On May 15th and 16th leaders from over 100 distinguished universities, corporations and non-profits from across the country will attend the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) semi-annual meeting at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I’ve been chairman of NCWIT for the past few years and am incredibly proud of what Lucy Sanders and her team have created. NCWIT is a capacity-building coalition working aggressively to increase women’s participation in computing/information technology (IT) – we believe that women’s participation is a compelling issue of innovation, competitiveness, and workforce sustainability.

As I was turning the pages in the April 23, 2007 Forbes in the bathroom today, I came across The South Rises Again and a great map of the top metro areas in the US according to Forbes. One of the rankings was based on college degrees (percentage of adult population with bachelor’s degree or higher.) Boulder ranked at the top and the list of the top five was interesting.

I hate almost all automated phone systems (except of course the ones created by Gold Systems.) Most suck and even though a little bit of effort could radically improve them, companies (and their customer service groups) don’t seem to understand (or care) about how their customers interact with them. While I try to avoid picking up the phone and asking for help, it happens sometimes. I try to get a special magic phone number that reaches a human immediately (e.g. I fly United a lot and can get a person on one ring), but this is the rare exception not the norm.

I had a long phone call with a CEO of a company on Friday. He’s had an intense few weeks and was clearly stressed out. His summary was “my stomach hurts.” My objective view of his business is that it’s fine – lots of things are going well – but there are plenty of issues he needs to address and they don’t necessarily have a short term time horizon for resolution.

Boulder OpenCoffee Club (part of the network of OpenCoffee Club’s popping up around the world) now has its own website. The next meeting is at Vic’s Coffee at 1800 Broadway in One Boulder Plaza on Tuesday, April 24th from 8am – 9:30am. Come join us and hang out. Andy Sack just had a successful OpenCoffee Club meeting in Seattle and is having another one next week at 8:30 AM at Louisa’s on Eastlake in Seattle. I’m not 100% sure of the date, but I’m guessing it was a week from yesterday (e.g. Tuesday.)

I love Wallstrip – it’s one of the funnest angel investments I’ve ever made. I wake up several times to a week to a five minute video of Lindsay being hysterically amusing about some public company stock that is at an all-time high. Today she takes on the Defense Industry and demonstrates why she is now comfortable with the military industrial complex (not really.) It’s a good contrast to my recent West Wing visit. 

Jason and I have written extensively about 409A – a new tax regulation for pricing stock options in private companies that both of us think is fundamentally absurd. For the past 24 months we’ve been dealing with draft regulations which have made the problem of figuring out how to deal with pricing stock options in private companies both ambiguous, time consuming, and unnecessarily expensive (at least if you want to conform to the draft rules.)

I saw Paul Kedrosky deliver his Top Ten VC Lies. Priceless (and accurate.) I also met him face to face for the first time – we both commented on how weird that was since we’ve become good blog / email friends over the past two years.

I got the following email from a smart entrepreneur friend I respect a lot. I subscribe to your blog’s rss feed and read it regularly. I have a suggestion to make – it would be great if you could put a simple explanation of the many different products/technologies you plug, when you plug them. I have to admit that I have NO idea what you are talking about or why I would be interested about 80% of the time you mention something. For example, Me.dium (which based on the stupid name, I would have no interest in exploring on my own based on your mention 🙂