I got back from doing the rounds of VC's on Sunday. Took the day off on Monday and didn't check email once. Its great to do that now and again.

My last couple of days were really hectic. On Thursday evening I flew up to Portland to meet with Steve Marshall from New Group and his creative team early Friday morning. Great bunch of people! And they have a tremendous client list too.

Before I got on the plane I had to connect on the phone with the founder of one of the companies that I visited in SF though. He had not been able to get to the meeting on Thursday - got caught in a hurricane in the mid west that closed all the airports. Very interesting guy. Ex-hedge fund manager who had over $300M under management when he was in the game, who has moved into playing in the public company arena.

He told me that with a couple of acquisitions that he is about to make their company, across all its sites, will be just behind MySpace in terms of monthly discrete visitors!

For the last two days I have been doing meetings in Sandhill Road.

Met with some very smart (and successful) people. And they ask good questions too...

Sometimes I wonder though, how they really do make the decisions they do.... Yesterday I was in a meeting and dropped in passing the name of a company that has just been snapped up, reportedly for round $300M, and said I thought that the underlying technology seemed pretty trivial. The VC smiled, and said to me that he agreed. It had started out as something quite different, but they had made some changes, and then 6 million people started using it regularly and that is what commanded the value. Well, I get that. But I wonder how much luck is involved in the decision making process.

And that is because in almost the same breath we talked about another company that was sold recently for about $20M. The VC said that he had looked at about 75 companies doing almost exactly the same thing (video fx for user created content) and passed on all of them.

So when does a feature become a product?