I’ve never totally understood the "send out physical greeting cards" thing.  I get that it’s a "tradition", but it has always seemed like a waste of time, energy, and money to me.  Yes – I know I’ve signed my share of these cards – I’ve just played along, but it doesn’t change the way I feel about them.

I now get a flood of electronic cards (and birthday wishes – thanks everyone!)  These make me smile and often generate a response via email from me to people I haven’t talked to in a while.  I received very few physical birthday cards this year (which is good) since pretty much everyone that would send me a card sent me an electronic one.

I just received an email greeting card from my friends at KKO.  In it, they say "In lieu of mailing holiday cards we have made a charitable donation to Emergency Family Assistance Association."

As this is likely to be a horrible year for charitable giving (based on the downturn in the economy), I think this is a fantastic idea.  Even if it is a modest amount of money, I (a) got my greeting card from KKO and (b) the money they gave to EFFA is going to be put to good use.

Nicely done guys.

Thanks to Micah Baldwin, a bunch of Colorado bloggers (including me) are putting up DonorsChoose widgets on their blogs.  Our goal in Colorado is to displace Fred Wilson as king of last years DonorsChoose technology blog category.

We’ve already got a bunch of great Colorado projects up on the DonorsChoose website.  To start things off on my blog, I just gave $200 to the Return To Technology project for Ms. E’s Classroom.  Look for the sidebar on the right of my main page or click through on the DonorsChoose website link.  Any amount helps – give up Starbucks for a week and join in with $25.

There’s lot of good Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado stuff going on.  The other day I wrote about the EFCO Annual Give Back Event that is happening on Saturday (please come join us.)  Today, New West announced that they have joined the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado.

Tomorrow (8/14) at 5:30pm, Application Experts is announcing that they have joined the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado and is having a rooftop party on the Foundry Roof Deck to tell anyone that’s interested why you should care about EFCO.  A bunch of TechStars folks with be there along with me and my partner Jason Mendelson – come join us for a beer.

The Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado is having their first annual "give back" event on Saturday 8/16.  If you are an employee of a company that is an EFCO member, you and your family are invited.  EFCO is doing this in conjunction with the Intercambio-KGNU Friendship Fun Run.  The logistics follow:

August 16 at Foothills Community Park (at Broadway and Violet, Boulder)
8 AM & 9:15 AM Adult 5K
8:45 AM Kids’ 1K
11 AM to Noon – Intercambio Strategic Planning Session  
Noon – Celebration Family Picnic

For some background on Intercambio, I asked Lee Shainis, the Executive Director, a few questions.

• Who is Intercambio?  We are an innovative, efficient and independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded in 2001 that works to build respectful communities and broaden opportunities for immigrants through language education, cultural exchange and friendship. 
• What does Intercambio do? We provide affordable and flexible English classes for over 1,000 adult immigrants each year, taught by over 350 trained volunteers at immigrants’ homes, other nonprofit agencies, and at public buildings.  We also offer community resource information and workshops as well as intercultural exchange through community social events such as potlucks, fiestas, camping trips and park clean-ups.  Over 1,800 people attend our intercultural events each year. 
• Why is this important for our community? In recent years, immigration has sparked a great deal of fear and discomfort in our society. Immigrants are striving to feel more confident and successful in their surrounding communities, but language barriers, fear, and lack of cultural understanding are severe obstacles. Intercambio provides a sustainable solution to these challenges and addresses the root causes by bringing together individuals from different backgrounds for an ongoing period of time with the objectives of learning from each other, building understanding, and creating a more inclusive community in which people of all cultural backgrounds feel better able to communicate, participate, and contribute.  We are transforming the way immigrants and non-immigrants are able to communicate with each other, while fostering intercultural friendships that lead to deeper cultural understanding.

Come join us for what should be a fun and interesting morning.  Register for the fun run and – if you are interested in volunteering to help with the event – please email Brandon Rattiner.

And then there were 19.  Symplified has joined the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado. 

Symplified was founded last year by Eric Olden, Jonti McLaren, and Darren Platt.  Eric and Jonti were previously the co-founders of Securant which was acquired in 2001 by RSA Security for $140m (if you remember 2001, then you’ll realize that this was quite an accomplishment.) 

I met Eric last fall as we were still raising our new fund.  He was on the verge of closing a financing and we just weren’t in a position to engage seriously since he had the financing effectively lined up.  As we got to know each other, I mentioned the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado and he got it immediately.

Eric got Josh Forman, Symplified’s VP of Customer Care & Operations, in the mix and Symplified was actually one of the first ten EFCO members.  They decided to hold off announcing their involvement until they launched.  However, from the beginning Josh got deeply engaged in what EFCO was up to and last month we invited him to join the EFCO board.

