Ever since I left home for college in 25 years ago, I periodically get a call from my father that goes something like "Hi Brad, it’s Dad.  I’m having trouble with my computer.  Can you help me?"  I fondly remember many long calls with my father where the exchange went as follows:

Brad: "Ok, now get to a DOS prompt."
Dad: "I’m there."
Brad: "What does it say?"
Dad: "C colon."
Brad: "Ok, type C colon backslash D O S"

sound of dad typing way more than seven letters

Brad: "Dad, what are you typing"
Dad: "I thought I figured it out, but now it’s asking me to Abort, Retry, or Ignore"
Brad: "Hit Control C"
Dad: "Ok"
Brad: "Now type C colon backslash D O S"

And this would go on and on.  About a decade ago, I told my dad I was retiring from tech support and now it was my younger brother Daniel’s turn.  Daniel didn’t necessarily agree to this handoff of responsibility, so occasionally our IT guy Ross gets the call from my dad (usually after my dad leaving me a voicemail that says "Brad, can you remind me what Ross’s number is.")

Today, we announced that we’ve made an investment in Pie Digital.  Soon, these tech support calls will be a part of history.

It could happen before you expect it.  I read a lot of science fiction and have been fantasizing about the opportunity to jack into cyberspace for a long time.  We are getting one step closer with our latest investment in EmSense.

We announced Our Investment in Topspin Media today.  My partner Ryan McIntyre has a long post up titled Topspin, Baby! that describes the history of how the investment came together over the past ten years.  Ian Rogers – the CEO of Topspin who was profiled in TechCrunch a few weeks ago in the article Ex-Yahoo Music GM Ian Rogers Launches Topspin Media has a nice a post up on the Topspin blog titled Old Friends, New Opportunities. 

Oh – and there is that really cool Billboard cover and article.

As a special bonus, Ryan blogged the text from The Declaration of Independence yesterday.  This seemed somehow fitting when you consider what Topspin is planning to do for music artists.

Larry Nelson from w3w3.com has an interview up with my partner Seth Levine.  The interview is called Is an Advisory Board or Advisors Really Necessary? but the first half of the interview is about Seth’s view of Foundry Group and his partners (e.g. me, Jason, Ryan, and Chris.)  Listen and find out some magic secrets – or just hear what Seth thinks.  As a special bonus Seth has some good ideas about advisors and advisory boards.

Over the past few months we’ve been posting about the "themes" we invest in at Foundry Group over on our Foundry Group blog.  I thought – with the most recent announcement of our investment in Smith & Tinker (our most recent human computer interaction (HCI) investment) – it was worth reviewing our current themes.

For a view on how we think about themes, start with our post What Is "Thematic Investing?"  We then cover four of our current themes:

• Human Computer Interaction
• Implicit Web
• Glue
• Digital Life

We also put up a post titled Did Darwin Skip Over Email? explaining our desire to find another investment on our long standing theme around email (and SMTP).  We are also continuing to scour the world for RSS-related stuff (yes – we love protocols – ad hoc or otherwise).

While we don’t limit ourselves to only investing in these themes, we rarely wander outside them and will usually only do so with someone we’ve worked with in the past.  We are always working on a set of new top secret themes that intrigue us.  Some of these will see the light of day; others won’t.  In all cases, they keep our brains busy.