I’ve got a little end of day advice for everyone out there that is getting whipsawed around by all the craziness in the financial markets.  While this is aimed at entrepreneurs, it applies to everyone. 

Focus on things under your control.

When I was a teenager, my dad said something to me that has stuck with me and informs many of the decisions I make and things I decide to spend my time on.  He said something like "Brad – if you want to change the world, start with the 2% you know best."

Now, this doesn’t mean "don’t be curious."  It doesn’t mean "don’t learn new things."  And it doesn’t mean "don’t try new things."  However, it does mean "don’t get distracted by all the things you don’t… Read more

Tomorrow is October 1st.  I love the first day of every month as it starts the monthly cycle anew.  Amy and I go out for "life dinner" almost every month on the 1st, exchange gifts with each other (I have a great one for her this month), reflect on the previous month, and talk about what we are working on and going to accomplish in the new month.

Tomorrow night we were going to have a nice dinner at Black Cat and just chill out.  However, I just found out – via a tweet from Jeff Herman – that Neal Stephenson is in town for a talk and book signing (for Anathem) at the Boulder Book Store.  Since Stephenson is one of our favorite contemporary writers, our plans… Read more

I love a good data visualization.  Take a look at the site Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America.  Truly awesome (the visualization of the data, not the spread of Walmart).  Thanks Ian for the link.… Read more

In May I made a request for images for a presentation I was doing at my 20th MIT Sloan School reunion.  The presentation – titled Software Innovation — Do You Think the Last 20 Years Were Exciting? The Next 20 Years Will Blow Your Mind is now up on the web.  If you don’t want to watch it, read the summary below:

In a trip down memory lane, Brad Feld regales us with the pre- and recent history of electronic innovation, with a rapid-fire delivery that achieves vaudevillian pitch.

Via a slide-laden PowerPoint presentation — and, by the way, Feld claims to hate PowerPoint, because as a venture capitalist “I’ve only received about 6,723,000 of them” — he narrates landmark moments in the evolution of the computer age. He… Read more

I’ve lived in Boulder, Colorado since 1995.  Six months after Amy and I moved her, we realized this would be our home for the rest of our life.  When I moved here I had no expectation that I’d ever do any work here as most of my entrepreneurial and investing activity up to that point was in Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle. 

Between 1996 and 2000 the Boulder software / Internet scene grew.  A lot.  The crash of the Internet bubble slowed things down some but they came roaring back starting in 2003.  Boulder is rocking today and – once again – there is way more demand for super amazing software developers than there is supply.

A bunch of local companies – including Aegis Analytical

The "start-up challenge" is emerging as the new platform marketing initiative.  Amazon has just launched the AWS Start-Up Challenge.  If you are into Amazon Web Services, think you might be, or just want to be part of a contest, go check it out and sign up.  $50k of cash and $50k of AWS credits are on the line.… Read more

Once a year I go on a long weekend trip with the men in my family (my dad, his brother, my brother, and my two cousins.) We hang out, see a baseball game, eat, talk about our lives, and discuss the future.

This year we went to New York City. My dad and his brother grew up in the Bronx and we decided to see one of the last Yankee games at the old Yankee Stadium. Before the game, we spent three hours touring the Bronx where my dad and his brother grew up. I don’t remember the Bronx at all; my world view of it was shaped by a combination of my dad reminiscing about his childhood in the Bronx in the 1940’s and 1950’s and Tom Wolfe describing… Read more

Amy and I were talking about the election process during our vacation.  Both of us dislike the electoral college process and have concluded that the cycle is way too long, the primaries are stupid, and the amount of money being spent is totally obscene.  We are also deeply tired of all of the endless partisan crap.

So I came up with a new process.  How’s this?