I’m psyched that Symplified has both launched and gone public with their commitment to EFCO, especially since both of their VC investors – Granite Ventures and Allegis Capital – are based in the bay area.  Thanks to everyone for their support. 

We’ve signed up two more EFCO in the past few days so we are looking forward to announcing #20 and #21.  In the mean time, if you are interested in learning more about EFCO, take a look at the website or drop me an email. 

A few weeks ago, my friend Alan Shimel connected me with Jennifer Leggio.  Jennifer is the Director of Strategic Communications at Fortinet and an active blogger in – among other things – security and communication.  Alan suggested to Jennifer that she might be interested in the work we have been doing at the National Center for Women & Information Technology.

I remember the conversation fondly because I was sitting on the floor upstairs at Oblong’s office in LA while a bunch of people ran around downstairs looking at some cool stuff that Oblong was presenting to one of their customers.  Oblong had recently moved in to their new office and there was a noticeable lack of comfortable surfaces or devices to sit on (or in) upstairs.  The floor had to make do.  It was actually pretty clean and comfortable.

Jennifer asked a bunch of hard questions.  We had a great conversation.  I connected her with Lucy Sanders, the CEO of NCWIT, and they talked.  Jennifer got her mind around how to engage in the problem NCWIT is addressing and Women in IT – Be A Change Agent (Part One) is the post she wrote kicking off her thoughts and actions.

I appear to have said at least one memorable thing during our conversation:

“The most impactful people tend to be the doers in the organization. We can’t rely solely on entrepreneurs, who may have very little time, to make change happen. Anyone with a strong voice can be a role model. It’s easier to get started when you’re a leader but real change happens when you build momentum across a much broader spectrum.”

Jennifer riffed nicely on this and came up with a number of actionable things for doers to do which she enumerated in Women in IT – Be A Change Agent (Part One).

Jennifer – great stuff on many levels.

We all know this, but it’s useful to be reminded of it periodically.

I’m chairman of the board of the National Center for Women & Information Technology.  It’s a remarkable organization that has accomplished a great deal under the leadership of Lucy Sanders.  While it would be easy to categorize NCWIT as a "gender equality" organization, it’s not.  Instead, NCWIT is focused on helping the US be more competitive in the long term in the field of information technology and computer science. 

Simply put, the only way to satisfy the increasing demand for computer science / IT folks in the US over the next decade is to get more women involved.  There is a long list of other important reasons to get more women in the US engaged in computer science / IT, but the need to stay competitive in this arena is the one that seals the deal for me.

NCWIT periodically gets emails like the following:

Subject: Answer of why woman in IT is shrinking

IT is a very hard field in which you have to study all the time to keep up with technology.   Also, it involves incredible troubleshooting skills, which by nature woman lack.   What you need are more special laws, so that woman have special privilages, which is the only way their will be an increase of women in IT.   Until then just keep complaining as your gender is perfect at it.  Please post this on your wall at your Facist Woman in IT offices.   Or just delete as women hate the truth.

Someone should teach that guy how to spell fascist.

I love Mental Floss (both the magazine and the books I refer to as "mental floss.")  I was proud to see that I’d made the list of 6 Curious College Donations.  My CU Boulder Bathroom joined Andrew Carnegie’s lake at Princeton, P.T. Barnum’s dead animals at Tufts, Frances Crick’s attempted brothel at Cambridge University, W.K. Kellogg’s horse shows at Cal-Poly Pomona, and Bob Gibson’s science fiction collection at the University of Calgary.

If you know me, you know that I have a weird obsession with bathrooms.  It goes back a long time and definitely has some strange psychologic underpinnings that I’m sure Dr. Freud would have fun discussing.  I don’t fight it – I just roll with it.

Several years ago, I had a discussion with Heidi Roizen about her failed attempt to get her name on a bathroom at Stanford during their fundraising drive for a new building on campus.  The rejection came with the admonishment that it wasn’t an appropriate thing to do.  I laughed and told Heidi – "no problem – I’m sure I can get one at MIT in no time – they are more flexible in their thinking about what is appropriate."  Boy was I wrong – I’ve written about the story before on this blog if you are interested.   The bottom line is the request apparently went around the system before being crushed by the bureaucracy somewhere at MIT.  Their loss.

No such challenge at CU Boulder.  I wrote about the immediate response of ATLAS’s director John Bennett to my Stanford / MIT bathroom story.  Following is the result a few months later.

That’s me standing in the doorway of the second floor men’s room at ATLAS next to my plaque which says "“The Best Ideas Often Come At Inconvenient Times – Don’t Ever Close Your Mind To Them.”

John – nicely done.  The Boulder Daily Camera interviewed me yesterday and wrote a fun story about it, including the punch line from John that ATLAS has seven other bathrooms that have the potential to be named. 

MIT – that could have been your money!