It’s hard to describe the satisfaction of “shipping” your product. I know many of you out there have done it many times and I expect you know what I’m talking about.

Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City is officially shipping. The Kindle version is available immediately; the physical copies are still on pre-order on Amazon but I know books are flowing.

Vivek Wadhwa wrote a wonderful article in the Washington Post on Monday that highlights the Boulder Thesis. The article - This is how you build a tech community - follows up on a Bloomberg article that Vivek wrote in 2010 titled Why Boulder Is America’s Best Town for Startups. In his latest article, Vivek does a great job of summarizing the Boulder Thesis and highlights my views on the difference between entrepreneurs (as leaders) and government (as feeders) in the effort to create a vibrant long-term entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Jerry Colonna also wrote an awesome post riffing off of Startup Communities titled The Sarajevo Effect. If you don’t know Jerry, he’s an extremely successful VC (he and Fred Wilson at USV were partners in the 1990′s at Flatiron Partners) who retired from VC in the early 2000s and is now a coach to a bunch of amazing entrepreneurs (including several who I work with). Even though we don’t spend a huge amount of physical time together, I consider Jerry to be one of my closest friends and intellectual soulmate on a number of fronts. We’ve had three great dinners in the last 60 days – two of them in Boulder (he’s living here part time now) – and we spend a lot of the last one (in NY) talking about some of the ideas underlying the thoughts in his post.

Finally, Fred Wilson put up a nice post last week titled Two Must Read Books For The AVC Community which included two books, Startup Communities and Steven Johnson’s new book Future Perfect. I’m a huge Steven Johnson fan and that one is now on my Kindle.

For everyone that has supported me during the effort of getting this book out, y’all are awesome – thank you. I’ll be blogging regularly about it up on Startup Revolution as I wander the earth talking about Startup Communities. If you are interested in this topic, I hope you read the book. Feel free to send me any comments – good, bad, or otherwise.

As an author, it’s always incredibly exciting to get the actual finished version of a book I’ve written. While I still haven’t seen a physical version of Startup Communities (it’s still in pre-order), the Kindle version is now shipping.

If you don’t want to wait any longer for it, you can grab a copy on the Kindle right now. And, if you’ve pre-ordered it on the Kindle, it should be pushed to your Kindle by now (if it’s not, tell me and I’ll nudge someone.)

A cool company named Simplifilm made a trailer for my new book, Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City.

What do you think of it? Any feedback – good, bad, constructive, or destructive is appreciated. And – if you like it – share it!

If you want an intro to the gang at Simplifilm, just ask.

Thanks to all of you who participated in Operation Pre-Order for Startup Communities. I got a bunch of fun emails and am excited to share my newest book with you.

The Amazon winner is Jess Bachman. He’s from Bowmanville, Ontario which Google shows me is an hour east of Toronto. Hopefully we can connect during my Toronto trip in October.

The BarnesandNoble.com winner is Chris Rill from Mamaroneck, NY. I’ll catch him on my next NY trip.

The ratio of Amazon to B&N started out about 10:1 but ended up at 6:1. Later entries thought about it and figured out that odds were better if they bought from B&N since they guessed that more people would buy from Amazon. They were correct!

My newest book, Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City, will ship around the end of the month. As a result, I’m activating Operation Pre-order today.

Between now and Sunday, if you pre-order a copy of Startup Communities, you will be entered into a random drawing. I’m going to pick two random winners – one for hardcopy book orders from Amazon and one for hardcopy book orders from BarnesandNoble.com.

All you have to do to be entered is email me the electronic receipt by 11:59pm EDT on Sunday night. I will announce the winners on Monday morning.

The winners will get a lunch meeting with me at their company sometime in 2013. I’ll spend 90 minutes with you and anyone on your team discussing whatever you want.

If you play, make sure you also Like the book (if you order on Amazon), tweet out or Facebook the purchase, or do whatever other social media thing lights your fire.

Related articles

• TechStars’ Feld Publishes Startup Community Book
• Launching Startup Revolution
• Brad Feld Makes Me Feel Bad About Myself
• Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City