In May 2004 Jeff left his position of General Partner of the Reuters Greenhouse Fund, the corporate venture arm of Reuters, to start his own firm, SoftTech VC. He began investing as an angel (with his own money) in very early stage consumer internet startups in Silicon Valley. Social Media was one of his investment themes, and despite the fact that he had been a VC for over four years, he did not have the network in the early stage world, especially in the nascent Web 2.0 crowd. Starting a blog in this market made absolute sense, and Software Only was born in an evening of June 2004, the day before the BlogOn conference.

He decided on the blog title Software Only because he, an angel investor, would only back companies developing software products or services; companies with no physical moving pieces, no inventory. Within the following 2 years, he wrote over 500 posts covering the startup and the investing world, commenting on news in the technology world, announcing news about his companies, etc.

Jeff's RSS reader count during this time also grew from a small number to the current count of over 82,000. He's since been invited to write guest posts for ZDnet and a few other online properties. All in all, blogging had been extremely useful and strategic to the deal flow for his companies.

However successful Jeff has been, he also feels it had taken too much of a tax of his time. On the second birthday of his blog (which happened around his 500th post) he decided to slow down blogging and instead focus on the top 10 blogs covering the Web 2.0 industry in Netvibes. And this is what makes Jeff somewhat unique in the book. He's the only blogger in this book who's already retired from blogging. However, the bug of sharing his ideas, views and whereabouts still remains. You can sometimes find him on micro-blogging sites like Twitter, etc.