I’m still really cold this morning and I’m dreaming of a time when I can put my meat puppet into hibernation for a while and just romp around in the metaverse. Then I lost 30 minutes of my life to “restarting my connection to the metaverse” and it reminded me that if I went into hibernation, there’s a pretty good chance the metaverse would crash and I’d be in suspended animation forever.

For the last three years I’ve been laboring to help propagate the myth that it doesn’t snow much in Boulder and when it does it’s 55 degrees the next day and the snow all goes away. After getting back from a week of vacation on the beach in Mexico on Friday and now being on day five of the thermometer hovering around zero, tons of very frozen snow on the ground, and no chance that I’m going to contemplate heading outside for a run, I’ve decided to call bullshit on myself.

Yesterday was Return Path’s 10th Birthday. Matt Blumberg, Return Path’s CEO and founder, wrote a great reflective post on his blog titled A Perfect Ten*.* Among other things he covers what he is proudest of from Return Path’s first decade as well as what he regrets or would have done differently. Matt and his team have created a significant company that is profitable, a market leader in its segment, and is growing nicely. It has a strong balance sheet and an excellent leadership team. While the business has evolved significantly from its creation a decade ago, it has always has a clear sense of purpose and vision which has stayed pretty steady, in large part due to Matt and his executive teams’ leadership and stability.

On Monday, I’ll be interviewing Tim Enwall, the founder, president, and COO of Tendril Networks as part of the Silicon Flatirons Entrepreneurs Unplugged series. The event will be from 6:15pm to 7:15pm at the ATLAS Building at CU Boulder. As a special bonus, you can use my bathroom on the second floor (if you are a guy). I’ve known Tim for many years and he’s another fantastic Boulder entrepreneur. I met him shortly after he had sold one of his previous companies – Solista – to Gartner Group. We’ve become good friends since and have done a handful of things together, including getting completely creamed at a monthly poker game we were regulars at (ok – I got creamed, Tim usually held his own and often came out on top.)

Amy and I just had an awesome week (mostly) off the grid at the Rosewood Mayakoba for my 44th birthday. Lots of sleeping, running, massages, eating, consensual activities between two adults, and reading. Lots of reading. Hothouse Orchid: I started the trip off with some light mental floss to get in the swing of things. Some of my favorite Stuart Woods characters, including Holly Barker and Teddy Fay kept me entertained for a few hours.

I was at a board meeting recently where the board and management was discussing the company’s market position. This is a strong company that leads its market and, as a result, one of the board members stated that we were “the 800 pound gorilla in the market.” In my world view, the market was still relatively small so I suggested that we were the 12 pound gorilla. While this got a chuckle, it was instructive and moved the conversation down an interesting path.

A month ago, NewsGator released TapLynx – their framework for building iPhone apps. They took the core code of NetNewsWire for the iPhone, abstracted it out, and built a really powerful and easy iPhone app development system as an SDK. A month later, the iPhone apps built on top of TapLynx are starting to appear, including All Things Digital, Variety, Discovery, TechStars, and the amazing and entertaining Foundry Group iPhone app.

I’ve been to my share of tech conferences that either don’t have any music playing or have some horrible mix that the hotel supplies turned up either a little to much or not quite enough. In contrast, I know that Eric Norlin obsesses over every aspect of his conferences, including the soundtrack. He knows his audience well and nailed it this year. He’s published the soundtrack on the Defrag blog. 

Last week I did an hour long interview with Jon Hansen on the Startup Visa Movement titled Diminishing Prospects: How U.S. Policy is Undermining Entrepreneurial Vision. The interview is embedded below and Jon has a longer post up on his blog titled Snakes in a Playpen: Why U.S. Policy Regarding H-1B and EB-5 Visas is Outdated and Ineffective. I haven’t done any long form interviews on this topic yet. I thought Jon did a great job of steering the conversation, pulling out some important perspectives, and helping cycle back to make sure the appropriate points were covered. If you are interested in this topic, I’d love to hear your reaction to this interview.