Thankfully I no longer get fedexed binders of board packages from my portfolio companies in advance of a board meeting. Through the modern miracle of email, the board packages show up in my inbox – hopefully a few days (rather than a few hours – or even minutes) before the board meeting. The board packages tend to show up in three different formats – one that is easy to deal with, one that is ok, and one that sucks.

Periodically FeedBurner gets all their engineers in a room, turns over tech support to the business team for the day, and cranks out a bunch of features. Hackathon III occurred a week ago on Friday and generated a healthy list of new things for all the friendly neighborhood FeedBurner users, including: Map It FeedFlare: Link to Google Maps if you have address info in your post. BuzzBoost Brush-up: Spiffy new BuzzBoost features, including subscribe to feed. Download Tracking Tweaks: UI cleanup on Download Tracking. FeedBulletin via Email: Get email alerts (instead of RSS alerts) for your FeedBulletin feed. IP To Location: Live hits page now displays countries where your items are being viewed. Mobile Feed Stats: Check your stats on a mobile web browser. FeedFlare Scratchpad: Play around with and test out new FeedFlare’s easily FeedBurner Module for Netvibes: See a bunch of FeedBurner stuff in Netvibes. New Email This FeedFlare: Email This webpage instead of mailto: (for non-nerds – this works better). FeedBurner Help: Lots more help. I love this approach to pushing features out.

Boulder was highlighted in the June 26, 2006 Fortune Magazine as the best place for outdoor addicts to retire. My friend Kimbal Musk’s superb restaurant – The Kitchen – was listed as the place to eat dinner on a “typical Friday night.”

A few days before NewsGator released their plug-in for the new version of Yahoo! Messenger, I was at NewsGator for a board meeting and sat in on their Friday demo hour (one hour of rapid fire demos from stuff people are working on or things that got built “under the radar” during the previous week.) I saw some neat stuff, especially around a major release / announcement that I believe is coming in the next two weeks. I also saw a bunch of cool “small things” like new UI stuff being rolled into the products or long term features (such as filter by category) that are functional and just waiting for the right release cycle for each of the products.

Amy and I were co-hosts for Mark Udall’s summer solstice party today. Mark has become a friend and is one of the few politicians I’ve really come to admire. The quote of the afternoon was from Winston Churchill – “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.” Mark reminded all of us that one of the great American traits is optimism. Right on my friend.

I’m really proud of my friends at Rally Software. Their business continues to grow very rapidly and they appear to have nailed the intersection of a couple of key trends – the growth of the Agile software development combined with the trendy but important reality of SaaS (“Software as a Service” for those of you living under a rock or in Alaska, like I like to do occasionally.) Last week Rally closed an $8m financing led by Vista Ventures – this should fund them through profitability. Earlier this week, Ryan Martens – Rally’s founder and CTO – was named a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in the Rocky Mountain region. While I don’t usually put a lot of stock in awards, I’ve been a judge for the Rocky Mountain region in the past and recognize the high level of quality among the various nominees for this particular award.

I’ve noticed a pattern in many of the VC and entrepreneur blogs I read – very few people ever talk about failure. Failure is a key part of entrepreneurship. As an entrepreneur, angel investor, and venture investor, I’ve had lots of success, but I’ve also had lots of failures. So has everyone that I know that has accomplished much of anything. While it’s often difficult to talk about failure, there are a lot of lessons that can be learned from it. The cliche “I learn more from my failures than my successes” applies directly to entrepreneurship and creating companies. It can be difficult to be self-reflective, but I’ve personally found it very cathartic to study my failures, understand what I did wrong, learn as much as I can from them, and move on. Occasionally I’ll have a similar failure a second time or a third time – hopefully I learn eventually.

Nick Bradbury, one of the great programmers that I know, has a post up about his approach to working out new ideas. He also has a few hints about things he’s playing with for the next version of FeedDemon. I’ve gotten to know Nick over the past year or so since NewsGator acquired Nick’s company and love his style and his products (I use FeedDemon all day long on several machines – it’s my primary newsreader.) 

Yesterday was my 13th wedding anniversary. Amy and I went out to dinner at the Flagstaff House with Seth and Greeley who were celebrating their 3rd anniversary. We had a wonderful time – I wouldn’t trade the last 13 years with Amy for anything (and I suspect Seth and Greeley feel the same way about each other.) We spent a lot of time talking about how satisfied we are with our respective existences on this planet. It’s a huge pleasure to be able to sit quietly at a nice dinner, looking out over one of the most beautiful views of any city that I’ve ever seen (Boulder from the top of Flagstaff is special), and enjoy the company of a few of the special people in my life.