Over this weekend I celebrated my tenth anniversary as a Venture Capitalist. When I joined August Capital 10 years ago, things weren’t so different than they are today. There had been a period of real exuberance in venture investing but it had come to an unceremonious end. The momentum in momentum investing had run out of steam. And it was back to the basics in Venture Capital — fund smart folks building interesting companies that didn’t require a pile of cash. I felt grateful then, as I do today, that I had joined a firm that focused on the fundamentals of Venture Capital and company building.

August Capital has always been a big picture firm — build great companies for the long run and everything else will work out in the wash. I don’t think that ten years ago I quite understood just how long the “long run” really was. But Venture Capital is definitely a long term business. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of opportunities in any given year to be short sighted and to optimize for the near term, but those decisions will assuredly come back to bite you. Venture Capital is about thinking long term. Venture Capital is about paying it forward. Venture Capital is about being honest, and forthcoming, and helpful and hard working. And, in the long run, you may have the good fortune to fund a great company or two along the way.

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One of the lead tech stories this week concerned the wild and crazy early days of Facebook. According to David Kirkpatrick’s soon to be released book, “The Facebook Effect,” Mark Zuckerberg used to have business cards that read “I’m CEO … Bitch!” What caught my attention most about the story wasn’t the fact that Mr. Zuckerberg had this irreverent business card. Rather, it was the fact that when the vast majority of journalists reported this “important” tidbit (and there were many who did), it always read something like “I’m CEO…B**ch!” or “I’m CEO…b****!” After all, we wouldn’t want decent folks like yourselves to have to read the word “bitch.” That would be such a shock to the system.

The business community’s jihad against swear words never ceases to amaze me. I was recently talking with an entrepreneur who had built a service that was populated by user generated content. In our discussion of his product, this entrepreneur went to great lengths to reassure me that he had built the necessary technology to protect against errant swear words finding their way into the content. And it struck me that I have had this exact conversation many dozens of times over the last decade. “Rest assured, no swear words will ever find their way onto our service!”

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I was at a party the other night to celebrate the first anniversary of Nokia’s “Ideas Project.” The “Ideas Project” is an effort to bring together a diverse group of smart folks to share their thoughts on the evolution of media. The site has a bunch of interesting videos in which the likes of Esther Dyson, Robert Scoble, Loic Le Meur, Jerry Michalski, etc. share their big ideas. It is a really nicely curated site.

When Nokia started the Ideas Project just a year ago, it was not as blindingly obvious as it is today, that the evolution of media is all about mobile (ok, maybe it was to Nokia). But, truth be told, venture capitalists have been predicting the domination of mobil and mobile applications for more than a decade now. And those of us who bet on the emergence of mobile in 2000 or 2003 or 2006 lost a lot of money.

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I get lots of emails with business plans, PowerPoints, executive summaries each week. I try to give them all a fair read. After all, you never know where you’re going to learn about the next Microsoft. But you’d be surprised how often I will get a mass email address to “Dear Sir” or, worse yet, addressed to the wrong person.

The other day I got just such an email. It was addressed “Dear Mr. Thorp” and then went on to pitch a new SaaS business. Rather than read through the plan, I emailed the sender back a curt reply:

“I will pass it on to Mr. Thorp.”

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This afternoon I attended an event sponsored by Proctor & Gamble called the “Innovation Outreach Venturing Day.” The event was an effort by executives at P&G to connect with the investment community in the Bay Area to discuss how P&G might work more closely with the emerging technology companies we all touch every day. The pre-amble to the event was a run down of the scale of Proctor & Gamble’s business and the massive amount of technology they already leverage. The scale of P&G is pretty stunning — P&G has 32 separate brands that do more than half a billion in revenue annually (and more than half of those do more than a billion). The company has 135,000 full time employees and did nearly $80 billion in revenue last year. In other words, Proctor & Gamble is freakin’ huge.

And because of their scale, P&G already leverages massive amounts of technology. When talking about social media platforms, they mentioned that they already have more than a dozen in trial within the enterprise at the moment, and they continue to assess more. They have looked at every knowledge management system you can imagine, and continue to assess more. They have worked with every digital agency on the planet, and continue to assess more. What is interesting, however, is that one thing they aren’t trying are cloud services. It was made clear that P&G runs everything behind their own firewall. And they have no intention of moving any part of their infrastructure into the cloud. P&G’s view of the enterprise is pretty old school.

