There was a huge kerfluffle over the weekend about racism in Silicon Valley which tried to end when Michael Arrington wrote a post titled Oh Shit, I’m A Racist. But it didn’t end – on Monday there were stories by CNN reporter Soledad O’Brien defending herself with an article titled Michael Arrington is right (about one thing) and then a well reasoned post by Mitch Kapor titled Beyond Arrington and CNN, Let’s Look at the Real Issues. And I’m sure there will be more posts, including this one.

If you don’t know me, I’m white, Jewish, third generation American, born in Arkansas, grew up in Dallas, lived in Boston for 12 years, and I now live in Boulder, Colorado. My great grandparents emigrated from Russia and Germany – there were people in those countries trying really hard to kill them before they managed to emigrate to America. I say this not because I’m going to prognosticate about racism, but rather I’m going to tell a story. Of something that happened last week. Just to remind all of us that racism is alive and well in the US and in tech.

On Thursday, I got a call from a CEO of company I’m on the board of. He was very upset as he relayed a story to me. He had just heard from one of his employees who had been at a customer site for the past three days with another employee. The first person (person A) is white; the second is Indian (person B). The customer site is a government owned military installation.

Upon arrival, the customer would not shake hands with B. The customer would not acknowledge B’s presence directly. Over the course of the three days, the customer made endless racial and ethnic slurs directed at B. While it was extremely uncomfortable, A and B did their work, put up with the nonsense, and were professional.

While the CEO was relaying this to me, I was pacing outside a room that I was about to give a talk in. I was furious at the customer. I was sad that A and B hadn’t called the CEO immediately – I know he would have told them to pack it up and come home right away and he’d deal with the customer situation directly. The notion that B, and A, had to put up with racist behavior for three days was appalling to me. Especially at a government facility. In the United States. In 2011. In the tech business.

Everyone on this planet gets to believe what they want to believe, but I’ll assert that racism is alive and well in the US. I’ve seen it many times, including in Silicon Valley. Rather than get into arguments about the existence, or lack thereof, I’d encourage anyone who cares about this to listen to some wise words from Mitch Kapor.

“Being meritocratic is a really worthy aspiration, but will require active mitigation of individual and organizational bias. The operation of hidden bias in our cognitive apparatus is a well-documented phenomenon in neuroscience. We may think we are acting rationally and objectively, but our brains deceive us.”

When you see racism, don’t tolerate it. Take action. And don’t deny reality.

I had a really fun night in Montreal at the opening dinner for the C100 Conference that I’m speaking at tomorrow. The dinner was put on by Accelerate MTL and included some friends as well as a bunch of new people I met tonight.

Dinner was really well done. I sat next to Howard Lindzon who teased and entertained me all night long. Dinner was a pre-set menu so I ordered the non-meat choices and didn’t think twice about it.

I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 19. I eat fish, so I guess I’m a fishetarian or pescatarian or whatever you want to call me, but no beef, chicken, or pork. Once a year I end up accidentally eating some meat (usually on nachos, soup, or something Italian) and I always realize it around 3 am.

The first course was yellowfin sashmi, which was excellent. The second course was some kind of red tuna like thing which I dug into without a second thought. It was easily the best tuna I’ve ever had. Snarf – and gone. I then made fun of my tablemates who were eating a beet salad (which also looked really good.)

Brad: “You guys made the wrong choice – this tuna tartare was awesome.”

Howard: “That’s not tuna, that’s steak.”

Brad: “Howard – you know I’m a vegetarian – quit giving me shit.”

Howard: “No seriously, look at the menu, you just ate a plate full of stake tartare.”

I looked. In fact, they’d served me “Tartare de boeuf epice, truffe, parmesan, citron.” Yes – it was the best tuna I’ve ever had because it was in fact steak tartare. And it was awesome.

Much mockery of me ensued. It’s not quite 3 am, but my stomach is doing the once a year “you just ate meat” rumble.

I’ve been a long time practitioner of having “random meetings” where I meet with whomever wants to get together with me.  Some amazing things have come out of this over the years, including my first meeting with David Cohen which turned into TechStars.

