viable platforms to develop to. Exciting times.

Finally, Sling Media had some interesting product announcements. During MacWorld they demoed the SlingPlayer for the iPhone (hooray) and they also showed the first EchoStar DVR with an integrated Slingbox. This product is the first of (hopefully Many) fruits of the vision of the 2007 merger of EchoStar and Sling Media. The Slingbox inside this new DVR has access to one of the multiple internal tuners, so a remote viewer watching via a SlingPlayer or SlingCatcher will no longer be commandeering what’s on in the living room. If they added a bluray player and access to online video sources, this would be the ultimate STB, and might be enough to cause me to switch from Comcast to DISH.

And as a final note, one thing that wasn’t announced until after CES, is that Sling’s co-founders Blake and Jason Krikorian as well as executives Jason Hirschorn and Ben White are leaving EchoStar and handing the reigns over to the (very) capable COO John Gilmore. I know that Blake, Jason, Jason and Ben are planning to take some well-deserved time off, and I wish them the best of luck in the future. Gents, it was an honor and a pleasure to work with you guys, and I sincerely hope we can work together again someday…

Hooray! As a former investor in Sling Media and an ongoing fan of the company and its products, I’m very happy to see they’ve announced support for the SlingPlayer on the iPhone.   Can’t wait to get my hands on it it — it is supposed to ship towards the end of this quarter, assuming Apple approves the app. C’mon Apple, don’t kowtow to AT&T and back down from support for this app because of bandwidth concerns…