Last year, the meme of “you can start a company for minimal capital” made the rounds. This is still true. But – it’s not trivial to scale a company for minimal capital (it’s possible, but an exception, not the norm.) This meme is starting to make the rounds – Heather Green at BusinessWeek just wrote an article titled Make-or-Break Time For The Net Newbies. Heather interviewed me for the article. Since I only do interviews by email, I asked her if I could post our email exchange as further background to the article. She kindly agreed as long as I waited until the article came out. Here is the actual interview we did. The questions Helen asked me are in italics.

At the National Center for Women & Information Technology we are about to embark on a “heroes campaign” – a new project to highlight 20 successful women IT entrepreneurs via 15 minute podcast interviews accompanied by text transcriptions. We’ve got a great initial set of women that we’ll be interviewing but are casting our net far and wide to find interesting, amazing, and inspirational stories. If you fit the profile (female IT / software / Internet entrepreneurs) or know someone that does, please give me a shout.

Over the holidays I read a magnificent book titled Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge. It’s an incredible collection of history combined with interviews from many of the great computer interface designers and entrepreneurs from the past 30+ years. The stories are superb, the interviews well done, and the pictures are incredible. It’s a must read for anyone serious about designing computer software of any sort. It’s a big book – I petered out about two thirds of the way through it as Moggridge shifted from storytelling to predicting the future – but I fault myself for trying to consume it at one time (and expect I’ll go back and try some of the later chapters again.)

A few weeks ago, Ben Casnocha showed up in Boulder to spend three months with us. I’ve gotten to know Ben over the past four years after having been introduced to him by Greg Prow as “hey Brad – you’ve got to meet this guy Ben – I bet he’ll remind you of you when you were his age.” Having known Ben for four years, all I can say is that I fantasize about having been as together at 18 as Ben is today. 

One of the really cool things about entrepreneurship (and life in general) is being open to new people and new ideas. I’ve written about my random days policy in the past. Today I got the following note from Ed Sullivan, CEO of Aria. Hello Brad, According to your blog you’re on the East Coast. If by chance you’re in Philly, I’d love to buy you lunch, dinner or coffee. I’ve gotten amazing value from your blog: YEO, tools to negotiate my financing, corporate mission statement, life review etc. and I’d love to meet you face to face and shake your hand. I promise not bore you with my business plan (I’m funded).

Another day, another city. At least I saw a really cool sculpture today. Ryan just posted Reason #73 He Hates Airports. Hint – “Caution, the moving walkway is nearing its end, please watch your step. Thank you.”

Yet another Hackathon at FeedBurner (#4). Guys – you really need to cut back on the sugar and caffeine. Eh – never mind – keep consuming! Eric (one of FeedBurner’s founders and CTO) dissects the hack he did (an “Event Feed” service.) It’s kind of like “Being Eric Lunt” in the spirit of “Being John Malkovich.” Plus we get a cool new FeedBurner service (on the Optimize Tab under Event Feed for those of you following along at home.)

Jack Bauer was very busy last night. I didn’t realize his family was so large, or so evil. I expect his reunion with his dad won’t be as enjoyable as mine was. I’m on the east coast somewhere today enjoying real cold but little snow (unlike Ben who is merely enjoying the unreality of snow in Boulder) plowing through my email and feeds before my day starts. My friends at NewsGator have given me yet another way to read RSS feeds with their new NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand (NGEOD – or NGOD for those of you that are atheists) product. If you want to try out enterprise RSS for free for 30 days and like Software as a Service (or On-Demand, or – if you are old school – ASP), now is your chance.

Air travel generally sucks these days. It starts when TSA tells you that you cannot have your toothbrush in the same ziplock bag as your toothpaste (liquids only in the quart bag Mr. Traveler), continues on the filthy plane (thanks for the nice smelling oder killer thing in the bathroom, but did you notice that the sink doesn’t look like it has been washed in a year), and finishes as you sit in the airport during yet another weather or mechanical delay.