Andrew does a nice interview. We covered plenty of ground, including failure, when to really call it quits, the concept that “life is a fatal disease”, global vs. local failure, working on things that matter, what I think “fail fast” actually means, how to evolve your business (using Return Path and NewsGator as the examples), my obsession with product, how we decided to invest in Pogoplug, more on product and release tempo, a story about my grandfather, a story about Laura Fitton and why I care about OneForty, why it’s so important to always give more than you get, how the Defrag and Glue conferences came about, some book recommendations, and why fear and anxiety are emotions that have zero value to an entrepreneur.

In March, I went to DC with Dave McClure, Eric Ries, Shervin Pishevar, and a bunch of Geeks on a Plane to discuss, advocate, and support the Startup Visa initiative. As part of the effort, we did two videos about the trip – one staring me and one staring Shervin. Ben Henretig of Micro-Documentaries produced them – they have some striking images of DC along with plenty of commentary from me and Shervin about why the Startup Visa is important.

As Fred Wilson likes to say, often the best content for blogs is in the comments. In this case, it was in an email I got from Boaz Fletcher in response to my post Web Sites and Books for Novice Programmers. Boaz made a very interesting observation: “As for learning how to code, I think good storytellers make the best programmers. I used to freak prospective employees out by having them write a story for me instead of the “what’s wrong with this code?” tests. But it showed me who was able to think well, organized, creatively, and filled in the details.”

Thanks for all the feedback and comments on the Learning to Program series with Nate Abbott and Natty Zola from Everlater. In the last post, titled Web Sites and Books for Novice Programmers, I foreshadowed some of the tools that Nate and Natty chose to build Everlater. Now that you know how they got started, here’s what they ended up choosing. Everlater is built on Ruby on Rails, postgreSQL and is hosted on Engine Yard using a passenger/nginx combination. Nate and Natty use several standard Ruby/Rails packages (gems) to extend the base functionality of Rails. On the front end, they use a combination of jQuery and Prototype for Javascript.

If you are a senior Java developer anywhere in the US and are interested in moving to Boulder, I’d like to hear from you. There was a nice article in Bloomberg Businessweek last week about Why Boulder Is America’s Best Town for Startups. With the combination of the new startup activity over the past few years combined with the rapid growth of a number of medium sized companies and renewed hiring from some of the outposts of major tech companies based here, we’ve clearly entered another cycle in Boulder where talent is tight and demand for senior folks is once again at a high point. 

Amy and I stayed in downtown Boulder over the weekend. It was pouring rain on Friday afternoon, flawlessly beautiful on Saturday through Sunday morning when we went for a long walk on the Boulder Creek Path, and then it snowed overnight last night. Here’s the view from our window. My iPhone tells me that it’s going to be 70 degrees on Wednesday. Welcome to spring time in Boulder.

I got anxious just reading the book You, Me & The U.S. Economy. Last Thursday, I had a beautiful dinner at Susan and Richard Casey’s house. The Casey’s co-founded and run Square 1 Bank and have become good friends over the past few years. During dinner we had a wide ranging conversation about a bunch of things “not-tech.” On my way out, Susan handed me a book titled You, Me & The U.S. Economy by her friend Stacy Carlson. I tossed it in my bag along with the book Richard gave me (Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society). I started reading it last night and finished it up today.

In the continuation of the Learning to Program series with Nate Abbott and Natty Zola from Everlater, I asked them a few questions about which web sites, books, and blogs they consumed at the beginning of their journey when they knew nothing about programming. It turns out that Nate and Natty spent most of their time simply searching for what they were looking for. Whenever a specific topic came up, they’d use Google, be patient when reading through the search results and forums, refine their search, and keep trying. They discovered that there are an amazing number of programmers who publish code on their personal blogs. As they were trying to get basic stuff to work, they spent time searching for and then reading the full posts and comments. 

In 2005, I wrote a post titled ADPrentice that talked about a weekend event I did with a number of the undergraduates in my MIT fraternity (ADP). In the post I described the entrepreneurship education event I helped put on with Sameer Gandhi (Accel Partners – then at Sequoia Capital) and Mark Siegel (Menlo Ventures). It was an awesome weekend – we held an event modeled after the Apprentice TV show (without the bad hair) that had three challenges: (1) Marketing, (2) Hiring / Interview, and (3) 5-Year Plan & Budget. In between events, Mark gave a talk titled “How Does Venture Capital Work”, Sameer gave a talk titled “Business Plan 101”, and I gave a talk titled “Do You Have The Balls To Start A Company?”