A week ago the MIT Entrepreneurship Review launched.  Today it’s up on MIT’s home page.

The MIT Entrepreneurship Review is a new online publication about entrepreneurship that is produced and written by MIT students dedicated to analyzing trends in entrepreneurship at MIT and beyond.  I’ve been involved with some of the folks behind this and I think they are doing an outstanding job.  If you are interested in entrepreneurship, I’d add this to your must read list.… Read more

Gist just announced that they have acquired Learn that Name and incorporated it in the Gist iPhone app. 

There are a lot of fun connections here for me.  For starters, as many of you know, I’m an investor in Gist.  If you haven’t tried it – or haven’t played with it for a while – give it a shot.  The evolution of the product over the last six months has been remarkable as it gets better every two weeks (the Gist teams’ release cycle).

The iPhone app has been out for a while and is a killer.  I’ve seen the Android app – it’s equally cool and useful.  Each of them connect up to the Gist service that lives in the cloud and connects together… Read more

I love the conferences we help sponsor (Glue and Defrag).  Eric Norlin is a genius at putting together a specialty technology conference.  He gets amazing people to attend, curates the content meticulously, isn’t afraid to try new things every year (and have some not work), and just keeps at it with single minded commitment.  He also totally gets why to do these things outside of the bay area – there’s a completely different tempo (and magic can happen) when people really commit two days of their life to a conference.

The 2010 Glue Conference is a few months away (5/26/10 and 5/27/10).  Instead of happening in Denver, Eric is doing Glue at the Omni Interlocken Resort on the outskirts of Boulder.  For a taste, here are some… Read more

My long time friend Alan Shimel has been blogging up a storm on Network World (if you want to hear any amusing story, ask him about the first time he met me.)  When Alan started writing his column for Network World he asked me for introductions to a bunch of our portfolio companies that were using open source.  Alan is a tough critic and calls it like he sees it so while I knew there was no guarantee that he’d go easy on the companies, I knew that Alan would do an even handed job of highlighting their strengths and weaknesses.  I also know that everyone I invest in values any kind of feedback – both good and bad – and they work especially hard to delight their customers… Read more

As you may have noticed, I’ve got a new blog design, as do my partners Jason Mendelson, Ryan McIntyre, and Seth Levine.  Every year or so I get bored of my blog design and we go through a nice little upgrade.  Our good friends at Slice of Lime do all the design work and Ross (our IT guy) wrangles everything. 

We’re still changing some stuff, but if you have any suggestions or notice any bugs, please leave comments so I can tune things up.… Read more

Not long after I posted about Dave Jilk’s experience with the Pogoplug, he started using the phrase “Pogoplug Simple” to describe one of the goals of Standing Cloud.  The idea is that technology products should be so easy to set up and use that the experience is vaguely unsatisfying – you feel like you didn’t do anything.  Standing Cloud – a company we provided seed funding for last year - is launching publicly this week with its Trial Edition and I think they’ve managed to make cloud application management “Pogoplug Simple.”

The Trial Edition makes it easy to test drive any of about thirty different open source applications on any of several cloud server providers.  Register with your email address, log in, pick an application, click Install… Read more

One of our internal mantras at TechStars is to “publish your data.”  We encourage every team to do this starting very early in their life.  To this day, I still get daily performance reports (I refer to them as TPS reports) from many of the companies that have gone through the program.

Last week, David Cohen published all of the historical TechStars data.  39 companies have gone through the program to date (30 through Boulder and 9 through Boston).  The data that David published covers a lot of ground, including status by individual company.  Some of the pertinent summary data follows:

• In three years, about $16.5 million in seed-stage funding has been raised.
• 27 of 39 (~70%) TechStars companies have either raised outside funding

