The current usage of the word unicorn makes me tired. I could rant about it for a while, but that would make me tired of myself ranting about it. Instead, I’d like to focus on a word that appeared a month ago by Aileen Lee in Welcome To The Unicorn Club, 2015: Learning From Billion-Dollar Companies. That word is unicorpse. From section #6 in Aileen’s post:

Techstars Boulder Demo Day is this week. It always marks the true end of summer for me and it’s a reminder that I stalled out on my Techstars Mentor Manifesto series of blog posts. The last one I wrote was #11: Clearly Commit To Mentor Or Do Not. Either Is Fine. It’s an important life rule – either commit or don’t commit – but choose! Mentor Manifesto #12 is also a good life rule: Know What You Don’t Know. Say I Don’t Know When You Don’t Know.

My idea of a really good afternoon on a three day weekend is to lay on the couch and read a book. Other than a nap in the middle of the experience, that’s what I did today. I read the Supersymmetry by David Walton. It’s the sequel to Superposition, which I read earlier this year. They are both excellent near term sci-fi in the action/adventure save the world while learning physics genre.

One of the most enjoyable things I get to do in my job is to be involved in creating amazingly fun products. If you hang around in our office at Foundry Group you see plenty of Makerbots, Fitbits, an Oblong Mezzanine, an Occipital Structure Sensor, ModRobotics Cubelets, littleBits, 3D Robotics drones, and Spheros. Now we’ve got some BB-8s (from Sphero) in our office. And if you want one, you can buy one right now.

There are two common email conventions in my world that I use many times a day in Gmail. I don’t remember where either of them came from or how much I influenced their use in my little corner of the world, but I see them everywhere now. The first is +Name. When I add someone to an email thread, I start the email with +Name. For example: +Mary Gang – happy to have a meeting. Mary will take care of scheduling it.

Lucy Sanders (NCWIT CEO), Sarah Bird (Moz CEO), and I are all participants in the Pioneers in Skirts documentary that is currently fundraising on Kickstarter. Please help us make our $50,000 goal.

I like Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend a lot. They are my bookends for summer and kick off the official “back to school” fall cycle. I realize that kids are back at school already, but even when I was in school I viewed Labor Day weekend as the official market. I’m noticing an enormous amount of anxiety in the air. When I reflect on what’s causing it, I suspect some of it is the public market gyrations along with the endless discussion around it. Some of it is the Republican Primary circus and the crazy and apparently unwanted popularity (at least by the Republican establishment) of Donald Trump. Some of it might be that it’s just been really hot outside for a while and it’s time for the cooler, softer tones of fall. And some of it might be all of the construction everywhere, which is at a fevered pitch right now.

I don’t listen to that many podcasts, but I like ones that are a short (< 45 minute) interview format. I can listen to one of these on a run or a drive to/from my office. Until recently, the only one I was listening to regularly was the Reboot.io podcast. Jerry Colonna, the co-founder of Reboot.io is a dear friend and his interviews are often magical. A few months ago I noticed The Twenty Minute VC by Harry Stebbings. I can’t remember which one was the first one I listened to, but I thought his style and interview approach was great. It was fast, started with an origin story, but quickly moved on to the present and then ended with a set of short questions.

Six weeks ago I wrote a post titled The Silliness Of Recapping Seed Rounds. I described a situation that occurred in one of our FG Angels investments that I thought was short sighted on the part of the VC involved and the CEO of the company. I characterized the situation as “silly” and specifically didn’t call out the people as my goal was to be instructive around the startup landscape, not to complain (we are big boys and will deal with whatever) or to try to generate a different outcome. I accepted what happened, wrote my post, and moved on.