Every day I get emails from folks either raising money or telling me about their new idea and asking for feedback. The conventional wisdom is that VCs rarely invest in things that reach them randomly (or “over the transom” in someone’s VC vocabulary – I can’t for the life of me figure out why that phrase hangs around.) However, this isn’t the case for us as 10% of the companies we’ve funded in the past two years were initially from “cold call” email inquiries (Brightleaf and Organic Motion). So – I’m very happy to get a steady stream of random emails – keep them coming!

I have a number of friends who are patent attorneys. Some have strong negative feelings about software patents that mirror mine while others keep me entertained by arguing both sides of the situation with themselves while I sit around and listen. One of my friends – let’s call him Sawyer – has very strong negative opinions as he’s spent most of his time recently defending his clients against software patent suits including an increasing number from patent trolls (non-practicing entities). He spends a lot of time in East Marshall, Texas and has figured out where all the best restaurants are. While East Marshall isn’t quite as nice as an invisible, mysterious island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, it clearly has a number of similar characteristics. Sawyer has decided that he can’t write publicly about his thoughts and experiences so I’ve agreed to channel his experience into my own parallel universe. Look for more missives from him (and better references from me with regard to Lost as I finally learn what really has been going on.) In the mean time here’s his reaction to the New York Times profile last week on Intellectual Ventures.

I’m extremely impressed with Vivek Wadhwa’s posts on TechCrunch. He’s been blogging periodically for them since last fall and has shown that he’s willing to take on difficult, controversial, and complicated issues and discuss them in data driven and systematic ways. Recently, Vivek wrote a post titled Silicon Valley: You and Some of Your VC’s have a Gender Problem that resulted from a research project he did with the National Center for Women & Information Technology (I’m chairman). I thought the post was excellent. The comments, however, were really enlightening to me. The amount of anger and hostility, especially irrational attacks, surprised me. Well – I guess it only surprised me a little – it mostly disappointed me.

If there is one thing you read today, go read Brad Burnham at Union Square Ventures excellent essay titled Software patents are the problem not the answer. Several years ago when I first started saying things like “software patents are invalid constructs” or “software shouldn’t be able to be patented” or “software patents are a huge drag on innovation”, I was told by many people (lawyers, journalists, patent trolls, and other VCs) that while I might be right, no other venture capitalist would agree with me or support this position.

Innovation happens all over the place. While I typically write about innovation in software and the Internet (which are the two areas I invest in), it’s useful to occasionally step back and tell a story about innovation in a different area that I’ve been exposed to. Peter Frykman was 15 years old when Muhammad Yunus proposed alleviating poverty through the innovation of the social-objective-driven entrepreneur, one who “competes in the marketplace with all other competitors but is inspired by a set of social objectives.” In 2008 Frykman founded Driptech, his for-profit social venture located in Palo Alto, CA, with a mission to create extremely affordable, water efficient irrigation solutions for small-plot farmers in developing nations.

After not seeing the word patent in my daily information routine for a few weeks, I saw it twice today – first in an article titled Turning Patents Into ‘Invention Capital’ (in the NY Times) and then in Region Sustains Robust Patent Production in the WSJ. Both stirred me up early this morning, but for different reasons. If you are interested in patents, I encourage you to read Turning Patents Into ‘Invention Capital’ as I’m very interested in your reaction. I’d love to hear what you think in the comments (anonymous is fine if you are concerned about attribution on this one.) I have an opinion and this article didn’t add anything to my thoughts (which is partly why I’m looking for yours as I’m curious what others think.) So I hit Ctrl-W and went to the next tab in Chrome.

I’ve been obsessed with the notion of email as the ultimate social network for a while. I wrote a post in 2007 titled Social Networks In Obvious Places that catalyzed me to thing harder about this as an investor. I eventually decided that the email address is the ultimate reference id for one’s current online identity and that it was ludicrous to ignore this notion. This ultimately led to my investment in Gist in 2009. 

If you are a long time reader of this blog, you know that I’m a huge believer that the way we interact with computers in 20 years will be radically different than how we interact with them today. I’ve put my money where my mouth is as Foundry Group has invested in a number of companies around human computer interaction, including Oblong. For the past few years, every time someone talks about next generation user interfaces, a reference to the movie Minority Report pops up. Sometimes the writer gets this right and links it back to John Underkoffler, the co-founder of Oblong, but many times they don’t. Today the NY Times got it right in their article You, Too, Can Soon Be Like Tom Cruise in ‘Minority Report’.

Over the years my partner Jason Mendelson and I have heard from numerous people that they’ve been exposed to our Venture Capital Term Sheet Series as reference material in a college course. We are delighted by this and whenever we’ve been asked, we’ve always said (and will continue to always say) “with our blessing.” However, we haven’t kept track of any of this over the year and have a few ideas for things we can do to update the material now that five years have passed.