The official TechStars Store is up. Shirts, hats, hoodies, and stickers. And of course the books Do More Faster and Venture Deals. What – no sweatbands? Cohen – we need sweatbands. C’mon man. Don’t forget to check out the new TechStars website while you are at it. And apply for one of the upcoming programs, including the brand new TechStars Cloud program

I spent the day in Kansas City yesterday at the Kauffman Foundation for my first Startup Weekend board meeting. I’m very stingy with my non-profit board activity after deciding in 2005 to get off any non-profit board that wasn’t focused on entrepreneurship and until yesterday the only non-profit board I’m on is the National Center for Women & Information Technology. I was at the first Startup Weekend in Boulder in July 2007. It was created by Andrew Hyde (he was the Community Manager for TechStars at the time). While I didn’t stay the entire weekend, my partner Seth Levine and I spent a bunch of time there on Saturday, had a blast, met some new people who became long term friends (my first extended experience with Micah Baldwin where Vosnap was created), and paid for a bunch (all of?) the food, which I recall included a lot of beer, chips, and bagels. In was a completely awesome experience.

I’ve often said that two emotions that are irrelevant for an entrepreneur are fear and anxiety. My favorite quote from Dune is “Fear is the mindkiller” and many people get confused and don’t understand the difference between panic and urgency (where panic is just a more extreme version of anxiety.) Several weeks ago I spent an evening and a day in Colorado Springs. I participated in a number of entrepreneur-related events, but my favorite was a talk that I gave to a freshman class at University of Colorado at Colorado Springs with John Street. John is a long time friend and one of the first entrepreneurs I met when I moved to Boulder (I actually met his wife Mary through YEO’s Birthing of Giants program in 1993 when I was still living in Boston.) In addition to being a good friend, John is a very successful entrepreneur who has had plenty of ups and downs and ups, but has perserved through it all and created several important companies.

StillSecure has been nailing it in the service provider segment with deals with XO, ViaWest, CoreSite, and others recently. StillSecure fundamentally believes that service providers – telcos, datacenter, cloud providers – will be the channel to market for security solutions and I agree. They have built an amazing set of solutions for colocation and dedicated server environments and have solutions that can apply to some higher-end cloud users. Today they are announcing a new host-based firewall management solution in conjunction with SoftLayer – a leader in the cloud market. Aimed at all cloud users, StillSecure’s new solution is the start of a major initiative for the company and is also a new category of solutions.

On Friday, I saw a tweet from Chris Sacca about super pro-rata rights that said “Seeing a lot of VCs cram super-prorata terms into deals. Feels uncool to me. Any good arguments for why it’s helpful to entrepreneurs?” I quickly responded to Chris on Twitter with “@sacca just say no to super prorata” and then opened up a WordPress window and scribbled some thoughts for a draft post on that that I was planning to put up Monday morning (now).

If you follow our investments, you know that one of our core themes is Human Computer Interaction. The premise behind this theme is that the way humans interact with computers 20 years from now will make the way we interact with them today look silly. We’ve made a number of investments in this area with recent ones including Fitbit, Sifteo, Orbotix, Occipital, and MakerBot. Last week Bloomberg did a nice short piece on Sifteo. I’m always intrigued on how mainstream media presents new innovations like Sifteo in a five minute segment. It’s hard to get it right – there’s a mixture of documentary, interview, usage of the product, and explanation of why it matters, all crammed into a few minutes combined with some cuts of the company, founders, and some event (in this case a launch event.)

One of the jokes in my little universe is that “every time I hear the word ‘marketing’ I throw up a little in my mouth.” I’ve been joking about this long enough that it’s become conventional wisdom that I hate marketing. Yet, if you look at many of our successful investments, they are extraordinarily good at marketing and some people suggest we (Foundry Group, me) are also good at marketing.

Today, TechStars announced that they’ve raised $24 million from a broad syndicate of investors to fund an additional $100,000 for every TechStars company going forward. The investors include Foundry Group, IA Ventures, Avalon Ventures, DFJ Mercury, SoftBank Capital, SVB Financial Group, RRE Ventures, Right Side Capital Management and TechStars alumni. There are lots of good articles on the news – two of them are at TechCrunch (Startup Incubator TechStars Raises $24M, Increases Funding For Each Company By $100K) and Launch (TechStars Offering Extra $100K to All Companies with New $24M Fund.)

Recently, several entrepreneurs and investors have asserted to me that they don’t think the terms on a convertible debt deal matter much. I was perplexed by the statement and asked each of them to tell me more. In every case, the person hadn’t really thought through the issues. Rather, they were just spouting what they believed was conventional wisdom about terms for seed deals. In one of the entrepreneur cases, I explained how it was likely that they were going to be on the wrong side of the valuation discussion in the next financing based on one of the terms. In one of the investor cases, I explained the difference between a 2x return and a 15x return – using a real example – based on the way the note was written. And in a third case a separate potential angel investor in the deal brought up a specific term that was important to him that addressed a real concern.