I’m excited to join David Cohen and his team in announcing TechStars in Austin. From the TechStars blog:

“The Managing Director of TechStars Austin is Jason Seats. Jason is a  “techie” and entrepreneur. Rackspace acquired his company Slicehost in 2008 and then made him VP of Engineering. Jason is an active angel investor and has been with TechStars since 2011 with two very successful programs under his belt as Managing Director. He brings amazing technical chops, founder experience and a strong network of his own. Jason is moving down the road from San Antonio to Austin and we’re confident that he will be a big part of growing both TechStars and the startup community in his new home.

TechStars will operate out of Capital Factory in downtown Austin. This beautiful space is “the most inspiring office space in Austin” for startups, and we’re happy that it’s our new home too. The amazing folks behind Capital Factory (Josh Baer and Bill Boebel) have played a critical role in bringing TechStars to Austin and we’re thankful for all of their support.”

Applications are open today and the final deadline is June 30th. Apply now. I look forward to meeting this new class of founders!

When I was in Rio a few months ago for the Global Entrepreneurial Congress, I did a talk called “Day1” that Endeavor puts on. It’s a 20 minute presentation about “your day 1″ – a profound moment that impacted your entrepreneurial journey.

I decided to talk about a number of Day 1′s that I’ve had. I’ve always felt that with the dawn of each day is a new chance to “try again to be the best that I can be.” So my Day 1′s vary a lot – some good, some bad, but all full of lessons for me. They include:

• Me deciding not to be a doctor
• My first real job
• Hating MIT as a freshman and almost leaving
• Deciding to sell my first company
• Having Amy tell me I was a lousy roommate
• Learning they can’t kill you and they can’t eat you
• The power of a random day

I mention plenty of characters – some you’ve heard of on this blog and some new ones. My dad (Stan), Chris and Helena Aves, Dave Jilk, Len Fassler and Jerry Poch, Raj Bhargava, Steve Maggs, my partners Seth, Jason, and Ryan, David Cohen, and of course Amy.

When I give a talk like this I never really know where it will go when I start. I don’t prepare – it’s 100% extemporaneous. I was the second person to present a Day1 so I had 20 minutes to listen to someone else’s as I rolled around some stories in my head. Amy and I just listened to it together and it made us both smile and chuckle a lot with memories.

What’s your Day1?

The Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at CU is looking to hire a new Director. As part of the Leeds School of Business, the Deming Center prepares students across CU’s campus to think like entrepreneurs, act as social innovators and deliver as successful business leaders. It actively engages the community members of Boulder in order to accomplish this. The Deming Center also partners closely with Silicon Flatirons and other CU organizations to put on events such as the New Venture Challenge, Productive Collisions, and annually hosts the regional Venture Capital Investment Competition for MBA students.

This is an exciting opportunity to be part of CU and the larger Boulder entrepreneurship community. The person who serves in this Director role will have a unique opportunity to work with individuals both inside and outside the University to help foster and shape entrepreneurship on and off the campus. This person will also be responsible for the overall brand of the center as well as its operational and financial oversight. If you want to be part of a unique contributor to Boulder’s startup ecosystem, apply here!

It’s such an immense relief when the oppressive weight of depression begins to lift. While I’ve had a big struggle the past six months, the last few weeks have been better and recently I’ve felt a broad positive shift in how I’m feeling.

My metaphor for my depressive episodes has always been that “dark clouds build on the horizon” as depression approaches. I no longer am afraid of the dark clouds, nor do I go through crazy rituals like I did in my 20s to try to keep them away. I don’t embrace or encourage them – I just accept that they are there. Often they disappear after a few days. Sometimes, like this time, then move on in and block out the sun. And then – like a long Pacific Northwest rainy season, they just hang there. Every now and then the sun peeks through and things feel a little better, but then the dark clouds swallow up the light again.

After a month of this, it gets really tough. After two months, there are periods that I can only describe as excruciating. After three months, the pain – at least for me – dulls – and everything is just joyless. I get up each morning, I do my work, I engage as deeply as I can in whatever I need to, but I mostly just want to be alone. Being with Amy is better than being alone, because she’s safe, but I know it’s eventually hard on her to watch me exist under this dark, cloudy sky.

In March, when I accepted that the depression wasn’t lifting, I decided to change my approach. I used the metaphor of “regroup” to define how I was approaching things. I eliminated a bunch of things. I cancelled all my travel from June 1 to the end of 2013. I let go of my need to answer every email the same day. I stopped scheduling a lot of stuff and just let it happen. I stopped a bunch of online routines like checking in on FourSquare and reading my daily news. I stopped waking up at 5am (something I’ve done every day during the week for the past 20 years) and started waking up whenever I wake up. I stopped drinking alcohol and coffee.

I then added a few things back in. I started running more. I started reading again. I started doing digital sabbath – no email or phone from Friday sundown until Sunday morning.

I can feel a material change. The sun is shining more. The agony of depression is gone. I’m enjoying some things again.

But I’m still in regroup mode and don’t feel a need to come out of it anytime soon. I’m still eliminating things I realize I don’t want to be doing. But I’m starting to play around with new things that interest me.

My greatest creative moments have come on the heals of periods in my life like this. It’s the one positive aspect of these depressive episodes for me. I can’t plan it, or force it, but I look forward to it revealing itself.

Update – if you want to get a deeper understanding of what depression feels like, several commenters pointed me to this amazing post by Hyperbole and a Half titled Depression Part Two.

I woke up this morning to a great article by Nick Grossman at Union Square Ventures on The Patent Quality Improvement Act. Nick does a great job of describing the software patent problem, suggesting several solutions, and explaining how the Patent Quality Improvement Act helps the increasingly dismal situation around software patents.

Nick has a great paragraph from Mark Lemley of Stanford Law School that describes a powerful solution to part of the problem – that of eliminating “functional claiming.” Regarding functional claiming, Mark says:

“This is a problem that is unique to software. We wouldn’t permit in any other area of technology the sorts of claims that appear in thousands of different software patents. Pharmaceutical inventors don’t claim “an arrangement of atoms that cures cancer,” asserting their patent against any chemical, whatever its form, that achieves that purpose. Indeed, the whole idea seems ludicrous. Pharmaceutical patent owners invent a drug, and it is the drug that they are entitled to patent. But in software, as we will see, claims of just that form are everywhere.”

Mark has written a strong paper on this called Software Patents and the Return of Functional Claiming that describes the problem – and the solution – in detail.

Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham, Jason Mendelson, and I have been talking about the problem of software patents for a long time and Fred brought it up again today on his blog in a post titled Piecemeal Patent Reform. It’s nice to see Senator Chuck Schumer proposing a simple yet powerful solution to part of the software patent problem.

While we continue to struggle with patent trolls in the US – which used to be called “non-practicing entities” (NPEs) but now apparently prefer to be called ”patent assertion entities” (PAE) – the New Zealand government has announced that software will no longer be patented. Maybe someday we will be so bold.