Yet again an article in the New York Times bemoaning the demise of venture capital – this one is titled Maybe We Should Call Them Venture Pessimists. *“*Optimism is in short supply”, “the quarterly Silicon Valley Venture Capital Confidence Index has reached its fifth consecutive quarterly low”, “there is understandable concern over the pressures on the VC business model”, and “the venture community should expect substantial structural changes to occur” are some of the snippets.

Howard Lindzon produced 4 minutes of fucking poetry. Episode #2 of the Fly. I’m not even sure I can spell all of those words. Hilarious. Remember – turn off the TV – especially CNBC, MSNBC, and CNN. They aren’t doing you, your brain, or your soul any good unless Paul Kedrosky is on and is ranting about something. Paul – when are you going to start your own Youtube channel?

One of the really fun things about working with Eric Norlin, the creator of Defrag and Glue, is watching how he evolves the agenda from a conference from idea to reality. It’s a very fluid process that Eric handles masterfully. Eric’s post The Glue agenda starts to get sticky summarizes some of the latest highlights on the ever evolving agenda. The headliner: Mitch Kapor is going to be giving the keynote on Wednesday, May 13th. 

I’m been fighting through one of the worst colds I’ve ever had. I started feeling crummy on Friday, spent the entire weekend in bed, suffered through work on Monday, and had the entire experience crest with the worst headache and one of the longest pain filed and sleepless night ever. I finally am feeling better today, but man that was a nasty 27 headed viral monster. I’ve never been a fan of handshakes. While I get the formality of it, I hate germs and – in a parallel universe – would probably spend all my time with my extremities wrapped in saran wrap. I’ve had a running joke of it with some friends, including Paul Kedrosky, who also thinks handshakes are stupid.

In 2006 I ran the Boston Marathon as a Charity Runner for The Michael Lisnow Respite Center. I had a tremendous Experience At The Boston Marathon even though I got a nasty email from someone a few days before that was a Major Emotional Bummer for me. I learned plenty from processing the entire experience (good and bad) and wouldn’t trade it for anything. A year ago I adopted Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis as one of my official 50×50 marathon sponsors. They are a great nonprofit based in Boston that is working to cure MS by determining its causes. It turns out that they have some extra Boston Marathon charity passes this year. They asked me if I wanted to run Boston again but since I’m still focused on one marathon in each state, I passed on this year’s race. 

My monthly column in Entrepreneur Magazine is up (and on the newsstands). This month’s article is titled VC or Angel Money? and has some suggestions for how to think about whether you should be approaching VC’s or Angel’s when raising a round of financing.

I’ve been involved in helping start a number of non-profits. One of them – National Center for Women & Information Technology – has surpassed my wildest expectations. Lucy Sanders and her team have done an awesome job of building a coalition of over 170 prominent corporations, academic institutions, government agencies, and nonprofits working to improve U.S. innovation, competitiveness, and workforce sustainability by increasing women’s participation in IT. I’ve been chairman of NCWIT since its early days. As with most of the non-profits I’ve been involved in helping start, the board of directors evolves over time. Unlike for-profit companies, each stage feels like a step function as you add new board members who bring a new set of capabilities, range, and diversity to the board.

Boulder AWS Anonymous held its first meeting last week, and there were eleven attendees despite the fact that the meeting had been inadvertently scheduled at the same time as Obama’s inauguration. Attendees represented a wide variety of uses and potential uses of Amazon Web Services, ranging from hosting popular websites and application development to load balancing, autoscaling, and internet telephony. The group is encouraging anyone in the area interested in getting updates to join their Google Group and/or to attend the next meeting at The Cup, 1521 Pearl St, at 10:00 am on Wednesday February 18.

Today’s Washington Post article titled Staff Finds White House in the Technological Dark Ages was no big surprise. However, while I was taking a shower (in a hotel in the Houston suburbs of all places) it occurred to me that this presents an incredible marketing opportunity for Apple. If I were king of Apple (or say, a board member with deep White House ties), I’d be on the phone with “the appropriate person” with the offer of “a Mac on every desk in the White House along with an iPhone for every White House staffer.” I’m sure there is some law that prevents Apple from giving this away from free so I’d offer it “at cost” just to Mac-enable the White House.