On my run this morning (yay – I’m running again) I listened to a wonderful podcast between Jerry Colonna and Bijan Sabet called Investors are Human Too – with Bijan Sabet. If you follow me, you know that I’m incredibly close friends with Jerry (he’s one of the people on this planet that I comfortably say that I love). I’m also a huge fan of his company Reboot.io. If you want a taste of what they do, listen to a bunch of the Reboot podcasts (I’ve listened to them all and the least interesting one is still excellent.)

Yesterday we closed our fifth fund, Foundry Venture Capital 2016, L.P. As with all four of our other funds, it’s a $225 million fund. In 2007 we raised our first fund – Foundry Venture Capital 2007. We subsequently raised a $225 million fund in 2010, another one in 2013, and a late stage fund in 2013. Our 2013 fund was originally raised in 2012, but we didn’t start investing it until 2013 so we renamed it 2013.

I got the following email recently, titled “Unicorns Without The Magic.” “With the rise in venture capitalism it’s hard to say the word “start up” and not be offered an abundance of accelerator programmes, free office space, free apartments & a free bible of connections. I myself have felt the pressures of the world of start up wonders & the prospects of investment. Whilst finishing my finals at university, I created my own algorithm for a business model to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage in a digital space. Through this I’m now building my first digital ecosystem, but along with it I’ve been offered numerous places in accelerator programmes, numerous loans and a wave of unicorn magic dust that seems to be collecting in my inbox. I’m not complaining, but what happens if the purpose of a business is greater than ones own self interest and certainly greater than a VCs interest? Our purpose is to give other people the tools to create their own opportunities, which is not necessarily in line with most VCs sentiments. I know in the next five years my company will make a lot of money, but what I don’t know is how as a 23 year old entrepreneur to says yes to the right VC and no to all the magic dust.”

Ernest Cline’s second book, Armada, is almost as wonderful as his first book, Ready Player One. While plenty of folks on Amazon are giving it mediocre ratings, I think it’s because they don’t understand what Cline really did here. Both books are scifi. Both books are heavily gamer influenced. Each moves fast. However RPO is complicated while Armada is straightforward. And that’s important, since RPO is missing the majority of self-referential human subtext – ala Lost – that Armada is filled with. The DHARMA Initiative has nothing on the Earth Defense Alliance. I mean, c’mon, even the EDA logo kicks DHARMA’s logo lameness.

I’m ending a full day in Denver with a talk about the potential invasion by the Europans at Startup Grind from 6pm – 9pm on 7/30 at Galvanize.

This is not a post about a bubble, real or imagined. It’s a lesson from when I was 20 years old. I showed up at MIT as an eager freshman. I was 17, from Dallas, with a nice pair of cowboy boots and long hair. On my first day, at the freshman picnic, I heard that 50% of us would end up in the bottom half of our class. Fifteen minutes later I was whisked away in a white van to ADP, the fraternity I ended up pledging and living in for four years, next to WILG and across the street from The Mandarin (no longer there), Mary Chung (still there and still awesome), and Toscanini’s (still there and even more awesome.) That night I met Dave Jilk, my first business partner and one of my best friends.

I’ll be doing an AMA on Product Hunt’s new Book Channel on Friday 7/24 at 1130 AM PST.

The language of startups has become pervasive. It feels like it started with Eric Ries’ great book The Lean Startup when words like MVP and pivot started showing up in all conversations. Back then it was new, fresh, and focusing. Today, there are hundreds of words that people throw around in the context of their startups. Many, like traction, are completely meaningless. If you need a dose of some of the language, just watch a few episodes of Silicon Valley.

One of my all time favorite blog posts is Ben Horowitz’s The Struggle. If you are a founder and you haven’t read it, open it up in another tab for after your finish this post. On Friday, a CEO I know sent me the following message. “Brad – I crafted the entry pasted below this morning for my eyes only (and for my own therapeutic purposes), but in thinking about it today, I realized that you’re probably one of the only people I know who might be able to relate or who has interacted with others with similar sentiments. I’m in a good place mentally and it simply feels good to share this with someone else.”