Monday night, I’ll again be the co-host of Entrepreneurs Unplugged where we will be interviewing Tyler Tysdal, the Managing Director of Mantucket Capital.  We’ll start at 6pm at the CU Boulder ATLAS center.  Tyler has a neat background as both an entrepreneur and investor and I expect this will be another fun and enlightening session.  Tyler’s background follows:

Mr. Tysdal serves on the Board of Directors for the following Mantucket Capital portfolio companies: BrandJourney Capital and PRN Medical Services. His investment background includes venture capital, buyouts, restructurings, hedge funds, real estate, public equities, bonds and several entrepreneurial ventures. Prior to joining Mantucket Capital, Mr. Tysdal founded a private equity firm primarily focused on healthcare, media & entertainment and secondarily on real estate and construction services. Mr. Tysdal is also… Read more

Speaking of the metaverse, we had a great TechStars summer program this year.  The companies that graduated from the program are starting to announce their financings and two announced this week.

SendGrid Raises $750K For Email Deliverability Software: I love these guys.  If your company sends transaction outbound email to your end users (e.g. confirmations, alerts, notifications) you can either (a) do it yourself and build all the infrastructure / support around it or (b) outsource it to SendGrid.  I’m a huge fan and really excited about their investor group led by Highway 12 Ventures, with SoftTech VC and FF Angel.

ReTel Technologies, Inc. Raises $1M Seed Financing: , which is an advanced surveillance video analytics company, was one of the companies profiled… Read more

I’ve always hated walled gardens.  Before I started blogging in 2004, I had a point of view that was driven from my desire to share interesting information with my friends and colleagues.  Since I’m a big reader, I run across a lot of stuff and have always enjoyed sharing, going back to the late 1980’s when I used to cut articles out of magazines and mail them to people.

When I started blogging, I gained an entirely new perspective.  As a writer, I was proud when people referenced things I wrote.  I loved the debate and discussion around topics that were controversial.  I’ve always been comfortable expressing my opinion and having people express a different opinion, as I almost always learn something as long as there is a real discussion… Read more

I spent last Thursday at TechStars Boston meeting with all of the TechStars Boston 2009 teams.  They’ve all made a ton of progress since I met with them a month ago and many of them are shaping up really nicely.

A few of them are starting to be more public about what they are up to.  One of them – Sensobi – is ready to roll.  I’m not a BlackBerry user (I use an iPhone), but when I fiddled around with their app on a BlackBerry a month ago I totally got it.   BlackBerryCool calls it an “enterprise-grade address book.”

If you are a BlackBerry user give it a try – you can sign up using my magic special invite code.  The Sensobi guys –… Read more

Yummy – that’s a fun tongue twister.  It doesn’t quite mean “synchronizing data”, but it’s in the same family.  I don’t have a better phrase yet for “renormalizing denormalized data”, but there is probably a construct for it that someone reading this blog can tell me (or invent – here’s your choice to replace the TLA RDD with something else.)

Two companies – Gnip and Brightkite – that I’m involved with (there – full disclosure!) made announcements today about data integrations.

• Gnip is now supporting the Seesmic firehouse of specific user activities.  Loic at Seesmic (a company I’m not involved with, but I’m a big fan of Loic’s ever since he took me and Amy out for an amazing dinner one night in Paris) has

Xconomy has a post up titled Who Knew? Xconomy Uncovers the Strange-But-True Details of Boston’s Innovation Leaders.  My bathroom at CU Boulder enabled me to make the list, even though I’ve never really been part of the Boston VC community.  The list includes some entrepreneurs (it is a list of the strange proclivities of Boston’s Innovation Leaders after all.)

In other VC hobby news, Fred Wilson is digging the new Soul Patch album Sooner or Later.  That would be a hobby of my partners Jason and Ryan.… Read more

If you are a long time reader of this blog, you know I’m a huge Warren Buffett fan.  So are many of you – when I offered to send out the "Annual Letters of Buffett Partnership, Limited, 1957 – 1970" I got over 1000 requests and every week I get a new one. (FYI – if you want them, just email me a request and I’ll send them to you, but you have to promise not to post the letters per a request from Buffett.)

