The web (and the universe) is an amazing place. My sister-in-law Laura turned me on NASA’s “Astronomy Picture of the Day” website. I bookmarked it and put it in my Daily folder so I get a cool new picture from NASA every day. While the web site has that late 1990’s look and feel, the pictures are stunning.

Episode 4 of The Founders: TechStars Boulder is up on the web. This week’s episode includes a special guest appearance from Greg Cohn at Yahoo, a poker party with KKO, thoughts on why startups play poker while big companies play chess, and a bunch of other good stuff. The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 4 “Skills & Persistence” from Andrew on Vimeo.

I’m sitting in the early dawn light in a cabin in Tabernash, Colorado drinking a cup of coffee and getting ready to go for a run in the mountains. I’ve just spent the last 18 hours with my Foundry Group partners at our quarterly retreat. This is an approximately 24 hour affair that includes staying overnight somewhere in Colorado within driving distance of Boulder. We’ve been doing this quarterly since we conceived of the idea for Foundry Group.

Last night I sent the Puttermans (the co-founders of Cloud Engines – the makers of Pogoplug) a note with a few ideas about features I’d like to see in the product. Included were requests for drop-dead simple integration with a few other products that I use including Sonos, Boxee, and AppleTV. As investors in Pogoplug, I’m an aggressive lead user and unapologetic fan boy – it’s just an incredible product with insane potential (how about them adjectives, eh?)

I have three major hobbies – reading, running, and collecting art. On my run today, I realized that I occasionally blog about reading and running, but I rarely blog about art. I’m pretty sure this idea got lodged in my head yesterday while Amy and I were looking around the web for a new piece to “buy each other” as our anniversary gift. While looking, we stumbled upon this incredible painting from Don Coen titled Prairie Rattler.

I had a great week last week. Most of the companies I’m an investor in are doing well and are having strong Q2s. A few, like Zynga, are absolutely killing it (see the Zynga video on CBS News titled SF-Based Startup Thriving, Hiring In Down Economy*.)* As one might expect, I’ve got a few companies that are struggling, but that’s the nature of the beast and I’m really proud of all the folks in those companies as they work their butts off to get to a happy place.

Episode 3 of The Founders: TechStars Boulder is up on the web. This week’s episode includes special guest Dave Morin from Facebook.

I’ve been an Internet email user since early 1984 when I got my first Project Athena account as an undergraduate at MIT. Notwithstanding all the “email is dead” messages over the years, I continue to use email as my primary online communication mechanism. There are an enormous number of things that frustrate me about email, most notably the lack of fundamental innovation in email clients and servers. That said, as a messaging tool – it still dominates for me.

I love data. And I adore playing with it graphically, as I learn a lot from graphing longitudinal data about things I’m involved in. However, I find that almost all of the web services I use suck at providing visualization / graphing tools for their data. For example, I’ve never really found any of the graphing options in any of the running software I use satisfying or useful. I’ve known about Tableau Software for a long time. The CEO and founder is Christian Chabot – we worked together at Softbank Venture Capital. Tableau has built a significant software company and when Christian called me up to ask if they could play around with some of my running data as part of their launch of their new web-based services, I agreed.