Yes – more Feld Job board. I just finished up a board meeting in San Francisco for a new company that I’ve invested in (they are launching next week – you’ll hear more on Monday.) We’re looking for two rock star software product managers. The company is releasing products at a torrid pace (multiple times a month) and is iterating rapidly as it builds an aggressive leadership position in its segment. Yeah – I know – all happy talk – but it’s wild and amazing stuff.

Now that one of our favorite IRS regs – Mr. 409a – has been around for a while, it’s still causing plenty of confusion, wasted time, energy, and money. The final regulations – issued in April – are to become effective on January 1, 2008. However, one 9/10/07, the IRS announced that they were extended the compliance deadline a year – it’s now 12/31/08 instead of 12/31/07. Thanks Uncle Sam – that’s nice.

I don’t invest (or know all that much about Bio or Life Sciences), but I like to follow Adam Rubenstein’s Colorado Life Sciences Deal Flow blog just to know what’s going on in the entrepreneurship scene around life sciences in my back yard. I was pleased to see Adam’s simple description of Lijit and why he’s using it on his blog. Adam nails it and makes a good blog even more useful.

Ahhh. This all changes tomorrow morning.

I’m getting dressed and about to head out to Boulder Open Coffee Club. It had been happening at Vic’s on Broadway, but they recently shut down. Today’s is now at The Cup (1521 Pearl) from 8am to 10am. The owners – Chris and Wendy – are great folks, it’s a superb venue, and the food is always great. As I was rolling through my feeds this morning, I noticed a few interesting Boulder-related things. It starts with Vic’s, and L’Absinthe, and The Reef, and Prima – four restaurants in One Boulder Plaza that abruptly shut down at the end of 2007. This isn’t a huge surprise to me – they were all chronically empty. The excuse of “no foot traffic” falls flat on me since they are two blocks away from the Pearl Street Mall. Something else was wrong, including rents that are probably much too high. Oh well – less short term choices for food and a reminder that the restaurant business is a bitch.

How about a portable turntable scratch pad for playing Guitar Hero. Or even better – using a real guitar to play something that looks like Guitar Hero. Nah – I think I’ll just stick with my Internet Connected Refrigerator that has an iPod port and a tablet PC connector. My veggies stay fresher when they are listening to Nirvana.

I love when we find magic technology that just does what it is supposed to. That – plus a handful of amazing people – are the underpinnings of the investment we just led in Memeo. My partner Ryan McIntyre – who joined the board – has a detailed post up titled Foundry Group Invests in Memeo. I’ve been searching for brainless backup and sync software for a long time. I’ve never been happy. I am now. I’m using Memeo to keep five Vista machines (going on seven) in sync and it just automagically happens. Oh – and my server is a Mac – how fun is that?

The Feld Job board is about to kick into high gear. Look for a handful of posts in January. The Silicon Flatirons program at CU Law School is looking for two research fellows. The first one is described on their web site. They are looking for an aspiring entrepreneur or VC who would work with the New Technology Meetup, the new Entrepreneurs Unplugged series, co-teach a class with Jason Mendelson, work with the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic, and get to know who is who in the front range entrepreneurial community. 

When I was a doctoral student at MIT, my advisor was Eric von Hippel. I’ve had my fair share of mentors in my 42 years – Eric has been one of the best. I still remember during the first lecture of 15.351: Managing the Innovation Process – the first class I took from Eric – hearing Eric rant about how “users are the real source of innovation.” When Eric first started talking about the notion of user-driven innovation in the late 1970’s, it was a completely novel idea. Over the past 40 years Eric has build an incredible body of research as well as a large network of academics and practitioners who follow and extend his battle cry. Of course, a great instantiation of this concept that we work with every day is open source software.