We are running the Venture Deals Online Course from September 13, 2020 – November 6, 2020. Our summer session had over 10,000 registrants and over 2,000 people completing the course. We got a lot of feedback about things to improve, several of which we are introducing into the Fall session. Once again, we’ll do a weekly AMA with a variety of people participating. We are also creating a new Venture Deals online community available to all past and current participants of the course. We’ll provide the link for the online community on day one (we’ll be using Mighty Networks, which I’ve loved for my virtual Startup Community.)

Amy and I have been collecting art since we first got together in 1990. My mom, Cecelia Feld, is an artist, and I have been around contemporary art my entire life. We prefer non-representational art from living artists. While we have paintings, sculptures, and photographs from artists who live all over the world, many of the artists are from the Western United States. We first met Julie Maren through a gallery in Boulder on the Pearl Street Mall called MacLaren Markowitz Gallery. When the Internet and telecom bubble collapsed, the gallery ran into trouble, so Amy and I invested in it to help support it and keep it open. We met many artists in the ensuing years and expanded the Colorado artists we were collecting. MacLaren Markowitz ultimately closed, but many friendships remain.

Mental health has been an issue among tech entrepreneurs for a long time, but has been exacerbated by the stresses of the Covid crisis. On March 31, I wrote a post called The Three Crises in which I suggested that the Covid crisis was the collision of three crises, each of which is a complex system. The health crisis (the disease) created the economic crisis (our economy was in strong shape before Covid), which would accelerate a mental health crisis. In the US, we have a fourth crisis amplified – the racial equity crisis – which has been going on since the inception of our country.

My long-time friend and former MIT professor, Professor Edward Roberts, who founded and still chairs the MIT entrepreneurship program, recently published “Celebrating Entrepreneurs: How MIT Nurtured Pioneering Entrepreneurs Who Built Great Companies”. The book is fascinating, especially its five chapters filled with in-depth interviews and background on the MIT “spinoff startups” that became the leaders of: the life sciences and biotechnology industry, the Internet, from CAD-CAM to robotics, and even “modern finance”, plus a host of other companies, including such recent successes as HubSpot, Okta and PillPack, all founded and led by MIT alums.

The Energize Colorado Gap Fund is open for applications. At some point, I’ll write a blog post about the story of how this came together via a public-private partnership to fill a much-needed gap in the Federal funding for small businesses throughout Colorado due to the Covid crisis, but for now either send this to people you think it is relevant to or, if it is relevant to you, please apply for funding.

I read On Truth and Untruth: Selected Writings by Nietzsche yesterday. It was chewy, but soaked me in an interesting set of ideas about what words mean, along with a bunch of stuff around the concept of truth. I get a lot of inbound random email where I get asked a lot of questions, so I see lots of questions repeat or get asked in different ways. For example, I continually get asked some version of “How do I get a job as a VC” and point everyone at my partner Seth’s post How To Get a Job In Venture Capital.

I’m not. And I know a lot of people who aren’t. I’m trying hard, but I’m aware that there are many moments where I’m nowhere close to being my best. Every day, I feel confused by behavior from someone I know well which is inconsistent with how I think of them. Sometimes it’s unsettling or upsetting. Often it is perplexing. Occasionally it is disheartening. Everyone I know is some element of tired, stressed, anxious, frustrated, or just running at maximum speed trying to keep it all together. People are short-tempered, irritable, irrational, and lashing out or thrashing around.

Since Covid started, I’ve had many conversations about office space. In April, almost all of our companies were unable to use their office space because of stay at home orders. Today, even though strict stay-at-home orders are no longer in place in most of the country, the vast majority of our companies are still in a primary work-from-home mode. Most of these companies are locked into long term office leases. Over the past few months, they’ve all tried to negotiate some relief with their landlord. While, in a few cases, there have been small rent deferrals in exchange for tacking on a few months at the end of the lease, and in a few other cases landlords have offered “meaningful cash now to buy out the lease” deals, these have been few and far between.

Amy and I, through our Anchor Point Foundation, are supporting HBCUvc’s VC Lab and Fund. If you are interested in supporting this initiative, send a note to info@hbcu.vc or email me. Several people pointed me at Hadiyah Mujhid, the Founder and CEO of HBCUvc. We talked a few times and I offered to support HBCUvc in any way that she wanted. She asked me to support the expansion of HBCUvc’s VC Lab and Fund.