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.

Let’s start with a brief history of my investment-led fight against the perils of spam and my never-ending love of SMTP. We were investors in Postini and my partner Ryan sat on the board. It transformed my life – with one minor change of an MX record some time in 2002 all the spam in my inbox disappeared. Well – it disappeared before it got to my inbox. Or even my server. The awesomeness of Postini was that it was the first cloud-based email anti-spam solution. And it was a beautiful thing that Google acquired in 2007 for $625m.

There is a moment during the exploration of a new relationship where a switch flips and the answer is “I want to do this.” With Mattermark, I remember the moment clearly – I was at The Kitchen in Boulder with the founders (Danielle Morrill, Kevin Morrill, and Andy Sparks) and my partner Seth. I had just put a garlic french fry in my mouth (if you’ve never had them at The Kitchen, they are epic) and looked over at Seth. He looked at me and gave me that “yeah – we should do this” look. And that was it.

I rarely read physical magazines anymore. I only read in the bathroom and most are things I forget to unsubscribe to or that Amy gives me. Today, I finished the most recent MIT Technology Review where I was reminded about the amazing MIT Science Fiction Society. As a sci-fi nut, I realized I’d screwed up by not having a lifetime membership. So, I’m now trying to figure out where to send my $260 to be a lifer.

I’m gearing up for a long series of posts about the various books I read on my month off on Bora Bora. In the mean time, I read a bunch of stuff online this morning (from Friday through today) and thought I’d give you a taste of some of it in case you feel like digging in. I started with How Reading Transforms Us. It’s a good frame setting piece about some new research on the impact of reading – both fiction and non-fiction – on humans. There is a pleasant surprise in there about how non-fiction influences us.

I always look forward to the annual Techstars video. I enjoy seeing it, and usually enjoy being part of it. This year I’m one of your favorite Sesame Street characters. Hang in there for New Years Resolution #9. Cookie cookie cookie. Give me cookie.

I live in Gmail. Gmail Contacts has been lame for a long time. Within an email, it’s even lamer on the right side bar, especially since it could be so amazingly useful. FullContact has just released their FullContact for Gmail product. It’s a free download in the Chrome Store. I’ve been using it for about six months since and it’s just awesome. I’ve been obsessed about the contact management problem for many years. In 2012 when we invested in FullContact, I wrote a post titled One Address Book To Rule Them All. FullContact has made great progress in the past two years on this problem while building a substantial enterprise API business. At the same time, we’ve been working extremely hard on a wide range of consumer products which are all just now rolling out into production (many have been in beta for the past year.)

I’m fascinated with Detroit. When I was there in October 2012 with my partners Ryan and Jason to run the Detroit Marathon we talked about the idea of getting more involved there in some way. Jason grew up in Detroit and has lots of stories there. He goes back regularly to visit his parents and Ann Arbor where he went to school. Since we were there, I’ve read a few books on Detroit and many articles that popped up about it’s downfall along with some of the entrepreneurial activities trying to revive the city. My partners and I believe that Detroit hit rock bottom around 2012 and in a decade has the potential to be an amazing city once again.