Simon Sinek’s TED Talk from TedxPuget Sound (Sept 2009) has been posted and is just awesome. He starts out with the question “Why is Apple so innovative,“ Why is it that Martin Luther King led the civil rights movement,” and “Why is it that the Wright Brothers were able to figure out controlled power manned flight?” He answers this by describing something he calls the Golden Circle: Every single organization knows WHAT they do. Some know HOW they do it. Very few people and organizations know WHY they do what they do, where WHY is “what’s your purpose, your cause, your belief; why do you get out of bed in the morning; why should anyone care.”

I just got the following breaking news alert from The New York Times. “U.S. Economy Adds 290,000 Jobs in April; Jobless Rate Rises to 9.9%” Let’s parse this. The first clause says “U.S. Economy Adds 290,000 Jobs in April.” This means to me that a bunch of people found new jobs in April. A bunch. Yay! Good economy. The second clause says “Jobless Rate Rises to 9.9%.” This means to me that the number of people in the U.S. that don’t have jobs went up in April.” A quick search showed that the March “jobless rate” (actually the unemployment rate) was 9.7%. That’s a big relative jump, especially given that it was 9.7% for the first three months of 2010 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Economic News Release titled Employment Situation Summary that came out a few minutes ago. Boo! Bad economy.

As long time readers of this blog know, I’m strongly against software patents. Succinctly, I think they are (a) invalid constructs, (b) totally unnecessary, and (c) a massive tax on and retardant of innovation. More and more of my VC brethren are beginning to come out publicly against them as are many extremely well respected long time software innovators. So I was amazed to start hearing a statistic being thrown around that 76% of Venture Capitalist Believe that Patents are Important. My partner Jason Mendelson dug in, figured out what was going on, and wrote a very important post titled 76% of Venture Capitalists Believe that Patents are Important (NOT!) explaining that it’s a totally invalid conclusion from a recent study.

Over the weekend, Mark Suster wrote a great post titled How To Communicate with your Investors between Board Meetings. Mark continues to just tear it up with great advice for entrepreneurs. However, he left out one thing from the post – which is one of my favorite pieces of advice for entrepreneurs. Give your venture capitalists (and board members) assignments Mark alludes to this in many of his suggestions but he never comes out and says it. And, amazingly to me, many entrepreneurs either don’t ever think of this or don’t feel comfortable doing it. They should.

I’m fascinated with first offices. I’m not talking about the bedroom, the dorm room, the garage, or the apartment. I’m talking about the first real office. Here’s mine. Bill Warner took this picture of me standing in front of 875 Main Street in Cambridge, MA last year. My first real office – for Feld Technologies – was the fourth floor. The building is a narrow five story building (three windows on the front) – long and skinny – 1600 square feet total. The elevator opened directly into the office, the front of the building (that you see) was to the left; the bulk of the space was to the right. I vaguely remember a cave like office near the back along with the bathroom and lots of open space in the middle. When we moved in all of the left over shit from Pegasystems was still there – they were the previous tenant. 

There’s a huge profile of my mom (Cecelia Feld) in this month’s Texoma Living Magazine. She’s one of the five highlighted artists for their third annual art issue. If you’ve ever been in my office or in my house, you’ve seen a lot of my mom’s art. As a kid, I was completely surrounded by art. In addition to my mom being an artist, both of my folks have an incredible nose for collecting and have built an amazing collection. Whenever we travelled, a big part of our trips were visits to art museums and galleries. As an eight year old, this often got really tedious and boring, but it sunk in and today one of my favorite things to do is stroll quietly thought a museum or gallery.

A few years ago, several friends started a company called Evergreen IP to help inventors commercialize their consumer innovations. I participated in the financing as an angel investor (it was during the period of time between funds where I was once again making angel investments) and since then they have commercialized several products and spun off several companies, including my favorite, TrashCo, which makes a product called Flings. First off, how could you NOT love a company named TrashCo? Seriously, what a great name. While my talent around my obsession with the product is limited to products made out of bits, I can appreciate a good product made out of atoms. 

For some reason I’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately. In many of them I get asked similar questions, including the inevitable “what makes a great entrepreneur?” When I’m on a VC panel, I’m always amused by the answers from my co-panelists as they are usually the same set of “VC cliches” which makes it even more fun when I blurt out my answer. “A complete and total obsession with the product”

Over the years, I’ve occasionally thought about writing a book about how venture capital actually works. I no longer have to contemplate doing this as Jeff Bussgang has nailed it with his book Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get from Start-up to IPO on YOUR Terms. If you are an entrepreneur who wants to understand how venture capital works, how VC’s think, and read some great stories about entrepreneurial arcs, this book is for you. When Jeff told me about this project a year or so ago, I gave him lots of encouragement, made a few introductions, and offered to do anything I could to be helpful. I did two meaningful proofreading cycles so I’ve effectively read this book twice – it’s just spectacular.