My long time friend Matt Blumberg, the CEO of Return Path, wrote a blog post today titled A New Kind of Partnership for Return Path. In it he talks about his recognition, as Return Path has grown (they are now around 250 people), of the gender imbalance in the software engineering team (women are around 15% of total engineering team.. He knew about NCWIT from my role as chairman and Matt and his team decided to join the NCWIT Workforce Alliance to engage in helping address this issue.

Matt and his team then did something that blew me away. They provided the sponsorship of the first-ever NCWIT/Return Path Student Seed Fund. This will program will provide seed funding to groups of technical women at universities across the US to advance the goals of women in computing. There are so many things about this that are exciting to me, including the focus on students, seed funding, and the linkage to NCWIT’s overall goal.

We’ve got a huge NCWIT announcement coming in a few days that Return Path is also involved in as one of the founding members. I’ll post more about it, why it’s so important to me, who’s involved, and what you can do to engage – probably over the weekend.

Return Path – thank you!

A week ago I had just gotten home after a month in Homer, Alaska.  I was totally chilled out – I worked plenty in July but had very little physical human interaction with anyone other than Amy.  I’m sitting here in my Boulder condo today thinking about the entrepreneurial tour de force that was the last six days.  I think I interacted with more different people each day than I did cumulatively over the previous 30 days in Homer.

The Boulder New Tech Meetup double header (Tuesday and Wednesday) started things off.  The second Boulder Open Angel Forum delivered.  Then we had TechStars Demo Day which was amazing, followed by an Open House at Jive Software (they acquired TechStars Boulder 2007 company Filtrbox last year and are growing like crazy), a Return Path board dinner at Black Cat, and the the TechStars Afterparty at the Draft House.  Friday saw a Return Path board meeting and lunch with the folks at Return Path followed by TEDxBoulder on Saturday.  Oh, and in between I had piles of “regular work.”

There were numerous blog posts and tweets from the week, but my favorite post about an event from the week is up on the True Ventures web site titled On The Road With TechStars Boulder.   In addition to all the locals, there were a huge number of folks from out of town who participated in the various events and I smiled a big smile when I read the post.

Last night during the TEDxBoulder intermission break, I had a few quiet moments to myself as I wandered around the grounds of the Boulder Chautauqua.  I was filled with a deep satisfaction about the amazingness of the people of Boulder.  While there are lots of other great places in the world, I am most at home here.  And it’s good to be back home.