While we’re only small-town investors, last week was gruesome. Board meetings in the early morning hours for the investments in Israel, sneaking in conference calls with the East Coast before work, and long night data crunching at night. Here a quick status update:

• The difficult B-round haggling about my seed and A-round investments is over – we finally found common ground on the share distribution. I would’ve never thought to hear people accusing me of being greedy. Lesson learned: Early disengagement or activation of options would have avoided most of the headaches. “Forever grateful” seems to have an expiration date attached, and people also forget how it felt when they didn’t know how to pay the bills and salaries and someone took the risk to fund four drop-outs with a six digit life-line.
• The New York startups around social gaming that went through the press are running themselves – thanks to some really great CEOs and visionary leaders, and great advice from  real VCs, not some hillbillies like me. Lesson Learned: The dance of softly influencing founders by asking the right questions is complex and long, and I have a lot to learn.
• My search for a better resource management system for one of the larger Canadian energy funds resulted in recommending a “cloud” solution – or Software-as-a-Service. The scary part is that about two weeks after my analysis and advice they signed a $40m deal (Canadian Dollars, that is, but nevertheless…). Lesson Learned: Sometimes people actually follow my advice, maybe I can make a business out of this after all…
• My Blu-ray Disc Live (BD-Live) based gaming development SDK worked out great so far. We have only four clients so far, but the tests have been very positive, and six titles are going to come to the market for XMas. The hardest part is convincing publishers of the advantages of BD-Live and the market size. Lesson Learned: At this stage I welcome any competition that helps me making my point (or the point of BD-Live based gaming, for that matter) to lower my customer acquisition costs.
• Portland is on my travel list again in two weeks. Real-Time Information Logistics is still one of my favorites right now. I’m doing an interview miniseries on “The Future of Cloud” right now, and this one will be one of the best interviews.