I’m on a six week rhythm in Seattle for the three boards I’m on up here – Gist, BigDoor, and Impinj. While I don’t have them perfectly synced up, I’m hopeful that I will in 2011. In the mean time, today full of BigDoor and Gist. It was an absurdly beautiful day in Seattle. When the sun is out, this place shines. The day started out at the new Founders Co-op office where BigDoor is located. It’s about 33% full but that’s going to change next week when TechStars Seattle begins and fills out the place. It’s great space, in a great location (near the new Amazon campus), and is covered with IdeaPaint.

The last two episodes of the Founders 2010 series are up. Episode 11 is called Hard at Play. Special guests include Howard Lindzon (StockTwits CEO), David Brown (one of the co-founders of TechStars), Rob La Gesse from RackSpace (and the sponsor of this video series), Lewis Gersh (Metamorphic Partners), Josh Fraser (Eventvue co-founder – TechStars Boulder 2007), and scenes from the annual ping pong tournament. “Hard at Play” The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 11 from TechStars on Vimeo.

My partner Seth Levine has a detailed post up today titled Trada – from the beginning that describes the creation and financing of Trada. Foundry Group is the seed investor in Trada and Seth’s post describes one example of what I think is effective VC seed investing. The meat of the funding story follows: “Of course coming up with the idea is the easy part. Executing against that idea is another matter. In this case neither Niel (nor I) had any interest in creating a traditional syndicate to fund the company. Instead we quickly put our heads together about a financing (we like to say it was over beers, but the truth is more mundane – we hammered out the details in a 10 minute conversation in the conference room of the Foundry office). We decided that we wanted to bring in some experts to help us with the business and together flew around pitching the business to a small handful of strategic angel investors to pull together a small syndicate that became the initial Trada investor base. Niel and I hammered out a second financing in similar fashion (again around the Foundry conference table, this time without the need for an angel roadshow). It’s a great example of how we like to work with entrepreneurs – especially those that we have a long history with. We like to be involved early (in this case before an idea for a business even existed) and we think of our angel investments as a down payment on a subsequent investment in the business (we’ realize that we need to give early businesses some time to develop).”

A week ago I had just gotten home after a month in Homer, Alaska. I was totally chilled out – I worked plenty in July but had very little physical human interaction with anyone other than Amy. I’m sitting here in my Boulder condo today thinking about the entrepreneurial tour de force that was the last six days. I think I interacted with more different people each day than I did cumulatively over the previous 30 days in Homer.

I attended the second Open Angel Forum in Boulder tonight. Simply put, it was dynamite. This is an intense week for seed stage stuff in Boulder as TechStars Demo Day is tomorrow where 11 new companies are having their coming out party. The Boulder New Tech Meetup had a special double header (Tuesday and Wednesday) where six teams practiced their pitches to a room of 300+ people on Tuesday followed up by the other five on Wednesday. The streets are crawling with angel and early stage investors – local and from other parts of the country – and the vibe feels great as tomorrow is the big day.

On June 20th, I declared that I was going to try A Month of Mac. I took my Macbook Pro (an older model from about 18 months ago) up to Alaska, left my Lenovo x300 in Boulder, and went native Mac. I’m typing this on my brand new spiffy MacBook Pro 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7 with 8GB RAM, with a 500GB solid state hard drive. I can’t figure out why I’ve been so stubborn about really switching to the Mac. This is a beautiful computer.

Last week saw an explosion of discussion around seed investing, including plenty of negative comments around VCs as seed investors. While I agree that many VCs are crummy seed investors, I think there are some that are excellent seed investors. This prompted me to write a post titled AngelList Boulder and Some Thoughts on Seed Investing where I promised to write up some of my thoughts on how and why VCs could be good seed investors.

As I watch Amy scurry around and put the final touches on our Homer house before we leave to go home to Boulder, I thought I’d stay out of the way and write a quick final book post on The House Advantage. I read a bunch more books the past two weeks but ran out of gas reviewing them all – see my Shelfari bookshelf if you are interested. But The House Advantage was worth mentioning.

Ah – well – another day passed and there was once again a ton of chatter around angel investing. A lot of it was prompted by AngelConf 2010 which you can watch recordings of on Justin.tv (AngelConf 2010 Part 1 and AngelConf 2010 Part 2). While there continues to be plenty of negative VC tone and “disruptive change is here” (ala traditional VC is over), there were also some great nuggets, including my favorite line from Joshua Schachter of typical VC behavior of SHITS (Show High Interest Then Stall).