Random

2008 was a fantastic year for entrepreneurship in Boulder. While the VC firm I’m part of (Foundry Group ) invests nationally, the partners have made a deliberate decision to live and work in Boulder. As a result, we believe it is our responsibility to participate actively in Boulder’s entrepreneurial community. I’ve been living here since 1995 and have seen and helped Boulder evolve into a serious entrepreneurial hub, as written about by my friend Ben Casnocha in his article Start-Up Town in The American Magazine. ...

Thomas Friedman has a phenomenal Op-Ed in today’s New York Times. Time to Reboot America . Whether you like or dislike Friedman, he’s nailed this one. Repeat after me: Ctrl-alt-del.

Lijit has five open positions: Publisher Support Engineer Ad Sales Catalyst Business Development Web Developer UI Web Developer If you are interesting, drop Lijit an email .

I made a mistake this morning. I allowed myself to get ramped up during my morning information routine. As I read through my online news and feeds, I kept seeing various permutations of discussions around “the bailout.” Which bailout you ask? So did I. Before I knew it I was way down a rat hole of reading about all the various requests around “the bailout”, tricks for getting “your share of the bailout”, absurd requests from very large established companies regarding “the bailout”, some surprising and particularly offensive (at least to me) requests from other companies around “the bailout”, and lots of justification for action couched in terms like “economic disaster”, “crisis”, and “collapse.” ...

All of the hedge fund (and some of the VC fund) statements I’ve been receiving the past few weeks have long essays in them. I categorize most of them as either (a) marketing, e.g. “look how smart we are – we know what’s going on” or (b) rationalization, e.g. “our numbers totally suck, but here’s why you should be optimistic about our future performance.” However, at least one of them was really interesting, well thought out, and gave me plenty to think about. ...

I’ve got a little end of day advice for everyone out there that is getting whipsawed around by all the craziness in the financial markets. While this is aimed at entrepreneurs, it applies to everyone. Focus on things under your control. When I was a teenager, my dad said something to me that has stuck with me and informs many of the decisions I make and things I decide to spend my time on. He said something like “Brad – if you want to change the world, start with the 2% you know best.” ...

The “start-up challenge” is emerging as the new platform marketing initiative. Amazon has just launched the AWS Start-Up Challenge . If you are into Amazon Web Services , think you might be, or just want to be part of a contest, go check it out and sign up. $50k of cash and $50k of AWS credits are on the line.

Amy and I were talking about the election process during our vacation. Both of us dislike the electoral college process and have concluded that the cycle is way too long, the primaries are stupid, and the amount of money being spent is totally obscene. We are also deeply tired of all of the endless partisan crap. So I came up with a new process. How’s this? There is one election. No primaries. No parties. As many people can enter as they’d like. The winner is whomever gets over 50% of the votes. The election is a multi-day process. On day one, all voters vote from the entire pool of candidates. If someone gets more than 50% of the votes they win. If no one gets > 50%, then anyone with > 10% of the votes gets to be on the ballot for day two. Repeat – this time only people that get > 20% of the votes get to be on the ballot on day 3. If day 3 doesn’t have a winner, the ballot is now between anyone with > 30% of the votes. Yes – there’s a slight risk that no one will get over the minimum threshold on day 1, but assuming someone does, it should work. The winner of the most popular votes is president. #2 is vice president. It needs more work, but you get the idea.

One of my favorite quotes of all times was Ted Leonsis’s statement in the mid-1990’s that “MSN will be Microsoft’s Vietnam.” Ted said this around the time that MSN launched (on a proprietary platform – pre-Internet) to compete directly with AOL. 15 years later this seems like such a prescient statement. I have no idea if Android will be Google’s Vietnam. We’ll have to look back 15 years from now to really know. But as I watched the T-Mobile G1 Video and read through some of the Android early criticism (and praise), I kept asking myself “why?” I have my own guesses as to the answer, and I know the public answers, but when I sit on the outside looking in, I have way more questions than answers. ...

I’m sitting in my hotel room in Palo Alto after 20 hours of travel from Hampshire, England. Amy and I took our Q3 vacation in the English countryside at the Hampshire Four Seasons where we had a glorious week off of the grid. I find myself really wanting to be tired, but I am so far beyond tired that I’m wide awake well past midnight California time. Our Q3 vacation was dynamite. I would have never thought to choose the English countryside, but Amy loves horses and our Q3 vacation is near her birthday, so we go wherever she wants to go. The weather cooperated in some sort of pleasant karmic-recovery from our abysmal Alaska weather (yes, I know they are uncorrelated events, but one can fantasize), my runs along with Basingstoke Canal were awesome, and the food surpassed expectations. ...