Amy and I just underwrote one-year memberships to the Boulder Chamber of Commerce for 62 Black-owned businesses in Boulder. Last summer, Aaron Clark started putting together a list of Black-owned Businesses in Boulder. The current list is at 62. A few weeks ago, John Tayer at the Boulder Chamber mentioned an initiative he was working on with Aaron to get discounted memberships to all 62 companies. The Boulder Chamber is a long-standing and important part of the Boulder business community, and John has been a great leader for many years.

The only time I go outside right now is to go running. I had an awesome run in the dark at 5:30am today in 10 degrees. There were only two cars that passed me and one person near the end of my run walking his dog. As Amy and I sit in our office in Aspen and grind away, we are blessed with a magical view. A few moments ago, my EA Annie sent me a link to WindowSwap. It’s a treasure. I felt like hanging out in Ukraine for a bit, so off I went.

A few minutes ago, Amy sent me this to ponder as we head into the weekend after an intense week. Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be. – Albert Camus Notebooks, 1951-1959

I haven’t been posting about my reading lately. While I continue to read at my typical pace, I think I was a little tired of writing book reports, but that has passed. Last night I read The 80/80 Marriage: A New Model for a Happier, Stronger Relationship. Kaley and Nate Klemp have written an excellent book that can help any married couple improve their relationship. This is especially true in the time of Covid, given all the additional dynamics about being home together most of the time.

We are running the Venture Deals Online Course from March 7, 2021 – April 30, 2021. We’ve moved the Venture Deals Community from Slack to Mighty Networks where we have much more functionality and flexibility. Once again, we’ll do a weekly AMA with a variety of people participating. For now, registration is open. Please sign up if you want to take the Spring 2021 Venture Deals Online Course.

I used to love the Matrix’s Red Pill / Blue Pill metaphor and still use it occasionally to try to make a point around dealing with reality in an entrepreneurial context. Several years ago, I became deeply bummed out about how this metaphor was being used in politics and gender equity situations. It’s gotten worse since then, and I find many of the cases it is used in and the people who use it reprehensible, so I don’t use it much anymore.

On my run yesterday, I listened to Tim Ferriss interview Naval Ravikant on Happiness, Reducing Anxiety, Crypto Stablecoins, and Crypto Strategy. I know both Tim and Naval. I have a mostly virtual relationship with each of them (I think I’ve been in the same physical space with Tim twice and never with Naval), but they are two people I’ve learned a lot from over the past decade. When I run, I listen to one of four things.

I expect we’ll be exploring, unscrambling, pontificating, and dealing with what is happening with GameStop (GME) for a while. If you are reading this in the future and want some historical context for the rest of this post, this chart from the last 30 days of trading is instructive. At the end of 2020, we start at $20 / share. 30 days later, it’s at $238 / share with a high of $482 / share.

The Covid crisis has generated an extraordinary amount of what I like to call “false reassurance.” Consider how many times you heard something general like the following some time in 2020. Everything is going to be ok. We will get through this pandemic. Things will go back to normal. You’ll look back on this as a unique time in your life. Or, consider all of the messages you heard about the severity of the disease over the past year. Most of the messaging, until recently, was not “79,000 people in the US are going to die of Covid in the first 26 days of 2021.”