markstansbury

Dan Primack at Fortune puts out a daily newsletter called Term Sheet. It's focus is broader than startups and VCs. It also includes private equity and other institutions. But it's a fantastic way to stay up to date on major deals across all industries and sectors.

Venture Beat and Pando Daily are also good resources. All three tend to run the same stories within a few minutes of one another.

Pash is right. No word yet on crowdfunding. It will be interesting to see how this change to the general-solicitation rules impacts the crowdfunding portion of the bill. The provisions are somewhat contradictory, so long as the accredited-investor limitation remains.

This is going to BLOW up into some amazing technology. Just you wait.

Well that was a letdown.

To be clear, I wasn't really suggesting that one should game the system, hence the scare quotes. But a competent lawyer should, in my view, respect the fact that judges are human and respond just like other humans. That means paying attention to little details like dress, demeanor, font, grammar, and all the other elements of presentation that every marketer knows but few lawyers understand.

On a deeper level there are tactics like angling your argument to the judge's world view. (This makes judicial panels all the more important.)

Legal realism is so fantastically obvious as this study easily shows.

The law is what judges do. So your lawyer had better know how to "manipulate" the judge.

I'd imagine that you could get yourself to the bay area if you went back to school for an advanced degree. I don't know if that's your path, but you could use that as a foot in the door.

I meant that it's likely to challenge some presumption held by nearly every reader. I enjoy honest analysis when it says: Side A is wrong and Side B is wrong, the answer lies elsewhere.

Everyone is angry at first because their sacred cow has been tossed on the grill, but in the end we reconcile and have a great cookout.

I had no idea. Very cool. I think that if I were a sea creature I might like a new home. But this won't be so funny when shipping-container sized crabs ascend onto L.A.

I suggest you grab a beer. First things first.

After that, maybe see if you can get some people signed up for launch notices. Maybe see if you can get some female early adopters. That strikes me as the biggest dating-site problem.

Good luck.

Interesting discussion. I like it because it's sure to piss off everyone.

box.net is a good option for sharing information with clients.

The Roaring Twenties weren't roaring because of the Super Rich. They were roaring for the same reason 2006 was: Your idiot friend could double his cash in just a few days of thoughtless investing.

This is not, of course, to defend wealth disparity.

Quit your bitching JBJ! Instead of wearing dirty, threadbare headphones in order to "get lost" in music chosen solely on the basis of van-transposed cover art, now I can decide that I want an album from an obscure Norwegian band with 27 fans and I can download it to my phone from anywhere on earth--and I'll pay half the price of a vinyl.

Don't get me wrong, I love record shops. But I love iTunes and AmazonMP3 too. And while changes to the music industry have hurt a lot of good people, Jon Bon Jovi is not one of them.

So, you're saying, if a company is successful at creating and marketing its product and I don't like the price I can steal it?

In the context of going out to dinner not buying is the same as "stealing".

I think we can do this all day.

Three quick things off the top of my head:

First and most important, you should probably take this post down right now. Whether or not you have a confidentiality agreement of any sort with this company, saying bad things about an "anonymous" major player--which could be just one of two companies--exposes you to potential liability and a headache that you do not want to deal with. I put no research into this, it's just my immediate opinion.

Second, ordinarily you cannot recover punitive damages for a breach of contract. You can recover actual damages and sometimes (rarely) attorneys' fees and costs.

Third, the size of the law firm is proportional only to the fees you will be charged--fees that you probably will not be able to recover. More important that office size and advertising budget, make sure that you get along with your lawyer, trust him or her, and be certain that the lawyer has adequate resources to handle your dispute--which sounds pretty basic. You do not need a firm capable of litigating a federal antitrust prosecution or a multi-party international-trade dispute. Focus on the lawyer, not the brand.

Good luck.

The Charleston case is just sad. That lady obviously needs help.

As a lawyer I can see why most of those cases were filed -- though I wouldn't file them myself!

I find the Google case most interesting. Google's lawyers clearly envisioned that happening, judging from the warnings and disclaimers on Google Maps. I certainly thought of the possibility years ago. But I think it's dead in the water.

The worst case IMHO is probably the Lindsay Lohan case. She surely has well-credentialed lawyers doing her work for her. They ought to know better.

Though the Wisconsin child-molester case is pretty wild as well. Even if it does have a perverse logic to it...

This, is Twitter.

It's a bit of a PR stunt too, of course. But this sort of public, real-time communication strikes me as vastly superior to, say, a call to 911 or Public Sanitation. For one thing, everyone can read it and respond immediately.

Maybe you don't want to tweet that your house is being robbed. (Maybe you do?) But for any issue of general concern, Twitter surely beats the pants off traditional media and modes of communication.

Keep it up Twitterverse!

... or that the reduction notice alone takes up an extra page.

I prefer whiskey and crying.

One million words and "stands" is the best you can find to describe a set that is "growing like mad"?

:p

Yes. But it may be worth the trade off in time and effort saved. Plus, for what it's worth, I'm a pretentious dick.

Everquest has destroyed more marriages than alcoholism. I can only imagine what it has done to credit scores.

After my surf-and-turf, three-martini lunches, I do tend to get drowsy

Here's a link to that Russell essay by the way. It's a good one.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/8299499/Am-I-an-Atheist-or-an-Agno...

It's called agnosticism. It's not new.

"...in regard to the Olympic gods, speaking to a purely philosophical audience, I would say that I am an Agnostic. But speaking popularly, I think that all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line."

-Bertrand Russell

I'll repeat the commentary I left on Kennerly's blog (which is always a great read, by the way):

------- This debate is fascinating.

Conservative commentators like Bainbridge et al should be taking the stance that eBay loses this case because an investor takes the company he invests in, poison pills, staggered board--presumably minimized profit aspirations--and all. More-liberal commenatators on the other hand should be crying foul at the blatant shareholder disenfranchisement. But those roles are reversed. Which just goes to show how weak legal arguments are in the face of moral instinct:

Disenfranchisement is okay--you take the company you invest in--when the company is doing something good. Minority-shareholder activism is okay--you aren't bound by pre-existing rules--when the shareholder is trying to do something good.

Have you seen the Halvetica documentary? FAN-TASTIC!