For almost 30 years, I’ve shared a huge number of life experiences with Warren Katz. Yesterday, I did a breakfast AMA at Cooley’s office near La Jolla with the Techstars MDs and PMs from the western half of the US. At the end of the hour, we were presented with the above video from Warren as the final word on a question that is on everyone at Techstars’ mind. I suppose if I used Facebook, I’d post this there. But I don’t, so it lives here for all of posterity.

Techstars was born 13 years ago. There’s a delicious article in the Denver Post that was the launch article of the first accelerator in Boulder titled How TechStars was born from 5/18/07. The photo is fun. Some of my favorite lines from the article include: Jared Polis, Brad Feld, David Cohen and David Brown are the “professors” – the founders of an organization called TechStars, created to mentor 10 startup companies for the summer. The inaugural session kicks off Monday.

I love chocolate. I love lasers. So it would be logical that I’d love chocolates that are engraved with personalized messages with lasers. I met Jennifer, the founder of Noteworthy Chocolates, in Boston at the Authors & Innovators event. She handed me some chocolates engraved with “Authors & Innovators” we talked a while and she sent me a long story about how she figured out how to laser engrave chocolates.

Personal robots and replicators and instrumented humans. I like to invest in areas predicted by the mountains of science fiction I read. Today, I’m delighted to report that another science fiction dream is becoming real. Take a look at this insane video of the Looking Glass 8K Immersive Display, which is the world’s largest and highest resolution holographic display. Foundry invested in the Looking Glass team in 2017. Since then they’ve shipped thousands of desktop holographic developer kits. But the Looking Glass 8K is something different.

It was a delight to interview Rajat Bhargava for the Give First Podcast. We’ve been working together since 1994 when I made my first angel investment in Raj’s first company (NetGenesis). We’ve worked on a number of companies since then, some successful, and some not, but our friendship – even with our own personal ups and downs – has been a constant. Raj covers a lot of ground in this podcast, including some origin stories, his relationship with Will Herman (who co-invested in NetGenesis with me at the very beginning, which is how he met Raj), a moment where I treated Raj poorly and our relationship could have easily gone off the rails if we hadn’t both put energy into acknowledging what had happened and getting back to a healthy place, and how he thinks about Give First, both in the Boulder startup community and at his current company JumpCloud.

I’ve been a Superhuman email fan for a while. I decided a week ago to go try Gmail and see if I still liked Superhuman so much better. After about two hours, I went back to Superhuman. Several days later, I tried Gmail again, deciding that I was just grumpy for some reason. I bounced back to Superhuman within an hour. This time I sat and thought about why I liked Superhuman so much better. It took a little while for it to come to me, but when it did it was painfully obvious.

Earlier this year Amy and I, along with a number of other local friends, supported the rollout of a new organization in Longmont called Entrepreneurship for All (EforAll). EforAll is a nonprofit organization that partners with communities nationwide to help under-resourced individuals pursue their dream of starting a business. They believe everyone should have the opportunity, resources, and support they need to successfully start their business. Its programs include a free, full-year Business Accelerator that utilizes a cohort model and includes intensive business training and mentorship as well as quarterly community pitch contests.

Pandere Shoes is an Alaskan founded and women-owned startup that creates expandable footwear that accommodates a host of conditions such as edema, diabetes, and neuropathy. I met the co-founder Laura Oden when I was in Anchorage last month to speak at the Accelerate Alaska event. She came up to me after I gave my talk and told me that her company wouldn’t exist without Startup Weekend and Techstars. While that caused a big smile to cross my face, I asked her to tell me more. She described how she met her founders at Techstars Startup Weekend in 2016.

At the Authors and Innovators event, the last panel included a discussion about diversity, with a particular focus on gender diversity. The actual segment was titled Success through Strategic Innovation but it was awesome to watch it evolve into a gender diversity conversation. One of the panelists was Jules Pieri, who is the founder/CEO of The Grommet. I’ve known Jules for a while and loved her book How We Make Stuff Now: Turn Ideas into Products That Build Successful Businesses. As she usually is, she was great on the panel and when it shifted to Q&A, I asked the second question.