What Fred said. Marc Andreessen (co-founder of Netscape, Opsware, and Ning) has been blogging up a storm and it’s awesome. His post from yesterday titled The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 1: Why not to do a startup is just awesome. My other favorite posts include: Why there’s no such thing as Web 2.0 – especially why there is no such thing as a “space.” The truth about venture capitalists, Part 1 The truth about venture capitalists, Part 2 The truth about venture capitalists, Part 3 Wow. Marc – keep them coming!

I had the following exchange with the CEO of one of my investments the other day. Q (Brad): It’s strange to me that only a few of the investors / board members are using Product X. Any insights? A (CEO): I’m in two minds. One is that my investors should use Product X to be more informed. On the other hand, I’m usually very careful to get investors to use a product I’m building just because I asked them to. There are only a few investors who are potential target users in the early days. I have done it in the past, and I often get feedback that I have to deal with because I made them play with the product. My goal is to get the product to a point where they end up using it because it’s that good, and that we’re targeting their target demographic. 

Amy and I became addicted to Lost this year after my brother and his wife gave us Season 1 on DVD for some holiday gift thing. If you are lost in Lost, check out the following video of the plane crash sequence. Someone went to the trouble of splicing the segments together across a bunch of different episodes – it’s pretty dramatic.

My buddy Ben Casnocha had his book My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley reviewed in the NY Times today by Harry Hurt III. Ben told me about this last week and is justifiably excited. One of my favorite lines from Ben is “I don’t want to be normal. I want to be something else.” Hurt picks it as the theme of his review and does a great job capturing the essence of the book.

Unless you’ve been on vacation and off the grid for the last two months, you’ve probably noticed the explosive growth with Facebook with a new and exciting demographic – all the web / tech nerds that previously weren’t using Facebook. I went to my Facebook account this morning to try to figure out when I originally created an account and can’t remember, but there’s been a rapid growth in my friends since the Facebook F8 platform launch.

We had a lot of fun on Thursday at the TechStars Funding Your Startup event. A few people have written great blog summaries about it, including one from eNeighbors, Certifyre, and stopthejunkmail.com. Given the audience (> 200 people) and the response, I think David Cohen is going to do one more public TechStars event this summer.

In general, Movable Type has worked great for me across the various blogs I maintain although I periodically fantasize about switching to WordPress. However, during an upgrade along the way, we accidentally switched the name mapping from text to numbers. We figured out a hack for this, but Ross (my IT guy) finally sat down and figured out the correct solution. The following is the best approach we could figure out for anyone that wants to figure out how to “remap MT URLs.” If you are not an MT nerd, please punt on this post. Oh, and if you subscribe via RSS and got duplicate updates for all the recent posts this is why – since the URL’s changed the feed got updated (sorry about that.)

Amy put an interview with Brad Paisley & Kimberly Williams titled “The Look of Love” (People Magazine, May 7, 2007, p. 193) on my desk the other day. The last few lines could have been from a conversation between me and Amy. Brad: I’m not really into beauty products. I just find them through my wife. I work in the sun a lot outside and I get dry skin, and I’ll borrow whatever is in the cabinet. Kimberly: He’ll take whatever is sitting there – if it’s $80 La Mer, he would still take it. Brad: Her hair products are good – like what’s that oil in the shower? Kimberly: That’s for shaving my legs! Have you been putting it on your hair? Brad: I thought it was conditioner. Well, anyway, it makes your hair real shiny!

On Thursday, I’ll be participating in the TechStars: Funding Your Startup event at 6pm at the Wolf Law Building on the CU Boulder campus. The panel includes me, Gary Held (exec director at CTEK), Chris Scoggins (Sequel VC), Lisa Rutherford (ex-In-Q-Tel), Dan King (ReadyTalk CEO) and Kimbal Musk (Me.dium CEO). The event is free, but you have to register. As of right now, there are still 76 of 225 seats available. If you are in Boulder, want to meet some of the TechStars folks, and sit in on one of the TechStars open sessions, please join us.