There’s a funny post over at TechCrunch about an iPhone app that might make you better at your job.  The app is very simple: run the app, push the button at various points of the day, and you might win a prize.  The easy analogy is to the sequence of numbers on Lost.

In any event, my take on this is that we have finally reached the nadir of human evolution (perhaps the peak?).  With all of our collective intelligence, we have endeavored to create the Human Pellet Machine.

I love it when I see a story or hear an anecdote that leaves me scratching my head wondering if there really was a different expected outcome.  The story from the NY Times which has the final numbers on the “Cash For Clunkers” program elucidates a dirty little secret.

One of my investments, CarWoo, had the story about a month ago.  My buddy, and CEO, spent the weekend going around to dealers in the San Francisco area talking to dealers about CarWoo and how they might work together.  He put together a blog post with some observations from the weekend, and pointedly discussed the fact that the American dealers were empty and the foreign dealers were booming.

The fact that the top 10 cars traded in for the program were all American comes as little surprise.  American spent years gorging themselves on SUVs and other fuel inefficient cars.  Further, the quality of American product has been lagging (at least in terms of the perception of the buyer, which is all that matters) that of the Japanese manufacturers.  They are seen as bad product with poor gas mileage.  Exactly the type of car you wouldn’t be looking to buy if someone were trying to incent you to buy otherwise.

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I have been waiting to write this post for a long time.  There are a great deal many resources on the web for entrepreneurs looking to learn, such as Hacker News, Andrew Warner’s Mixergy, and Eric Ries’s Lean Startup Blog.  However, I have always felt there was a gap in the the resources that really would help an upstart.  Having a really good base Excel model, fully built, and flexible (think Basecamp but for your financial/ operational model), would be extremely helpful.

Another resource I have always wanted to see were the actual decks which were used to get companies funded.  For obvious reasons, those are pretty hard at which to get a look.  Now that I am three years on from the initial funding of IMSafer, I have decided that I would post the slides that we used when we went out to raise angel funding.  Beyond just throwing the slides over the wall, as part of my community book The Failing Point, I have an entire essay dedicated to the content of the slides, and what it means with regard to putting together a long form business plan.

These are the actual slides, with no edits, save a few names removed for privacy reasons.  Please send questions.  Don’t be afraid to ask.  They biggest take away most of you will have is that there is no magic bullet for content, but there is good form to follow, and more than anything, at this early a stage, investors are backing people first, ideas second, slide content third.

It’s been an interesting week.  I posted the note about the Zappos deal and got quite a few comments and emails about it.  I will readily admit that the use of the word “hate” was a bit pejorative, but I had a point to make and at the time it seemed appropriate.  I don’t think VCs hate entrepreneurs, but I do think that there are things that VCs do that make life for entrepreneurs very hard.

In some of the discourse I have had over the past week on this topic, I felt a bit like George Costanza trying to explain to his co-worker that he has black friends (for the record, I am an African American, on the off chance that this paragraph offends someone’s sensibilities).  I have VC friends.  I have many VC friends.  I’m not sure that my opinion of the trade has improved much over the last handful of years, but I do like some of the people in the trade.  My opinion of the trade itself has more to do with my observations of the value delivered versus the value extracted by VCs.

I was asked if there were any VCs that I do like, and while I won’t generalize and say that there are firms that I like, there are a handful of VCs I have met in my travels who seem to have good heads on their shoulders, want to do the right thing, are willing to tell you “no” (instead of stringing you along because it costs them nothing), and are people whom I would go to with a deal if someone was looking to raise money and needed an introduction.  These are folks at firms that invest along the entire spectrum of deals, but these 10 are some of the “good guys”:

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