On Saturday I ran the Mesa Falls Marathon.  I've now completed a marathon in 12 of the 50 states - almost 25% of the way there.  My co-conspirator for this one was Matt Blumberg, who ran the last half of it with me and wrote about it in Half as Long, One Third as Hard.

This was a small marathon - my guess is around 150 people ran it.  My goal was to finish in the top 200 which I accomplished comfortably.  My serious goal was to break 4:45.  My official time was 5:02, although according to my Garmin 305 my running time was 4:52.  I can confirm that I lost about 5 minutes to a bathroom break at mile 10 and another 5 minutes at the half way mark and on a few pee breaks.  So - I was close.  However, I finished much stronger than I had two months ago at Grandma's Marathon in Duluth so I'm pleased with the progress of my training under my new coach Gary Ditsch.

Mesa Falls was a beautiful marathon.  The first 10 miles are on a dirt road in the middle of no where.  Tranquil, quiet, and wonderful.  I had trouble getting into a rhythm - my shoes were too tight, I had to pee, and then around mile four I got an upset stomach.  There was a porta-potty at mile 6 but I felt better so cruised by it.  Predictably, at 6.5 miles, I had to go.  For a brief moment I considered turning around, but powered on to mile 10 where I took a delightful 5 minute break.

We immediately turned onto a road and I totally kicked ass - covering the next 3 miles in 27 minutes.  It was a decent downhill but I felt much lighter.  I stopped for 15 seconds right at mile 13 to look at the incredible view at Mesa Falls and then stopped again at 13.1 to meet up with Matt, make the "Uncle Spike sign", have Amy take a few photos of us, and change my shirt.

It was huge to have Matt join me.  The course had a brutal uphill between mile 17 and 20 that Matt towed me up.  I marched through to mile 23 where I finally slammed into the wall.  I don't really remember the 25 minutes that it took me to run mile 23 and 24, but Matt said I was pretty calm.  I got a seventh wind at mile 25 and covered the last mile in under 10 minutes.

Thanks to everyone who supported me on this one, especially my sponsors Return Path, Pixie Mate, NewWest, and Bill Flagg who made an extra generous contribution to Accelerated Cure.  And of course - my sherpa Amy and my friends the Blumbergs.

Next up - Mount Desert Island Marathon in Bar Harbor, ME on 10/19/08.

Congrats to Josh Hug and the gang at Shelfari for joining the Amazon.com family.  I was an early angel investor in Shelfari and have been a long time avid user of the service.  Amazon was an investor in the first round and the two companies fit naturally together.

I invested in three vertical social networks in 2006 - Shelfari (books), Dogster (dogs and cats), and Enthusiast Group (sports).  So far I have one win (Shelfari) and one loss (Enthusiast Group).  Dogster is doing great and looks like it'll be a nice winner also.  I made these as small angel investments to learn about the dynamics around vertical social networks.  I've learned a bunch from Josh and from Ted Rheingold at Dogster.  It also looks like I'll have a nice "aggregate financial outcome" for my investments in this area.

Well done Shelfari!

The parents of a close friend just had a direct lightening strike on their house.  It immediately burned to the ground and everything was lost.

The simple advice from my friend if this ever happens to you is "get out fast and not go back for anything that is not a human being."  She also suggested that you check your home insurance to make sure you are covered for this.

One of the big topics that came up on the panel I was on today at the DNC was the issue surrounding the labor supply in the US in computer science and IT.  There is a growing shortage of software engineers in the US that is getting worse as every year passes.  I've talked about this in the past as my main motivation for being involved in the National Center for Women & Information Technology as one of the ways to build the long term labor pipeline is to encourage more women and girls to get involved in careers in computer science and IT.

I think the Bush administration has completely missed the boat when it comes to dealing with temporary work visas and permanent residency for high tech software / IT workers.  This issue has come up repeatedly over the past few years as large software and technology companies have finally weighed in to try to impact some of our inane policies.

