It’s another raining day in Boulder (weird) – maybe I’ll go to Boston tonight. Oh – I heard it was raining there also. I bet they don’t get hail in June. Today’s reading is sponsored by Ted – the airline that never made any sense to me and is finally going away. – The Wall Street Journal has an excellent article on Gates-Ballmer’s history including the headliner Gates-Ballmer Clash Shaped Microsoft’s Coming Handover. The subarticles and videos also provide some great context on the past and current reality.

If you are a software engineer at Xilinx that is caught in the current layoff, please drop me an email with your resume. Several of the companies I’m involved in locally – including Rally Software and Gnip – are actively hiring experienced software engineers.

One of the many satisfying things about being a venture capitalist is being involved in a company from the very beginning that has a huge vision that it subsequently executes on it maniacally. This is the case with Rally Software which announced today that it has closed a $16.85 million round led by Mohr Davidow Ventures. Rally started out life as F4 Technologies. I remember my friend Ryan Martens sitting down with me and Chris Wand around 2001 and walking us through his idea for changing the how he approached managing the software development process. I can’t remember if Ryan used the word Agile at that time, but I remember scribbles on a white board that listed out all the different software that Ryan had used at BEA to manage his dev team and how maddening it was to try to integrate information in Word, Excel, Project, a dev workbench, a set of testing tools, and the support / QA system. Ryan had a vision for an integration web-based system to layer on top of all of this to help support and manage the software development process.

I have some weeks where I wake up and realize there is a speaking engagement almost every day. This is one of them. Last night was TechStars – The FeedBurner Story. This was part of Google Day at TechStars. I was on a panel with Dick Costolo and Rick Klau telling the FeedBurner story (and helping Rick be Dick’s straight man.) Tonight is a TiE Rockies event titled “Funding Your Business in Hard Times” I’m on a panel with Vipanj Patel (iSherpa), Mike Devery (Silicon Valley Bank), and Dan Caruso (BearEquity / Zayo Group) that is being moderated by Catharine Merigold (Vista Ventures). The event is happening tonight at the PPA Event Center in Denver from 5:30pm – 8:30pm. 

In 2005, my partner Jason Mendelson and I wrote a long series of posts describing all of the parts of a typical venture capital Term Sheet. We started on 1/3/05 with a post on Price and finished up on 8/23/05 with a post on Indemnification and Assignment. Of all of the stuff I’ve written over the past four years, my stats continue to tell me that stuff we wrote in the Term Sheet series is some of the most popular content on my blog. As I was writing my post I Blog, I Tweet, But Why I realized that many of you have started reading my blog after 1/1/06 so you might have missed this series.

TechStars 2008 is in full swing as it heads into week two. Today was Google day. During the day Kevin Marks and Dion Almaer were in The Bunker talking about Google AppEngine and OpenSocial. In the evening Dick Costolo, Rick Klau, and I talked about the FeedBurner story from inception through the acquisition of FeedBurner by Google. I forgot to make my crack about ClosedPrivate, but we got plenty of other good stuff out there. Thanks to Kevin, Dion, Dick, and Rick for coming out to Boulder!

I’ve been fascinated with SEO for a long time. I’ve experienced a lot of random SEO events as a result of my blog, such as all the traffic I get from Google on the word “iBrick” that link to my post titled iBrick (currently #2 in the index – sometimes #1*.)* A reader sent me a note yesterday that I am the #1 search term on Google for the phrase Boulder Justice Center Community Service which is linked to my post titled My Afternoon at the Boulder County Justice Center*.* I decided to take a look at the other search services and see where I landed on this search.

If you are an entrepreneur, I expect you’ve shouted this (or at least thought it ) sometime during your time on this planet. My partner, and ex-lawyer, Jason Mendelson has a fantastic rant up titled Why Start-up Lawyers Frustrate Me*.* He provides a detailed look on his two gripes: pricing and execution. While “some of my best friends are lawyers”, I couldn’t agree more with Jason’s post. I’m looking forward to Jason’s equivalent of “fucking accountants” post which is hopefully coming soon.

Lots of good stuff from my friends this weekend. I’ve been periodically doing this daily reading thing – hopefully you like it. Feel free to flame me in the comments if you don’t; give me positive feedback if you do. – What, Why, Can and How – Deciding on the Next Business Idea: Paul Berberian’s last business – Zuzingo – didn’t work. He blogged eloquently about what didn’t work in his post Tango Blue. Now he’s written a great post talking about how he’s thinking about the next thing.