I’ve had a busy July – lots activity in my portfolio, travel, and interesting stuff to deal with. Most of the companies in my portfolio had solid Q2’s (recession? what recession?), I’ve watched the TechStars teams in both Boulder and Boston grow up quickly, and the tech M&A market has woken up nicely. At the same time, I watch the mainstream press report on the same old nonsense, our government struggle with “big issues” that seem to polarize everyone, and I listen to chatter in trains, planes, and automobiles about all the problems that exist.

I’ve been interested in different approaches to software development going back to 1987 when – in my first company Feld Technologies – my partner Dave Jilk and I started talking about “semi-custom software development” (way ahead of its time). During the same period (1987 – 1990) and I did some work at MIT under Eric von Hippel on “user driven innovation with regard to software development” which today would probably fall under the heading of “open source software development approaches.”

I hope you are enjoying the TechStars video series as much as I am. This week’s video – Episode 8: Your Best Friend is a special one. Early on Jeffrey Kalmikoff of Threadless has a great line which is “give me your pitch, but give it to me as if you are giving it to your best friend.” I’ve gotten to know Jeffrey over the past year and I think he’s as brilliant as this line is, although you need to think about it for a few minutes to really understand it.

Everyone remembers their first “X”. Last Thursday, I spent the day in Cambridge at the TechStars Boston office. It’s in Central Square, just down the block from where I lived for four years while at MIT (351 Mass Ave) and around the corner from my first office (875 Main Street). Feld Technologies very first address was 7310 Hillwood Lane, Dallas, TX 75248 (the house I grew up in). At some point the address changed to 351 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139 (my frat). I wonder how many other companies used that address at one point or another. In 1987, my first real business partner Dave Jilk joined me and we decided we needed an office. Somehow we ended up at 875 Main Street, directly behind our fraternity. 

I spent last Thursday at TechStars Boston meeting with all of the TechStars Boston 2009 teams. They’ve all made a ton of progress since I met with them a month ago and many of them are shaping up really nicely. A few of them are starting to be more public about what they are up to. One of them – Sensobi – is ready to roll. I’m not a BlackBerry user (I use an iPhone), but when I fiddled around with their app on a BlackBerry a month ago I totally got it. BlackBerryCool calls it an “enterprise-grade address book.”

The book I read tonight – Computing in the Middle Ages: A View From the Trenches 1955-1983 by Severo Ornstein – stood out in stark contrast to the book I read yesterday – The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich. Both were great (my review of Mezrich’s book is in the post Mastering A Genre – Book: The Accidental Billionaires). Both were about key moments in the creation of revolution computing technology. Both were quick, fascinating, and engrossing reads for anyone who likes interesting stories about people behind seminal computing innovation.

Yesterday afternoon I read Ben Mezrich’s latest book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal. I downloaded it on my Kindle yesterday after hanging out with Howard Morgan of First Round Capital. We are both voracious readers and – after the question “what’s on your Kindle right now” – I realized I’d forgotten to grab it. I gobbled it down while recovering from my run, hanging out with Amy, chilling out after an intense week, and getting ready for my partner Jason’s birthday party.

My friends at Zynga just put up a short video on the YouTube Zynga channel titled Inside Zynga which is an intro to their company. I’ve never been involved in anything like Zynga – Mark Pincus and his team have created an amazing company. They continue to add people to the team at an incredible rate. If you are in the bay area and interesting in joining one of the fastest growing Internet companies on the planet, give them a shout.

When I ran my first marathon in 1983, I remember carefully filling out all the information on my race number so that when I crossed the finish line the race organizers could actually figure out my time and place. I can’t remember, but I don’t think any computers were involved; I believe it was entirely a manual process. Maybe there was an Apple II and a copy of Visicalc or dBase II somewhere behind the scenes, but I doubt it.