From April 30 to May 2, the 10th annual Nantucket Conference is happening on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts. I haven’t been to a Nantucket Conference, but I’ve heard of it and have considered going in the past. This year Scott Kirsner invited me to be on a panel and I happily accepted as I was already going to be in Boston for the TechStars Boston Mentor Dinner on April 30th before heading to Cincinnati to run the Flying Pig Marathon on May 3rd. 

F3EL7-T3YL2-MBN5P-ZQI6R-YE8PI Ever type that into a pop up box on your computer when installing software? If not, you’ve never installed anything from Microsoft (or many other companies) – at least not legally. This morning I was copied on an email from my partner Ryan McIntyre to a company we are talking to about funding that said: “I use Pro Tools and other pro audio software regularly and since the SW is quite expensive, the SW vendors go to great lengths to use copy-protection, and most audio plugins and applications (and there are dozens) have some sort of authorization code scheme, ranging from friendly to downright byzantine. It drives me nuts, but my constant exposure to it means I’ve formed some opinions about what is “easy” when it comes to entering authorization codes. The easiest plug-ins (authorization-wise) in the audio world use alphabetical codes broken up into strings of words, so instead of the longs strings of numbers, you get long strings of words, which are much easier for a human to enter without a mistake. A couple code examples might be: HOUSE-BIRD-TRUCK-DRUM FLINT-TRUE-SWORD-CALL You get the idea. I’m assuming third-part auth-gen packages must exist to generate codes like these that give you a big enough address space yet also make guessing authorizations relatively difficult. And that you could relatively easily change your process at the manufacturer for associating MAC addresses with device IDs.”

I’m psyched that my friends at Spark Capital have launched Start@Spark, their new seed program. In their post Why are we doing this? they explain: “So, this must be a terrible time to fund a start-up company. Correct? Au contraire. This may be the best time in the last 8 years to start a company. While capital is scarce, the tectonic plates continue to shift creating major rifts. The walls are coming down and the barriers to entering new markets are falling along-side.

I was in a board meeting yesterday with a company planning a major commercial release of their product “at the end of summer”. We managed to turn this into 8/31/09 at 11:59:59pm pacific time (since I don’t believe you can release something unless there is a time/date stamp associated with it.) As part of this discussion, we spent some time discussing the notion of a daily / weekly / monthly rhythm for both the CEO/CTO as well as the product team.

Wilson Sonsini puts out a quarterly Entrepreneurs Report. The Winter 2008 issues is titled Private Company Financing Trends*.* They asked me if I’d contribute an article around the topic of hints for pitching VC’s so I wrote an extended version of Perfecting Your Pitch. The other articles in the Winter 2008 Entrepreneurs Report include: How Do I Get Meetings with Investors? By Babak Nivi and Naval Ravikant, Venture Hacks Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists’ Confidence Declines to Lowest Level in Five Years By Mark Cannice, Ph.D., University of San Francisco From the WSGR Database: Financing Trends Outsourcing: A Tool for Survival Avoiding Trouble: Provisions in Previous Employment Documents that Every Start-Up Company Founder Needs to Know Recently, I’ve been fielding a lot more requests to write for publications as well as for permission to resyndicate content from Feld Thoughts and Ask the VC (e.g. the republishing of this content on the MIT Technology Review’s Blogs page.) As I come up on the fifth anniversary of writing this blog, I’m finding myself intrigued by the dynamics of how user generated content has evolved.

In February, I did a “Beers and Boulder with Brad” event in Seattle. Local Seattle-based entrepreneurs Dave Schappell of TeachStreet and T.A. McCann of Gist put the event together and I was blown away by the response. Several hundred people showed up; I had a great evening of talking about entrepreneurship, local entrepreneurial communities, and the dynamics of startups. I also got to hang out for a few hours with a ton of Seattle entrepreneurs who looked like they were having as much fun as me.

There has been a lot of activity around entrepreneurship at CU Boulder lately, especially in computer science and engineering. This is encouraging to me as I believe that a strong culture of entrepreneurship at “your local university” is important to the long term health of any entrepreneurial ecosystem. TechStars recently coordinated with CU Boulder to create five summer internships. Each of these internships will enable a CU Boulder student to work as a software engineer at TechStars for the summer. The overall dynamics are:

I’m really enjoying writing my print column for Entrepreneur Magazine. It’s a different kind of writing than my blogging and exercises different mental muscles. This month’s article A VC’s Biggest Flaw: Arrogance is out (both on the newsstands and the web). Amy told me this is her favorite one so far as it includes a number of people she’s met: Mr. Know-It-All and several of his cousins. I hope you enjoy reading the articles as much as I enjoy writing them.

I usually sleep in on Sunday’s but I’ve got a 16 mile run and want to meet Amy at the end of it at 10:30 for brunch. So – good morning 5am and my normal daily reading routine. I ran across a lot of intriguing stuff this morning that I thought I’d share with you. I encourage you to trade your TV watching time for a handful of clicks. Will Google’s Purity Pay Off? If you have engaged in the “yes Twitter is cool, but how will it make money” conversation I encourage you to read this BusinessWeek article from Pearl Harbor Day in 2000. And I quote: “LIMITED BUSINESS. But how will Google ever make money? There’s the rub. The company’s adamant refusal to use banner or other graphical ads eliminates what is the most lucrative income stream for rival search engines. “