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I’m always amazed to hear VCs describe themselves as “value added investors.” Not because I am skeptical about their ability to add value. More because I think all investors need to be “value added.” If the only thing you do as an investor is hand out money, you are in big trouble. There’s a lot of money out there. And it isn’t that hard to hand it out. If all you are as a venture investor is a money dispensary, you are as fungible as the money that you are handing out.

I know that in some entrepreneurial circles there is a reasonable amount of skepticism about the idea that investors can add value. While that may be a fair criticism in some circumstances (there are investors out there who have been known to add a little bit too much value, if you know what I mean), after attending the tail end of First Round Capital’s CEO Summit last night, I was reminded that Great investors can add significant value to their portfolio companies (Congratulations to the FRC team).

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Over the last few weeks I’ve started to suffer from Four Square fatigue. After all, Four Square is a lot of work. To get the benefits of Four Square, you need to proactively check in wherever you go. And, while each checkin requires a relatively small amount of work, in the aggregate, it takes real effort to make the most of the Four Square experience. Would it be better if Four Square just checked you in automatically any time you lingered at a location for more than 15 or 20 minutes? Or does that cross the privacy line for most of us?

The challenges of Four Square have gotten me thinking more broadly about privacy on the web. On the one hand, the less proactive input a service requires, the less friction there is in maintaining its usefulness. Automatic Four Square naturally will produce more data, on average, than does a Four Square that requires proactive behavior. And, for many, the Four Square experience would be greatly enhanced. On the other hand, when data is being passively collected by a service, there are natural privacy concerns that come with that data collection. How many of us want our every daily stop published to the Web? So perhaps automatic Four Square would turn away more users than it would attract.

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I’ve just arrived in Long Beach for the annual TED conference. When I first started going to TED, it was a relatively small, relatively unknown gathering in Monterey, California. But don’t confuse relatively small and relatively unknown for relatively uninteresting. Since its inception, the TED conference has been an amazing gathering of people across a variety of disciplines (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design). And with the advent of TED’s fantastic video destination site and a growing number of enthusiastic boosters, the conference has become much larger and much more influential.

It has been a while since I blogged about TED, but I’m going to try to post some thoughts over the course of this week. There are always nuggets of wisdom I collect throughout the TED conference. And they often come from the most unlikely sources. Perhaps this year that wisdom will be dolled out by Sarah Silverman or Temple Grandin, David Byrne or Nathan Myrvold, James Cameron or Benoit Mandelbrot. Rest assured, whoever the source, there will be wisdom dolled out. And, with any luck, I can be the conduit for some of that TED wisdom.

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What we think of as Venture Capital today is a pretty young profession. “Modern” VC firms first came into existence in the 1960s, started by the likes of Bill Draper, Pitch Johnson and Reid Dennis. These visionaries shaped the technology industry, and lay the groundwork for everything that we VCs do today.

My friend Paul Holland and the folks at Foundation Capital have produced a new documentary that tells the story of the early days of the venture business. The film is called “More than Money: The Untold Tale of Risk, Reward and the Original Venture Capitalists.” Those original VCs chronicled in the documentary are Tom Perkins, Don Valentine, Arthur Rock, Bill Draper, Dick Kramlich, Reid Dennis, Pitch Johnson, Bill Edwards and Bill Bowes. They were the guys behind Apple, Intel, Cisco, Genetech, Atari, Tandem, and many others.

The film is a great history lesson — not just on the venture business, but also on the tech industry and Silicon Valley. If anyone is interested in getting an early peek at the film, WAVC (the Western Association of Venture Capitalists) is holding an advanced screening of the documentary at 6pm on March 25th at the Computer History Museum. A number of the amazing men profiled in the movie will also be at the screening and reception. So if you’d like to learn more about the birth of the venture business, click here and buy tickets to this great event.

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After a bunch of early speculation, it was announced last week that Google has acquired Aardvark. It didn’t surprise me one bit that Google wanted to own Aardvark. Aardvark is completely awesome. And I am going to miss lending a hand in building this amazing company.

About a year and a half ago I first met with Max Ventilla, founder and CEO of Aardvark, to talk about his company. That meeting was on a Friday. And after the meeting I rushed to get Max and his co-founders (Rob Spiro, Nathan Stoll and Damon Horowitz) in to meet my partners the following Monday. My partners had the same reaction to Aardvark that I did — love at first sight. And so we quickly gave the team a term sheet to fund their Series A. But we weren’t alone. In the period of two weeks, Max and team managed to wrangle a handful of term sheets from fantastic firms.

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