I didn’t come up with this idea – Om Malik did. But he’s absolutely right – Obama needs to look outside the beltway for many key positions, including FCC Chair. Tom Evslin is an absolute star in my book and as Om states: “Tom Evslin, who is a retired telecom executive, is the kind of person I would expect to be in the FCC. He knows the machinations of the big companies and at the same time is an Internet liberal who can keep broadband providers and their anti-consumer tricks under check.”

As I stall before I head out the door for an hour run in the cold, dark mountains outside my house, I thought I’d share some of the interesting stuff I read this morning with you. Forrester Chief on What Not to Cut in a Downturn: I mostly include this since it’s so entertainingly short and substance-free. It links to a post of George Colony’s blog titled Why this tech recession will be different which is still short, has a little more substance, but seems painfully obvious. Maybe people will cut their Forrester spending in the downtown (oh, cynical me.) I hope no one at Forrester is using social media or any keyword alerts that catch this blog or else I’ll be in trouble with my friends at Forrester.

I was reading through Technology Review in the bathroom this morning and came across a quick piece on Iron Man that I missed during the movie. Apparently Tony Stark was MIT Class of ’87. Note the Brass Rat (not the same as the one I never wear.) The article on the web goes on to mention my good friend John Underkoffler, who was the science and technology advisor for the movie (along with a number of other movies including Minority Report, The Hulk, and Aeon Flux.) John is the founder / CTO of Oblong Industries, one of our Foundry Group investments. Oblong will be unveiling itself later this month.

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.