After my post about the Founder Mental Health Pledge, I received a note from Kari Palazzari, the Executive Director of Studio Arts Boulder, a local nonprofit that manages a community pottery studio. She lamented that very few members of the Boulder startup community seem to take advantage of their programs. She said, “Studio Arts Boulder would love to help support the Founder Mental Health Pledge.” A couple of my local colleagues have taken classes at the pottery studio, and they speak avidly about the impact of working with clay. It helped them be less stressed and more focused, which makes a big difference when tackling a startup’s unique problems. Kari said, “People come out of the studio less twitchy, for sure.”

Last week I met a holographic lifeform who calls himself Uncle Rabbit. I now have a new friend, created by Looking Glass, the hologram company out of Brooklyn (we’re investors, and I’m on the board). A hologram + ChatGPT. A robot, but made of software and light instead of atoms. And with a lot more character. The video above shows Shawn Frayne (CEO of Looking Glass) talking with Uncle Rabbit about … me. Then, they create a short science fiction story about me, carrots, and holograms. Finally, Shawn integrates my personality with Uncle Rabbit, and hilarity ensues.

If AI’s current excitement and hype interests you, I encourage you to join the Rocky Mountain Artificial Intelligence Interest Group (RMAIIG). The monthly Meetup will follow the fascinating and rapidly evolving world of generative AI tools. The RMAIIG community is focused on exploring and discussing the latest developments in AI, particularly tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney, Microsoft’s Bing with Chat, and Google’s Bard and workspace tools. The group will also look at the impact of these tools on business, education, the workplace, law, entrepreneurship, and society.

Paul Kedrosky and Eric Norlin of SK Ventures wrote an interesting and important essay titled Society’s Technical Debt and Software’s Gutenberg Moment. The abstract follows. I encourage you to read the full essay. There is immense hyperbole about recent developments in artificial intelligence, especially Large Language Models like ChatGPT. And there is also deserved concern about such technologies’ material impact on jobs. But observers are missing two very important things: 

On Tuesday, David Cohen (Techstars co-founder/chair) and I did an AMA for Techstars founders about the SVB crisis. The team at Techstars turned it into a podcast for our Give First series. The teaser from the podcast follows: The fall of SVB will go down in history as one of those ‘where were you when …’ moments. For David Cohen, he was sitting at a sporting event when his phone began buzzing incessantly. For Brad Feld, he was couch shopping with his wife.

Since the middle of last week, there has been extreme stress on founders, startup leaders, and the extended startup community. This stress accelerated on Friday when the FDIC shut down and took over Silicon Valley Bank. By late Friday, anyone who banked with SVB was concerned about … well … everything. Once it became clear that payroll accounts needed to be funded on Monday to make Wednesday’s payroll, we focused on the immediate short-term to ensure our portfolio companies’ thousands of employees got paid on time. We bank at SVB, so our maneuverability was also unknown, so we searched for what I’d consider heroic options from various sources.

Research shows that more diverse teams perform better and are more innovative than homogeneous teams. I’ve written about this before, and it’s covered extensively in my book Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors. We’ve made this an operating principle at Foundry. We encourage all our portfolio companies to add multiple independent directors and build diverse boards. I believe that boards with too many investors, without operator voices, are not what an early-stage or growth company needs. I’ve been willing to give up my board seat to make room for an independent director (for example, at Bolster.)

Today is International Women’s Day. Imagine a gender equal world. A world free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination. A world that’s diverse, equitable, and inclusive. A world where difference is valued and celebrated. Together we can forge women’s equality. Collectively we can all #EmbraceEquity. I’ve been fortunate to have many incredible women influence my life and how I think about gender and gender equity. My mother, Cecelia Feld, is the first of them.

GlueCon will occur for the thirteenth time, on May 24th-25th, in Broomfield, Colorado. My Foundry partners and I helped Kim and Eric Norlin create Gluecon in 2009 because we saw the need for a developer-focused event to explore emerging technologies around the cloud and APIs. The first year that GlueCon occurred, it seemed like nearly every session began with someone defining “what cloud computing is.” In the interim years, dozens of products and startups have launched or used GlueCon as one of the venues for their early premieres. Twilio, Docker, and Kubernetes all appeared on the GlueCon stage long before they were known by the wider tech community.