Philanthropy

I’m excited to announce the launch of the Colorado Startup Community Fund. This is a $200,000 fund for providing financing to support activities, events, and organizations in the Colorado startup community. It’s part of the Startup Colorado initiative and is going to make the first round of grants at the end of Q3. The Startup Colorado Community Fund from Startup Colorado on Vimeo . One of the four principles of my Boulder Thesis (discussed in my book Startup Communities) is that you need to have activities and events that engage the entire entrepreneurial stack on a continual basis. If you look at the activity in Boulder and Denver, there is at least a one activity every day at this point – sometimes as many as five. It’s amazing to observe and experience – this super-saturation of activities and events around the startup community is awesome. ...

Following is a guest post from Lura Vernon, President of the Monarch High School PTSO. Lura is also a good friend, contributor to Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur, mother of two awesome young women, and wife of Todd Vernon, CEO of VictorOps . Lura’s request is for laptops for Monarch High School Students. Any amount will do – 1, 2, 5, 10, 25, 50, or even 100. If you have any extra, please email me and I’ll get you connected. Foundry Group is contributing a MacBook Air this week. ...

[embedit snippet=”jedimax”] On Sunday I’ll be running the Detroit Marathon with a bunch of friends including my partner Jason Mendelson who is running his first marathon. Becky Cooper, our CFO, and Jill Spruiell (Jason’s EA) are also running their first marathon, as is Andrew Tschesnok, the CEO of Organic Motion. As this is my second marathon in my Random Act of Kindness series, Amy and I are again raising $10,000 for someone on GiveForward. We’ll be matching $5,000 of contributions from this community with a gift from us of $5,000. Our recipient this time in Max Simmons who we refer to as Jedi Max. We don’t know Jedi Max – we just know he’s fighting cancer and is awesome. ...

Let’s end Friday on a high note. The recipient of our first Random Act of Kindness in support of my marathons is now cancer free! If you go out this weekend, do a random act of kindness. Buy the meal for a young couple in the same restaurant you are in. Tip 50% instead of whatever you normally tip. Do something unexpected for someone you don’t know.

[embedit snippet=”giveforward”] When you support a family member in need, you’re doing the right thing. The community you are part of is counting on you, and fulfilling your obligation to them is part of being a member of that community. What happens, though, when you help someone you don’t know? What happens when one community deliberately seeks out someone who needs a leg up and attention and support and reaches out – with no possibility of reciprocity? That feeling is extraordinary, and as I run the 29 marathons I’ve got left to go to make my 50 marathons by age 50 goal, I have been thinking harder about fundraising as part of this experience. ...

In the “truth is stranger than fiction” category, my CU Boulder bathroom donation (well – the gift I gave to CU Boulder that resulted in me getting to name a bathroom) made the TV news tonight in Boston on Fox 25. There’s apparently a new bathroom news cycle because of William Falik’s gift to Harvard Law School for the Falik Men’s Room at Harvard Law School. While my bathroom at CU Boulder doesn’t have the same elegant name (it’s known as RRM 209 in the ATLAS Building, or the Feld Mens Bathroom on Foursquare), I’ve got a better quote: ““The Best Ideas Often Come At Inconvenient Times – Don’t Ever Close Your Mind To Them.” ...

Last week I was called out on a blog titled Stop Squawking; Embody The Change . In it, Nilofer Merchant (the writer) asserts that while my writing about the lack women in tech / entrepreneurship / computer science is useful, it doesn’t have much impact. Nilofer says: “Those posts are all “Yeahness”; maybe they are helping educate the few people on this earth who haven’t read the research, statistics that says that diversity of opinions improves the performance of any workgroup. Perhaps they counteract the “women just want to have babies” or “women don’t take risks” posts out there.” ...

I love LEGOs. So, when I saw the page yesterday of the new LEGO Minifigures (sent to me by Lucy Sanders, the CEO of National Center for Women & Information Technology ) I threw up a little in my mouth. Like me, Lucy is a LEGO enthusiast, but she was not happy to see how women (or minorities) were represented in the LEGO Minifigures sets. Sure, there is a female snowboarder, a female tennis player, and a lifeguard, but the rest of the female Minifigures are a hula dancer, pop star, cheerleader, witch, and nurse. And that’s it. While I have nothing against nurses, entertainers, or athletes, these mini-figures are perpetuating ridiculous stereotypes about both women and men. ...

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. ...

The blogo-twitter-sphere erupted this weekend in response to an article in the WSJ on Friday titled Addressing The Lack Of Women Leading Tech Start-ups . I missed most of it as I was pretty heads down this weekend going through the final page proofs of the upcoming book “Do More Faster.” TechCrunch / Arrington wrote a post Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men . Fred Wilson followed with Women In Tech and Women Entrepreneurs Discussion . My partner Jason Mendelson did a video interview on the subject with EZebis. ...