I was going to write a different post this morning, but I came across this post by Matt Haughey titled Ev’s assholishness is greatly exaggerated and, after reading it, sat for a few minutes and thought about it. Go read it now and come back. Welcome back. I’m not an investor in Twitter directly (I am indirectly in a tiny amount through several of the VC funds I’m an investor in) but I’m an enormous Twitter fan and user. I also wasn’t an investor in Odeo so, as the cliche goes, I don’t have a dog in the hunt. But I have a few friends who were so I have second hand knowledge about the dynamics around the Odeo to Twitter evolution.

I gave a talk yesterday to a class of soon-to-graduate MBA students at CU Boulder yesterday. It was their last class in the course that had been filled with a bunch of interesting VC and entrepreneurial guest lecturers. We did Q&A for several hours, covered a lot of ground, and had plenty of fun (or at least I did.) At the end, the professor asked if I had any final words of advice to the room full of MBA’s who were about to graduate. I thought for a moment and then said an abbreviated version of the following.

After my Schoolhouse Rock posting on how a bill becomes a law, several people sent me alternative versions of the video. This one rang true to me. This one – not so much – but it made me laugh out loud. And then there’s this.

I strongly believe that entrepreneurial education and community building is not a zero sum game. So when Jim Franklin, the CEO of SendGrid (one of our portfolio companies and a TechStars Boulder mentor) asked if I would write a post about the Founder Institute program in Boulder, I told him that I’d give him control of my blog to write a guest post on it. I have enormous regard for Jim and Jon Nordmark, his co-host of the Founder Institute Denver program and want to be supportive of anything they are involved in. So – following is Jim’s view on the value of Founder Institute, how it differs from TechStars, and a call to action if you are interested in it.

If you support the Startup Visa and are in the congressional district for Congressman Lamar Smith (TX-21), Darrell Issa (CA-49), or Bob Goodlatte (VA-6) I’d like to talk to you – please drop me an email.

I spent a full day at MIT last month rolling around in a bunch of really cool tech. One of the meetings led to today’s Brad Feld Amazing Deal for OoOTies. I had just sat through three meetings with MIT-related entrepreneurs – two who showed me new human instrumentation products and one who walked me through a new way to develop Android apps. The guy for my next meeting showed up, sat down, and started talking about bow ties. He was an MIT grad student who had become fascinated with bow ties and subsequently created a company called OoOTies along with an iPhone app. We had a fun conversation and then it was time for my next meeting.

Today Seth posted a new blog on the Foundry Group site titled Foundry Group’s AdTech Investing: Adhesive. While we’ve seen a billion AdTech related investments, we’ve only made a few of them over the past three years. We are huge believers in the macro of digital advertising, but we think the morass of much of the online ad world is just that – a morass. So we’ve avoided large swaths of the digital advertising world, instead focusing our energy on the ones that fit in our Glue theme.

I’ve got an entrepreneur focused deal on Brad Feld’s Amazing Deals today. The deal is for Udemy.com, a website that has online courses on a variety of interesting topics. When Udemy came to me, they were interested in offering a deal on one of their $99 courses that was pertinent to startups. After some negotiation, we decided to do an offer where you get their five top startup courses, priced at a total of over $400, for only $59.

I love watching our portfolio companies iterate on their products, especially when they are in the early days. Initial efforts often provide nothing more than learnings, but turning those learnings into an improved product offering is a huge part of what being an early stage company is all about. BigDoor has been going through that iteration process over this past year and this last week they quietly launched a pilot of a new feature called “Quests” on UGO.com and a dozen other sites. BigDoor partnered with the talented folks at SpectrumDNA to bring Quests to life. At first blush Quests may just appear to be the addition of a directed-engagement type game mechanic, but what is going on behind the scenes is really interesting.