I love my morning reading routine. Most mornings during the week – between 5am and 6:30am – I sit at my computer, catch up on email, read the stuff in my daily folder, go through my RSS feeds, and generally explore whatever I can on the web. Some is systematic (my daily folder, my RSS feeds), some is more random (Techmeme, Hacker News), and some comes from places that I couldn’t tell you how I got to.

Yesterday I published one of Sawyer’s posts titled Why the Decks are Stacked Against Software Startups in Patent Litigation. In it, I realized that Sawyer hadn’t defined the different types of plaintiffs in a patent case. Below are good definitions (from Sawyer) of each type and clear explanations about what you are up against in each one. If you’re sued in a software patent case, the first thing you should do is figure out what kind of plaintiff you’re up against, because that will have a major impact on your negotiation posture, and you will almost surely want to settle out sooner rather than later.

*The conventional wisdom has long been that software startups benefit from patents. I’ve been investing in software / Internet companies for over 16 years and I’ve never once had a patent influence my investment decision. More importantly, since it takes a number of years to get a patent, most startups haven’t even contemplated applying for a patent when they raise their first angel or venture round. Our friend Sawyer has seen this first hand and has some specific thoughts on what they decks are stacked against software startups in patent litigation. *

In the last few days there have been a large number of posts about two platform companies – Apple and Twitter. These posts covered a wide range of perspectives (a few of the better ones are linked to below) but fundamentally came down to the tension between a platform (e.g. the iPhone OS or Twitter) vs. third party developers that build applications on top of the platforms. Several of the Twitter related posts include The Twitter Platform’s Inflection Point, Twitter and third-party Twitter developers, and Developers In Denial: The Seesmic Case Study. Several of the Apple related posts ones include and Adobe Vs. Apple War Generates Rage, Facebook Group, Why Apple Changed Section 3.3.1, Steve Jobs response on section 3.3.1. If you missed the leads to the story, Apple made a major change in their TOS and Twitter launched an official Blackberry client and acquired the Tweetie iPhone client, rattling their developer community. And Twitter Officially Responds To Developers and Tries To Calm Fears.

Sometimes I feel like a conference promoter. It’s worth noting that while I put plenty of events up on this blog, I only post the ones that I’d consider going to. Specifically, I probably get 10 requests to post something for everyone one I do. Over the past year, I’ve gotten to know Eric Ries through the work we’ve done together on the Startup Visa initiative. If you don’t know of Eric, he’s a software entrepreneur who over the past few years has been developing and evangelizing the idea of the Lean Startup. He’s an extraordinary writer – I gobble up every word that he writes on his blog Lessons Learned.

Amy and I love sushi. While my sushi dining experiences have been limited to the US and Europe, I’ve had a number of amazing sushi dinners, including Masa in New York. Boulder has a bizarrely large number of sushi restaurants and over the years we’ve frequented them all numerous times. A year or so ago a new one – Kasa Japanese Grill and Bar – opened up on the corner of Pearl and 15th. It’s around the corner from our condo in Boulder so we stopped in a few times. The first time went there it was empty, but the owner and manager Mimi was delightful and upbeat, shining her happiness on us. As we kept going back, the number of people in the restaurant at any given time increased, but Mimi always welcomed us as if she was welcoming us into her home, doted over us, and made sure we had an amazing time.

I had lunch today with Nate Abbott and Natty Zola, the co-founders of Everlater, a TechStars 2009 company. Nate and Natty are two of my favorites – not only because they regularly kick my partner Seth Levine’s ass on bike rides but also because they starred in last year’s TechStars The Founders video series. Today, while enjoying a veggie burger at Mustard’s Last Stand, we talked about how Nate and Natty learned to program. When they came up with the idea for Everlater, they were both young finance geeks on wall street. Nate was a math major; Natty was a econ major, but neither had a clue how to build a web app. They decided that rather than find a “developer” to team up with, they would learn how to program.

I hate spam. Over the years I’ve been an investor in a number of companies that address the spam problem, including Postini and Return Path. I’ve also been involved in lots of other companies in the email ecosystem and spam has always been something I’ve paid close attention to. I’ve thought hard about Blam (Blog Spam), Spim (IM Spam), Skam (Skype Spam), and SMam (SMS Spam). A few times in the past I’ve thought about Twam (Twitter Spam) but Twitter has done a good job so far of dealing with most of the nasty stuff, the most visible being the porn-follower twam that they somehow managed to beat back (or that I’ve successful ignored).

We’ve been having a running joke within Foundry Group for several years about “stealth mode.” My partner Seth alludes to it in his blog post a few years back titled To stealth or not to stealth. I’ve always been on the side of “not to stealth” but after watching the remarkable stealth experience of Trada, thinking about how Niel Robertson (Trada’s CEO), Seth, and the Trada team have effectively used stealth mode, and reflecting on what “stealth mode” actually means, I’ve changed my mind.