This year I’m the interviewer for the Silicon Flatirons Entrepreneurs Unplugged series.  On Monday @ 6:00 pm I’m interviewing David Cohen, the founder of TechStars at the Wolf Law Building in Room 204 on the CU Boulder Campus. 

I’ve known and worked with David for about four years.  Prior to starting TechStars, he started three companies – two that were successful and one that failed.  Since starting TechStars, he’s had an incredible impact on the Boulder Entrepreneurial Ecosystem during that time, is an awesome entrepreneur, and can be hilarious.  Come watch me pry some great stories, anecdotes, and advice out of him.  Register here.

Including Monday’s interview with David, there are five more interviews in this year’s series.  On 11/2, I’ll be interviewing Steve Halstedt, the co-founder of Centennial Ventures.  On 11/4, Brad Bernthal will be interviewing Nir Barkat, the Mayor of Jerusalem and a special guest of the State of Colorado at the Denver Art Museum.  On 11/13 I’ll be interviewing Ted Turner (yes – the Ted Turner), and then on 12/7 I’ll be interviewing Tim Enwall, the founder and President of Tendril.  Please come join us.

Dell has put up a new site called Motherboard that I don’t totally understand the point of, but I very much enjoyed the interview with Ray Kurzweil. 

Kurzweil has always been a hero of mine ever since I first hear of him when I was at MIT in the mid-1980’s.  I’ve never worked with Ray although I got to know his business partner Aaron Kleiner near the end of my time in Boston.  I’ve observed Ray from afar, read his books, and thought about his thinking.  I find all of it, including the notion of the Singularity and his goal of living long enough to be able to live forever, very compelling.

Watching the interview I realized that I’ve been out of the flow of an area that is really interesting to me.  I have no idea how much, if any, will show up on this blog (or in our investing), but look for more of it.

If you’ve enjoyed the TechStars video series, this one is a really fun one.  It focuses on the TechStars Bay Area Demo Day which happened at the end of September.  Among the beautiful and inspiring scenes of the bay area are a bunch of super capable entrepreneurs from Boulder and Boston who grew an enormous amount in the last three months (yes – I’m very proud of them.)  As a special bonus, you find out that the Everlater guys can “give as good as they get” (after getting punked by David Cohen in Episode 8: Your Best Friend.)

As a special bonus, David had a great article today in the Huffington Post Denver Edition titled TechStars: It’s About Community.  And then it was way past my bed time.  Goodnight.

The Gist iPhone app was released this morning.  It’s the first of two meaningful iPhone releases this week from companies I’m an investor in.  Not surprisingly the Gist iPhone app is tightly coupled with the overall Gist service which I’ve written about in the past. 

Bill French wrote a great review on iPhone CTO titled Mobile Professionals Develop Business Acuity and Information Readiness With New Gist iPhone App.  In this he clearly explains what Gist is trying to do, why it’s special-magic-happy, and where it has room for improvement.

Gist is providing a little Apple love today with a change to their avatar on Twitter.  If you are so inclined, give Gist a try and send me any feedback (good or bad) that you have.

I ingest a ton of information on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis.  My process for doing it today is entirely manual.  I’m starting to look around for a way to automate this using the metaphor of a “personal dashboard”, not dissimilar to the idea from the 1980’s of an EIS (“executive information system”).  Let me explain.

• Daily: I have an information processing routine each morning that is web-based.  I open a folder in Firefox that contains 14 tabs.  I then go through all of them – most, but not all are news related.  A few are interactive and require data from me.  I then scan through my tweets from the previous night.  I then review my “Daily” email folder – most of the items are “daily reports” from a variety of companies I’m an investor in.  Next up, my RSS feeds.  Finally, I process whatever email came in from the previous night.
• Weekly: I have a weekly tab in Firefox.  There are only 5 tabs here and they shift around a little.  But – they reference a variety of text and numerical data that I check on a weekly basis.
• Monthly: I get financial statements (balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement) along with board packages from all of the companies I’m an investor in along with all of my personal financial information.
• Quarterly: Similar to monthly, but for the quarter. 
• Annual: Similar to monthly, but for the year.  I also generate a variety of other “annual data” much of it to do with either money or fitness.

My Daily routine takes around an hour.  Weekly, which includes reviewing my upcoming calendar, takes about 30 minutes.  I don’t know how long Monthly, Quarterly, or Annual take as they are usually spread out over multiple days.

In theory, I’m using Firefox and Outlook as my personal dashboards to get to this data and then viewing it in a variety of apps including Excel, Adobe, and Word.  However, this is really unsatisfying as the data is (a) in different formats, (b) impossible to search effectively, (c) not persistent, and (d) difficult to handle or manipulate.

My guess is I need both an (a) ingestion and (b) presentation layer.  The ingestion layer seems straightforward – the software I’d use for my personal dashboard should be able to generate an XML template for each “type of data”.  I should be able to configure this (or – optimally – the ingestion layer should be able to figure this out automatically).  The ingestion layer should be able to handle different types of inputs – html files, xml files, emails, or some other quasi-API.  So – “Glue”.

The presentation layer is a little harder for me to get my mind around.  A year ago I would have said “hmtl is fine – just give it to me in Firefox via a web page.”  In some cases this is fine, but I want finer grained control over how this stuff is displayed.  Some of the web pages I look at are formatted worse and are less flexible than the DEC-based EISes I played with in the 1980’s.  In many cases we haven’t made any progress on the presentation layer not withstanding all the efforts of Edward Tufte.  So – “HCI”.

I’m hopeful that in a decade I’ll have a much more effective way of dealing with my periodic information routine.  Until then, I’m searching for companies working on both the ingestion layer and presentation layer (preferably both).  Feel free to give me a shout if this is something you are working on.

