I generally hate conferences and do my best to avoid them.  However I find myself thoroughly enjoying Gnomedex 6 (which Amy refers to as the “conference for short nerds” (Chris – she might be talking about you)) for the second year in a row.

Chris Pirillo and his fiance Ponzi put on a high energy and very entertaining conference.  It’s in what’s now becoming “classical unconference” format – rather than lots of presentations with commercial bents, people get up for 30 minutes and lead “conversations” of the audience of 400 or so people.  Susan Mernit – now of Yahoo – just got up to talk about “sex and relationships” (instead of widgets and microformats.)

It’s been a romper room of interesting people so far today. Michael Arrington started… Read more

Amy and I have been strong supporters of the expansion to the Denver Art Museum (the Hamilton Building.)  I think Daniel Libeskind has designed an awesome building, Lewis Sharp (the director of the Denver Art Museum) has shown incredible vision and leadership, the team at the Denver Art Museum has done an unbelievable job, and the extended Denver community is in for a real treat when it opens on October 7th.

I’ve been on the technology advisory board with Ron Cooper, the COO at Adelphia.  Bruce Wyman, (DAM’s director of new technologies) and Timothy Standring (DAM’s deputy director) hosted a private tour of the museum for me, Ron, Ron’s wife Beth, and my wife Amy last Friday as a “thank you” for our help and involvement.  While the project has a way to go… Read more

If you are a CEO or a VP of Sales, you should read Will Herman’s great post titled “Just Say No To Weighted Average Sales Forecasting.”  Will’s a very accomplished CEO of both private and public companies, has spent many years managing “the sales number”, and has a very straightforward message about sales forecasts… Read more

It was a magnificent (and very full day) in Seattle today.  Amy and I have left Boulder behind until mid-August.  We’re enjoying a spell of perfect weather in Seattle while I jam through a final wave of stuff in the lower 48.  Running on Alaskan Way at 5:30am is – well – as good as it gets if you have to run on a road (since it’s sea level).  Oh – and the “Sexy Fries” at The W Hotel are unbelievably great, as are the milkshakes at Daly’s.&nbsp… Read more

Paul Kedrosky has a great article up on PE Week Wire about Venture Capital Best Practices.  His conclusion – “There are no best practices in venture capital.  You’ve either got it, or you don’t.”&nbsp… Read more

Greg Reinacker – NewsGator’s founder and CTO – has a two part roadmap post up.  His first post summarizes what NewsGator has been up to over the past 18 months.  His second post talks about where NewsGator is going with their products. 

I’ve heard plenty of chatter lately about the fundamental differences in enterprise software between shrink-wrap software, appliances, and hosted (or SaaS) software.  Most VCs I know have fallen in love with SaaS – often without understanding the fundamental economics of the SaaS model (“trendy is good – thank you SFDC”.)  Others are convinced there will never again by any life in enterprise software – which is just fine with me as I love a counter cyclical trend (e.g. enterprise software is my friend again – but… Read more

I’m looking for recommendations for headphones for running.  I’ve been using some from Sony for a while – they are ok, but I’m having some trouble with how the right one fits (I guess my ears are different sizes – how exciting.)

If you have any suggestions for sport headphones, can you leave comments here?… Read more

A few days ago I wrote that there wasn’t enough talk about failure.  I had an awesome run tonight in the mountains behind my house and pondered – among other things – some of my early failures.  As my mind wandered and I tried to keep from stumbling on the rocks, my thoughts drifted to my first software company – Martingale Software.

I co-founded Martingale Software in 1984 with three fraternity brothers.  Three of us were second term freshman (me, Andy Mina, and Sameer Gandhi) and one was a senior (Dave Jilk).  After Martingale failed, Dave joined Viewlogic Systems as their first non-founder employee and – after having success there – went on to start Feld Technologies with me (which succeeded.)  After college, Sameer had a strong run at Oracle… Read more

I’m two degrees of separation away from two people that died tragically yesterday.  I’ve been thinking about it on and off all day.  Both were friends of very close friends of mine.  One died in a plane crash – he was in the prime of life, a huge success, and apparently a very happy person.  He was flying his new plane with an instructor – they crashed and both died.  The other was a young mother who was out for a bike ride with her daughter.  A truck lost control and ran her over.  I’m not sure what happened to the daughter.

The cliche “every moment is precious” has rung true for me all day long.  I’m going to go hit the trail and enjoy a run in the mountains and… Read more

Our good friend Mollie Fager (the executive director of The Dairy Center for the Arts) has a great rant up on the New West Network blog on “why opera rules” titled Opera: It’s Not for Wusses.  In my endless effort to avoid wussness, I’m a believer… Read more

Ryan McIntyre pointed me at a car that gets 3.14k miles per gallon.  Now, if it only ran on pi.… Read more

I received a lot of interesting and positive feedback on my post on talking about failure.  There’s no question that enlightened entrepreneurs get the value of failure and generally enlightened people have noticed the absence of VCs (and entrepreneurs) publicly talking about it for a variety of reasons.

Adam Green pointed me at a podcast he did with Adam Bosworth (now at Google) discussing his lessons learned from the failure of Reflex.  I hadn’t thought of Analytica / Reflex for a long time (I had an original copy and loved it) – and subsequently discovered this useful essay about it on the web.… Read more

Thankfully I no longer get fedexed binders of board packages from my portfolio companies in advance of a board meeting.  Through the modern miracle of email, the board packages show up in my inbox – hopefully a few days (rather than a few hours – or even minutes) before the board meeting.  The board packages tend to show up in three different formats – one that is easy to deal with, one that is ok, and one that sucks.

• Happy Version: The entire board package is in a PDF file, formatted nicely, and easy to either read on the screen or print out.
• Ok Version: The entire board package is in a PPT file.  While this is ok, there are often pages – such as financials, board minutes, or other Word documents - that are

Periodically FeedBurner gets all their engineers in a room, turns over tech support to the business team for the day, and cranks out a bunch of features.  Hackathon III occurred a week ago on Friday and generated a healthy list of new things for all the friendly neighborhood FeedBurner users, including:

• Map It FeedFlare: Link to Google Maps if you have address info in your post.
• BuzzBoost Brush-up: Spiffy new BuzzBoost features, including subscribe to feed.
• Download Tracking Tweaks: UI cleanup on Download Tracking.
• FeedBulletin via Email: Get email alerts (instead of RSS alerts) for your FeedBulletin feed.
• IP To Location: Live hits page now displays countries where your items are being viewed.
• Mobile Feed Stats: Check your stats on a mobile web browser.
• FeedFlare Scratchpad: Play around with and test out new FeedFlare’s easily
• FeedBurner

Boulder was highlighted in the June 26, 2006 Fortune Magazine as the best place for outdoor addicts to retire.  My friend Kimbal Musk’s superb restaurant – The Kitchen – was listed as the place to eat dinner on a “typical Friday night.&rdquo… Read more