I am completely wiped out. It’s noon on Saturday in Colorado. I just had five days in a row of 18 hour days. I started the week in San Francisco and flew back home on Friday night from New York (with a red eye in between). It was awesome, but exhausting. In addition to all the work, there was plenty of ambient emotion last week including some around mortality (Steve Jobs died and a close friend’s father died). In between everything, I spent a had a lot of meals with people I haven’t seen in a while, or whom I’m really close to. On top of that, there were hundreds of emails a day, plenty of telephone calls, and lots of random stuff to deal with. And plenty of running, coming off a weekend of back to back long runs (14 miles on Saturday, 16 miles on Sunday). And the Imperial March rang on my phone several times a day when Amy called, which always gave me a nice positive emotional charge.

Since last checking in with the SayAhh team, they have spent a few months consumed with building an early version of the product and speaking to potential customers, all the while watching their cash balance steadily diminish. They realize the clock is ticking and have decided that it is time to create a robust set of financial projections in order to provide themselves with a better sense of when they will need to raise more money.

Last night, during dinner with the Return Path board, Fred Wilson interrupted the discussion we were having to tell us that Steve Jobs had just passed away. All of us were stunned silent for a minute as we reflected on the amazing impact that Steve has had on our lives. While I don’t have a personal relationship with Steve, he’s been a hero of mine since I was a teenager when I bought an Apple II computer with 16K of RAM in 1978 with my Bar Mitzvah money. To this day I still remember the sound the disk drive made when I typed PR#6 and how excited I was when I got a Silentype printer.

Today on Brad Feld’s Amazing Deals you can purchase a $250 Ruby course from Udemy for only $49. The course, Learn Ruby Programming (In Ten Easy Steps) contains over 30 video lectures, written course materials, and additional discounts on Ruby literature. With more and more companies making the move to Ruby on Rails, demand for Ruby developers has gone through the roof. If you are interested in giving Ruby a look, this is a great place to start.

I’ve had a string of great board meetings lately. They all had several similar attributes. There were no powerpoint slides: While each company has a substantive monthly reporting package, this was decoupled from the board meeting. I got my taste of financials, metrics, qualitative stuff, and whatever else the CEO wanted me to see on a monthly basis. But I read this independent of the board meeting (which wasn’t on a monthly cadence) and asked questions in reaction to getting the monthly reporting package rather than taking up air time in a board meeting.

As some of you may know, we made a modest investment in Slice of Lime in 2007. This year, Slice of Lime is celebrating 10 years of being in business. This is a huge accomplishment and we couldn’t be more proud of the business Kevin, Jeff, and Daniel have built. Slice of Lime has done web strategy, design, and development work for many of the companies we’ve invested in over the years including BigDoor, BrightLeaf, and Orbotix (new site launching soon) as well as our own Foundry Group website. They’re consistently listed as Top 10 in their industry and one of the fastest growing companies in Boulder County.

I’m in San Francisco right now and then New York later this week. When I look at my schedule, and where I’m hanging out, I realize that even though I’m in two very big cities, I’m going to spending most of my time in a very small area. When asked why Boulder is such a vibrant entrepreneurial community, I talk about a concept I call entrepreneurial density. Boulder is a small town – the city itself is only 100,000 people. Yet the number of entrepreneurs in Boulder is significant. And the number of people working for startups is off the charts. Start with the definition:

A few years ago my running coach – Gary Ditsch of Endurance Base Camp – introduced me to the idea of a “double long run.” In this I do the typical weekend long run on a Saturday and then repeat it on Sunday. At first, I hated these, but they’ve grown on me and are now my favorite run. Today I did a 16 mile run in San Francisco that followed a 14 mile run on Saturday. I did the same run (Market to Embarcadero to the Golden Gate bridge, over, and then back) but added on an extra mile on the bridge today just because I felt like it. I think this is the furthest double long I’ve done (30 miles) – I know I’ve done some in the low to mid 20’s, but I felt like I broke through to a new level today.

I received at least one email a day last week pitching a politics oriented web startup. The emails start off something like this. Over $8 billion dollars will be spent on the upcoming 2012 election. The web and social media are critical tools for any candidate. Every candidate will need our stuff and since over $8 billion dollars will be spent, even if we capture a tiny part of that market, we will create a huge company. Did I say that over $8 billion dollars will be spent? Would you like to hear more about the amazing opportunity we have in front of us?