• There is one election.  No primaries.  No parties.  As many people can enter as they’d like.
• The winner is whomever gets over 50% of the votes.
• The election is a multi-day process.  On day one, all voters vote from the entire pool of candidates.  If someone gets more than 50% of the votes they win.  If no one gets > 50%

The tschotske at the Microsoft Venture Capital Summit was a spiffy blue Zune.  I managed to figure out how to open the box – it’s pretty cute.  I followed the "Start" directions which sends me to www.zune.net/setup to install the Zune software.  I created an account and downloaded the 28mb file.  I ran it to install it.

I’m running the most recent version of Vista on a Lenovo X300 and downloaded through IE 7.  Gack.… Read more

As I live my Digital Life theme, I realize that sometimes I need to take a step back to take a step forward.  This happened today when I was in the shower.

When I switched to an iPhone, I lost the ability to synchronize Outlook/Exchange Tasks.  I’m a heavy Task user and a zero inbox person, so I spent a few weeks trying to find a good workaround.  I didn’t find it yet.  So – I started typing my tasks into a page in the Notes application on the iPhone and emailing the page to me at the end of each day.  I then cut and pasted the individual entries into my task list.  Stupid, but it was the best option up to that point that still integrated with my… Read more

One of my favorite quotes of all times was Ted Leonsis’s statement in the mid-1990’s that "MSN will be Microsoft’s Vietnam."  Ted said this around the time that MSN launched (on a proprietary platform – pre-Internet) to compete directly with AOL.  15 years later this seems like such a prescient statement.

I have no idea if Android will be Google’s Vietnam.  We’ll have to look back 15 years from now to really know.  But as I watched the T-Mobile G1 Video and read through some of the Android early criticism (and praise), I kept asking myself "why?"  I have my own guesses as to the answer, and I know the public answers, but when I sit on the outside looking in, I have way more questions than answers.

If… Read more

Fred Wilson gave a phenomenal speech at Web 2.0 Expo NY titled New York’s Web Industry From 1995 to 2008: From Nascent to Ascendent.  It’s about 25 minutes long – worth watching from beginning to end.  It’s a fantastic history lesson that details the rise, fall, and re-emergence of the Web industry in New York.

As part of this, Fred makes a plea to "bury the name Silicon Alley."  He hates it in the same way I’ve always hated the names "Silicon Flatirons" and "Silicon (whatever)" to describe the tech communities in other geographies than Silicon Valley.  Fred appropriately suggests that we should call "New York" simply "New York" – which I completely agree with.… Read more

Bambi Francisco was at TechStars Investor/Demo Day in Silicon Valley yesterday and did a short interview with me on how TechStars works.

Mom – please listen to at least the first 30 seconds as Bambi calls me a technology luminary!… Read more

Yesterday was an exciting first day back from vacation for me.  I spent the morning at the Microsoft Campus doing our TechStars Demo and Investor Day for Silicon Valley.  It was well attended and showcased a number of the 2007 and 2008 TechStars companies.  Dan Kaplan at VentureBeat had a detailed write up on it titled At TechStars, twelve teams show that Boulder, CO can produce some fantastic tech and Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch weighed in with his views in the post titled TechStars Demo Day: Acquisitions Galore As Twelve Companies Strut Their Stuff. 

One of the 2007 TechStars companis, IntenseDebate, announced during the presentation that they had just been acquired by Automattic, the makers of WordPress.  There was a ton of positive buzz yesterday in the

I’m sitting in my hotel room in Palo Alto after 20 hours of travel from Hampshire, England.  Amy and I took our Q3 vacation in the English countryside at the Hampshire Four Seasons where we had a glorious week off of the grid.  I find myself really wanting to be tired, but I am so far beyond tired that I’m wide awake well past midnight California time.

Our Q3 vacation was dynamite.  I would have never thought to choose the English countryside, but Amy loves horses and our Q3 vacation is near her birthday, so we go wherever she wants to go.  The weather cooperated in some sort of pleasant karmic-recovery from our abysmal Alaska weather (yes, I know they are uncorrelated events, but one can fantasize), my runs… Read more