I’m starting to integrate a bunch of new stuff into the Startup Revolution site now that I’ve finished book #2: Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur. I’m looking for someone with web design chops who has experience with WordPress to work with me on some stuff. I’m using the TechStars HackStar model – I’ll pay a modest amount of money for a full-time or part-time and will plug you in aggressively to the TechStars and Foundry Group portfolio after three months if your work is awesome.

On Friday I spent three hours at Tufts University meeting with Chris Rogers and a few of his colleagues at the Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach. We had an awesome, wide ranging conversation about what they are doing, how the accelerator model could apply, and how education, especially around engineering and computer science needs to radically change, as well as some concrete suggestions about how to change it. I also got a tour of the research lab which had an enormous number of legos everywhere as one of their key sponsors is Lego.

A few weeks ago at Thinc Iowa I noticed the tradition they had of giving a standing ovation to the speaker when the speaker took the stage. I had never seen that before and thought it was awesome. Speakers also got a standing ovation after their talk. As someone who does a lot of public talks, the first sixty seconds of warming up a room are often awkward (even if well executed) and the standing ovation at the beginning eliminated all of this for me.

I got an email today from an exec at a company who I was with at a recent board meeting. I thought it was a powerful summary of part of our discussion, specifically around the sales pipeline for Q4 and overall sales execution. I’ve been in something like 91,293 pipeline reviews in my life and it continues to baffle me that experienced sales execs manage to snow the CEO and the board with “probability weighted sales pipeline.” I hung in there in this case and continued to make my point about playing offense on sales forecasting.

Update: Cards@fullcontact.com is no longer available as FullContact has integrated this into all of their consumer applications. The simplest approach to doing this is now FullContact CardReader. There are some things I wish would just go away forever. Business cards are one of those things. I stopped carrying them several years ago and simply give people my email address (brad@feld.com) as my primary contact data. But at the end of every day I have a handful of cards to deal with. Sometimes it is one or two; often it is a big pile.

Marathon #23 is complete. On Sunday, I finished the Detroit Marathon in 4:41:39. The two smiling faces next to me in the picture are Matt Shobe, who I’ve now done three marathons with, and my running coach Gary Ditsch. They ran with me in Detroit and it was super helpful to have them. The most exciting thing for me about the Detroit Marathon was that my partner Jason Mendelson completed his first marathon! The whole notion of this is pretty awesome as Jason had major hip surgery eighteen months ago. It was brave of him to take on the training for this and powerful that he got it done.

When I wrote Startup Communities, my mission was to provide a framework for building a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem in any city in the world. I am excited to announce that I have partnered with Cojourneo to take this mission to the next level by launching a free online workshop for Startup Communities. By participating in this workshop, you’ll receive exclusive videos I created that expand on the content in the book. You’ll also be able to interact with me directly via “Office Hours” and “Ask the Guide.” Even more importantly, you’ll actually begin the process of building startup communities by connecting and collaborating with fellow entrepreneurs near you and taking steps together towards making this book a reality in your city.

Some time ago a group of entrepreneurs including my partner Seth Levine came together to talk about how to promote entrepreneurship in Colorado and celebrate the fact that entrepreneurship has become a huge part of the Colorado business ecosystem. The result of that discussion was Colorado Entrepreneurial By Nature – a grass roots branding campaign whose goal is to get Colorado entrepreneurs to rally around their shared love of our state and our entrepreneurial culture.

Amy and I shipped the final draft of Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur yesterday. “If you are interested in this book, go pre-order it now on Amazon to help our pre-order numbers”, said Brad the Book Salesman. The backlog of things on my to do list is at an all time high. I’m normally super responsive to everything and have zero backlog. That is not the case right now.