Things I Like

I’ve run one ultramarathon – the American River 50 Mile Endurance race . It seriously fucked me up for a while . On Sunday, 8/11 Amy and I had dinner at Brasserie 1010 with our long time friends Bill Ritchie and Andrea Barthello. We’ve known Bill and Andrea since the mid-1990s – we met through Young Entrepreneurs Organization. Bill and Andrea have a super cool company called Thinkfun (it used to be called “Binary Arts” – a name I really loved) and are a great example of a husband and wife entrepreneurial team. Bill and I spent many hours working on the early YEO web site, back before anyone had web sites, and the four of us enjoyed lots of time together at YEO events in unexpected places like Barbados. ...

Put this in the protip category. When you create a calendar event and invite someone to it, make it useful. For example “Board Meeting” is not helpful. But “BigDoor Board Meeting” is very helpful. Don’t invite me to a meeting that says “Meeting with Brad Feld.” Make it something like “Smith / Feld – UX for BigDoor” meeting. For bonus points, use the “Where” field. Put the full address in it. If it says “Foundry Group – 1050 Walnut Street, Suite 210, Boulder, CO 80302” your iPhone or Android phone can automatically map the directions. If it just says “Foundry” well – that’s not really very helpful. Or put your phone number instead of “Phone”. Or your Skype handle instead of “Skype”. ...

I had a shitty website day on Friday. But an awesome Flickr day today. It was my anniversary and I wanted to post an anniversary tribute to Amy . I ended up writing a post titled Happy 20th Anniversary Amy . I dug up a bunch of old pictures (hosted in our very large photo archive on Dropbox), crafted a WordPress blog, uploaded the photos in the media center on WordPress, and published the blog. ...

20 years. Just amazing. You are my favorite person on this planet. Here are some pictures from the past 20 years. Fashion has clearly never been my strong sense. Fortunately, my t-shirts are rubbing off on you. ...

I’ve decided not to travel for the rest of 2013. There are a lot of inputs into this decision, including the fact that I’ve been travelling 50% – 75% of the time for the last 20 years and I’m just tired of it. I also have realized that my endless travel introduces a lot of friction into my world that I believe is both unnecessary, is shortening my life, and starting to have a material impact on my creativity. ...

I closed a large transaction yesterday without signing a single piece of physical paper. It was painless. The entire negotiation was done using email and DocuSign . I’m doing this at least once a week at this point. Either with DocuSign or EchoSign , the two services that seem to be most popular. I generally hate paper and have almost no paper in my world anymore so being able to eliminate the “print out the signature pages”, “sign the signature pages”, “scan the signed document”, and “email the signed document” step is a joy. ...

At 3:55pm yesterday I cried. I was getting ready for a Google Hangout back to my office with my partners and I noticed something about an explosion at the Boston Marathon on twitter. I did a quick scan of Twitter, clicked through to a few links, and realized a bomb had gone off near the finish line. I went blank – just stared at my computer screen – and then started crying. I called Amy – she hadn’t heard about it yet and told her what had happened. I collected myself and called in to my Hangout. My partners were all shaken also – Seth lived in Boston for many years, Ryan has done several marathons, and Jason just did his first marathon last year in Detroit. ...

I’m at the The Athenaeum at Caltech which is the alumni club / hotel on Caltech’s campus. I’m on Caltech Guest WiFi and am getting speeds of between 2 and 10 Kbps (e.g. miserably slow). My Verizon phone has one bar and is flickering between 3G and LTE, but is mostly 3G. I have no expectation that I get a certain level of infrastructure and connectivity in my life, so this isn’t a rant about that. In fact, I’m amazed on a regular basis that any of this shit actually works. Rather, I’m intrigued by the disparity between the top and bottom speed of connectivity I experience on a daily basis with my laptop and my iPhone. ...

Last October, when I put out a call for A Design HackStar for Startup Revolution I got about 50 responses. Around ten were great; one was awesome. That one was from Cole Morrison , who starting working part time as a Hackstar on all the Startup Revolution stuff at the end of last year. If you haven’t been on the Startup Revolution web site in a while, go take a look and give me feedback on things you’d like me to change, or add to it. We are continuing to evolve it on a weekly basis – our most recent change was to incorporate the Ask the VC website into it as part of the release of the 2nd edition of Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist. ...

I’m not at SXSW this year. I sort of miss it, but not really. Last year I cancelled at the last minute (the day before – I was already in San Antonio at TechStars Cloud) to come back to Boulder after Amy fell and broke her wrist . This year I just didn’t feel like I had enough extrovert reserves in my tank to deal with it. I stayed home and am hanging out at my house in Eldorado Canyon enjoying what looks like at least 12 inches of snow in the last 12 hours. And yes, I’m heading out later for a very quiet and transcendent run. ...