We are deep in budget season as the last board meeting of the year typically includes the 2010 Budget – or at least the “2010 Draft Budget” or “2010 Budget – Draft”. This is also known as “the joy of cramming a spreadsheet into a powerpoint presentation.” The budgets I see generally fit into one of the following five categories. Pre-Revenue: We are pre-revenue and won’t generate revenue in 2010. First Year of Revenue: We are pre-revenue but will generate our first revenue in 2010. Growing Revenue: We are on a revenue growth curve in 2010 but will lose money every month. Becoming Profitable: We are currently losing money but will become profitable in 2010. Profitable: We are profitable every month this year. While I’ve written about this before, it’s worth noting that “profitable” is often used to mean either EBITDA positive, Net Income positive, or Cash Flow positive. These are three totally different things and you aren’t really in a happy profitable place until all three are true.

I’ve introduced two new devices into my personal human instrumentation experiment. In addition to my Zeo, I am now carrying around a FitBit and using a Withings scale. I’ve discovered the mild embarrassment associated with having a scale mis-tweet your weight by 10 pounds too much (e.g. “Brad – you gained a lot of weight recently – everything ok?”) But I suppose that is part of the experiment. The comparison on the Zeo and FitBit sleep data is fascinating. Take a look. Zeo from last night first.

Jon Hansen from PI Window on Business had so much fun with me a few weeks ago that he asked me to do another interview – this time on the dynamics around foreign investments. We covered plenty of ground, including what country, state, and local governments do to slow down investments, along with a bunch of my own philosophy around why I only make VC investments in the US and Canada. Buried deep in the interview is my track record making VC investments in European companies (hint: not pretty).

I love having steel balls. Amy and I discovered Mark Castator about a year ago. He’s a Boulder based artist that does amazing stuff with steel. Here’s a few other things in our house in Eldorado Canyon. The metal painting on the wall is by Mark Cesark who is an Aspen based artist (and another Mark) who we’ve fallen in love with and are collecting aggressively. The steel towers by the window are Castator’s.

How to be a Jewish Star. I feel like some potato latkes this morning. When I was a kid, everyone said that Hanukkah was better than Christmas since we got eight gifts. My view was that we got eight shitty little gifts while all my friends had a giant gift orgy on Christmas. At some point I stopped caring completely. Really, I don’t care. Really! Well not really.

Last week I complained about how miserable I was with AT&T. I love my iPhone, but the AT&T service (both data and voice) is abysmal here in Boulder. All my Blackberry friends on Verizon are happier, so I decided to try a Droid on Verizon. After 24 hours I bailed and went back to my iPhone – the Droid just isn’t ready for prime time IMHO. Thaddeus Arroyo, the CIO of AT&T Services, is on the National Center for Women & Information Technology board with me and saw my tweet (apparently via Facebook) whining about AT&T. He reached out to me immediately and asked if he could help in any way. I sent him a long note which has resulted in a call tomorrow with the senior regional area support executive.

I got an email from my friend Rob Shurtleff of Divergent Ventures this morning that said “So I looked at your bookshelf for ideas. It is a bit like walking into a library without an idea of what I want to read. So here is the challenge, we are driving to Yellowstone for 4 days of hanging out at old faithful before xmas. I would like to grab a few books on my iphone for the drive 12 hours each way. How about putting up two lists: The Ten Non Fiction books you really should read and The Ten Fiction books.”

One of my recent obsessions has become “human instrumentation.” I’ve always been really interested in the data that I generate (sleep, fitness, diet, medical) and in the past six months have started buying every personal measurement product or device I can find that is integrated with the web. One of my favorites is the Zeo. We looked at investing a while ago and I got to play with one of the alpha prototypes. It was cool but we just didn’t get there on the investment, even though I loved the product and had a great impression of the founding team and what they were up to. We keep a list of “companies we hope we regret not investing in” which means (in English) that we are huge fans and will do whatever we can to help, even though we aren’t investors. Zeo is on that list for me.

As 2009 heads into the home stretch, I’m feeling techno-restless. I’ve got two big end of year projects that I’m working on that will keep me in front of my computer a lot, along with a pile of new toys that have shown up in the past few weeks that I’m playing with. So – yesterday I decided to start trying to use new stuff and see if I would switch.