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.

I’ve been spending more talking in public recently. I always try to be accessible to entrepreneurs and spend time in interesting venues where I learn something, but I hate conferences. So it’s always a balancing act for me to participate, be “content”, but not use up 100% of my extrovert energy and end up hiding under a table somewhere trying to recover. Last week, I did the first of my podcast series with Phil Weiser. If you don’t know Phil, he’s a one of the most significant assets that CU Boulder has and has become a very close friend. He runs the Silicon Flatirons program, is a professor at the CU Law School, is driving a lot of entrepreneurial activity at CU, and is co-chairman with me of the Colorado Governor’s Innovation Council. Phil asked if I’d endure a long series of questions over a handful of interviews with him and I said yes, so he is publicly interviewing me on a variety of topics of his choosing, with questions he makes up and doesn’t tell me in advance. The first interview was titled “Feld on Finance” (I’m sure someone will enjoy the alliteration) – you can read the summary or listen to the podcast if you are interested.

On the eve of the passing of the massive “economic stimulus package” (I was really hoping it was going to be more than 1 trillion so Dr. Evil could start saying “1 trillion dollars”) we are hearing “broadband broadband broadband.” I’m going to be spending the day tomorrow at the Silicon Flatirons Conference titled The Digital Broadband Migration: Imagining the Internet’s Future and I’m speaking at 9:45 on the panel titled Overview Panel: The Internet’s Challenge to Policymakers. It’s clear that I’ve been set up as my co-panelists are:

There are so many reasons to love Valentine’s Day. My favorite is that on 2/14/09 the Unix Time will be 1234567890. This happens at exactly 00:31:30 CET. Yeah – it’s a little bit of a cheat since CET = GMT+1 and – correspondingly – it will still be 2/13/09 in the United States. Just another good reason to go to Paris for Valentine’s Day. (Thanks ScottM).