Now that it’s winter time, I’m spending more time on my treadmill. While I run naked when I’m outside (no headphones, no music), I find running on a treadmill to be mindnumbingly dull. Pluck my eyeballs out, swallow them, then poke my fingers in my ears and pull out my cochlea, and then punch myself over and over again in the face until FAKEGRIMLOCK comes and rescues me from myself kind of dull.

My TV show this winter is Entourage. Amy won’t watch it, so I’m watching it on my iPad while running. I finished Season 1 yesterday and am loving it. Today, when I went downstairs to pound out 70 boring, excruciating, nose hair pulling, sweat all over my iPad minutes, I realized I had not yet downloaded Season 2. And, when I looked in my video folder on my iPad, I realized I didn’t have anything in it I hadn’t seen since Pan Am, which I’d started downloading on my laptop, somehow hadn’t synced over WiFi (grrrrrr).

So – I started running. My iPad was in front of me and I started poking around. I noticed the Shelby.tv app. The Shelby team was one of my favorites from the first TechStars NY program. I ran with Reece Pacheco every time I was in NY (he was always very kind to me), loved their spirt, and thought they did a great job of pivoting away from something they were interested in, but not in love with, to something they were super passionate about. While Shelby.tv isn’t the kind of thing we invest in, several of my good friends in the VC world do and I was psyched when Rich Levandov from Avalon led their round.

I hadn’t played with Shelby.tv for a while since I don’t ever just browse video on my iPad. I clicked the Shelby.tv icon. 65 minutes later my run was over and I was still watching amazing video. Shelby.tv picks up any video link in your Twitter stream or on your Facebook news feed. It then just plays them in reverse chron order. You can interact with the individual videos, skip them, tweet or like them, or just do what I did and watch them. There was only one in the stream of about 15 that I watched that I wasn’t interested in and one I had already seen. The rest were fascinating, both in what I saw, what people where curating for me, and how quickly they made the time pass on the treadmill.

Reece et. al. – nice job. I think you just solved my “I’m bored, on my treadmill, and shit I forgot to download the latest season of that thing” problem.

As someone obsessed with human computer interaction, the Kinect is an important piece of hardware. Of all the various things Microsoft is working on these days, I find it the most interesting. I’ve seen some awesome things done with it by my friends at Oblong and Organic Motion and saw a ton of neat hacks at last year’s Blur Conference.

Recently, Microsoft announced the Kinect Accelerator, a program created to incubate startups building the next generation of innovative experiences for the Kinect. Microsoft’s Kinect Accelerator is powered by TechStars and applications for the Kinect Accelerator are now being accepted through January 25, 2012. If accepted, each company will receive an equity investment of $20,000 in exchange for six percent of the company in common stock, which will be held by TechStars. While Microsoft is putting significant effort into the accelerator program, Microsoft will not retain intellectual property or equity in any of the participating companies.

From March to June 2012, the companies will co-locate in space provided by Microsoft in Seattle where they will be provisioned Xbox development kits, Kinect hardware, the Kinect for Windows SDK and space for testing and developing Kinect based applications. Microsoft BizSpark will also supply each of the companies with a full complement of Microsoft development tools and support.

The companies will interact with and have access to mentors during the course of the program including Microsoft executives, entrepreneurs, and investors. The goal is to help new startups develop both the technology around their Kinect experience as well as the business model so the resulting company can prosper as an independent entity after the program.

Some of the mentors, in addition to me, include:

• Jeff Powers, Founder, Occipital,
• Andrew Tschesnok, Founder, Organic Motion
• Manu Kumar, Investor, K-9 Ventures
• Eran Egozy, Founder and CTO Harmonix
• David Cohen, Founder/CEO, TechStars
• Eric Norlin, Organizer, Blur, Defrag, and Glue conferences
• Jason Mendelson, Managing Director, Foundry Group

Some of the Microsoft mentors include:

• Dan’l Lewin, Corporate VP, Strategic and Emerging Business Development
• Craig Eisler, General Manager, Kinect for Windows
• Phil Spencer, VP, Microsoft Games Studios
• Anoop Gupta, Distinguished Scientist, Microsoft Research
• Michael Mott, General Manager, Microsoft Games Studios
• Rick Martinez, Executive Producer, Microsoft Studios
• Dave Drach, Managing Director, Emerging Business Team
• Adam Isgreen, Creative Director, Microsoft Studios
• Jeff Matsushita, Executive Producer, Microsoft Studios,
• Rhys Dekle, Director, Business Development, Microsoft Studios

David Malcolm, a former Microsoft executive and current TechStars mentor, will be the Managing Director of the Kinect Accelerator. Since the program is powered by TechStars, it’ll follow the standard TechStars timeline finishing up with a demo day at the end of the program.

