Last year, Eric Norlin sent me an email in response to my post titled Intelligence Amplification which was an attempt to put a label on the theme for companies I’d been investing in that address the Trust / Attention / Relevance problem. Eric and I had crossed paths a few times around his involvement in the creation of Digital ID World. He proposed that we put together a conference that addresses this broad theme and I jumped at the idea to help.

Earlier this week, TechStars announced that it is joining the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado (EFCo) and is pledging 1% of its equity to EFCo. As a co-founder of both EFCo and TechStars I couldn’t be more pleased. EFCo is an exciting project and TechStars is the sixth member company, joining the founding member companies Collective Intellect, Me.dium, NewsGator, Rally Software, and Tendril. We have several other companies in the final process of joining which we hope to announce in April.

I got back to my hotel room after a long and enjoyable day – my first day back from a glorious week off – and did a quick Techmeme check before watching 24. The top item was a long, graphic, and upsetting story from Kathy Sierra. I don’t know Kathy, but I think her blog is great and it almost always prompts me to think of something new. Scoble summarized my feelings well in his post – “I’m physically ill after reading what happened to Kathy Sierra.”

In a shameless plug for my portfolio company Rally Software, they have once again won the “Oscar equivalent” for their industry segment – the Jolt Excellence Award in the Project Management Category. I’m not a big “award guy”, but even this one had me chanting “threepeat” since it’s highly unusual to win a Jolt award two years in a row. Rally is the market leader in providing agile software development tooling. If you write software for a living and either are using (or want to use) an agile methodology, take a look at Rally’s products. If you are still programming in Cobol using the waterfall methodology, well, eh – never mind.

If you’ve been thinking about applying to TechStars but have been procrastinating, the time to do it is now as the application deadline is Saturday 3/31/07. While we currently have over 175 quality applications, they are all on equal footing until 4/1/07 when we start the hard work of choosing the 10 finalists. In the words of a wise young man, “if you don’t ask, you don’t get.”

A guest blog from my partner and Ask the VC co-author Jason Mendelson. In case you’ve ever found yourself cursing lawyers and / or the legal system (I do on a weekly basis and I am a lawyer), I have finally found the answer to the question “Is there anyone more stupid than a lawyer?” The answer apparently is “law professors.” I guess this intellectually makes sense, as someone has to train the lawyers – they aren’t born this way. Well, maybe a couple of them are. Anyways, I digress. 

I’m a huge Warren Buffett fan and have been for as long as I can remember. Buffett has recently posted his annual blog post (also known as the Berkshire Hathaway’s 2006 Chairman’s Letter (thanks Alex for the pointer that it is up on the web.) It should be required reading for anyone in any business.

A bunch of good blogging occurred during my Q1 vacation. I’ve scanned through most of it and landed on a highly relevant story for any obsessive entrepreneur to start their morning with. Will Herman – a long time friend, super successful entrepreneur, and “retired” person – has a great post up titled Work:Life Balance II – A Story. It’s a nice follow up to his earlier post titled Work:Life Balance – It’s a Perspective Thing and nicely compliments my Discovering Work Life Balance post that I wrote in 2005 and first discussed my Qx vacation concept.

Amy and I just got back from an awesome week off. We flew to Laguna Beach for our Q1 vacation, disconnected completely, and hid from the world for a week. Lots of sleep, running, sun, great food, that marital thing (you know – walking on the beach and holding hands), and a few movies (Deja Vu was way better than expected and Blood Diamond lived up to expectations.) And books – lots and lots of book.