Yeah – I know that “Rwanda Venture Capital” sounds a little out there and no – this isn’t yet another email scam migrated to your RSS feed. A Denver-based friend – Rob Fogler (a partner at the law firm of Kamlet Shepherd) and his colleague Antoine Bigirimana (the founder of the Kigali Center for Entrepreneurs) have started a Rwanda-based Venture Capital firm called Thousand Hills Venture Fund. While I’m personally not terribly clued into Rwanda (or Africa in general), a number of my friends in Boulder (including Amy) are and it’s easy to support guys like Rob (Amy and I are investors in THVF) who believe “that the US business community must pay greater attention to the opportunities and challenges of doing business in emerging markets if it will continue to thrive in the globalizing marketplace.”

The CEO’s of my companies have probably gotten tired of me saying “c’mon guys – put a blog up as part of the front page of your site.” While folks are still issuing press releases, the “home page corporate blog” is a great way of quickly getting messages out about your company and your products. Plus – if you do it right – you can use the voice of people in your company, rather than just boring-as-shit PR/marketing speak.

Last week we were one of four VC firms recognized by the Women’s Technology Cluster for our significant investments in women-led companies. The other firms recognized were NEA, Vanguard Associates, and Versant Ventures. While we are flattered to be acknowledged like this, my partner Heidi Roizen said it well when she was quoted as saying “But make no mistake about it, we don’t fund women out of some sort of ‘diversity cause.’ It is just the opposite. We funded these women because they are great entrepreneurs and it made smart business sense to do so. Any VC not being open to women entrepreneurs is missing out of half the population, a lot of smart, talented people, and a lot of opportunities to generate great returns.”

For those of you that like to read about entrepreneurship and venture capital from a VC’s perspective, three younger VC’s have recently started blogging. Will Price: Will is a Senior Vice President at Pequot Ventures. Last month I led a financing for Klocwork which Pequot had originally spun out of Nortel and have been working with Will and Karen White on the company. Will and I have plenty of two degree of separation action – he used to work with Seth Levine (who works for me at Mobius) at Morgan Stanley and my first company (Feld Technologies) was bought by Will’s boss at Pequot, Jerry Poch (Jerry and I have had a few monster hits together – including Service Metrics – along with some crummy failures – can anyone say Guggenheim.com (Rex – stop snickering)). 

As an unrepentant Ben and Jerry’s worshiper (thanks to my dad for my ice cream addiction). I’m always sad when my favorite flavor disappears. I like everything chocolate – the stranger the better – and they’ve had some strange ones (Makin’ Whoopie Pie or Reverse Chocolate Chunk anyone?) These flavors got sent to the Ben and Jerry Cemootary. I guess enough folks like me believe in ice cream resurrection so you can now vote to have them come back to life. Vote now.

Jeff Jarvis has a comprehensive summary of Rupert Murdoch’s recent speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. I don’t follow all the media titans, but Murdoch coming out and talking clearly about how print media needs to change – especially in the face of blogging and the way that the next generation of digital natives (“young people” – according to Murdoch) deal with news and information – is an important acknowledgment of the changing zeitgeist in mainstream media.

If you are a Warren Buffett fan like I am, then you’ll enjoy The Warren Buffett CEO: Secrets From The Berkshire Hathaway Managers. While Buffett’s Letters and Berkshire Hathaway’s annual reports give lots of hints about the various Berkshire companies and the CEO’s behind them, Robert Miles has in depth interviews with 19 of them. In addition to a great history on the companies and the folks running them, you get a clear sense of how Buffett – and his CEO’s – manage the business.

On 4/26/05, Feedburner announced support for Google AdSense ads in Feedburner feeds. I heard from a few skeptics stuff like “yeah right – when will this actually happen?” Today (one month later), Feedburner has put this functionality into production. If you have a Google AdSense account (like I do), it takes two minutes (two check boxes and one piece of data) to implement Google ads in your feeds. It’s still “beta” (at both Google and Feedburner) so there will probably be some stuff to shake out, but it’s trivial to turn on and ready to go.

Nike – as usual – is trying a bunch of marketing and branding things in and around blogs. I got a note from Josh Spear who runs a blog he refers to as “the pulse of cool” who was chosen by Nike to participate in their online / blogger shoe design contest. Josh put up a white and yellow design which you should go vote for. His is the white and yellow sneaker called “The Spear.” Josh is in second place, no doubt helped by his own use of his blog to get the word out.