I just read Howard Lindzon’s book The Wallstrip Edge: Using Trends to Make Money — Find Them, Ride Them, and Get Off. It’s a really fun book – 200 pages of the inside of Howard’s brain. There are so many things about Howard that I love including: He is totally hilarious He created Wallstrip, which was a successful investment for me (and him) He understands how and when to use the word fuck He twitters endlessly about his twittering (and stocks – especially Stocktwits, which he helped create) Whenever I spend any time with Howard, I laugh at least once ever five minutes He has this funny Canadian accent that is crossed with a weird Arizona semi-drawl spoken at a New Yorkers pace He’s been a hugely helpful TechStars Mentor He’s a self-proclaimed putz – and proud of it He wrote about me in his book and was very flattering He has a giant party in the spring called LindzonPalooza and schedules it on a weekend that I can never come His blog is dynamite I could keep going but you get the point. If your path hasn’t intersected with Howard, you are missing out. Howard will engage in a conversation with pretty much anyone, including my dad, so go for it. And grab his book – it’ll give you a fresh perspective on public (and private) market investing.

I spent last Sunday at CU Boulder at the Silicon Flatirons Digital Broadband Migration: Imagining the Internet’s Future conference*.* Not surprisingly it was an interesting day where early on, surrounded by lawyers, public policy people, academics, and telco executives, I realized I existed in a parallel universe to them. For example, when I asked who used twitter, less than five hands went up in a room of 250+ people. Phil Weiser, the major domo of Silicon Flatirons, has a great post up summarizing the conference. If you are curious, go take a look at From Imagining The Internet’s Future To Examining The Internet Ecosystem*.*

Gnip has completed the latest version of their schema and is now about to embark on a campaign to integrate at least 100 services by mid year. They’ve decided that rather than simply choosing them by themselves, they’d crowd source the process. There are currently over 350 web services in consideration with more being added every day. You can vote on which ones you’d like to see integrated by going to https://gnip.uservoice.com.  This will be a dynamic process with Gnip tagging the web services that are either in process or completed.

Among other things, my wife Amy is a writer and a poet. I love it when she writes, especially when she chooses some sort of structural framework for what she writes. This year she decided to write a series of posts using the alphabet as a guide. She started off with the first post titled The Year of Living Alphabetically where she describes what she is doing. “I had a new idea this past week about structure that I’m hereby officially announcing I’m going to implement this year. I’ve done lots of reading about goals (rather than work toward actually achieving mine?) and one of the consistent tips is to make public announcements and create accountability to others and enlist their support in your efforts. So, my new idea is this: I’m going to use the 26 letters of the alphabet to create a weekly theme based on each letter, cycling through the alphabet twice in a 52 week year.“

I love everything about french fries. And – much to my delight – Spud Bros. at 2010 10th Street in Boulder is the purveyor of possibly the best french fries on the planet. They are even poets, having written a poem titled Ode to Spuds. When I get my first no from Brad I can count on French fries to take away the sad When I can’t get tickets to Boulder Ignite I go to Spud Bros. to get a bite. Built up an appetite going up Sanitas for a hike Coming down for some Chili Fries I like When I’m in need of some WiFi I know where to go for the Internet and a Fry After a night out on the town I head to Spud Bros. Where everybody knows your name and they’re always glad you came.

If you are in Seattle and interested in startups, entrepreneurship, venture capital, or TechStars, I’ll be in Seattle having a party with up to around 150 people to talk about these topics. T.A. McCann of Gist and Dave Schappell of TeachStreet have pulled this together – we’ll be doing it on Wednesday February 25th from 6pm to 8:30pm at the Palace Ballroom at 2100 5th Avenue in Seattle. I’m going to spend the evening talking about my views on entrepreneurship, especially around early stage companies in today’s environment. I’ll provide a detailed view of TechStars and how/why it’s been working, along with an explanation about how I think about early stage VC investing. The evening with be heavily Q&A oriented – I’m open to any questions about anything.

My partner Jason Mendelson – who is also my co-conspirator in writing the blog AsktheVC – is having an open session called Crash Course – Raising Venture Capital*.* It’s part of the Silicon Flatirons program and is happening on February 24th from 5:15pm to 6:45pm in Room 204 at the Wolf Law Building. Jason says he’s going to cover: Everything from what makes VCs tick, who are our bosses, what are things that you can do to improve your chances of receiving funding and things that many VCs don’t want to talk about. No question is off limits and I hope that it will be a very interactive forum. Consider this to be a live version of Ask The VC.

On Monday, StillSecure announced that it has acquired ProtectPoint. ProtectPoint is a managed security service provider (MSSP) and immediately adds a portfolio of managed security products to StillSecure’s award-winning product arsenal. Alan Shimel, the Chief Strategy Officer of StillSecure, does an excellent job of explaining the reasons for the acquisition in his post titled StillSecure acquires ProtectPoint, entering the MSSP market – Why? This is the second time in less than a month that a company I’m on the board of has made an acquisition. At the end of January, in my post titled Rally Software is a Buyer I wrote:

Ever since David Cohen started TechStars, I’ve encouraged him to “open source” everything. We regularly get approached by people all over the world to talk about the program. We do – we tell them everything about what we do, how we do it, and why we do it. We share our documents with them. We try to help and support them. We regularly get asked for the documents we use for doing early stage financings. I personally believe these documents should be able to be done on a single piece of paper and sealed with a handshake (or more preferably, a fist bump), but I’m generally alone in that view. So, we’ve worked closely with Cooley Godward Kronish, LLP (and specifically Mike Platt, who has been my go to lawyer and a close friend since I moved to Boulder in 1995) to put together a set of “Model Seed Funding Documents” that anyone can use.