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. “

Wow – Operating System Interface Design Between 1981-2009 is awesome (thanks Dave). It is a screenshot from every major graphical OS since the Xerox Alto. Some old favorites of mine include the Apple Lisa (1983), the Amiga Workbench (1985), Geos (1986), NeXTSTEP (1989), and OS/2 2.0 (1992). At some point in time I had a computer that ran these and/or installed them on a computer of mine.

I caught the tail end of SXSWi (showed up yesterday and gave a speech sponsored by the Canadian Consulate) and am hanging around today for some night time music entertainment as the music part of SXSW. It’s pretty cool to watch Austin shift from “nerds” (the SXSWi gang) to “hipsters” (the SXSW music gang); while the music scene is not my thing (I’m a nerd), it’s highly entertaining to observe this species in action.

If you have been thinking about applying to TechStars for either the Summer 2009 program in either Boulder or Boston, now is the time to do it as the application deadline is Saturday, March 21, 2009 at 11:59:59 PM MDT. In my first company (Feld Technologies), when we set deadlines we started out with days of the week (e.g. Wednesday). In the late 1980’s, this meant “sometime before Thursday morning when people start showing up at work.” So – we tightened it up and put a date on it (e.g. Wednesday 3/18). This was supposed to mean “by the end of the day” but inevitably meant 11:59:59 PM. So – we started putting date and time stamps on deadlines. I continue that practice to this day.