I’ve had some really crummy experiences with business and corporate development people in the past year. There’s been a strange change in ethos, where suddenly people have forgotten that when they do deals, they are doing deals with other people, not with a company. I learned this in 1993 when my first company was acquired by Len Fassler and Jerry Poch, two of the absolute master deal makers I’ve ever worked with. The each taught me so much about this, by first being people, then dealmakers.

As Amy and I get ready to return to Boulder today and physically re-enter the human race, I woke up this morning thinking about how I’m feeling emotionally. We’ve had an excellent three weeks up at our house in Homer, Alaska, far away from the people we know. Our only friends up here are our neighbors (whom we adore) so other than one visitor (Matt Shobe – who we also adore) it’s been a very solitary and physically introverted time.

I love origin stories. The moment of the beginning of something new, or a key point in the founding of something, is always powerful to me. On the 238th birthday of the United States of America, I think it’s useful to reflect on America’s origin story. So, after seeing an email by Bart Lorang at FullContact where he said that he read the Declaration of Independence to his new son, Laser Lorang, I decide to go read it again.

Getting into an accelerator is increasingly difficult. While there has been a proliferation accelerators around the world, there has simultaneously been a dramatically increasing number of companies applying to accelerators. In my world, supply and demand never balances out, so if you are on the application side of this equation, it’s important to do everything you can to improve your chances. UP Global, an organization that I’m on the board of which is the umbrella organization for Startup Weekend, Startup Education, Startup Digest, and Startup Week, has just rolled out a new program called Startup Next. I participated in an early version of it and am psyched to see it ready for prime time.

I woke up to a bunch of VC related things in my twitter stream this morning. I had a nice digital sabbath yesterday so I was a little surprised by how much there was. I tried cranking out a #tweetstorm of them using Little Pork Chop but I found the tweetstream experience to be very unsatisfying and very inauthentic feeling. The links are good, so here they are if you want to get in the headspace for what I really want to talk about.

As many of you know, I have a keen interest in the future of digital publishing. One of the reasons we started FG Press was to give control and transparency back to the authors. Specifically, at FG Press the author gets 50% royalty on all books sold (up from the traditional 15%) and we employ the latest technologies, promotions, and marketing efforts to help the author build a personal audience who they have a direct relationship with. Ultimately, we want to create the foundation for how future long-form content (e.g. books) will be created and consumed as well as how the connections between reader and author will be established and managed.

Every single day I have multiple conversations and emails from CEOs and people at companies I work with about how to work with Big Tech Companies. You know – Google, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, SAP, LinkedIn, Cisco, Yahoo, HP, AT&T, Verizon, Icouldkeepgoingforalongtime. But this conversation is not limited to just the gigantic tech companies. They include all the up and comers andtheabunchmoreyouprobablydontthinkarethatbigbutare, including a long list of newly public companies or still private but mega-funded companies.

Jane Miller‘s first book Sleep Your Way to the TOP is out and available in digital and print. This is Jane’s first book and FG Press’s second one. Around the Foundry Group Offices we’ve been referring to Jane as “Sheryl Sandberg meets Chelsea Handler.” If you happened to catch my interview with Jane during Boulder Startup Week, you know exactly how smart, funny, and authentic Jane is. She’s a great CEO (who just sold Rudi’s Organic Bakery) with an incredible amount of experience on the front lines building and guiding businesses. Her writing style is funny while packing a serious punch.

I just read an amazing post from Nikki Durkin, the founder and CEO of 99dresses. It’s titled My startup failed, and this is what it feels like and it is one of the best posts I’ve ever read about startup failure. I almost titled this post “What Failure Tastes and Smells Like” because Nikki does such an awesome job of describing not just what happened, but what she felt throughout the process. The post is long and goes through multiple ups and downs, just like a startup. It covers four years, several near death experiences, recoveries, and then final failure.