If you are an entrepreneur working on something related to Kinect, I can’t imagine a better place to spend three months of your life accelerating your business. Apply now.

PBS Newshour has a neat eight minute segment on accelerators. TechStars is featured, along with several others. This makes me happy as part of our goal when we started TechStars was to “open-source” the mentor driven accelerator process. It’s been awesome to be part of this incredible (and – in my opinion – incredibly important phenomenon).

The punch line from the interview is in the first 30 seconds.

“The Kauffman Foundation, which studies entrepreneurship, recently found that startups create about 3 million new jobs a year.”

I really wish every member of Congress would read this over and over and over again. Whenever I see stuff like Protect IP and SOPA making progress through Congress (both bills – which if passed – will have a chilling effect on entrepreneurship and job creation) I get frustrated. It’s easy (but incorrect and uniformed) for people in Washington to dismiss accelerators, and entrepreneurship, as a small part of our economy. But when there’s as much focus as there is on creating jobs, it seems like our friends in Washington should be turning everything else upside down to be supportive of activities that create jobs, especially when the job creators (e.g. entrepreneurial companies) aren’t asking them for anything. And remember that these are only direct jobs – think of all the indirect jobs that get created by the payrolls, wealth, and taxes generated by these entrepreneurs.

If you don’t understand what an accelerator is, or just want a nice eight minute overview, watch this video. And repeat to yourself “startups create about 3 million new jobs a year.”

Near the end, Vivek Wadhwa makes the comment that “other countries like India and China are learning our secret sauce. They are learning what made America what it is.” I’d add Europe to that – following is a picture of me talking to a group of entrepreneurs in Copenhagen this moving via Skype as part of Startup Bootcamp, a TechStars Network partner with accelerator programs in Copenhagen, Dublin, and Madrid. This is a worldwide phenomenon – and it’s awesome.

If you want to go to TechStars for a Day in Boston, today is the last day to apply for the Boston program early application deadline. If you haven’t heard of TechStars for a Day, it’s a one day event that immerses you in the TechStars program, exposes you to the mentors, and increases your visibility with the selection committee. Why wouldn’t you do this? I have no clue.

If you are contemplating applying to Techstars Boston, stop procrastinating and apply now. If you are curious about how some of the TechStars Boston class of 2011 have done, take a look at the post titled 2011 Funding: Boston. And yes, I plan to be in Boston for the second half of January so I’ll be at the first few days of the program for everyone who gets in.

Are you building a cloud startup? If so, apply to TechStars Cloud today!

Earlier this month TechStars announced its newest accelerator program, TechStars Cloud, and we are looking for the best cloud startups we can find to go through the inaugural program.

We’ve gotten a lot of questions about what constitutes a “cloud startup”, so here is a discussion of what we think are cloud startups. We think we can do something special with this program and have big expectations for the results we’ll see when we connect early stage cloud startups to the best cloud mentors and companies.

If you haven’t heard, we have upped the initial funding in the program to 118k.

Apply now as the deadline is October 21.

The official TechStars Store is up. Shirts, hats, hoodies, and stickers. And of course the books Do More Faster and Venture Deals. What – no sweatbands? Cohen – we need sweatbands. C’mon man.

Don’t forget to check out the new TechStars website while you are at it. And apply for one of the upcoming programs, including the brand new TechStars Cloud program

Today, TechStars announced that they’ve raised $24 million from a broad syndicate of investors to fund an additional $100,000 for every TechStars company going forward. The investors include Foundry Group, IA Ventures, Avalon Ventures, DFJ Mercury, SoftBank Capital, SVB Financial Group, RRE Ventures, Right Side Capital Management and TechStars alumni.

