As of today’s announcement that Ted Wang at Fenwick & West has collaborated with a group of bay area early stage VC’s and angel investors to create the Series Seed Documents we now have – at my count – four different standardized seed financing documents floating around the industry. TechStars Model Seed Funding Documents (by Cooley) Y Combinator Series AA Equity Financing Documents (by WSGR) Founders Institute Plain Preferred Term Sheet (by WSGR) Series Seed Financing Documents (by Fenwick & West) Many smart and capable people have either worked on these various docs on signed on as supporters. However, until there is one standardized set of documents that everyone – especially the various law firms agree on – I don’t expect there to really be a standardized set of seed financing documents. I wrote about this in my post The Challenge of The Ideal First Round Term Sheet.

Marathon #15 is in the bag – I finished the New Orleans Rock ‘n’ Roll Mardi Gras Marathon in a time of 05:15:05 yesterday. Here’s a video of me crossing the finishing line. It was a beautiful day for a marathon – the temperature was 50 degrees and the sky was clear. There were about 18,000 runners (most for the half marathon) and like most Rock ‘n’ Roll races it was extremely well organized.

Videos like this one remind me that I live in a very tiny corner of the universe. Only 8% of the people interviewed (out of a sample of over 50) correctly defined a browser. It also shows how effective Google has been in their approach to branding, especially given that they just aired their first TV commercial a few weeks ago.

If you support the Startup Visa and have a blog or a website, put the Startup Visa Twitter Widget up on your site. _2gov_issue_id = 22; _2gov_default_tweet = “.@2gov Support Startup Visa! Tweet Congress https://bit.ly/aGr34n"; And – on March 2nd at 12 noon Pacific / 3 pm Eastern – we are going to do a Tweet Hall for the Startup Visa. All you need to do is tweet @2gov supporting #startupvisa exactly at Noon Pacific on Tuesday March 2nd. We’ll collect your Tweets and deliver them during our visit to the White House on March 4th.

I love the Pogoplug. We’ve been investors in the company for about a year and it has been a blast working with the team. Pogoplug is in our Digital Life theme and has a lot of conceptual similarities to our previous investment in Sling Media (now part of EchoStar). We love products like the Pogoplug and the Slingbox “software that ships with a little plastic box that does magic stuff” that, in Pogoplug’s case, provides you access to any of your external hard drives from anywhere in the world on any device.

Today, Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) introduced the StartUp Visa Act of 2010. The group of us behind the Startup Visa project have been working closely with key members of each Senators’ staff on this and we are incredibly pleased with the proposed bill. Following is the text from the press release announcing the bill: “Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, today introduced legislation to drive job creation and increase America’s global competiveness by helping immigrant entrepreneurs secure visas to the United States. The StartUp Visa Act of 2010 will allow an immigrant entrepreneur to receive a two year visa if he or she can show that a qualified U.S. investor is willing to dedicate a significant sum – a minimum of $250,000 – to the immigrant’s startup venture. “Global competition for talent and investment grows more intense daily and the United States must step up or be left behind,” said Sen. Kerry. “Everywhere Dick Lugar and I travel for the Foreign Relations Committee, we see firsthand the entrepreneurial spirit driving the economies of our competitors. Creating a new magnet for innovations and innovators to come to the United States and create jobs here will offer our economy a double shot in the arm – robust job creation at home and reaffirmation that we’re the world’s best place to do business.” “Our country should strive to attract to the United States the most talented and highly skilled entrepreneurs. We should channel the power of innovative thinkers from around the world and American investors towards creating jobs and encouraging economic growth and future prosperity,” said Ranking Member Lugar. The StartUp Visa Act of 2010 would amend immigration law to create a new EB-6 category for immigrant entrepreneurs, drawing from existing visas under the EB-5 category, which permits foreign nationals who invest at least $1 million into the U.S., and thereby create ten jobs, to obtain a green card. After proving that he or she has secured initial investment capital and if, after two years, the immigrant entrepreneur can show that he or she has generated at least five full-time jobs in the United States, attracted $1 million in additional investment capital or achieved $1 million in revenue, then he or she would receive permanent legal resident status. More than 160 venture capitalists from across the country have endorsed the senators’ proposal. That letter of support is attached.”

Jon Hansen has started interviewing me periodically on his show on BlogTalkRadio as part of his Thought Leaders Series. Yesterday’s interview focused on my experience of investing in Rally Software and included short discussions on how Rally got started, how and why I decided to invest, and the role various factors play in my decision making process. Jon does a nice interview. I’m very proud of my friends at Rally – they’ve created a company that is well on its way to being one of – if not the – most significant software company in Boulder.

My folks stayed at my condo in Boulder the last few nights with me so I was inspired this morning to write a quick post in the Letters to my Dad series that I’m writing with my father (he’s calling his posts “Father and Son.”) In my dad’s last post, Father and Son #3, he wrote about our overthrow of the administrative regime in my high school at the start of my senior year when they botched the AP course schedule because of a “computer glitch.” He calls it a “lesson in leadership and self reliance” and tells a great story of how we (him and I) quickly mobilized about 60 parents and students in 24 hours to get together, proposed a solution to the problem, presented the case the superintendent and principal, and then fixed the problem. We all got to take more than one AP class (even though school was over for me my senior year at lunch time since there were no other classes to take) and I even wore a tux to prom.