I got the following note the other day from a friend: After reading your latest post on Board Room Rules, I started thinking about the pressures that entrepreneurs experience starting, growing and managing start-up companies (whether it’s their first company or their fifth.) So I wonder if you as an investor/board member/partner/cheerleader have ever had to counsel your entrepreneurs on this topic and if so what advice did you dispense?

Fred Wilson has a great, descriptive post on how he thinks about deal size in the context of his fund (Union Square Ventures.) The “Brad” in the post is Fred’s partner Brad Burnham. Overnight I received a question from someone about “typical deal size” – I couldn’t have answered it better than Fred did – who clearly demonstrates in his post that it is firm specific. If you want to get inside the brain of an early stage VC (e.g. have your own Being John Malkovich moment), read Fred’s post.

I go to a lot of board meetings. As a result, I’ve reviewed a lot of board meeting minutes. In general, the philosophy among most VC-backed companies – promulgated by the law firms for these companies – is to keep the board minutes “light.” They should cover the substance of the meeting and have any specific votes, option grants, or board level issues documented, but they should not contain extensive details about the presentations giving in the board meeting.

Ever since I started teaching my 15 year old neighbor Ruby (and learning it simultaneously), I keep running into people who ask “why don’t you just learn / teach PHP?” When I was up in Seattle, I met with Scott Collison who is running a neat company called Ohloh whose goal is to “map the open source world by collecting objective information on open source projects.” Neat. Robin Luckey at Ohloh was about to release an article titled PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast. Before you devolve into the standard flame war with the “PHP is a language; Rails is a framework; you are an idiot” rhetoric, the article is really about PHP vs. Ruby vs. Python vs. Perl. And – the data (and results) that Ohloh and Robin have put together are fascinating. Following are the key graphs from the article.

The Season 6 Trailer is up. Jack is “almost” back.

As I was reading NY Times Science section today in the bathroom (the only place I bother reading physical newspapers and magazines anymore) I came across a superb explanation of the Periodic Spiral. As a young nerd, I was fascinated with the periodic chart and – even though I didn’t like chemistry very much (I was a physics guy) – I spent hours staring at it. I could easily lose an entire day to the Shockwave version of the Periodic Spiral. Did you know that strontium has a molar mass of 87.62 and that Y (atomic number 39) is yttrium?

On Friday, I did a podcast with David Cohen and Kimbal Musk on angel investing. David and I have done a few angel investments together (Solidware Technologies and ClickCaster), I’ve got a long history of angel investing (over 50 since 1994), and I’m an investor in Kimbal’s new company Me.dium (part of my “dynamics of information” theme.) Plus – we did the podcast at The Kitchen – my favorite restaurant in Boulder – which happens to be owned by Kimbal and was previously the location of some of my “for-profit philanthropy” in the form of a previously failed restaurant called Triana (once hot – now not.) So – there was plenty of “angel karma” in the room as we talked.

CNET has an article titled Putting blogs to work for Wall Street about one of my investments – Collective Intellect. I imagine Don Springer – Collective Intellect’s CEO – either smirked or grimaced when he saw the subhead “Collective Intellect has a goal: Make bloggers work for The Man.” Don, his partner Tim, and the Collective Intellect team have been working on part of the “dynamics of information problem” as applied to public company information. It’s hard and intriguing stuff that they are well suited for after their tour of duty at WebMethods by way of the acquisition of their first company – Dante Group.

Kevin Tillman joined the Army with his brother Pat in 2002 and they served together in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pat was killed in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. Kevin, who was discharged in 2005, has written an essay called After Pat’s Birthday that everyone should read regardless of their political ideology – and reflect on what Kevin has to say. Thanks Dick for pointing it out.