While some people hate the phrase “failing fast”, I find it instructive when it’s used to signify that one isn’t going to pursue a particular path in the context of a larger set of activities. A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about The Proliferation of Standardized Seed Financing Documents. It generated several hundred email responses and a handful of phone calls. A week or so later, my partner Jason Mendelson wrote a post titled Why There Will Never be a Standard Set of Seed Documents. I’ve concluded that Jason is right so rather than torture myself, I’m failing fast with regard to trying to help create a set of standardized seed documents.

Over the past year the amount of emails I receive on a daily basis from entrepreneurs has reached a point where I can’t deal with it any more. My partners at Foundry Group feel the same and as a result we’ve moved to twitter to deal evaluation. If you are interested in talking to me about a potential investment, please just tweet it. Limit yourself to 140 characters – that’s more than enough to describe what you are doing. Optimally, you’d DM me, although I realize that I have to follow you for this, so just use @bfeld in your tweet and I’ll see it. And please – don’t sent me multiple tweets – that kind of defeats the purpose.

On March 8, 2010 Amazon fired me as an Amazon Affiliate because of Colorado HB 10-1193. I proceeded to have a dozen different conversations (email and live) with several of my state representatives, including one of the co-sponsors of the bill, and each conversation made me more incensed at the abject stupidity and lack of understanding of the dynamics surrounding the situation. Ultimately, the argument came down to one of protectionism – e.g. “we have to protect our local merchants so Amazon shouldn’t get an unfair advantage by not having to charge state tax.” I could rant about this for a while, but I’ve got better things to spend my time on at this point.

I talk about human computer interaction (HCI) a lot on this blog. We’ve invested in a number of companies in our HCI theme, including Oblong, Organic Motion, and EmSense and have a few more that we are working on that hopefully will be announced shortly. When I think about the areas I’ve been paying the most attention to and am the most intrigued with as an investor, HCI rises to the top of the list. 

Tonight, during Lost, I tried to decide just how “willful” Locke-the-smoke-monster was being. I didn’t reach a conclusion – and doubt I will until the end of the season. In the mean time, my anonymous lawyer friend known as Sawyer sent me a nice essay on the notion of “willful infringement in the context of patents.” He also sent me some interesting comments about how pissed off a bunch of biotech patent lawyers were today are at U.S. District Court Judge Robert W. Sweet for invalidating seven patents related to the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2, but that’s not what this essay is about. Remember, no matter how sensible Sawyer’s advice is, none of this is legal advice and, if you have a specific issue, make sure you spend lots of money on your lawyers since they also have to eat. Sawyer’s comments follow.

After downloading Skype 4.2, I realized that I could now invite all of my Facebook friends who had Skype accounts to my Skype contact list. So I did. Unfortunately the Skype UI for this sucks so I had to go through about 1,000 entries a screen of five at a time unchecking the Facebook friends I didn’t want on Skype. I ended up inviting about 280 – fortunately I was on a conference call for the thirty minutes it took me to grind through this.

I was thinking about how to drive CTR’s up via different mechanisms this morning when this email arrived in my inbox. I remembered talking about high CTR email response rates with Dave McClure and Shervin Pishevar when we were in DC on our Startup Visa trip at the beginning of March. I’d forgotten about this conversation until this email showed up while I was thinking about this. Of course, I clicked to see where Dave had tagged me (it was on a Huffington Post article about innovation.)

I’ll be in Seattle on Tuesday 4/6 for a bunch of meetings and am attending the Seattle Open Coffee Club meeting at 8:30am at Louisa’s on 2379 Eastlake Avenue E in Seattle. Andy Sack who runs the TechStars Seattle program is hosting and providing the coffee. We will both be answering any and all questions about TechStars Seattle, plus eating plenty of baked goods.

I had an amazing day on Saturday in Charlotte, North Carolina. I attended the Bank of America Technology Stars of the Future awards ceremony for the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing. If you’ve been following along on this blog, you know that I’m chairman of NCWIT (the National Center for Women & Information Technology). I’m proud of a lot of things that NCWIT does, but after attending the Aspirations in Computing awards I think it has moved to the top of my list.