Today we announced that Foundry Group has joined the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado. We’ve contributed 1% of our carried interest (the functional equivalent of 1% of our equity) to the Community Trust Endowed Fund of the Community Foundation Serving Boulder County. When I co-founded the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado (EFCO), we explained what we were trying to accomplish in the post titled Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado Encourages Early Stage Giving*.* Fifteen months later, with the addition of Foundry Group, we now have 19 member companies.

When I read the NY Times Article In One Flaw, Questions on Validity of 46 Judges my immediate response was to break out laughing. Then I said – out loud – “no fucking way.” Then I laughed some more. John Duffy, a law professor at George Washington University Law School just might be my new hero. According to the NY Times: He has discovered a constitutional flaw in the appointment process over the last eight years for judges who decide patent appeals and disputes, and his short paper documenting the problem seems poised to undo thousands of patent decisions concerning claims worth billions of dollars. His basic point does not appear to be in dispute. Since 2000, patent judges have been appointed by a government official without the constitutional power to do so.

I’m attending and speaking at TECH Cocktail in Chicago on May 29th. Since I’m not a conference guy, it’ll be entertaining to see if I can sit still the whole day since my panel isn’t until 3pm. If you are in the Chicago area, I encourage you to come to this event put on my Frank Gruber and Eric Olson. There are going to be some dynamite speakers that I expect will deliver something different than the typical Silicon Valley conference thing. Plus it’s at Loyola University, a place I’ve never been before which is always fun for me.

While Soul Patch’s new album Sooner or Later is not yet on the Billboard Top 10, I believe it is #1 on the VC Rock Album Chart so far this year. My partner Ryan McIntyre explains the history of the band. Learn more by joining the Soul Patch Facebook group and look for scandalous photos of Ryan and Jason Mendelson in the upcoming issues of Variety and People Magazine. Even VC’s need groupies. Please help.

In my quest to abolish software patents, I’ve been pondering “short term approaches” since I doubt the Supreme Court is going to wave a magic wand and make my fantasies come true anytime soon. I’ve been hearing about something lately that bothers me a lot. More and more companies are paying engineers a bonus to file patents. Not “get patents” – simply generate patent applications. The intended consequence is an obvious one – companies get to file more patents. The unintended consequence is a particularly nasty one – lots of shitty patents get filed and the PTO has to wade through that much more garbage.

I love a good rant. Especially about software. Joel is one of the best ranters out there – when he gets going there is no stopping him. Last week’s rant was titled Architecture astronauts take over. He takes Microsoft Live Mesh to task and reminds us of the legacy of Hailstorm, Groove, Lotus Notes, and – well – the past. And he explains why synchronization is not the killer app. Well – it sort of it – as long as we don’t realize it’s happening. But then again, the real problem is that there just aren’t enough programmers in the US anymore.

I love it when blogs pop up from people I love reading – like Om Malik – that highlight stuff I also love. In this case, it’s FeedDemon and the ThinkPad x300. These are two of my favorite nerd things. I’ve been using FeedDemon since before Nick Bradbury joined up with NewsGator several years ago and still think it is one of the most finely crafted pieces of Windows-based software that I’ve ever used. And I regularly used it on my relatively new and currently sticker free ThinkPad x300.

While everyone is spending their day talking about Microsoft and Yahoo, I thought I’d share an email with you from 1993. Once again, my old friend Warren Katz has dug into his email archive and pulled out a doozy. This time I’m introducing him to this great new magazine called Wired. Subject: Wired.com Date: 25 Apr 93 16:57:27 EDT From: Bradley Feld <75170.1206@CompuServe.COM> To: Warren Katz Warren, If you haven’t seen it already, check out the new magazine WIRED. It’s excellent. Flood them with press releases for Mak — they’ll definitely pick you up (in issue #1 there’s an article about SimNet and in issue #2 there’s an article about how Jaron Lanier is fearless). If you haven’t heard of them, email them at info@wired.com. Hope you’re doing well. I’m back in town for a few weeks — let’s get together. … Bradley

I just posted the great VC blog of the day over on Ask the VC but I think that it is so useful I’m reposting about it here. One of my favorite VC posts of all times was my partner Seth Levine’s post titled How to become a venture capitalist. I regularly get emails from folks looking for a job in the VC industry and I almost always point them at this post.