If you happen to live in North Carolina or regularly attend the CED Venture Conference (the Southeast US’s longest running early stage company financing conference), come say hello to me on April 21st.  I’ll be spending the day at the conference and am speaking on a panel from 1:30pm to 2:45pm.  We don’t yet appear to have a panel title, but the other participants are Dana Callow (Boston Millennia Partners), Noel Fenton (Trinity Ventures), Todd Forrest (Hummer Winblad), and Patrick Kerins (NEA).  I don’t think I’ve ever been on a panel with any of them before (although I’m pretty certain I’ve fixed Dana Callow’s computer a few times back during my Feld Technologies days), so I’m looking forward to having some fun bwahahahahahahahaha.… Read more

Monday night, I’ll again be the co-host of Entrepreneurs Unplugged where we will be interviewing Tyler Tysdal, the Managing Director of Mantucket Capital.  We’ll start at 6pm at the CU Boulder ATLAS center.  Tyler has a neat background as both an entrepreneur and investor and I expect this will be another fun and enlightening session.  Tyler’s background follows:

Mr. Tysdal serves on the Board of Directors for the following Mantucket Capital portfolio companies: BrandJourney Capital and PRN Medical Services. His investment background includes venture capital, buyouts, restructurings, hedge funds, real estate, public equities, bonds and several entrepreneurial ventures. Prior to joining Mantucket Capital, Mr. Tysdal founded a private equity firm primarily focused on healthcare, media & entertainment and secondarily on real estate and construction services. Mr. Tysdal is also… Read more

I know I owe everyone a follow up to my post from last week titled The Proliferation of Standardized Seed Financing Documents.  To the many of you out there that emailed me in response, thanks for all of the thought, ideas, suggestions, and offers of help.  More on that soon.

In the mean time, I noticed today that Dow Jones is running a seminar titled Negotiating an Angel Deal: What Angels, Entrepreneurs & VCs Need to Know.  My partner Jason Mendelson is one of the panelists, along with several other notable lawyers and angel investors.  If you are interested in this particular topic, I expect there will be a “robust” discussion as I know that the opinions between a few of the folks on the panel vary… Read more

Over the years, a number of companies I’ve been an investor in have had hackathons.  These are typically day long events where everyone in the company works on whatever cool new ideas they have.  On Monday night I got a note from a company I’m on the board of about a hackthon they just completed.  As I looked through the list of things that the various teams created, I got chills of excitement.

Most of the companies we invest in release software at least once a month.  Some release weekly, or even daily.  I’ve become a big advocate of true Agile development (partly because of my experience with Rally Software – the leader in Agile software development environments) and – more recently – the notion of trying to… Read more

Today, Amazon’s 1-Click patent was confirmed following a four year re-examination.  Amazon now has ownership of a highly controversial and very absurd patent which I hope will only be used defensively.  This a classic example of a “business method patent” that should simply not exist.  I continue to wait patiently to see what the Supreme Court says re: Bilski.

In other patent news, Google and Facebook were sued over a social network patent.  This was a patent issued in October that apparently has something to do with how people join social networks on mobile phones.  Egads.

In better news, it looks like I’ll soon be able to buy a jet pack for $86,000

These people are way cooler than I could ever be.  At least I have something to aspire to.

I’ve been an Amazon Associate (Amazon’s affiliate program) for many years.  Today I got the following notice in my Amazon Associates account.

and I woke up to the following email.
Dear Colorado-based Amazon Associate:

We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to inform you that the Colorado government recently enacted a law to impose sales tax regulations on online retailers. The regulations are burdensome and no other state has similar rules. The new regulations do not require online retailers to collect sales tax. Instead, they are clearly intended to increase the compliance burden to a point where online retailers will be induced to “voluntarily” collect Colorado sales tax — a course we won’t take.

We and many others strongly opposed this

One of the great things about living in Eldorado Springs, Colorado is interacting with nature on a daily basis.

Protecting the environment has been a priority of mine for many years.  Every now and then I like to call out a non-profit organization that I support that I think does an excellent job of helping protect the environment.

Colorado Conservation Voters is one of these groups.  CCV works to turn conservation values into Colorado priorities by educating legislators and the public about important environmental issues, helping pro-conservation candidates win their elections, and then holding our elected officials accountable. Most importantly, they do it efficiently as they are a group that has influence and reach much larger than their budget would indicate.

In the past… Read more