On Wednesday, November 12th Silicon Flatirons is hosting a panel discussion titled Crash Course – Growing a Startup Amid Uncertain Economic Times*.* The discussion will be held at Room 204 in the Wolf Law Building on the CU Boulder campus from 5:15pm to 6:45pm. My partner Jason Mendelson will be speaking along with Ken Fugate of Square 1 Bank and Jim Cowgill of EKS&H. Brad Bernthal, Brad Bernthal, Associate Clinical Professor and Silicon Flatirons’ Director of Entrepreneurship Initiatives, will be moderating.

I’ve made a large number of mistakes in my life. My goal when I make a mistake is to understand what I did wrong, learn from it, pick myself up, and move forward. When I’ve made the same mistake for the third time, I usually finally figure out what I’m doing wrong. While I’ve also had plenty of success, I never get confused about where most of my lessons come from. In case this is ever ambiguous from my writing, I learn the vast majority of my lessons from my failures. I also have learned what I don’t know, and have figured out that I shouldn’t venture into areas where I’m clueless unless I am willing to spend a lot of time up front researching them – at least to the point where I’m no longer completely clueless.

On the heals of a really awesome Defrag conference, many of the companies I’m an investor in are plowing ahead aggressively regardless of the rumors and innuendo about technology entrepreneurship. I’ve got a post in me titled “The Four Types of Companies” – look for that soon to help explain how I categorize venture-backed startups in the current environment and what I think they should be doing. Suffice it to say, the companies in this post are all in a happy place.

I love a good data visualization. A friend (thanks Rick) pointed me at this awesome site of different mapping permutations based on the 2008 election results. For example – election results based on a population cartogram. Lots more on the site – check it out. Thanks Rick!

The amount of mailing list spam I’ve been getting has been steadily increasing with a huge jump in the last few months. I was perplexed by it – this isn’t real spam (they are all opt-in mailing lists – many of which I recognize the associated organization.) However, I hadn’t opted-in to any of the lists! Some were political lists, some were technology lists, and some were random things. As the election got closer, the political ones increased. Today, as I was hitting delete over and over again I realized that I must have been on a seed list that got passed around between organizations. This is a pretty typical spam thing and gets 99.999% blocked by Postini (my anti-spam system), but until recently I hadn’t connected the dots on it from legitimate opt-in emails since I actually want to get the emails I’ve opted in to.

Fred Wilson has the best post I’ve read so far from the 700 of so feeds I follow on how he feels about the election. It’s titled Barack Hussein Obama, President of the United States. Fred – like me – decided a while ago to believe in Barack Obama and I’m sure he’s as happy as I am to see him elected president of the United States. Fred states clearly the six things he thinks we’ll get from an Obama administration. 

Today Gnip announced they have raised a $3.5m round that follows their seed financing . We invested along with our friends at First Round Capital and SoftTech VC. Gnip has made a ton of progress since we initially funded it at the beginning of the year. I wrote about the initial financing when Gnip launched in July in my post Gnip is Ping Spelled Backwards*.* Since they launched, the founders (Eric Marcoullier and Jud Valeski) have build a great technical and product oriented team, launched v2.0 of Gnip, have continued to make great progress on fleshing out the initial idea into a business, and have made some important decisions about their near term product roadmap.

David Cohen has a detailed post up describing the types of companies that should apply to be presenters at Venture Capital In The Rockies Winter 2009. VCIR is now in its 26th year and is the premier conference for startups in the Rocky Mountain region. If you think you fit the bill, drop an executive summary to submissions@vcintherockies.com.

I had dinner tonight at the Defrag pre-conference “Future of Email” gathering. It was a great crowd that included a bunch of smart people working on interesting email / communication / collaboration stuff. Around dessert, I got into a deeper conversation about features. We were talking about one of the greatest challenges of any software company – how to decide what features to leave out of the next release of your product. We immediately went deeper than the typical “do what your users say they want” paradigm as anyone that has sold software knows that there is a huge difference between “what your users say they want” and “what your users will pay you for”. This is especially challenging if you have a free, or freemium, model.