I saw this video earlier today and it delighted me. I love Sphero.

As I read about the unveiling of the Tesla Model X, I have two thoughts. The first one is “I want” (hint: Amy – you need to replace your red Range Rover.) The second is that price of admission is an amazing product. Indulge me while I go on an amazing product rant from our portfolio. Glowforge is turning 3D printing inside out by using a laser to cut and engrave, instead of an extruder to, well, extrude. They just crossed the $4 million mark in day five of their thirty day pre-order campaign. Sphero has sold more BB-8’s in the month since they launched than even I thought possible. I have one on my desk and it gives me joy every day I’m in the office. Accenture just launched their Connected Analytics Experience’s immersive environment which is enabled by Mezzanine. As a daily user of Mezzanine, it actually makes video conference and collaboration tolerable. The demand for the 3D Robotics Solo drone is off the charts. Rock Band 4 comes out next week. Yesterday two new U2 songs were added as exclusives. Enough said. We closed an investment yesterday in a company that will announce next week. I’ve been using the product for sixty days along with their competitor’s product. Their competitor has raised 10x the amount of money so far (prior to our investment), and the product from the company we invested in, from my own head to head comparison, is amazing, compared to the “meh” product from its competitor. We are issuing a term sheet today to another company that I hope accepts our offer. Your mind simply explodes when you use this particular product. I could keep going but you get the idea. When I reflect on our successful investments, regardless of the form factor (software or hardware or both) that they take, they all are amazing products. And the founders come from a product first mindset – their goal is to unambiguously create the best product that delight users every time they come in contact with it.

A few weeks ago I did an interview about mental health, depression, and entrepreneurship with Samara Linton and Michelle Pamisa. They wrote it up and posted it on the Dream Nation site in an article titled Be Well – It’s Work. I thought they did an excellent job capturing what I said and they game me permission to repost the interview here. Could you tell us a bit about when you first started noticing that you weren’t feeling right?

The 2015 Defrag Conference is happening on November 11-12. Early bird pricing ends tomorrow. For a taste of what you’ll get if you attend, following is a guest post by Ramez Naam, the author of 5 books including the award-winning Nexus trilogy of sci-fi novels. I’m a huge fan of Ramez and his books – they are in my must read near term sci-fi category. A shorter version of this article first appeared at TechCrunch. The tech has advanced, even since then.

An event about how the Maker movement is transforming the role of public libraries is happening on Friday, October 16, 2015 at 6:00 p.m. at the Boulder Public Library. I’ve sponsored ten tickets for local high school students active in the library’s teen programs.

Glowforge has started taking pre-orders with an expected ship date of the pre-orders of before the end of the year. It’s one of the most magical products I’ve ever been involved with. It’s in the “show, don’t tell” category, so spend three minutes of your life and see what you can do with it. For the next 29 days, Glowforge 3D laser printers are available for 50% off the retail price. In addition, if you buy using my referral code, you get another $100 of the price.

Three weeks ago, Mardy Fish wrote an amazing article on The Players’ Tribute site titled The Weight. I stopped halfway through the article and took a deep breath. “This is a story about how a mental health problem took my job away from me. And about how, three years later, I am doing that job again — and doing it well. I am playing in the U.S. Open again. This is a story about how, with the right education, and conversation, and treatment, and mindset, the things that mental illness takes away from us — we can take them back. Tens of millions of Americans every year deal with issues related to mental health. And the journey of dealing with them, and learning to live with them, is a long one. It can be a forever one. Or, worse, it can be a life-threatening one. And I want to help with it.”

Last Tuesday, while I was enjoying a week off the grid, AvidXchange announced they had raised a $225 million financing led by Bain Capital Ventures. I’m psyched to be joining the board of a company co-founded and run by Mike Praeger, a friend of mine for over 20 years. It was big news in Charlotte, North Carolina where AvidXchange announced the groundbreaking on a new headquarters complex in the N.C. Music Factory. And, Matt Harris from Bain Capital Ventures wrote a good thought piece titled Submerging Payments, Part II on why AvidXchange is such a big deal.

Amy and I are back in Boulder after spending a week off the grid in Aspen. We sent my mom a birthday present from the Prada store and she responded with an OMG so I figured it was ok for a 49 year old to use it publicly if his mom used it privately. On our way to Aspen last Friday, I spent most of the time in the car asleep. I could tell I was super grumpy based on the tone of some of my recent blog posts, what was rolling around in my head, and Amy’s mildly concerned questions about how I was doing.