I was sitting at a Return Path board dinner around a year ago. We were at Frasca having a wonderful dinner when the discussion turned to American history. I sat and mostly listened as Matt Blumberg, Jeff Epstein, and Greg Sands had a vigorous discussion about several US presidents. Within about fifteen minutes, I realized that I knew almost nothing about American history. Sure, I took a class in junior high school (in Texas public schools, you do Texas history in 7th grade, American history in 8th grade, and World History in 9th grade), but I really didn’t remember much.

I hate doing “reflections on the last year” type of stuff so I was delighted to read Fred Wilson’s post this morning titled What Just Happened? It’s his reflection on what happened in our tech world in 2014 and it’s a great summary. Go read it – this post will still be here when you return. Since I don’t really celebrate Christmas, I end up playing around with software a lot over the holidays. This year my friends at FullContact and Mattermark got the brunt of me using their software, finding bugs, making suggestions, and playing around with competitive stuff. I hope they know that I wasn’t trying to ruin their holidays – I just couldn’t help myself.

Foundry Group has now been around for over seven years and I’ve been working with my partners for 14 years. We’ve started to develop some traditions. One of my favorites is exit gifts. When a company has an exit that generates a return for us, we give a gift to the partner who served on the board. These gifts are generally tuned to what the partner loves such as musical stuff for Ryan and Jason, bike stuff for Seth, and art for me. They are modest, but very thoughtful and something the partner wouldn’t have just gone out and done for himself. They are often self referential, such as the Makerbot sculpture of me created by an artist and printed on a Makerbot after Stratasys acquired MakerBot.

As the Boulder Startup Community evolved, I started to become inundated with people who wanted to get involved. Some of these were locals while others where people looking to move to Boulder, or who had recently moved here. Some where people known to me while others were new relationships. As the momentum, size, impact, and reach of the Boulder Startup Community grew, I found myself overwhelmed by the amount of requests I was getting to get together, meet, explore ways to work together, and just generally share food and drink in the quest for figuring out ways to work together.

I’ve now lived in Boulder for 19 years. It was an amazing place when I moved here and has evolved into an even more stupendous place over the past 19 years, notwithstanding the irrational and self-limiting struggle that the Boulder City Council seems to have with change. Over the past decade, the Boulder Startup Community has had significant success and impact on the culture and dynamics of the city. I wrote about some of the history and impact in my book Startup Communities and the Boulder Thesis that I came up with has now been used as a template for creating startup communities all over the world.

William Hertling is one of my top five favorite contemporary sci-fi writers. Last night, I finished the beta (pre-copyedited) version of his newest book, The Turing Exception. It’s not out yet, so you can bide you time by reading his three previous books, which will be a quadrilogy when The Turing Exception ships. The books are: Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears A.I. Apocalypse The Last Firewall William has fun naming his characters – I appear as a minor character early in The Last Firewall – and he doesn’t disappoint with clever easter eggs throughout The Turing Exception, which takes place in the mid-2040s.

I just spent around an hour shrinking my Facebook friends list from 1,500+ to 535. I ignored another 2,000 friend requests. I made my entire Facebook feed from the beginning of time private, which eliminated 33,000+ followers (dear Facebook followers – you really meant to follow me on Twitter, that’s where all the public fun is.) I turned off all my email notifications. Hint – if you want to do stuff like this, use the iOS app instead of the web app – it’s so, so, so much faster. Last night I tried to do this on the Facebook web app in front of the TV. It was a total fail – every few unfriends caused the page to refresh and I had to start scrolling all over again. This morning I was pleasantly surprised with how much better / cleaner / faster it was with the iOS app.

I’m in the home stretch of my next book co-authored with Sean Wise, titled Startup Opportunities: Know When To Quit Your Day Job, so I thought I’d procrastinate a little this morning and write another Techstars Mentor Manifesto blog post. This one is about the ninth element, Clearly Separate Opinion From Fact. We live in a world of assertions. Many of us, including me, often have a fuzzy line between opinions and facts. We interpret facts to fit our opinions, but then make our opinions broader than the underlying data. Opinions are formed from a single fact, rather than a set of several, or a lot of facts, to form a clearly substantiated opinion.

I read over 40 books in my month off the grid in Bora Bora recently. I’ve had many requests to blog about my reading list but rather than do one big long post I thought I’d break it up into several “longish” different posts over time. If all you are interested in is my reading list, my Goodreads Brad Feld account has everything I’ve read in reverse chronological order. This post is about biographies. I’ve always loved to read biography and expect that my 2015 reading diet will include a lot more biography and history than normal as it has caught my interest lately. I’m including company biographies in this post. I didn’t read many, but had a little Google obsession on this trip which you’ll see in a moment.