I think the solution to the problem is really simple.  The US should grant permanent residency to anyone who graduates from a qualified four year university with a computer science degree.  If you are concerned about people gaming the system, you can start out by limiting it to people that receive a post-graduate degree.  Of course, you can easily extend this beyond computer science (e.g. physics, chemistry, etc.)

When I was an undergraduate at MIT, a meaningful percentage of the student body was from other countries.  It never even occurred to me that these folks were "different" and didn't "belong in our country."  Some of my best friends in college weren't US citizens and I was baffled by the hoops they had to jump through even back then to work in the US.  In the past eight years, this has gotten dramatically worse and it's time we got in front of this.

Everyone on the panel seemed to agree that this was a huge issue surrounding innovation in the US over the long term.  Most people seemed to agree that this was a simple solution that would not require a huge bureaucracy to administer.  With your diploma, you get permanent residence status. 

I don't understand why there would be any rational resistance to something like this - after all, wasn't the United States built on immigrants?

I'm having my half day DNC experience this morning.  At 10am I'm on a panel creatively titled 2008 Technology Roundtable.  It's limited attendee (200 people at the Ricketson Theater) but appears to being broadcast live on the web.

It's an interesting experience. I really didn't want to deal with the traffic and people around the DNC, especially after running a marathon this weekend (and still being in a recovery phase), so I took advantage of my early wake up time and drove to downtown Boulder around 6:30.  I'm now sitting all alone in the breakfast room (green room equivalent) waiting for them to pull together the coffee service.  It's kind of tranquil in a weird way.

My session (one of three) - titled "Promoting the Next Wave of Innovation" - covers the following:

The second session will address the question of what strategies that the federal government can use to promote technological development and innovation. In particular, it will evaluate what public policies can best spur capital formation and protect the U.S. advantage in that area; what educations reforms, particularly as to math and science education, can prepare a next generation of engineers and business persons; and what innovation policies, be they support for basic research or patent law reform can spur greater levels of technological development.

My co-panelists are John Seely Brown (Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation), Charlie Ergen (CEO - Echostar), Bill Kennard (Carlyle Group, Former Chairman FCC), Honorable Zoe Lofgren (Congresswoman - U.S. House of Representatives), Don Rosenberg (General Counsel and EVP - Qualcomm), and David Thompson (Group President of Information Technology and Services - Symantec). 

It'll either be really interesting or really dull.  I'll work on "interesting" but I've been told "no swearing."

Anyone who has worked with me knows that one of my favorite lines is "marketing is stupid."  And - if you really know me - you know that I don't actually mean "marketing is stupid", but I use it as a proxy for "most PR people suck, most marcom is done poorly, and most companies have no idea what they are trying to accomplish with all the money they waste on shitty marketing and PR."

Last week I got one of Jason Calacanis' email missives from his new email list (post-blog).  It's been reblogged on the Silicon Alley Insider blog titled Jason Calacanis On How To Get PR For Your Startup: Fire Your PR Company.  There are a few things I disagree with, but on the whole it's one of the best long essays I've ever read on how to do PR for your startup.

While there are a few technology PR firms (or more specifically - people) that are just awesome and worth the money, the vast majority range from marginally useful but not worth the money to completely useless.  If you are the CEO of a startup, I encourage you to read Jason's post slowly, and then re-read it, and then think about what you are doing to get PR for your company.

It's DNC time in Denver and all kinds of weird advertisements are popping up all over the place, including the airport.  My partner Jason sent me a photo of this one today with the heading "Puke".

I put this in the "you've got to be fucking kidding me" category.  Let's break it down.  Here are the messages:

• Life Liberty and the Pursuit of More Patents
• Averaging 2 Patent Applications Per Day
• Official Wireless provider for the Democratic National Convention

Let me guess - AT&T is positioning themselves as a key supporter of no patent reform.  Or, maybe AT&T is positioning themselves as key advocators of patenting everything under the sun.  Maybe they are advocating that they should give their engineers bonuses for every patent they file.  Maybe they are trying to say that a good democracy has lots and lots of patents.  What ARE they trying to say?

