We’ve run TechStars in Boulder for three years. So far each year at least one of the teams ends up with a runaway success on a bootstrapped business. In year one it was J-Squared with their Facebook (and now MySpace) apps. The bootstrapper of year two is Occipital with their awesome RedLaser iPhone app. RedLaser has been at the top of the iPhone App Store paids apps listing for over three months. Rather than review the app here, I’ll just point you to a recent TechCrunch article about it reaching over 750k downloads and a recent WSJ article about Price Checking: Finding Deals With a Phone. Or just download RedLaser – it’s only $1.99 and you’ll love it.

Speaking of brilliant photographs, my mom sent me two yesterday. The first one is her dressed in PJ’s reciting “Twas the Night Before Christmas” to her kindergarten class. I remember having to sing Christmas Carols as a kid but I stopped in seventh grade when I started declaring to my teachers “I’m Jewish – I don’t have to do this.” But kindergarten was probably fair game.

When I’m at my house in Keystone, I work my way through my infinite pile of physical books rather than reading on my Kindle. It’s always a mystery as to what has made it to the top of the pile (I don’t select anything particular – I just read whatever is “on top” and, since it’s an infinite pile, “top” doesn’t actually refer to any particular place in the pile. Two of the ones that I gobbled down in the past few days were spectacular. 

As we finish up the year, I’m really pleased with the progress the Startup Visa gang is making. I started thinking about, writing, and working on this on 9/10/09 when I wrote the post The Founders Visa Movement. One quarter later, we’ve: Put together a core group of entrepreneurs, angels, and VCs who are working on this. Received a tremendous amount of positive feedback from entrepreneurs and investors who have struggled with this issue. Verified that this is a real issue, there is no current solution under the existing visa system, and even though there are plenty of immigration lawyers who say “no problem, I can get around this”, there aren’t clean solutions. Engaged with a number of Congressmen in both the house and the senate. Found a member of the house who is sponsoring a bill addressing the issue. Talking to several folks on the senate side to find a sponsor. Codified a first clean draft of language around this. Build lots of grassroots support and enthusiasm. Gotten plenty of discussion going in the blogosphere and mainstream media. Shortly after I started talking to people in Congress about this it became clear that this wouldn’t be a 2009 legislative issue given the massive financial and health care reform issues being worked on in Congress. So – we decided to use Q409 to “figure this out” with a goal of launching aggressively in Q110 with the goal of having this be part of whatever immigration reform activity happens next year, especially in the context of a renewed push for job creation activity in the US.

After having a few conversations yesterday about the Startup Visa, I realized that I never posted the Wall Street Journal OpEd on the Startup Visa that Paul Kedrosky and I wrote and had published on 12/2/09. I don’t know the rules about reposting OpEd’s – I assume that since we wrote it I can republish it. If that’s not true, I’m sure some one will tell me. In the mean time, here it is:

There were some great comments on my post from Sunday titled Being Syndication Agnostic. One of them was from Kevin Vogelsang – he asked the following question: What are the downsides to syndicating a round of financing for the entrepreneur/startup (assuming the relationship with all investors is a good fit of course)? By syndicating a deal, the entrepreneur gains access to a larger network. This seems to be a big positive. However, there must be downsides (less attention, more interest groups, etc.) Love to hear more on the topic.

I’m not on an airplane again until 2010 (1/6/10 to be exact when I head to Las Vegas for CES) which is a relief since I flew 87 segments 2009. Ok – not as much as Ryan Bingham in Up in the Air (very good BTW) but enough to decide to boycott United whenever possible. One pleasant surprise on a flight from DEN to OAK on SWA was the presence of Wi-Fi. I paid my $12 and worked online for two hours instead of using my airplane sleeping superpower. Little did I know that I was on one of the four planes in the SWA fleet of 500 that had Wi-Fi according to the Gizmodo Complete Inflight Wi-Fi Cheat Sheet.

Bijan Sabet started it with a great post titled We Gotta Do A Deal Together and Fred Wilson followed with an equally great post titled Trading Deals, A Lost Art? I’m going to try to add to the mix with this post by describing our strategy at Foundry Group around syndication and explain a little of where it came from. Please read both Bijan’s and Fred’s posts as it’ll provide a lot of context for this one.

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m Chairman of the National Center for Women & Information Technology. In five years, NCWIT has become a prominent national organization helping encourage, inspire, advocate, and educate women (and girls) to get involved in computer science based on the following belief: “We believe that inspiring more women to choose careers in IT isn’t about parity; it’s a compelling issue of innovation, competitiveness, and workforce sustainability. In a global economy, gender diversity in IT means a larger and more competitive workforce; in a world dependent on innovation, it means the ability to design technology that is as broad and creative as the people it serves.”