As I was going through my morning information routine, I noticed a number of articles that I’d put in the “how to not fail” bucket. I read a few of these and noticed a consistent tone of “failure is bad – here’s how to avoid it.” Throughout my life and career I’ve failed at many things, large and small. I view failure as a fundamental part of every entrepreneurial endeavor, whether it’s a failed project, hire, partnership, relationship, lead, customer, or even the entire business. One of the great things about entrepreneurship in America is that failure is an accepted part of the cycle.

I’ve watched (and participated) with excitement as Rally Software has helped move the notion of agile software development into the mainstream over the past few years. In addition to having the leading Agile application lifecycle management solutions, they are tireless educators and evangelizers for all things Agile. Today, over 1500 companies are doing over 33,000 projects using Rally’s SaaS-based ALM software. Rally has just announced their Agile Success Tours. The first one is in Denver on 3/18/09 followed by similar events in LA on 3/26/09 and New York City on 4/02/09. They are free, but you have to register for them.

I had a call this morning with a CEO of a young company I’m on the board of. They are well funded so they have plenty of urgency, but no panic, around what they are doing. During the conversation, he asked what he could do to increase the board member’s visibility of the progress they are making. I told him to start sending out “daily data”. There is a lot of data flowing through their system and there are several different dimensions of growth that are easy to measure. Rather than hand collecting stuff, I encouraged him to automate all of this right now, while the company is young. It can be web-based data (which I’d just toss in my daily information routine) or better yet emailed to me so it shows up with other reports like this in my daily folder.

As I read the Berkshire Hathaway 2008 Annual Report, a thought kept popping into my mind that had also come up over and over again while reading Bogle’s Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life. “Be an investor, not a speculator.” As a venture capital investor, I have a long term time horizon on my investments. Since I’m investing very early in the life of a company, I’m usually an investor for five or more years. Sometimes I’m an investor for over ten years. I’m rarely an investor for less than a year, although it happens occasionally.

I find trail running to be a magical experience. I live behind Eldorado Canyon State Park just outside of Boulder and have a plethora of trail runs that I can start and finish at my house such as Eldorado Canyon Trail, Walker Ranch, Rattlesnake Gulch, Fowler Trail, Dowdy Draw, Mesa Trail (and all the branches), and South Boulder Creek Trail. I’ve run them all – many times – in many different permutations. Since Amy and I own a lot of property that is adjacent to Colorado State Park land and Boulder Open Space, I’m very respectful of staying on the trails as it makes me crazy whenever someone comes off of the Eldorado Canyon Trail or Rattlesnake onto our land.

Congrats to all my friends at Kerpoof – it was announced a few weeks ago that Kerpoof was acquired by Disney. Krista Marks – the CEO and co-founder – emailed me the Kerpoof mouse ears photo which inspired me to blog about them. It’s another great example of a local Boulder software / Internet company that had a passion, made something happen, and had a great exit. I met Krista and her co-founders at a CSIA event and then again while they were gearing up for the 2007 TechCrunch 40. I gave them feedback on their presentation, started playing around with Kerpoof, and decided that Krista was a star. They weren’t raising money at the time (they were self funded through consulting work they were doing while building out their service) so I gave them feedback whenever they asked and stayed close to them. I encouraged Krista to have Kerpoof join the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado – which they did.

When I was on vacation last week, I read John Bogle’s book Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life. In addition to be a superb book, it had a bunch of tasty little nuggets in it. One of my favorites was “the three i’s – innovator, imitator, and idiot” that was attributed to Warren Buffett. I thought of this nugget this morning when reading Fred Wilson’s post When Government Funds Business. In it, he concludes “When government funds business, it messes everything up.” One of his examples is the delicious irony that Citi – which just got more government money – is running traditional print ads in the NY Times.

I love my dogs. I have two giant golden retrievers – Kenai and Brooks. Dogster (where I’m an investor) recently launched a new Together Tag pet ID service in partnership with the American Red Cross. It’s a comprehensive and well thought out service that goes beyond things like microchipping your pet. It’s inexpensive – only a $24.95 one time fee for your pet. As part of this, Dogster contributes $5 of the fee to the American Red Cross to help support pet safety programs. I just got one for each of Kenai and Brooks – the signup process was trivial and took less than five minutes.

In case you don’t get enough of me, you can now download the Brad Feld iPhone app. Or – from your iPhone – just do an App Store search on Brad Feld. As a result of the Brad Feld iPhone app you can easily get the blogs from Feld Thoughts, Ask the VC, Foundry Group, Amy Batchelor, and Stan Feld all in one nifty app on your iPhone. While my ego is satiated, at least for a few days, the really cool thing to me is how this came together. When the iPhone first came out, Brent Simmons created an iPhone version of NetNewsWire which was dynamite. He iterated quickly on this and realized that it could be the core of an iPhone app business built on top of the NewsGator / NetNewsWire framework. This has resulted in a new product for NewsGator – the NewsGator iPhone App Framework.