This morning I read through a post titled Notes From Buffett Meeting 2/15/2008.  This was from a Q&A session with Buffett hosted for students from Emory’s Goizueta Business School and McCombs School of Business at UT Austin.  Outstanding stuff.  Thanks Scott

Jeff Nolan from NewsGator has a good post up on the Enterprise RSS blog titled Attention Data: Content vs. User that describes both attention data and privacy dynamics.  There’s a lot more where this comes from, but it’s a good starting point if you keep hearing "attention" in the context of RSS and wonder to yourself "what is it / why do I care?"… Read more

While catching up on some stuff today, I came across the word “automagically” on Bebo.

I first heard the word from Todd Vernon.  Todd is now the CEO of Lijit, but at the time he was CTO of Raindance.  It it one of my favorite Vernonisms, up there with “chocolatey goodness” (used to describe a wonderful computer hack or feature.)

I use automagically all the time – it’s a nice shorthand for Arthur C. Clarke’s third law of prediction: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  I occasionally see it in the wild on blog posts every now and then, but this is the first time I’ve actually seen it used in a web service.  Oh happy day.

Oh yeah – I’m bradf037 on Bebo in case you… Read more

Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about cleantech and – more specifically – the ethanol market.  However, I do understand basic economics reasonably well and have pretty good reasoning skills, although I’ve probably forgotten most of the math I learned in grad school about IS-LM curves.  Oh – I’m also a huge tree hugging environmentalist.

My PIDS (personal information discovery system – aka Amy) has continued to catch up on her RSS feeds and forwarded me an article by Daniel Gross in Slate titled Is The Ethanol Boom Going Bust?   It was short enough for me to read on my handheld while filling up my car with E85 (just joking – I can’t seem to find a gas station nearby me that actually has E85 – it seems to kind of defeat… Read more

I’ve received a lot of great comments and emails in response to my “Reflections on Mentors” post.  One of them was a note from my mom with a letter attached that I sent to my dad in 1988.  My dad was my first real mentor (and continues to have a huge impact on me.)  I wrote this when I was 23 – when my dad was 50.  One last piece of “mentor advice” – make sure you let your mentors know they are being helpful to you.

March 14, 1988

Dad FeldDallas, TX 75248

Dear Dad:

          I remember a sunny summer day about ten years ago. We were driving to Fort Worth in a white Corvette. You were about to deposit me at the Tut Bartzen tennis camp. We chatted about the… Read more

Matt Blumberg pointed me to a post about the Boulderites recent decision to raise taxes on themselves by passing a carbon tax.  The feds can’t seem to get around to doing it, so the Bouder locals just took it on themselves as an effort to fill the federal governments gap on climate policy.  … Read more

I’ve been struggling with what to say about Al Gore’s book “An Inconvenient Truth.”  I read it a few weeks ago and had very mixed emotions about it.

Fred and JoAnne Wilson saw the movie last night.  Fred’s blog post perfectly captured how I felt about the book. I want the science and the facts, not the melodrama and the preaching.  At some point as I was reading the book, I told Amy that if I read the phrase “moral imperative” one more time, I’d puke. 

The summary – Gore’s substance has impact; Gore’s style is detracting.… Read more

Congrats to my friends at Gold Systems for winning the “Best Outbound Solution” as part of the Microsoft Speech Server Partner Spotlight Awards that were announced on Tuesday.  Terry Gold and his team have been working closely with Microsoft on their new Speech Server product and have done some really cool stuff with it, such as the Gold Systems Password Reset Solution that Microsoft is highlighting on the Microsoft Speech Server website… Read more

It’s inevitable.  Every year we have our “first real snow” in Boulder.  That would be – today. 

Coinciding with the first snow – 100% of the time – is an Internet outage at my house and at our office.  Since we use IP phones, are connected to our infrastructure in our California office via point to point, and my T1 line from my house is direct connected into the office, and outage is – well – a major pain in the ass (did you know you can’t make a phone call on an IP phone from your house if your network is down – duh – yeah I’ve got a land line in this server room somewhere, now where the hell is it?)

I got home Saturday afternoon from being on the road… Read more