Today’s special guest post is from Sarah Reed of Lowenstein Sandler PC. Sarah is a good friend and collaborator with my partner Jason on the NVCA Model Legal Document task force. She also has a wicked sense of humor. After sitting through ten days of meetings hearing a variety of VC-lingo tossed around as though it was LA-trendy-speak (seriously dude), I was amused to get the following unsolicited email from Sarah with a guest post attached. 

The Defrag Conference is happening on Monday 11/3 and Tuesday 11/4. I’m totally psyched – Eric Norlin has put together a killer agenda. The list of people coming that I can’t wait to see and spend time with is dynamite. When Eric and I cooked up the idea for Defrag, our goal was to create a “thinking person’s” conference for exploring ideas around the Implicit / Semantic Web. It’s evolved and – in its second year – we are planning on talking about the intersection of the following topics:

Maine has been conquered by the Feld Marathon Machine. I finished my 13th marathon on Sunday – the Mount Desert Island Marathon that started at Bar Harbor, Maine. It was hilly. Really hilly. But beautiful, perfect weather (40 to 50 degrees), no wind, blue skies, and wonderful people along the course including the “beer girl” (a girl – probably 12 – with her mom that had a sign that said “Finish = Beer”). Did I mention the course was hilly – check out the insulting, endless, torturous climb from mile 21 to mile 25.

Tomorrow is Marathon #13 – the Mount Desert Island Marathon in Bar Harbor, Maine. As part of my pre-marathon tradition, Amy and I relax at a movie the day before. Today’s was Flash of Genius at the awesome Reel Pizza Cinerama. Flash of Genius is the story of Robert Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper. It’s a tragedy in three acts. Act 1: Invention and hopefulness that ends in betrayal. Act 2: The hero encounters increasing difficulties, complications, and losses. Act 3: Triumph and redemption. While I’m deeply anti-software-patent, I’m equally pro-inventor. The Kearns story – at least what I know of it from the great 1993 New Yorker article titled The Flash of Genius – is a complicated and provocative one. Greg Kinnear is brilliant as Robert Kearns and plays the dedicated and single-minded investor magnificently.

This morning, I read two wonderful essays on the web – one by Warren Buffet and one by Paul Graham. Warren Buffett: Buy American. I Am. Paul Graham: Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy Both of these made me immediately think of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s brilliant new book – The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable- which has been making the rounds the past few months. If you haven’t yet read it, you should stop what you are doing, buy it immediately, and read it. If you haven’t read Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, you should read it first as it sets the stage for The Black Swan.

No – not that kind of trip, although it might have made watching the debates last night more entertaining. I’m hitting the road for 10 days to travel our great country, check out main street, see some American heroes, and subject myself to more airplane travel fun. I wonder if I’ll stay in any of the same hotels as the presidential candidates. I start this trip in New York, where I’ll be exploring the now famous Wall Street greed and corruption people. I then travel to Bar Harbor Maine to run a marathon (sponsor me and support Accelerated Cure). As part of this quest, I’m going to search for main street; it seems like I should be able to find it in Maine. Then I’m off to Boston to return to my post high school roots, have a nerd party with some wikipedia worthy entrepreneurial friends, and explore the outer reaches of 495. A quick trip by train back to New York and then off to Virginia and Maryland to make sure the leaves are turning the appropriate colors there before they completely fall off the trees.

An annual institution in Boulder occurred last week – the Boulder Chamber of Commerce Esprit Awards. A bunch of my friends were winners this year and – since they were all nice enough to call me out for my contribution to them, I thought I’d reciprocate by congratulating them. So, a big congrats to: Mike Platt at Cooley Godward Raj Bhargava at StillSecure Krista, Johnathan, Tom, and Brent at Kerpoof Y’all are great – thanks for all of your hard work, vision, and contribution to the Boulder entrepreneurial scene.

The “new VC entrants into the blogosphere” has slowed over the past 12 months. In addition, the decay curve of many of the newest VC bloggers looks very similar to the decay curve of nuclear waste, except for it happens over a six month period instead of having a 24,100 year half life. In contrast, the gang at RRE Ventures have both launched a new blog titled Five Years Too Late and filled it with great, relevant, and stimulating content, including posts such as:

A well worn tradition of most venture capital firms is the Monday Meeting. While there are several variations of it, including having it the meeting on Tuesday or Friday in an effort to be counter-cultural, most venture capital firms gather on Monday’s to review their portfolios, have companies come in and present for follow-on rounds or new investments, and ponder the state of the universe. I expect there will be a lot of pondering today. Given that it’s only 1:23pm and I’ve already received several missives commenting on the Sequoia RIP article (including a skeptical email from someone forwarding the VentureBeat article stating that Sequoia raised the largest new fund in Q3), it’s clear that many VC firms are sitting around today discussing ways they can “help” their portfolio companies in these “uncertain times.”