As Amy and I sit in the sun at South Beach eating frozen grapes and waiting for the snowpocalypse to hit the east coast, we decided to pick the Startup Life Win a Dinner winners. There are two – one of Amazon orders and one for Barnes & Noble orders. Five times as many people entered on Amazon, so the odds were better for the B&N folks. Except, one B&N person entered 10 times (by buying 10 books). The way we chose the winner was to count up entries, use Randomnumbergenerator to pick a random number between 1 and the number of entries, and then go to that entry in Gmail in the specific label we had tagged everything with.

In general, I love Gmail. While Amy likes to complain to me about how ugly it is, I don’t even see the UI anymore as I just grind through the endless stream of email that I get each day. My biggest struggle is figuring out how to keep up, without the email ending up dominating everything I do. In the past year, this has gotten a lot harder, but I continue to try new things.

I asked Amy to send me a picture of my inner animal spirit. She won’t let me share hers, but that’s me on the left. I’ve always felt like a bear. A big, cuddly, nice, soft bear. Mellow. I like to sleep. I like to eat. I wander around, a little curiously larger than comfortable in my slightly oversized body. I’m really fucking ferocious when I’m mad. Which doesn’t happen very often (maybe once a year). Don’t poke the bear.

Woof! We just announced Foundry Group’s investment in Rover.com this morning. We led a $7m financing in the leader in digital dog boarding that connects dog owners with approved, reviewed, and insured sitters. Rover.com is part of our marketplace theme, which now includes investments in SideTour and PivotDesk. I’m psyched to be joining the board, working with my good friend Greg Gottesman at Madrona on another Seattle-based company.

Simplifilm created a one minute book trailer for Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur. Based on feedback from the last trailer for Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City, I did the voice over this time. Take a look and tell me what you think. And, don’t forget to enter the Startup Life – Operation Win A Dinner With Us – it’s still going on until Saturday 2/2/13 @ 11:59pm EDT.

TechStars Chicago applications are now open. Apply now. Huh? What? You didn’t know there was a TechStars Chicago? There is now. Last night I was in Chicago at 1871, the amazing 50,000 square foot co-working space in the Chicago Merchandise Mart that has become the convening spot for the digital economy in Chicago and the home of Excelerate Labs. It was the mentor kickoff night for the fourth year of Excelerate Labs and I was delighted to be able to announce that Excelerate Labs and TechStars are joining forces to create and run TechStars Chicago.

I received a bunch of great comments and responses to my post Be Vulnerable. Several people asked if I was inspired by Brené Brown’s TEDxHouston talk in 2010. I hadn’t ever seen it so I watched it last night. After 20 minutes, it’s easy to see how it could have inspired my post – it’s absolutely wonderful. As a bonus, it’s an example of an excellent 20 minute presentation – Brené shows us how a 20 minute high concept talk is done.

Over at the TechStars blog today, David Cohen introduced the new Managing Director for TechStars in New York, Eugene Chung. Thirty-five great candidates were interviewed for this position; the only offer we extended was to Eugene. His background includes NY-area investments BuzzFeed and Bedrocket while he was at New Enterprise Associates. Prior to that, he worked at Warbug Pincus and Morgan Stanley. We were looking for deep competence and culture fit with TechStars and we found it with Eugene.

Today appears to be government day on Feld Thoughts. This morning I wrote about the Colorado PUC trying to shut down Uber in Colorado (bad). Now I get to write about Senators Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) re-introducing the Startup Visa Act of 2013 (good). Mark – thank you – you’ve been an awesome supporter of this and leader of the effort since the first day we discussed it in 2009. Senator Flake – thank you for showing leadership on this issue.