Planet Earth needs a good lawyer. If you are as appalled as I am by the hostility of the Trump Administration to climate change, clean energy, and what appears to be a systematic effort to dismantle the EPA, then please support this month’s #EarthMatch fundraiser that Joanne, Fred, Amy, Albert, Susan, and I are matching up to $30,000. This month we are funding Earthjustice, which started in the 1960s as the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund. Since then, Earthjustice has been the legal backbone for thousands of environmental organizations. They leverage their expertise and commitment to fight for justice and advance the promise of a healthy world for all. Earthjustice’s courtroom fights remain the last lines of defense for many of our crucial public health protections and the nation’s cornerstone environmental laws.

As part of the UCLA Depression Grand Challenge, I’ve been asked by them to be their first #DepressionHero. Over 300 million people around the world suffer from depression. I’m one of them and have written extensively about my experience with it. The following 90-second video gives you a little more context on this. April 7th is the World Health Organizations “World Health Day” and the theme of this year’s World Health Day is Depression: Let’s Talk. UCLA is engaging in a number of activities in commemoration of World Health Day. One of these activities is a social media campaign to publicly recognize a number of individuals who their campus has identified as a #DepressionHero. The UCLA Grand Challenge Facebook and Twitter accounts have been generating lots of content around this and I’m doing a public interview next week (I’ll post the details when I have the final information.)

I’m on the receiving end of a lot of reference calls. I try to be thoughtful and direct in my responses, but I’m increasingly annoyed by the generic nature of the questions. Over time, I’ve developed an approach to doing reference checks, and my approach actively avoids asking any of the following questions. How did you get to know Person X? What is your relationship to Person X? What were Person X’s different roles? How does Person X rank concerning leadership ability? How does Person X rank concerning analytical ability? What about Person X’s vision and ability to communicate it to others? Was Person X well respected by the people he managed? What are Person X’s strengths? What are Person X’s weaknesses or areas for development? Would you hire Person X again? If so, what size company? What other questions should I have asked? Are there any things you would want to know if you were me? I don’t know which VC or Private Equity firm first came up with this list of questions, but like many elements of a term sheet, they seem to have been passed down from generation to generation.

Amy and I just funded all of the unfunded DonorsChoose projects in Alaska as part of the annual DonorsChoose #BestSchoolDay event. As part of the #BestSchoolDay program, your donation is matched. In all of the Alaska projects, Aspect Ventures matched our donation. Huge thanks to Jennifer Fonstad, Theresia Gouw, and team! Amy grew up in Alaska and we have a house in Homer, which is what motivated us to support Alaska this year on #BestSchoolDay. As I was supporting projects, I saw one in Homer and a few Sphero and littleBits requests which made me smile.

Most of us learned about dog years as children. Unfortunately, the adage that one human year = 7 dog years is not entirely correct, as dogs mature much faster than humans and the aging process depends on the size of the dogs. But the general idea works. Recently, I was in a board meeting at a company that had increased its revenue by a factor of four in 2016. We were discussing two things: (1) the 2017 budget and (2) all the things that broke in 2016 that we needed to fix in 2017. After a long, healthy discussion, we did an AMA with the whole company.

Foundry Group is best known for our investments in startups, but our vehicle currently investing in other venture funds, Foundry Group Next, is off to what we believe to be a great start and I wanted to share an update about it by talking about our new investment in a fund managed by Founder Collective. I’ve written previously about why we created Foundry Group Next. We have been personally investing as LPs in funds of other managers for decades and found the activity to be emotionally rewarding. When we decided we wanted to expand and formalize that activity, it gave us a chance to work more closely with Lindel Eakman, who was the largest investor in our first fund through his role at UTIMCO. Lindel joined Foundry Group as a partner to lead the fund investing activity of Foundry Group Next.

If you have purchased the hardcopy edition of Venture Deals 3rd Edition, you can now buy the Kindle version also for $2.99 via the Amazon Kindle Matchbook program. Jason and I have been asking our publisher (Wiley) for this for a while and we are psyched they’ve agreed to it. It came about after a number of you asked us if we were going to do this, so thanks to y’all for pushing us on it.

In a vox with my partner Seth recently, he said something that stuck with me. “Relationships are 100/100, not 50/50.” He was referring to a business dynamic between two people, but it applies to any relationship and any number of people. It’s a simple idea, but a great one. When I consider my relationship with Amy, it’s 100/100. Sure, we have plenty of conflicts, but we are both 100% all in on the relationship.

*He took his vorpal sword in hand: **Long time the manxome foe he sought — **So rested he by the Tumtum tree, *And stood awhile in thought. – from Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky Jabberwocky and the vorpal sword always makes me think of Princess Leia saying “Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi you’re my only hope.” *One, two! One, two! And through and through **The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! **He left it dead, and with its head *He went galumphing back.