I got a note yesterday from David Abramson – an MBA student at Stanford – about The Cool Product Expo which is taking place from noon to 6pm on Wednesday (April 11th) at the Arrillaga Alumni Center (326 Galvez Street) at Stanford. Admission and parking is free – the event sounds very cool. Following is a description. The Cool Product Expo is an annual exposition celebrating innovative technologies and product design. An attendee walking through the Expo will encounter exciting demonstrations by budding startups, global manufacturers, local design studios, and university research projects. It is a great opportunity to learn about the latest technology advances, as well as interact with successful entrepreneurs and industry leaders.

My partner Chris Wand is finally blogging (even though he’ll deny it) over at AsktheVC – he’s writing a series on what should be in a “board reporting package.” My long-time friend Will Herman – who happens to be hanging out in Boulder this week making the rounds (and getting his bike fitted – whatever that means) – inadvertantly contributed with his post titled Communicating with Your Board: Sales Numbers. Will’s post covers some good ground – I can’t tell you the number of times a clear sales report is missing from a board package. It’s even worse when there is a sales report, but given the fact that I attend N board meetings a year (where N is a large number) the CEO doesn’t create any linkage to historical performance, current expectations or the plan. Great stuff.

My friend Ben Casnocha’s book titled My Start-Up Life hits the stores on May 18th. The website for the book – being published with Jossey-Bass (Wiley) is up. It’s all great stuff – I’m super excited about this having read, commented on, and contributed a short piece to the book. It’s always fun to end up on the back cover of a book – here’s my quote: This book is extraordinary. I predict it will be a New York Times bestseller. While the world is filled with inspiring stories, there are few as insightful, enlightening, and powerful as Ben’s.

On Monday StillSecure announced their Cobia Unified Network Platform (UNP). Alan Shimel (StillSecure Chief Strategy Officer) and Mitchell Ashley (StillSecure CTO / GM Cobia) have blogged extensively about it. I’m a huge fan of John Zagula and Richard Tong’s book “The Marketing Playbook” – especially their notion of a Platform Play. I use this approach with many of my portfolio companies – StillSecure is one of them. StillSecure’s historical products form the base of this platform play. While security software is a fast moving and very fragmented market, StillSecure has built a security software platform business with Strata Guard (IDS/IPS), VAM (Vulnerability Management), and Safe Access (Network Control). These are best of breed products that have won many awards and have rapidly growing customer bases.

Reuters had an article out today titled US reaches visa cap, skilled workers out of luck*.* As someone who is constantly trying to recruit great software developers for companies I’m an investor in, this is an insane situation. The US Immigration Service apparently “reached its annual quota for visa applications in one day.” The article summarizes the situation: “The Citizenship and Immigration Services received a record of more than 150,000 applications for the H-1B visa on Monday, nearly double the number of visas it can grant for the fiscal year beginning October 1, 2007. Individuals cannot apply for the visa. The employer must apply or submit a petition on the worker’s behalf. The visa is good for up to six years. The government will grant 65,000 visas to those who hold the equivalent of an undergraduate degree and possess the technical expertise in a specialized field, such as engineering and computer programming. Another 20,000 visas will go to people with advanced academic degrees who have technical expertise.”

Earlier this year Saul Klein sent me an email about an idea he had to create a meeting spot for entrepreneurs and VCs in a community to get together on a regular basis. Saul’s idea was that this would be like a “Coffee Club” – same location and time on a weekly / bi-weekly basis. I responded that I thought it was a cool idea and my partner Jason decided to help set one up in Boulder. Saul subsequently launched OpenCoffee Club which is sprouting up in a bunch of cities around the world.

As I stared across the table at my partner Ryan, he said to me “hey – we just got up in the middle of the night to come to California to have breakfast in at Stacks in Menlo Park.” Alarm clock start time: 3:15am Mountain. Stacks: 8:00am Pacific. There’s something fundamentally wrong with this. The Lox Scram (without capers) however is yummy. Who said “blogging about what I had for breakfast” wasn’t trendy. Maybe I should start Twittering.

In 2005, Jason Mendelson (my partner and co-author of AsktheVC) wrote what has become an extremely popular series dissecting the “term sheet.” The feedback we got from it encouraged us to write several more series of blogs and ultimately led to us deciding to start writing AsktheVC to answer random questions from entrepreneurs. Last Friday I pointed to a post from Dave Naffzinger (Judy’s Book) about Stock Options from an Entrepreneurs Point of View. I woke up today to two more great entrepreneur posts on term sheets. The first is from Dick Costolo (FeedBurner) titled Venture Terms – Liquidation Preferences and Participation*.* The second was titled Term Sheet Hacks was on a new blog titled Venture Hacks and written by Naval Ravikant (Vast.com) and Nivi (EIR at Atlas Ventures.) 

Christopher Buckley is a genius. I’ve written about how I’ve loved his previous books Thank You For Smoking and Florence of Arabia. I read Boomsday over the weekend – it’s Buckley’s best yet. Cassandra Devine is awesome and her approach to solving the impending social security crisis (and the formation of “Concerned Americans for Social Security Amendment Now, Debt Reduction and Accountability”) and her proposal of “volunteer transitioning” is out of the box brilliant (every major government wanna-be reformer should read it for ideas.)