“There is a category of people that do stuff and a category of people that stuff gets done to.” The following short video is from the end of the event I did a few weeks in Seattle that was summarized nicely by Xconomy Seattle in Greg Huang’s post VC Model Is Not Broken: Insights from Brad Feld of TechStars and Foundry Group. Brad Feld – cofounder of Tech Stars – “Do Stuff!” from Seattle20 on Vimeo.

I love numbers. I was thinking about numbers and dates on my run yesterday. Here’s a few fun ones for you. 101010 – On 10/10/2010 the answer the life, the universe, and everything will be revealed. 030309 – Isn’t it fun to have square root day be “prime square root day”? How many of them are there in the 21st century? How about 02/02/04, 03/03/09, 05/05/25, 07/07/49. That would be five. So there are a prime number of prime square root days.

I’m going to be at SXSW from 3/17 to 3/19. At 1pm on 3/17 at Mezzanine 1 at the Austin Convention Center I’ll be giving a talk titled What’s Next For Venture Capital Investing and Entrepreneurship in the US. It’s being hosted by CanadaConnects, a partnership of the Canadian Interactive Alliance, the Department of Canadian Heritage, and the Consulate General of Canada. If you are interested in attending, drop Michael Mendoza an email.

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.