I’m crazy proud of my partners Jason Mendelson and Ryan McIntyre for their band Legitimate Front. In addition to being VCs, we each have a creative outlet that is super important to us. Mine is writing books; their’s is creating awesome music. In August, their released the first album from their new band Legitimate Front. The idea of staying up until midnight on a Saturday night at The Fox Theater in Boulder is an odd thing for me, but I showed up and rocked out with them. And was totally, and completely, blown away.

I love Scott Kveton, the CEO of Urban Airship. He and his team are building an amazing company in Portland. If you do anything mobile-related and use push notifications of any sort, or real-time location targeting, you need to be talking to them. But even more impressive is how Scott leads his company. The other day, I got an email from my partner Jason with a photo of the Urban Airship Meeting Rules posted on the wall. They are so logical as to be rules that should apply to every meeting at every startup from now until forever.

Following is a guest post from Lura Vernon, President of the Monarch High School PTSO. Lura is also a good friend, contributor to Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur, mother of two awesome young women, and wife of Todd Vernon, CEO of VictorOps. Lura’s request is for laptops for Monarch High School Students. Any amount will do – 1, 2, 5, 10, 25, 50, or even 100. If you have any extra, please email me and I’ll get you connected. Foundry Group is contributing a MacBook Air this week.

I recently decided to back three graduates on Upstart. In this new model of crowd-funding, accredited investors back entrepreneurs and have the option of signing on as mentors. In exchange, the “upstart” gives up a percentage of their future income over the next 10 years. FYI – I’m not an investor in Upstart, but I am a big fan. The common thread with the upstarts I’ve backed is their passion to cross art with technology. Chris Mathews, Bennett Lin and Shefali Kumar Friesen are all highly-focused on their interdisciplinary efforts, applying art and music to technology to solve today’s problems.

An email was forwarded to me this morning that had the following text in it (I’ve anonymized “The College” but it’s a large, well-regarded four year university.) The College is Going Google! What does this mean? How will it impact teaching and learning at The College? Many K-12 school districts are using Google Apps for Education, providing their students with access to Google productivity tools as early as primary school. Students coming to The College in the next five years may never have opened Microsoft Word, but will be familiar with sharing, collaborating, and publishing with Google tools. Are you ready?

If you are reading this on Friday, 1/18/13 I’m probably doing one of a couple of things right now. The three most likely are sleeping, laying on my couch reading next to Amy, or just hanging out with her. There’s a chance I’m on a run or having some adult entertainment with Amy (different than hanging out). Or drinking something from my Vitamix monster smoothie maker. And – if it’s in the evening, I’m probably watching a movie with Amy.

Every year in December and January I go through the same cycle for all the boards I’m on. It’s the annual bonus, next year bonus plan, option grant refresh cycle. For many management teams, especially in rapidly growing, or mature companies, it’s an important part of their existence as culturally we’ve oriented compensation, bonuses, and future compensation around an annual cycle. I embrace this – my goal is to help these entrepreneurs and management teams win. I know compensation is an important part of the feedback / reward loop. While I’ve occasionally had conflict over compensation, and I’ve had a few CEOs I work with tell me they feel like it’s an uncomfortable discussion, my own perception of my behavior is that I’m a softy. If things are going well, I am supportive of anything that’s reasonable. And, having thousands of data points over the past 17 years, I’ve got a good calibration on reasonable.

I joined my first board of a company other than mine in 1994 (NetGenesis). Since then, I’ve sat on hundreds of boards and been to a zillion board meetings. It crushes my soul a little to think of the number of board meetings I have sat through that were ineffective, poorly run, or just plain boring. I guess that’s part of the motivation I have in writing Startup Boards: Reinventing the Board of Directors to Be Useful to the Entrepreneur (the next book in the Startup Revolution series which should be out sometime this summer.)

A bunch of the companies we’ve invested in were at CES 2013. Modular Robotics, the makers of Cubelets, were at the Eureka Village (where Startup America was). The first thing I had to do when I got to CES was a panel for Startup America so the Modular Robotics booth was literally one of the first places I stopped after getting to Las Vegas. It was mobbed. I came back around a few other times and it continued to be mobbed. They were showing Cubelets (which are for sale now) as well as a few new spicy connector things that they are about to release that let you connect Cubelets up to anything you can build with Legos.