My mom (Cecelia Feld) has had a huge positive impact on my life in many ways. I like to think that I’ve also had a huge positive impact on her life, although I’m sure there have been times that she wanted to hide in a closet from me and scream at the top of her lungs. Cecelia is an amazing artist who has worked at her craft her entire adult life. As kids, my brother Daniel and I understood that between 9am and 5pm “mom was working in her studio” and was not to be bothered. Among other things, I learned the notion of focused, passionate discipline from her, but I also figured out how to keep myself entertained until she was done working for the day.

My friends at Orbotix, a TechStars Boulder 2010 company that Foundry Group invested in recently, are having their second hackathon on 11/13 – 11/14 at their office in Boulder. Orbotix is the gang that is “reinventing the ball” while also creating smartphone apps that control robots. The November Hackathon is all about hacking Android apps and there will be a contest that I’ll be judging on Sunday afternoon along with Paul Berberian (Orbotix’s CEO) and Julian Farrior from Backflip Studios.

If you are in Boulder, come to my community hours today between 1 and 5 at the Boulder Bookstore on Pearl Street. David Cohen (TechStars CEO and co-author of Do More Faster) and I will be hanging out all afternoon, talking to whoever shows up about anything that is on your mind, and signing copies of Do More Faster until the Boulder Bookstore runs out of them. As readers of this blog likely know, I do monthly community hours (also known as random days) where I’ll meet with anyone for 15 minutes about anything they want to discuss. Usually they are scheduled – today’s is an open free-for-all.

The Defrag Conference is happening in Boulder on Wednesday November 17th and Thursday November 18th and is looking like it will be the best one yet. If you haven’t yet registered, use the code “foundry2” to take 15% off of your registration. The confirmed Keynote Speakers include: Alex Wright addressing the “deep history” of Oral Culture and Social Networks Stowe Boyd speaking about “social cognition” Esther Dyson on Exploration and innovation Dion Hinchcliffe on the future of social analytics Jeff Ma on Business Lessons from the Blackjack Table David Weinberger on the Philosophy of Knowing Paul Kedrosky talking about Monkeys, Typewriters and Data Jeff Jonas on Organizations Getting Dumber, and IT’s to Blame JP Rangaswami on Information as seen through the eyes of a Foodie And that’s just some of the keynotes. Toss in a bunch of networking, lots of stimulating discussion, and breakouts that cover everything from APIs to shifting to the Cloud to Social Media Analytics to the Social Customer and it’s shaping up to be dynamite.

Terry Kawaja of Luma Partners created today’s hilarious XtraNormal to help us understand what is going on at ad:tech.

We got tired of Google having all the fun so we put up a new drawing of us on the Foundry Group home page. Google also did a nice job with the Mystery Machine in the background. Happy Halloween from Brad “Not your Mummy” Feld, Seth “Franken-Levine”, Ryan “El Diablo” McIntyre, and Jason “Count” Mendelson.

Last week I posted an article on peHUB titled How to Create a Sustainable Entrepreneurial Community. Here it is in its entirety. I’ve lived in Boulder for 15 years after living in Boston for a dozen. While I’ve spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley — both as an angel and venture capital investor — I’ve never lived there. While the firm I’m a partner in — Foundry Group — invests all over the United States, I regularly hear statements like, “The only place to start a tech company is in Silicon Valley.”

My TEDxBoulder presentation on The Quarterly Week Off The Grid was recently posted on YouTube. I participated in TEDxBoulder on August 7th and it was an awesome Saturday evening in Boulder. Most of the talks were dynamite – the worst ones were merely good. If you are interested in work-life balance, this is one of my favorite algorithms for it. The video of my presentation follows. If you’ve heard me talk about this before, you’ll recognize some of my schtick. You’ll also recognize this from the first chapter of Theme 7 of Do More Faster (Work-Life Balance). And if you were at Chicago’s Startup Mixology today you’ll recognize pieces of this discussion. But there are a few new gems in here that I had forgotten I’d used. 

As part of our Do More Faster book tour, we’ve been having a pitch session each day called “Pitch More Faster.” During the hour, we hear four pitches that are five minute each and give direct feedback / suggestions on the pitch itself (not the content or the business, but the pitch.) In my experience, most people suck at the five minute pitch. It’s really hard to do well. There are lots of variants of suckage, including cramming a 30 minute pitch into 5 minutes, doing a 5 minute pitch for the first time (and having no comfort with the material), or talking at 732 word per minute and being impossible to follow.