If you’ve been watching the TechStars Founders video series, you’ll love the Behind the Scene (aka “bloopers”) episode that just came out. The Founders | Behind the Scenes from Megan Leigh Sweeney on Vimeo. Watch otherwise chatty people be speechless, learn more about the use of the word “fuck”, try to figure out which one is Nate and which one is Natty, see Canadians sing and learn what happens when they get nervous, and go on a rocket ship. Great stuff Megan (and TechStars).

Mark Suster, a partner at GRP Partners, has an outstanding post up this morning titled VC Seed Funding is Dead, Long Live VC Seed Funding. Mark started blogging recently and has quickly turned into my second favorite VC blogger (after Fred Wilson) – if you don’t subscribe to his feed, you should. Mark just did his first seed deal, a $500k investment in a company called Ad.ly, and his post is a long essay on how he’s thinking about seed investing these days. He makes the appropriate warning (and differentiation) between VC investors who view seed investments as “options” on future rounds (e.g. they toss a little money in and then generally ignore the company until the next financing) and “active seed investors” (like First Round Capital, SoftTechVC, True Ventures, Union Square Ventures, and O’Reilly AlphaTech) who view the seed investment as their first round of several as they help get a company up and running.

Periodically I get way behind on my “daily routine” and skip my RSS feeds for a while (up to a week). This week was one of them – I had two 4am wakeups that led me to the airport followed by a 7am wakeup (due to me being glued to my bed) followed by a 8am board meeting. So – no RSS feeds. This morning, after sleeping 12 hours, I spent an hour and read through what I missed this week. There’s some great stuff that came out of it (most from the last few days) – here you go.

I spent the morning at an NCWIT (National Center of Women & Information Technology) board meeting where I’ve been chairman for the last few years. NCWIT’s mission is to increase women’s participation in IT. We focus across the entire pipeline (K-12, higher ed, industry, academic, and entrepreneurial communities) and – in addition to having a number of our own programs – work hard to leverage the efforts of other organizations around the country. We’ve got a superb board of directors and executive advisory council and an incredible staff which I’m especially proud of. For a quick overview, take a look at the Fact Sheet and the FAQ.

This year I’m the interviewer for the Silicon Flatirons Entrepreneurs Unplugged series. On Monday @ 6:00 pm I’m interviewing David Cohen, the founder of TechStars at the Wolf Law Building in Room 204 on the CU Boulder Campus. I’ve known and worked with David for about four years. Prior to starting TechStars, he started three companies – two that were successful and one that failed. Since starting TechStars, he’s had an incredible impact on the Boulder Entrepreneurial Ecosystem during that time, is an awesome entrepreneur, and can be hilarious. Come watch me pry some great stories, anecdotes, and advice out of him. Register here.

Dell has put up a new site called Motherboard that I don’t totally understand the point of, but I very much enjoyed the interview with Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil has always been a hero of mine ever since I first hear of him when I was at MIT in the mid-1980’s. I’ve never worked with Ray although I got to know his business partner Aaron Kleiner near the end of my time in Boston. I’ve observed Ray from afar, read his books, and thought about his thinking. I find all of it, including the notion of the Singularity and his goal of living long enough to be able to live forever, very compelling.

If you’ve enjoyed the TechStars video series, this one is a really fun one. It focuses on the TechStars Bay Area Demo Day which happened at the end of September. Among the beautiful and inspiring scenes of the bay area are a bunch of super capable entrepreneurs from Boulder and Boston who grew an enormous amount in the last three months (yes – I’m very proud of them.) As a special bonus, you find out that the Everlater guys can “give as good as they get” (after getting punked by David Cohen in Episode 8: Your Best Friend.)

The Gist iPhone app was released this morning. It’s the first of two meaningful iPhone releases this week from companies I’m an investor in. Not surprisingly the Gist iPhone app is tightly coupled with the overall Gist service which I’ve written about in the past. Bill French wrote a great review on iPhone CTO titled Mobile Professionals Develop Business Acuity and Information Readiness With New Gist iPhone App. In this he clearly explains what Gist is trying to do, why it’s special-magic-happy, and where it has room for improvement.

I ingest a ton of information on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. My process for doing it today is entirely manual. I’m starting to look around for a way to automate this using the metaphor of a “personal dashboard”, not dissimilar to the idea from the 1980’s of an EIS (“executive information system”). Let me explain. Daily: I have an information processing routine each morning that is web-based. I open a folder in Firefox that contains 14 tabs. I then go through all of them – most, but not all are news related. A few are interactive and require data from me. I then scan through my tweets from the previous night. I then review my “Daily” email folder – most of the items are “daily reports” from a variety of companies I’m an investor in. Next up, my RSS feeds. Finally, I process whatever email came in from the previous night. Weekly: I have a weekly tab in Firefox. There are only 5 tabs here and they shift around a little. But – they reference a variety of text and numerical data that I check on a weekly basis. Monthly: I get financial statements (balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement) along with board packages from all of the companies I’m an investor in along with all of my personal financial information. Quarterly: Similar to monthly, but for the quarter. Annual: Similar to monthly, but for the year. I also generate a variety of other “annual data” much of it to do with either money or fitness. My Daily routine takes around an hour. Weekly, which includes reviewing my upcoming calendar, takes about 30 minutes. I don’t know how long Monthly, Quarterly, or Annual take as they are usually spread out over multiple days.