I’ve always loved computer games. My Apple II screen had burn marks in it from Olympic Decathlon, Choplifter, Castle Wolfenstein, and Ultima. Recently, I’ve become addicted to several of Zynga’s games online, especially Mafia Wars (I’m level 52 – friend me on Facebook and join my Mafia) and Scramble (I think I’m better than I actually am so it’s endlessly frustrating.) Zynga’s been cranking on their iPhone apps so most of my Scramble action is now on the iPhone. However, last night Zynga released Mafia Wars on the iPhone and it has immediately moved to third place on my “things to do on my iPhone other than email and call Amy.”

I’m having a blast working with Mark Pincus on Zynga, his latest creation. Mark embodies so many things to love about an entrepreneur, including relentless energy and an endless drive to move his business forward. So, it was with glee that I found out that Ali, Mark’s new wife (still less than a year) was working on her own startup. I figured it was good newlywed payback for Mark as he’d now have to split the “complain to spouse about pressures of creating a company” 50/50 with Ali.

My friends at Highway 12 Ventures have started a blog. The gang at Highway 12 is based in Boise, ID and has built a very interesting portfolio throughout the Rocky Mountain region. Plus they are great guys. Fortunately they put Lijit on their blog for search so I didn’t have to badger them about into using it and it made it easy for me to add them to the brand spanking new Venture Capital Bloggers Network powered by Lijit.

At Foundry Group, while we live and office in Boulder, Colorado, we invest all over the United States. In the last 18 months, we’ve invested in companies based in Seattle, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Colorado. My partners and I are regularly exploring new entrepreneurial communities, thinking about what makes them unique, and trying to figure out what makes them sustainable over the long term. Last week, Jason took a trip to Ann Arbor, Michigan – the home of his alma mater. He spent a couple of days talking to folks throughout the university and the community about entrepreneurship. He summarized his trip in his post titled Entrepreneurship in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Mark Maynard of the University of Michigan TTO wrote a comprehensive post on Jason’s talk titled Building an Entrepreneurial Community: Lessons from Boulder, CO.

Q109 is over. The numbers are starting to roll in. After all the gloom and doom at the end of 2008, I’m very pleased with the performance of most of the companies in our portfolio. As I mentioned the other day, some struggled, but many met or exceeded their Q109 plans, and several of them destroyed them (sandbaggers, how I love thee.) There is nothing easy about operating a young company in any environment. It’s especially difficult in a downturn (or a recession, or whatever you want to call this.) If you haven’t managed to turn off TV news, stop reading the newspaper, and are still listening to NPR instead of the XM Chill station in the morning, you are likely continuing to get whipped around emotionally. So are the people in your company that are listening to all this crap every day.

One of the neat things about business is that it runs in cycles. I’ve been involved in the software business since 1985 when I started my first company. Since then, I’ve seen numerous cycles with a wide range of amplitudes. I don’t try to time any of the cycles, the peaks, or the troughs; rather I just invest and work hard all the way through each of the cycles. Given the negative sentiment across many parts of the business universe (e.g. the NY Times headline this morning Jobless Rate Hits 8.5%; 663,000 Jobs Lost), I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the Q1 performance of many of the companies I’m an investor in. Several had record quarters, most made or beat their Q1 plan (obviously the easiest plan of the year to make since it’s usually baked near the beginning of the quarter), and a couple had extraordinary growth that surprised everyone. Some struggled, but when I look at the overall distribution of behavior across our entire portfolio, it was kind of what you’d expect from a typical economic environment versus one that is either distressed or bubbly.

Today, my partner Seth Levine, Eric Norlin, and I cooked up the idea to Pitch Brad and Seth at Glue. If you are an entrepreneur working in the area we define as Glue we’d love to spend some time with you at the Glue Conference. Here are the rules according to Eric: Register for Glue. (use “pitch1″ to take $100 off of the price.) Shoot me [enorlin AT mac.com] (or Brad) a paragraph describing what you wanna pitch. Brad and Seth will pick 6 startups. Your pitch will be 5 minutes (in a room with just them; no “big stage” pressure), and 5 minutes of honest feedback. If you register and don’t get picked, fear not — the guys have vowed to make themselves uber-available during Glue (for a hallway pitch). If you aren’t aware of the history of the Glue Conference and the Defrag Conference, they both came out of our desire at Foundry Group to participate in focused conferences around themes that we are currently investing in (Defrag emerged from the Implicit Web theme; Glue emerged from Glue theme.) We couldn’t find any conferences like this so we decided to try to create them. We got lucky and found Eric Norlin (or – more accurately – he found us) and he has turned out to be a master at putting these types of conferences together.

Eric Norlin, producer of the Defrag and Glue conferences, has a phenomenal rant up today titled An Open Letter to Technology Startup Marketers*.* We had an email exchange the other day about how self-limiting the phrase “I’m being cautious” is. I put it in the category of “I don’t want to think so I’m just going to defer any decision and judgment, which I’ll rationalize as being cautious rather than passive.”

I met with an entrepreneur yesterday that I hadn’t seen in a few years. I originally met with her about five years ago when she was starting her company. She’d been a very successful executive at a large company and had decided to jump into the entrepreneurial game and re-invent herself. Her business has grown nicely – and profitably – without having raised very much money. We mostly just caught up on how things have been going (we email back and forth periodically, but it had been a while since we had met in person.) After about ten minutes, she asked if she could tell me a story about the first time we met. Always game for a good story, I said sure. It goes something like this.