Well, I’ve learned a lot about how a bill becomes a law on my journey to try to turn the Startup Visa idea into a law.  And yes – it’s a lot like how I learned about it on Schoolhouse Rock about 35 years ago. It’s been a little less than a year since I […]

I’m far away from Washington DC today.  Actually, I’m a lot closer to Russia than I am to DC and that makes me an expert on Russia.  Wait, someone else said that (although the people next to me and Amy at dinner last night were speaking Russian.) But my friend the Internets (actually, the Web) […]

I’m in Washington DC again – this time to talk about innovation.  I’ve been here three times in the past year – the first time was to hear Bilski at the Supreme Court in November and then I was back in March to talk about and promote the Startup Visa.  Yesterday, Thomas Friedman article wrote […]

I was thinking about how to drive CTR’s up via different mechanisms this morning when this email arrived in my inbox. I remembered talking about high CTR email response rates with Dave McClure and Shervin Pishevar when we were in DC on our Startup Visa trip at the beginning of March.  I’d forgotten about this […]

On Thursday, March 18th (during CU Entrepreneurship Week) there is going to be a great Silicon Flatirons Conference on “The Role of Place”.  Brad Bernthal, who is chairing the conference, leads with a great quote from Harvard Professor and Monitor Group co-founder Michael Porter. "Paradoxically, the enduring competitive advantages in a global economy lie increasingly […]

If there is one thing you read today, go read Brad Burnham at Union Square Ventures excellent essay titled Software patents are the problem not the answer. Several years ago when I first started saying things like “software patents are invalid constructs” or “software shouldn’t be able to be patented” or “software patents are a […]

On Friday I spent two hours at Mahalo headquarters in Jason Calacanis’ studio filming This Week In Startups Episode #35.  Jason and I have known each other since the mid 1990’s – the last time he interviewed me was at Josh Harris’ Pseudo.com thingymabob as part of a roundtable with Fred Wilson, Jerry Colonna, and […]

Brad Burnham at Union Square Ventures put up a very important post last night titled We need an independent invention defense to minimize the damage of aggressive patent trolls.  His partner Fred Wilson echoed Brad’s thoughts on his blog with a post titled Why We Need An Independent Invention Defense. Brad’s post starts out with […]

Yesterday I had a good conversation with Nivi, the co-author of the great Venture Hacks blog.  He recently added me to AngelList, a directory of angel and seed investors that Nivi curates.  Our discussion covered a variety of things, including trying to define the parameters that qualifies someone to call themselves an angel investor. Historically, […]