Whenever a TechStars company is acquired, they get a yellow shirt with their number on the back. Last month Fitrbox, a TechStars Boulder 2007 company, was acquired by Jive Software. The yellow shirt presentation is in the short video below: FiltrBox #4 TechStars Company to be Acquired from TechStars on Vimeo. On Tuesday, February 9th at the Denver Athletic Club (1325 Glenarm in Denver) Filtrbox’s founders Ari Newman and Tom Chikoore are going to do a presentation titled Filtrbox – A Case Study from Start-up to Exit on the story of Filtrbox. I expect this will include everything from the very start of the company, to their experience with TechStars, to their first financing, through launching a product, seeing early customer growth, and ultimately being acquired by Jive Software. 

Vivek Wadhwa has a strong article in BusinessWeek today titled Addressing the Dearth of Female Entrepreneurs*.* He makes the argument that “There are too few women running high-tech companies; that’s too bad, considering evidence shows female-led businesses outperform those run by men” and concludes “[I] hope that when I revisit this topic in subsequent years the percentage of women launching IT companies rivals the percentage of women going into law, medicine, and higher education. The outcome would benefit us all.”

Sometimes a person says one sentence that just sticks with you and is so perfect that it defines a whole category of behavior. Mark Pincus, the CEO of Zynga, riffed on the phrase “be the CEO of your job” in a board meeting a year or so ago. It stuck with me and I’ve thought about it many times since. On Sunday, the NY Times did a great “Corner Office” interview with Mark titled Are You a C.E.O. of Something? Among other things it explored the idea of being the CEO of your job. Fred Wilson – also an investor in Zynga – wrote a post on Sunday titled Empowering Your Team which talks about one aspect of this. But Fred left out a great example from one of Mark’s earlier companies (Support.com) which really nails this concept.

Help me get my photo of Amy’s Burning Mercedes up on Fail Blog. All you have to do is click through on the picture below and vote for it. moar funny pictures And yes – that really is Amy’s old Mercedes on fire in our driveway. Oops.

I had a very interesting meeting yesterday with an MIT Professor who I’ve known for a long time. He is anti-software patent, as am I. However, he suggested something I hadn’t really spent much time thinking about, namely that patents slow down innovation. Some very credible folks have been talking about this for a little while, including James Bessen and Michael Meurer in their excellent book Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk. 

Steve Bell of Startup Trek came to Boulder about a month ago and did an interview with a bunch of Boulder people, including me. Following is part one (12 minutes) of the interview where I talk some about my history, my first company Feld Technologies, and the Feld Technologies’ motto (“we suck less.”) I also spend some time talking about how I first learned how to do deals, acquire companies, and make angel investments. You get to learn how I met Fred Wilson, Rich Levandov, and Jerry Colonna. And, as a special bonus, you get to see a reasonably tired version of my avatar sitting in one of the chairs in my office.

Over the past eighteen months I’ve gotten to know Bill Warner through my work with the Boston program of TechStars. Bill was a well known entrepreneur when I lived in Boston between 1983 and 1995 – he’d founded Avid which is one of the famous MIT software companies to come out of the 1980’s and the subsequently founded Wildfire Communications with Rich Miner, now of Google Ventures and another great entrepreneur in Boston that I’ve gotten to know over the past year.

I heard this phrase at about 75 minutes into my run this morning. It’s from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book I’ve read a half dozen times over the years. I decided to listen to it on my iPhone while training for an upcoming marathon, just to see what different things I’d pick up from listening to it read to me rather than reading it myself. The actual paragraph is in the middle of Chapter 11 as the narrator is discussing Phaedrus’ lateral drift. He shifts back to the present time and talks with some trepidation about heading up over mountain beyond Red Lodge. 

While the rest of the US is watching football, I thought I’d sit quietly at my house and catch up on some writing, most notably what David Cohen, Entrepreneur Magazine, and a few other special people are waiting for from me. However, before I dig into that, I thought I’d procrastinate by catching up on some reading from the week and, motivated by a few interesting things I came across, stall a little more by writing this blog post summarizing the interesting things I came across today.