Regardless we know that big companies can submit lots and lots of patents.  Hey AT&T - two applications per day isn't actually all that many anymore!  How about telling us about some of the real innovation you are doing. 

Actually, can you just spend some time improving your 3G network so my iPhone calls don't drop as often?

At Foundry Group, one of our investment themes is Glue.  We've done a handful of investments in this area, including Gnip.  Since Gnip's launch last month, it's been put into production in a number of cases - some obvious, some subtle.  Part of the fun is watching the adoption of it evolve rapidly as we continue to build out the core capabilities of the what Gnip can do.

I had a long conversation with a VC I work closely with about the value Gnip ultimately provides to its various constituencies (data providers, data consumers, and end users) and how / where it expects to get paid in the long term.  During the conversation, we covered a number of different potential areas, but I realized that my thinking could be much crisper.  That's normal for this stage of a startup as Gnip is still very early stage (we've done one seed round of investment and are gearing up for the next financing) but the exercise of defining a clear business endgame (vs. just a technology endgame) is extremely helpful and self referential, as it creates more focus on what we should actually be building.

There is nothing quite like an example.  Yesterday, we had the TechStars 2008 Investor and Demo Day.  EventVue - one of the TechStars 2007 companies - provided the online community infrastructure for the event.  They automatically extracted all the data from the registration system and build an online community.  As part of this, members of the community could add their twitter account and - if they had already been a member of another EventVue conference community - like me - would automatically have all their information already in EventVue and wouldn't have to do anything.

The then created a techstars08 twitter account.  This rebroadcast all the tweets from anyone at the event that had a twitter account set up in their EventVue profile.  However, rather than writing the polling software to Twitter to continually check for updates in the twitter stream, the used Gnip for this.

EventVue had a data set (I don't know the number - but lets say it was 100 userids) of twitters at the conference.  They wrote a tiny piece of code that monitored Gnip's twitter notification stream.  Whenever someone in the set of 100 usersids appeared in the twitter notification stream, EventVue's handler then queried twitter for that one discrete piece of data and then rebroadcast it on techstars08.

This took a huge load off of Twitter.  It was much easier code to write for EventVue.  It created a virtually real time twitter rebroadcast stream.  I'm sure I'm missing at least one of the technical nuances - hopefully the guys at EventVue will write up a deeper post on what they did, how they did it, and why it was valuable to them.

Update: Josh Fraser, the co-founder and CTO of EventVue, has posted How Gnip rescued us from our twitter nightmare.

Look for plenty of more thinking out loud from me on our Glue theme as we bring some of the investments we've made into sharper focus.

Jason and I were talking about some of the running events in the Olympics as we walked in to the office together this morning.  After chatting about the marathon, he asked if I'd seen the Bolt 100 meter final.  I did - and it was an amazing performance - but I was perplexed why Bolt coasted the last 20 meters and "only" did 9.69 when he most likely could have broken 9.60.  Now - 9.69 is a world record, but 9.60 (or even the symbolic 9.59) would be mindblowing.

Jason suggested that it might be marketing.  Whoever is "advising" Bolt said "just win and break the world record by a little.  Then the endorsements will flow.  Then you can keep breaking the world record and steadily upping the stakes."  Cynical, but it rang true.

This just in - Bolt won the 200 meter and set a world record - 19.30.  This time he ran hard through the finish.

Now - I think both Bolt and Phelps are incredible athletes.  Amazing.  Mindblowing.  But I was really baffled to see Bolt pull up short.  It made no sense to me, especially when compared to the incredible effort by Phelps across all of his races. 

This made me think of sales people or teams that beat their number in a quarter and then bank something for the next quarter.  I've never ever liked this practice, especially in private companies.  I much prefer the Phelps approach - where you give it your all through the very end and bring in as much as you can, take a deep breath, and start all over again - than the Bolt approach (at least in the 100) of when you know you have it nailed, you coast to the finish.

I like this life thing.  Good luck TechStars Class of 2008!