I’ve decided to try something different for the next few months.  Rather than having random days in my office, I’m going to have “community hours” in the Bunker (the TechStars office) once a month.  The TechStars space is big enough for people to hang out and mingle (unlike my office) so it’s easier for groups to hang out and meet each other, in addition to spending time with me.  I’ve always loved the idea of “professors office hours” – this is the closest I could come to simulating it in my little section of the universe.

We’ve set up a self-service wiki for my Community Hours.  The rules for signing up are simple – just set up an account and then pick a date and time slot.  Put your name, email address, and a brief description of the meeting.  Given my ever changing schedule, there’s always a chance that we’ll have to move one of the dates around so having a valid email address is critical for us.  More extensive instructions are on the wiki.

My partners Seth Levine and Jason Mendelson are also giving this a try, as is David Cohen.  If it works, we’ll do more.  Feedback and suggestions are welcome.

I had a dream last night.  In it, I was sitting in front of an old PC.  I typed:

c:
cd\
copy con config.sys
files=255
buffers=32
<ctrl-z>

I can’t remember much more of the dream.  But – I do remember typing this.  My dream must have been about something in 1991.

Last week I did an interview on Rally Cafe with Chris Spagnuolo.  Some of the questions came from real time tweets to the show but we didn’t get to a handful.  Chris just emailed them to me – I figured I’d do a quick job of picking them off for those that asked or were following the show.

@jordanmuela What does Brad view as common themes in the investments (companies) that have failed? My failures have several common characteristics (note that these are applicable only to me – plenty of other entrepreneurs and investors have made plenty of money in these areas.)  I’ve consistently failed when I’ve invested in companies (a) in markets / segments that I know nothing about, (b) founded / run by people that I don’t like / enjoy spending time with, (c) that are “rollups” – where the company is trying to consolidate an industry focused on “rolling up” a bunch of small companies into one larger business, (d) based in Europe.  What “didn’t work” is one of the things that informs our thematic approach at Foundry Group.

@ksowocki What are Brad’s thoughts on the Lean Startup methodology coming from @ericries / IMVU ?  I saw Eric Ries present his Lean Startup ideas a month or so ago and really enjoyed it.  I’ve been a big fan of his blog and think he’s gone some great ideas.  I particularly like the notion of continuous deployment.  If you are interested, Eric is coming to Boulder on 8/19 and 8/20.

@ktinboulder Interested in hearing a bit more about the "Protocol" theme. I wrote a post about Protocol recently on the Foundry Group blog titled Theme: Protocol.  Our current investments in this theme include Gist and Lijit.

@theagent How would "GLUE" companies become monetizable and how far is the horizon line for that activity. ie. GNIP.  I’ll give two examples from our portfolio: AdMeld and Gnip – as both are generating revenue today.  AdMeld runs an “Ad Network Optimization” platform for premium publishers (they “glue together” ad networks.)  They take a percentage of the revenue they increase above a baseline amount determined with the publisher.  They now have 140 million Quantcast-verified unique users, so you can imagine the revenue they are generating.  Gnip provides a data transport service for the real-time web (they “glue together” data between systems publishing data and systems consuming data.)  They charge a monthly fee for use of their service – think of them as “middleware software – delivered via a SaaS model – for the real-time web”.

@chadalbrecht What does Brad think are some of the most important leadership characteristics in an entrepreneur?  I only have generic answers for this one as I’ve seen and worked with so many different types of successful entrepreneurs.  Leadership – especially in an entrepreneurial context – is a complicated thing.

@GEOpdx Does Brad generally find himself dispensing advice on what he would need to see for him to be interested in a project? Sometimes, although most of the time I’m pretty binary.  Within our firm, we filter very heavily on our themes.  If something doesn’t fit in our themes, I try to say No in less than 60 seconds.  If it’s within our themes, I then spend a lot of time trying to decide if I want to be partners with the entrepreneurs.

@brijacob How important is pre-money evaluation?  I’ve never thought that pre-money valuation is that important in an early stage company.  I’m playing for huge outcomes so I don’t over-optimize on the margins.  Rather, I focus on a “fair deal” at the early stages for everyone involved.