If you watch Lost and are current, you know that the “Variable” is extremely important. As Daniel Faraday says, “we spend way too much time trying to figure out the constants – we need to pay more attention to the variables.” On Saturday I was at the Nantucket Conference (the 10th one.) I did not have a great time getting there (note to self – you get seasick even on the high speed boat thing) but I had a great time hanging out, participating (I was on the VC panel), seeing a bunch of people I hadn’t seen for a while, and meeting some new ones.

I’m a big believer in super powers. Each human has at least one super power even if they haven’t discovered it yet. I fly on planes a lot. While I’m looking forward to my own personal teleportation machine and that damn jetpack that I was promised in my childhood, I survive all the travel I do because of my airplane super power. I can go to sleep immediately upon sitting down in my seat and sleep until the plane begins its final descent, regardless of the length of the flight.

The videos from my talk in Vancouver last week are up on the Bootup Labs Entrepreneurial Society web site. They are embedded below – the first one talks about entrepreneurial communities and the second talks about the dynamics between VCs and entrepreneurs. There’s also a throwaway line about my mom, a reference to the smell hanging over Boulder on 4/20, and the last vestiges of my voice before it departed me for a week. Enjoy.

Last night at the TechStars Boulder Mentor dinner I got into a conversation about what makes a better CEO of a new startup – an experienced entrepreneur who’s last company was a failure or a big company executive with a stellar pedigree who has never worked in a startup. Give me the experienced entrepreneur whose last company was a failure 100% of the time. The cliche “you learn more from failure than success holds true”, but more importantly the dude that just came off a failure and is ready to go again is super-extraordinary-amazingly hungry for a success. It doesn’t matter how much money he’s made in his past companies – once he decides to go for it again he’s going to be ready to crush it.

Eric Norlin has a great post up this morning titled A conference is about community*.* In it, he describes clearly the difference between a conference and a trade show, what makes a great conference, and what you’ll get at a great conference. Having been involved in Defrag since it was a germ of an idea and now watching Eric put together the first Glue Conference, he knows of what he speaks. I won’t try to summarize – go read the post (it’ll take you two minutes.) 

After Bill Ritter was elected governor of Colorado in 2006, I was asked to be a member of the IT transition team. We had about a month to review the current state of affairs with regard to broadband, the Colorado IT structure and strategy, and to recommend a CIO candidate. I’d never been on a transition team before so I found it to be an interesting experience. I don’t remember the number of transition teams (I have the number 16 in my head) – they were all busy trying to collect, assimilate, and understand what existed, put together clear recommendations that the new Governor and his staff could build on, while trying to separate a bunch of signal from noise of the outgoing administration.

My friends at Foodzie (TechStars 2008) and Brightkite (TechStars 2007) were both recently named Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2009. There are a bunch of neat links up on the Businessweek.com site: Foodzie Overview Brightkite Overview Foodies Will Welcome Foodzie article Foodzie video Congrats guys. You make me (and everyone at TechStars) proud! We’ll be sure to roast y’all at the TechStars Boulder Mentor dinner tonight.

I stayed at my parents’ house in Dallas on Tuesday night. My mom has been going through a “clean all the shit out of the house” routine and keeps dumping piles of old stuff on me. This trip, I got my high school prom album and my bar mitzvah album. Following is my high school prom picture. My partner Seth just informed me that my fundamental essence hasn’t changed since I was 17. There’s 40 pounds more of it, but at my core I’m pretty much the same.

I did another Beers with Brad event tonight in Vancouver. Danny Robinson and Boris Mann of Bootup Labs pulled it together with some help from their friends and a few sponsors. 150 people showed up to talk about early stage entrepreneurship. For these events, I have a few themes to riff on around entrepreneurship (e.g. entrepreneurial communities, the role of venture capital, and leadership) that are set in my head. Rather than do a presentation, I just get up and talk for 15 to 30 minutes and then do Q&A until everyone is done. I deliberately don’t have a prepared stump speech and what I say varies with each event, but the themes are consistent. I like to just talk off the top of my head because – in addition to requiring zero preparation time – I’ve always felt that overly prepared talks around entrepreneurship are missing the point. Entrepreneurship is messy; if the talk is too tidy, then it’s incongruent with what is being talked about.