There are lots of good articles on the news – two of them are at TechCrunch (Startup Incubator TechStars Raises $24M, Increases Funding For Each Company By $100K) and Launch (TechStars Offering Extra $100K to All Companies with New $24M Fund.)

One of the principles of TechStars has been to be as inclusive as possible for the VC and angel investors in the communities in which we run programs. To date, there are over 75 VCs and angels that are funding TechStars programs in Boulder, Boston, Seattle, and New York. There are many more who have invested in individual TechStars companies.

With the launch of the new TechStars Cloud program, there are now over 60 new companies a year going through TechStars and getting launched. At $100k / company, TechStars has raised enough to fund each company with the incremental $100k for the next three to four years (that’s a hint that there will be more programs coming.)

When I think about all the amazing investors – and the hundreds of mentors - involved in TechStars, I’m deeply humbled to be a part of it.

On This Week In TechStars #6, David Cohen interviews Jason Mendelson on the making of our hard hitting documentary on VCs music video “I’m A VC.” The interview happens in Jason’s basement music studio where much of I’m A VC was written, composed, sung, recorded, and – well – whatever you do in a music studio.

If you haven’t yet watched I’m A VC, what are you waiting for? And, if you have a connection to Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart, give me a shout as we’d love to help them educate the world about venture capitalists, along with helping promote our book “Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist.” Mendelson on the Colbert Report – doesn’t that sound cool?

I’m back in Boulder after living in Paris for the month of July and Tuscany for the month of August. I had an incredible time in both places, got a lot done, enjoyed being with Amy continuously, and had a very successful experiment of “working in some other place for a month” that I intend to repeat many times over the course of the rest of my life.

David Cohen (TechStars CEO) and his wife Jil were two of our many visitors in Tuscany. We stayed at a magical place called Casetta run by Xenia Lemos who we now consider a lifelong friend. David did a ThisWeekIn TechStars segment with me while we were together at Casetta in which you get to see the place, watch me swim laps in a pool while David interviews me about Occipital, the book Venture Deals, volatility in the stock markets and how entrepreneurs should think about it, and then some thoughts at the end of work-life balance.

I had an awesome time, but I’m glad to be back in Boulder.

When David Cohen and I first talked about TechStars in 2006, the concept of a “mentor” was front and center. Early on, we defined TechStars as a “mentorship-driven seed stage investment program” and have held deeply to that concept from the beginning. Today, the vast majority of accelerators use a mentorship model, which is something we are really proud of and thinks serves entrepreneurs everywhere extremely well.

When I was in Cambridge, England at the end of July for the Springboard Demo Day, Jon Bradford (the Springboard Managing Director) talked elloquently about how mentorship was a key part of the program. Springboard is a member of the TechStars Network and subsequently uses the same mentorship model that TechStars uses. During the day I got to meet a bunch of Springboard mentors – they were superb and also incredibly enthusiastic about the Springboard program that Jon had created. Jon then took me for a meeting at 10 Downing Street and on the way suggested that David and I write up a “Mentor Manifesto.” I thought it was a great idea, suggested it to David, who published his Mentor Manifesto yesterday. It follows:

• Be socratic.
• Expect nothing in return (you’ll be delighted with what you do get back).
• Be authentic / practice what you preach.
• Be direct. Tell the truth, however hard.
• Listen too.
• The best mentor relationships eventually become two-way.
• Be responsive.
• Adopt at least one company every single year. Experience counts.
• Clearly separate opinion from fact.
• Hold information in confidence.
• Clearly commit to mentor or do not. Either is fine.
• Know what you don’t know. Say I don’t know when you don’t know. “I don’t know” is preferable to bravado.
• Guide, don’t control. Teams must make their own decisions. Guide but never tell them what to do. Understand that it’s their company, not yours.
• Accept and communicate with other mentors that get involved.
• Be optimistic.
• Provide specific actionable advice, don’t be vague.
• Be challenging/robust but never destructive.
• Have empathy. Remember that startups are hard.

If you’ve read Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons To Accelerate Your Startup, you’ll recognize many of these. David’s added a few more concepts and synthesized / evolved a few. In typical TechStars fashion, view this as an evolving manifesto – comments are welcome (and encouraged!)