It’s DNC time in Denver and all kinds of weird advertisements are popping up all over the place, including the airport. My partner Jason sent me a photo of this one today with the heading “Puke”. I put this in the “you’ve got to be fucking kidding me” category. Let’s break it down. Here are the messages: Life Liberty and the Pursuit of More Patents Averaging 2 Patent Applications Per Day Official Wireless provider for the Democratic National Convention Let me guess – AT&T is positioning themselves as a key supporter of no patent reform. Or, maybe AT&T is positioning themselves as key advocators of patenting everything under the sun. Maybe they are advocating that they should give their engineers bonuses for every patent they file. Maybe they are trying to say that a good democracy has lots and lots of patents. What ARE they trying to say?

At Foundry Group, one of our investment themes is Glue. We’ve done a handful of investments in this area, including Gnip. Since Gnip’s launch last month, it’s been put into production in a number of cases – some obvious, some subtle. Part of the fun is watching the adoption of it evolve rapidly as we continue to build out the core capabilities of the what Gnip can do. I had a long conversation with a VC I work closely with about the value Gnip ultimately provides to its various constituencies (data providers, data consumers, and end users) and how / where it expects to get paid in the long term. During the conversation, we covered a number of different potential areas, but I realized that my thinking could be much crisper. That’s normal for this stage of a startup as Gnip is still very early stage (we’ve done one seed round of investment and are gearing up for the next financing) but the exercise of defining a clear business endgame (vs. just a technology endgame) is extremely helpful and self referential, as it creates more focus on what we should actually be building.

Jason and I were talking about some of the running events in the Olympics as we walked in to the office together this morning. After chatting about the marathon, he asked if I’d seen the Bolt 100 meter final. I did – and it was an amazing performance – but I was perplexed why Bolt coasted the last 20 meters and “only” did 9.69 when he most likely could have broken 9.60. Now – 9.69 is a world record, but 9.60 (or even the symbolic 9.59) would be mindblowing.

I like this life thing. Good luck TechStars Class of 2008!

Marathon #12 is on Saturday. I’ll be running the Mesa Falls Marathon in Ashton, Idaho. 157 people ran it last year so it’s a deliciously small one. I’ve been training with a new coach – Gary Ditsch – for the past six weeks with a goal of ultimately getting below 4 hours. My goal for Mesa Falls is sub-4:45 which given my training and how I feel should be achievable.

I have no idea where this joke came from, but I couldn’t resist posting it because it combined Alaska, Massachusetts, Democrats, Republicans, Guns, the Pope, and a Grizzly Bear. The Pope took a couple of days off to visit the rugged mountains of Alaska for some sightseeing. He was cruising along the campground in the PopeMobile when there was a frantic commotion just at the edge of the woods. A helpless Democrat, wearing sandals, shorts, a ‘Save the Whales’ hat and a ‘To Hell with Bush’ T-shirt, was screaming while struggling frantically and thrashing around trying to free himself from the grasp of a 10-foot grizzly. As the Pope watched in horror, a group of Republican loggers came racing up. One quickly fired a 44 magnum into the bear’s chest. The other two reached up and pulled the bleeding, semiconscious Democrat from the bear’s grasp. Then using long clubs, the three loggers finished off the bear and two of them threw it onto the bed of their truck while the other tenderly placed the injured Democrat in the back seat. As they prepared to leave, the Pope summoned them to come over. ‘I give you my blessing for your brave actions!’ he told them. ‘I heard there was a bitter hatred between Republican loggers and Democratic environmental activists but now I’ve seen with my own eyes that this is not true.’ As the Pope drove off, one logger asked his buddies ‘Who was that guy?’ ‘It was the Pope,’ another replied. ‘He’s in direct contact with Heaven and has access to all wisdom. ‘Well,’ the logger said, ‘he may have access to all wisdom but he doesn’t know squat about bear hunting! By the way, is the bait still alive, or do we need to go back to Massachusetts and get another one?’

Matt McAdams has a clever blog up titled Up next: telesoftware! He discusses the rise of our favorite new buzzword (hint: it’s “Cloud Computing”) and spends some time harkening back to its origin (hint: it’s the “Application Service Provider.”) I was around at the birth of the ASP as the co-chairman of one of the early ASPs (Interliant) which started out life in 1996 as a “web hosting company” (how passe) and evolved in 1997 into an Application Service Provider. I clearly remember the tech media latching onto the ASP label at the end of the 1990’s right alongside prefixing everything with a lowercase e and postfixing everything with “.com”. 

My partner Chris Wand has a long guest post up on Ask the VC titled How Should I Approach a VC I Don’t Know? Lots of good do’s and don’ts for anyone looking to connect with a VC.

I’m baffled whenever I hear from a CEO that he’s having trouble getting a response from one of his VC investors. Unfortunately, this is a very common occurrence in VC-backed company land. After noticing this during the Internet bubble around the turn of the century (doesn’t that make it seem like so very long ago), I’m starting to notice this again more frequently. As I pondered this the other day, I tried to discern a pattern, but I just think it’s just the way the universe works for some people.