I just wandered down to Seth’s office to see if he managed to get tickets to the World Series. He asked everyone in the office to fire up the Rockies website and keep hitting refresh until someone got on to the ticket buying site. No luck – and Seth has a big frown on this face – but he’s still cuddling his Red Sox jacket. The Boulder Daily Camera has a great wrap up story on the TechStars experience this summer. Of course you have to have a stupid login to be able to read it – but at least it’s free. Oh – and yet another TechStars company got funded – this time it’s SocialThing. Congrats guys!

I received several questions in response to my post titled The Purpose of Numbers on a Y Axis and my followup post titled The Lack of Numbers of Y Axis Doesn’t Disqualify You. One of the questions prompted a rant in my brain that often spills out of my mouth when I’m on the receiving end of an early stage pitch. The question is: “what kind of numbers would actually get your attention on a revenue chart for the first 12 months of business (or would income / cash flow be a better measure?)” Before I answer the question, I want to add an explicit qualifier – this answer applies to early stage software / Internet startups – think a few people, an idea, and maybe a prototype.

Within 10 minutes of the end of the Red Sox game, I got the following email from StubHub. I’ve also received several emails in the past 24 hours from folks looking for Rockies / Red Sox tickets. I officially don’t have any – my best suggestion at this point is StubHub!

I’ve got my share of friends who I think of as “big brains suspended in something” (where the typical instantiation is human form, but I often imagine them as something else.) My friend Bruce Wyman – the Director of Technology at the Denver Art Museum fits nicely into this slot in my brain. Bruce has done some amazing things by himself – or with his very small team – during his time at the Denver Art Museum. 

Amy started out my Sunday morning with the Select A Candidate Quiz from Minnesota Public Radio. I’ll leave it to her to decide whether or not to say who she selected (but it was a surprise to me). So – I figured I’d take it also. Given that I don’t know who Dennis Kucinich is, I was perplexed by how strongly I matched him. Now that I’ve read his story, I get it. My top five were Kucinich, Richardson, Gravel, Dodd, and Edwards. Clinton and Obama were tied for #6 – I disagree with them on Iraq, Immigration, Social Security, Energy, and the Death Penalty. It’s no surprise to me that the Indians (I mean Romney, McCain, Gilmore, Huckabee, and Brownback) are in the cellar. 

The subtitle of this post is “Wow – that boy can write.” If you found my post titled CTO vs. VP Engineering to be relevant to your universe, grab a cup of coffee and wander over to Niel Robertson’s post titled Do Programming Languages Matter Anymore. I’ve worked on various companies with Niel over the past decade, including NetGenesis, Service Metrics, and most recently Newmerix. In addition to being a phenomenal CTO (confirmed by Tom Higley – Niel’s partner at Service Metrics), Niel can write an essay like very few others. This one covers his view of programming languages, how they fit in SAP’s world, and why SAP (and others) should “integrate a CLR runtime engine native in the application server (or at least have a three legged stool of ABAP, Java, and CLR-based runtime).”

John Markoff suggests there is a looming battle of semantics between Web 3.0 and semantic web. Markoff summarizes by saying: “There is no easy consensus about how to define what is meant by Web 3.0, but it is generally seen as a reference to the [semantic Web](about:semantic web). While it is not that much more precise a phrase, the semantic Web refers to technology to make using the Internet better by understanding the meaning of what people are doing, not just the way pages link to each other.”

Yeah – well – it’s always conference season in the tech business. I’ve been enjoying Web 2.0 from a distance while getting reports from the field. However, I will pop my head up above the surface at a few conferences in November. We start with New New Internet conference on Nov 1 in DC followed by a quick trip to Chicago to judge the Global Student Entrepreneurs Awards. Next up is Defrag on Nov 5 and 6 in Denver, which I’ve helped organize. I then head to Las Vegas to play with Amy for a long weekend while doing a quick flyby of Blogworld on Nov 7. Then on to NY for the week of Nov 12th for a bunch of stuff.

I get loads of questions throughout every day. I try to be responsive to all of them – it’s just the way I am. I have a saying which is “you can’t send me too much email” – for whatever reason I’ve figured out how to process it all quickly each day (zero inbox strategy.) One of my capabilities is to know when I’m clueless. Most VCs (and many entrepreneurs) have a hard time admitting they are clueless about something. It’s a natural reaction of a smart, hard driving person who is constantly analyzing data and making decisions to have an opinion about everything, especially when asked politely by someone for advice.