The Startup Visa movement is picking up a lot of speed. I’ve had more positive conversations about it than I have about any other government related thing I’ve been involved in or worked on in the past few years. David Binetti and the gang at @2gov have set up a way for anyone to make a $50 contribution to the Startup Visa effort. This is an anonymous donation and you have to be a US Citizen to make the donation – just go to the contribute page. If you want to contribute more than $50, just email donate@2gov.org. 

A few weeks ago I wrote a post titled An Angel Investor Group Move That Makes Me Vomit. In the post, I lambasted the practice of charging entrepreneurs to pitch to an angel group for funding. I think this is completely backwards – the angel group members should cover all the costs and the entrepreneurs should not be charged. Last week David Cohen (the founder of TechStars) wrote a post titled An offer to Funding Universe. On 9/30, Funding Universe is having one of their CrowdPitch events in Denver. The were originally charging $125 to present – David welcomed Funding Universe to Colorado and offered to pay the presentation fees for half the companies if Funding Universe covered the other half.

In an intense environment like TechStars, filled with smart and extremely driven people, you might expect that things would get competitive among the teams. However, one of the most interesting things I’ve seen over the three years of the program has been the level of collaboration among the teams. I’ve seen them practice their pitches together, test product strategies, discuss approaches to getting investment, and share stories when things are going well and when they are not.

As I continue to walk the earth, like Caine in Kung-Fu, I’m enjoying another early morning in Mountain View. I look forward to getting back home to Boulder late tonight, just in time to have avoided the crummy weather this week. Next week has plenty of walking the earth, starting in Boulder, then Mountain View, then Boston, then back to Boulder. I’ve had a number of requests to publish an “event calendar” of stuff I’m doing that’s public – look for that on this blog soon. In the mean time, following is info about where I’ll be and what I’ll be up to in case you want to come hang out with me.

I was fortunate that two of my early mentors were master dealmakers. They had different styles and approaches so I learned an incredible amount from each of them. Before I met them I’d never made an investment, acquired a company, or sold a company. In the past 17 years since I met them, I’ve done a ton of each. React to the following: “We’d like to buy your company for between $35m and $50m.” That means $50m to you, right?

We’ve just wrapped up our third year of doing TechStars and not only do we have some interesting companies coming out of Boulder, we also have a bunch coming out of our new Boston program as well. In all, we had 19 companies go through the program this summer. I expect at least 14 of the 2009 companies will eventually close their seed rounds, which is similar to the ratio we’ve seen in past years.

I received an overwhelming response to my post last week titled The Founders Visa Movement. There were tons of comments – both positive and negative (many constructive on both sides), lots of emails, and plenty of tweets. I sent the comment thread on to the senior staffer in my congressman’s office who I was talking to and got a thoughtful response from him. I’ve got a series of calls set up this week to talk with several other of my congressmen (and women). In addition, we are in the final stages of getting a CU Law student to intern with us at Foundry Group on this project to help pull together more substantive material, options, data, and support (we hope to announce this next week). There is no question in my mind, after hearing the response and thinking about this more, that the time to do something about this is right now.

Yesterday morning I spent the day at my semi-annual MIT Sloan Executive Advisory Board meeting. During breaks, I got into two separate conversations about a book I read last week called Breakpoint by Richard A Clarke. Clarke was chief counter-terrorism adviser for Clinton and Bush and – among other things – has become a superb science fiction writer. Breakpoint – like Daemon – is an absolute must read in the cyber-thriller category (BTW – thanks Kwin for the recommendation.)

For those of you that are regular readers, you know how excited I am about Gist, an investment we made earlier this year. On Tuesday Gist launched their open beta program making Gist available to everyone. The coverage of the launch was extensive with articles describing how Gist works and what it is useful for in sites including GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, Forbes, Mashable, Cnet, eWeek, NetworkWorld, WebWorkerDaily, TechFlash, and Microsoft StartupZone. Some of my favorite articles were FilltheFunnel (hint – iPhone screenshots) and MarketingProfessor (hint – what they like, what they don’t like – much of which is on the product roadmap.)