Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book The Thank You Economy came out today. Gary sent me an uncorrected manuscript a few weeks ago and I read it the night I got it. It’s dynamite and I highly recommend it for anyone who is doing anything in business today. I’m a huge Gary V fan. I can’t remember where I met him, but it was at a small dinner about five years ago at some event where I also met Tim Ferris for the first time. When I look back on the evolution of the gang in the room (I think Sacca was there and I’m now digging for some of the other attendees, but Gary fed me so much wine that my memory is now hazy) it’s pretty cool to see what everyone has accomplished.

A post in the New York Times this morning asserted that Software Progress Beats Moore’s Law. It’s a short post, but the money quote is from Ed Lazowska at the University of Washington: “The rate of change in hardware captured by Moore’s Law, experts agree, is an extraordinary achievement. “But the ingenuity that computer scientists have put into algorithms have yielded performance improvements that make even the exponential gains of Moore’s Law look trivial,” said Edward Lazowska, a professor at the University of Washington. The rapid pace of software progress, Mr. Lazowska added, is harder to measure in algorithms performing nonnumerical tasks. But he points to the progress of recent years in artificial intelligence fields like language understanding, speech recognition and computer vision as evidence that the story of the algorithm’s ascent holds true well beyond more easily quantified benchmark tests.”

Wow – that was cool. Thanks for the help with the experiment in the post How To Score 30 Minutes With Me. Tons of great feedback – both in the comments, by tweets, and by email. In case you missed the post, I decided to offer one 30 minute session with me per week for the next four weeks in exchange for 10,000 Feld Gelt. At least one person found the “Purchase Feld Gelt” option (which I’ve since disabled, at least for now) and bought 9,995 Feld Gelt’s for $10 valuing my time at around $20.01 / hour! Oops.

Who said March Madness was only for college basketball fans? I’m a proud nerd, am pretty good at basketball, but my college team (MIT) never ahem did much in March so I missed out on the whole March Madness thing in college. So, I’m psyched that I get to play TechStars 2011 Startup Madness this march. We are picking 64 companies to participate. To qualify, you must enter by March 9th and meet the following requirements.

Long ago I concluded that life is just a video game. We fly on airplanes to get mileage points so we can get free stuff and or level up to get more priority. We used to get green stamps (when I was a kid) whenever we bought stuff so we could get free stuff (most of it shitty, but free). Our credit cards have points programs (and lots of free miles), we get credit (implicit and explicit) eating at the same restaurants over and over ago, and when you buy a dozen cups of coffee at the coffee shop down the street from my (they still keep track of it with note cards and one of those funny metal punch things) you get the next one free.

My latest foray into the Daily Deal universe is up – and it’s a 50% offer on Manpacks. If you are a guy and aren’t familiar with Manpacks, it’s an easy way to get essentials (undies, socks, razors) mailed to you every few months. Why spend time shopping for undies and socks when you can climb mountains, slay dragons, and conquer the world? If you area a girl and are tired of your guy wearing tired, worn out undies, a Manpack makes a perfect gift.

My partners at Foundry Group and I decided not to do something after a month of thoughtful deliberation. The decision is fresh so I’m not going to talk about the specifics, but our conclusion was that while it would be relatively easy to do and potential financially lucrative, it wasn’t consistent with our strategy. I used it as an example this morning during my run with @reecepacheco about fully engaging with your mentors. While we could have made this decision on our own, we talked to a number of people who we consider our mentors (including several peers, investors of ours, and folks that have been doing what we’ve been doing a lot longer than we have), got their direct feedback, synthesized it, and made a decision. Of course, we had plenty of conflicting data, but it was all additive to our decision. And it was ultimately our responsibility to make the call on what we wanted to do.

If you’ve been following the Startup Visa, you may know that the bills that were submitted in both the House and the Senate expired at the end of the 2010 Congress. I’ve been on a number of calls lately discussing re-introducing these bills with updates to reflect the renewed understanding of the impact on high growth entrepreneurship on jobs in our country. A few months ago several entrepreneurs took it upon themselves to create a great short (25 minute) documentary called Starting-Up In America. It is a set of interviews with foreign entrepreneurs in the US talking about why they chose to start their company here, the struggles they’ve had getting appropriate visas, and – in several cases – the severe limitations their visa status has placed on their businesses.

My partner Jason Mendelson and I are in the final stretch of writing a new book. The project started as an extension of our Term Sheet series and Letter of Intent series that we wrote on this blog in 2005 and 2006. It’s evolved into a much broader book covering financings, acquisitions, how VC firms work, and a bunch of other random things we think are important to entrepreneurs. We’re working on finalizing the title. If you have 30 seconds, can you choose which of the following three titles is your favorite and leave the answer in the comments? If you have other suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments as well.