As the co-founder of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, I’m a huge fan of what the Entrepreneurs Foundation is all about.  Two weeks ago, when I was in San Francisco at Cloud Engines’ offices (makers of the Pogoplug and one of our investments) I noticed their Entrepreneurs Foundation plaque signifying their membership in the bay area chapter.  I asked Dan Putterman – the CEO of Cloud Engines – if he’d write a guest post about why Cloud Engines joined the Entrepreneurs Foundation.  It follows.

As a serial entrepreneur, it feels like there is always a reason to sacrifice; spending too much time at the office at the expense of one’s family, not getting enough exercise, eating poorly, and  certainly not taking enough (or any) time to give back to the community, environment or people in need. The rationale is that at some point there will be the ever elusive "exit" and things will 
change. The truth is that most of us perpetuate the circle by starting or getting involved in something new right afterwards (being an entrepreneur seems to be in one’s blood). Although guilt can be a great motivator of change, most entrepreneurs just lament amount their shortcomings and soldier forward (tenacity is also one of the traits that makes us successful).

I’ve been trying to break all of the rules at Pogoplug.  Yes, we work hard and pretty much live on email morning and night, but I encourage people to take care of themselves and their family. And I do my best to personally demonstrate this life balance through example. This time around, we joined a wonderful organization called Entrepreneur’s Foundation, a well-run group of high-tech focused philanthropists that help you allocate a little time to give back to your community through events and individual time contribution and actually run a foundation on your behalf based on equity that your company donates to it.

Here’s what’s so cool about this model: the more successful a company is, the more the foundation grows in value.  The team then gets to put the money to good use on a liquidation event. This way, if you selfishly work tons of hours one week, you can put the guilt aside knowing that the growing the value of your company is good for more than just you and your investors. During our last board meeting, I proposed that we put 1% of our company into the foundation.  Everyone unanimously and enthusiastically approved the motion.  With the "big picture" out of the way, we’ve also picked two awesome organizations in San Francisco, 826 Valencia and Homeless Prenatal Program. We’re going to do some group events and spend some personal time helping these organizations, including helping to purchase turkeys for hundreds of families who will prepare their first Thanks Giving meal.  EF takes care of all of the details so all we have to do is show up and get involved.

Thanks to EF, we are giving back and  feeling great about ourselves – and most importantly, we are breaking some outdated and dumb rules about entrepreneurship.

This year TechStars ran a program in Boston.  Shawn Broderick was the ring leader and everyone had an awesome time.  To get a feel for the scene, take a look at The Founders video on Bean Town.

The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 13 | Bean Town from Andrew on Vimeo.

Two things really tweaked me in the past 24 hours.

1. The FTC rules to regulate product endorsements in blogs
2. The US Antitrust Inquiry of IBM

The FTC thing is just fucking stupid.  Jeff Jarvis does a better takedown of it than I could ever do on his post FTC Regulates Our Speech.  I’m not a journalist, nor do I pretend to be.  I’m involved in some way in virtually everything I write about on this blog.  While I don’t directly make money when you buy a product or service from one of the private companies I have an investment in, I have the potential of eventually making money if the company is more valuable.  I do get a share of the ad revenue that appears alongside the articles and I get affiliate fees from some services like Amazon whenever I write about a book or movie, link to Amazon, and remember to include my affiliate link.  These are all well known practices among bloggers that adding “disclosure to” in every post is tedious, pointless, and irrelevant.

Is this what the FTC should be spending it’s time on?  I completely agree with Jarvis – this is about “free speech” – presumably I should be able to write about whatever I want on this blog (it is “my blog” after all) and you can decide to ignore me if you want.  Oh – and no one pays me to write this blog so how does it become an FTC issue?  I’ve seen some comments that this is aimed at payola – only impacting bloggers that get paid to write about products and services.  But the language seems to include direct payments and indirect payments.  Call me perplexed and confused.  I wish there was a product called “perplexed and confused” that I could sell.

The The US Antitrust Inquiry of IBM is even weirder.  As I read the NY Times article, it looks like a bunch of companies whining that IBM won’t license their mainframe software to them.  This stems from a complaint filed by the Computer and Communication Industry Association whose members include Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Yahoo, Fujitsu, and a bunch of others. IBM is conspicuously absent from the membership list – I guess they made a mistake not joining since it looks like the argument being made could easily apply – in my experience – to business practices of Google, Microsoft, and Oracle.   Two important quotes from the NY Times article.

“I.B.M.’s opposition to licensing its technology to outsiders is not enough to build a successful government antitrust case, said Andrew I. Gavil, a law professor at Howard University. More likely,

and

In the ruling in the private case last week, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan found that I.B.M. had invested heavily in its modern mainframe technology and its decision not to license it “does not constitute anticompetitive conduct.”

The only logical conclusion to this one is Gavil’s speculation that “the Justice Department is investigating to see if I.B.M. is engaged in other tactics that might be anticompetitive.”  But based on what actual evidence?

Last week I was interviewed by the Denver Business Journal for an article on the StartupVisa Movement.   Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO) – who represents the district in which I live – was also interviewed.  Kevin Mann – the founder of Take Publishing (one of the TechStars 2009 companies) and a UK citizen – talked about his story.  Good – and important – stuff – Polis wants foreign company founders to be allowed to stay in United States.

Eric Ries also put together a short two minute video describing the issue and highlighting Eric Diep, the co-founder of Quizzes (a very popular early Facebook app).  The Eric’s explain the issue around visas for founders of companies and talk briefly about some of their activity on a recent trip to Washington DC.

As each day passes, I continue to get a steady flood of positive feedback and constructive suggestions about this from a wide variety of people.  Thanks to everyone for engaging in this important conversation.