Yum. Snowcrash anyone?

I’ve been investing in Internet-related email stuff since 1995. I still remember when I got my first Internet email address (brad@id.wing.net) back in 1994 – shortly before I figured out I could set up email on brad@feld.com. Email has evolved in some amazing ways over the last 12 years while at the same time standing still in others (thanks Mr. SMTP – both directions.) In 2000, I started noticing spam again. I think the first time I heard “spam” was in college – one of the guys in my fraternity (John Underkoffler) loved to do all kinds of bizarre things with spam (except eat it) – at some point in the mid 1980’s I learned what email spam was. Between 1995 and 2000 I occasionally got some spam, but it usually just pointed me to an online porn site which was still a novelty at that point in time.

The MIT Enterprise Forum has an annual program called Venture Capital Outlook. If you are in Colorado, you can see a 40 minute digital presentation of this from MIT/Cambridge and a panel of Boston-area VC’s followed by a live panel of Colorado VCs discussing the same questions, namely the trends from 2006 and what they see happening in 2007. The Colorado–based VCs (in the flesh rather than digitally rendered) are:

Paul Kedrosky has an excellent summary of Mark Gilbert’s theories of modern finance using the two cow metaphor. He ends with his own special version for the venture capital industry.

If you go to Feld Thoughts, you’ll see a little widget on the right hand side that looks like the following: This is my “badge” for the FeedBurner Venture Capital network. This a network of all of the Venture Capital bloggers that I could find – I’m the coordinator so if you are a VC blogger and not part of the network, drop me an email. There are now 62 VC bloggers in the network with a daily subscriber reach of over 150,000 people (if you are an advertiser and want to target this audience, my friends at FeedBurner will be happy to help.)

One of my core strategies as a VC has always been to aggressively facilitate conversations between the entrepreneurs that I work with. Over the last 13 years, this has paid off in numerous ways, endless times. A while ago I realized that, in addition to being a lot of fun (usually for all involved), it was a way for me to learn an incredible amount by just watching where the entrepreneurs took the conversations.

Cisco just announced that they are open sourcing their network access control client (known as Cisco Trust Agent.) While on the surface it might seem like a generous move, Alan Shimel (at one of my portfolio companies – StillSecure) has a somewhat different point of view. I’ve noticed an increasing trend of large companies embracing the open source movement by “open sourcing” their lousy software that doesn’t work very well and that has little to no adoption. An optimist would say “this is good – at least the open source community can fix that crap.” My view is that this just pollutes the efforts of companies that are legitimately trying to work effectively with open source communities. “Open sourcing orphaned software” as a marketing strategy just doesn’t feel effective or useful to me.

My friends at the Enthusiast Group are about to launch a new series of sites over the next two months to add to their growing network of enthusiast web sites. YourCycling launched today and is edited by Enthusiast-in-Chief Whitey Debroux, a Boulder, Colorado-based professional road and cyclocross racer who is riding for Team Einstein this season. YourCycling joins YourRunning (check out my running blog – 50×50 if you care about such things – especially if you want to be amused by my challenges of maintaining any sort of base while traveling non-stop), YourClimbing (for rock climbers), and YourMTB (for mountain bikers.)

I’ve been pleased to see that the reaction to TechStars has generally been very positive. We’ve been pleasantly overwhelmed with quality applications for the program – over 75 to date for the 10 spots. There are still 52 days to apply, so if you are thinking about it, I encourage you to give it a shot. Of course, there has been some debate about whether or not TechStars is “worth” giving up 5% of your equity. I thought I’d take a crack at addressing this and further explaining what we are trying to do with TechStars.