Creating companies is hard. Most fail. Overnight success is rare (my favorite “overnight success stories” are the ones that take 10+ years, like iRobot or Harmonix.) While strategy plays a key part in the outcome of an entrepreneurial venture, the fundamentals matter a lot. Take the following parable that I got from a friend recently. I was thinking about you as I drove home from my tennis match the other night. My doubles partner was clearly excited to implement what she had learned in previous doubles strategy lessons. Minutes before we stepped onto the court, she developing signals she was going to use for poaching, staying put at the net, etc. Since I had never played against our opponents before, I wasn’t initially concerned about strategy. I figured assess their strengths and weaknesses during the warm up, then play to them accordingly.

I’ve been chairman of the National Center for Women and Information Technology for the past two years. The mission is straightforward – it is “to ensure that women are fully represented in the influential world of information technology and computing.” NCWIT programming is organized into “alliances” – we have an academic, workforce, K-12, and entrepreneurial alliance. The academic and workforce alliance are the most mature; the entrepreneurial alliance is the youngest.

Once again I woke up to a Saturday morning blog post flurry on Techmeme. Today’s was on the criticism by Valleywag of the Microsoft People Ready campaign that ran on the Federated Media network. It appears that everyone is talking about it – and I guess I just did also (oops.) This particular conversation made me think of a pair of blog posts that Stan Feld (my dad) wrote recently. I recommend that you – dear reader – take your brain out of the tech industry echo chamber for a moment and think about the notion of critical thinking. Let’s wander over to the health care industry for a few minutes.

TechStars is really cranking – I’m totally blown away by what everyone is working on and the level of engagement of the TechStars mentors. I’m very optimistic that some great stuff is going to come out of this adventure and I’m looking forward to our first demo night on Tuesday. A number of out of town visitors have swung by in the last 10 days including Don Loeb (ex-FeedBurner – now Google), Eric Marcoullier / Todd Sampson (ex-MyBlogLog – now Yahoo), and Noah Kagen (ex-Facebook – now Mint.) Thanks guys for making the trek to Boulder – I know it was a massive personal sacrifice.

In April, Lijit published what we thought were the first Widget stats. Last month, comScore published their “Widget Metrix”, a new service they have started to track the usage of widgets across the Web. The data was interesting – and very different – as the two methodologies were different (Lijit is looking at it from the publisher point of view; comScore is looking at it from the visitor point of view.) Both approaches are important indicators of both widget growth and popularity.

I’ve had an account on Facebook for a while. Until a month ago – around the time of the F8 Platform launch – I checked it once a month. In the last 30 days, I’ve been checking it once a day. My friends list has exploded, I’ve added a bunch of apps (just to play around – hint – important reference to a note below), and exercised most of the features that I could find. VCs and entrepreneurs have “discovered Facebook” – everyone is talking about it on blogs and in pitches (as in “we are going to build a Facebook app for X.”)

Amy and I have been married for 14 years today. On June 21st, I always have the Little River Band song in echoing in my head all day and a larger than normal jump in my step. For those of you mix summer solstice with a dollop of marriage, happy anniversary. To Amy – thanks for an awesome 14 years. I’m looking forward to at least 103 more. I’ll see you tonight.

John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, has an excellent blog post up on the Whole Foods web site titled Whole Foods Market, Wild Oats, and The Federal Trade Commission. Whole Foods is trying to acquire Wild Oats and the FTC is challenging the merger. As I scanned through my online newspapers this morning as part of my morning routine, I saw articles in each of them (Boulder Camera, Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, NY Times, and WSJ) about this. The deal is getting a lot of airplay locally since Wild Oats is a Boulder-based company and Whole Foods has significant presence here.

I am regularly amazed at the amount of money consumer electronics, mobile device, and cell phone companies spend on “stupid customer service tricks.” I got the following note from a friend that has a Sony Reader. My screen cracked for some reason. Probably got hit in my bag somehow. I sent it in to Sony for service and they offered to fix it for $272; a new unit is $299. I declined. I sent a letter to the Sony USA VP marketing. I pointed out that when my ipod broke, I got a new one in 20 minutes at the store, no questions asked. And the contrast in experiences is why my family of 4 has 8 ipods but is only likely to have 1 reader. I got a nice phone call last night and a new reader is on its way!