Of all the podcast interviews I’ve done over the years, I think the one I recently did with Jerry Colonna on his Reboot podcast series is my favorite. In the podcast show notes, Jerry links to a fun post by Fred Wilson titled Sixteen Years Ago (which is now 19 years ago…) We’ve known each other for a very long time and I treasure Jerry as one of my best friends on this planet.

This year’s local election in Boulder is a critical one. The city that we love risks shutting its doors. While the business community in Boulder has contributed immeasurably to the vibrancy, charitable contribution base, economic development, and success of our community, there is a faction in Boulder that feels that our city should stop moving forward and instead should live in the past. This faction believes in a less inclusive Boulder and aims to achieve this goal by literally shutting the doors to our city.

When I was 14, my dad gave me a copy of Alvin Toffler’s book The Third Wave It blew my fucking mind. I then read the prequel – Future Shock – which was good – but since my mind was already blown, it was anticlimactic. If you don’t know the arc of Toffler’s waves, they go as follows: The First Wave: agricultural society The Second Wave: industrial society The Third Wave: post-industrial society Future Shock was written in 1970 and The Third Wave was written in 1980. While the idea of post-industrial society seems obvious in hindsight, in 1980 it was a completely new idea.

There is a cliche in the financial world that has been around forever. “Two things drive decisions: Greed and Fear” For the past few years, we’ve been a zone where greed has been dominating. Every now and then a little fear creeps in and then gets squished into the corner by chants of “things are different this time” and “that’s just PTSD from the Internet bubble.” Recently, the fear seems to be sticking around. There are plenty of people trying to kick it away, shake it off, or ignore it. But it lingers. And the smell of it gets stronger.

If you’ve been following our Glowforge investment you will be familiar with the pre-order campaign they are currently running. Halfway through (with 15 days to go) they are now at $7.8 million. Yesterday, Dan Shapiro and I did a video of me creating a Foundry Group coaster out of a piece of wood. It was done remotely – I did all the design work on my computer in Boulder, uploaded it to the Glowforge cloud, and printed it on a Glowforge in Seattle. As a bonus, you get to see a VC (me) struggle with Adobe Illustrator, which – while being ubiquitous – is one of those pieces of software that can only be described as “a beast.”

Yesterday, I gave a talk and then did two breakout Q&A sessions at EO Alchemy 2015. It was a lot of fun and many of the questions were thought provoking to me, which I enjoy greatly. One of them caused me to pause and answer extra deliberately. Near the end of the second breakout session, I was asked “What Do You Want Your Legacy To Be?” I don’t think I’ve answered this question before publicly and I realize I never think about it, so I took a few seconds to roll the question around in my mind and make sure I agreed with what was about to come out of my mouth.

It’s here. And you know you want it. You can buy just the Rock Band 4 software (if you have your old instruments) or, if you are like me and you’ve given your instruments away, you can buy a new full bundle of everything. And, in case you missed it, Spark Capital joined us an investor last week with a few other long time friends in a $15 million round.

We’ve seen several M&A deals collapse unexpectedly in the past two months. Each was at the signed LOI stage. There was no warning or evidence of an issue until the moment the CEO got the phone call from the acquirer saying the deal was off. In both cases, the explanation was vague. I’ve also seen several financings fail to close recently. Two of them were late stage financings that were pulled by the investor at the last second. One of these investors is highly visible for doing late stage deals. The other was an investor I didn’t know much about. The explanation I heard from the founder in each case was again vague.

I spent the day yesterday doing Denver Startup Week stuff. I was on a bunch of panels and during one of the Q&A sessions someone asked something to the effect of: “Now that things are moving faster than ever before, how do you deal with / keep up with them?” I thought about it for a second and responded that I wasn’t sure the assertion was correct. I don’t think things are moving faster than ever before. I paused to make sure I believed that. Then I continued with my answer.