I love origin stories. Some of them glorify entrepreneurship in a way that makes them challenging to parse, as the struggles of our heroines and heroes gets romanticized in a way that tastes sugary sweet. But, when they are written in first person, unedited, on a blog, they are often delicious in a tasty and fulfilling way. Jud Valeski, the co-founder of Gnip, wrote a great one a few days ago. It’s titled How Did Gnip Get The Twitter Deal? and does a thorough job of telling the story from Jud’s perspective. If that’s all that was there, it’d be a solid origin story.

Pro Tip: If you are at CES today and want to connect, I’ll be hanging out at Eureka Park from 11am this morning (Friday) when I’m on a panel about diversity until I leave the premises at 2:30. My dad and I left the Venetian yesterday at 8:30am to head over to the Las Vegas Convention Center. When I arrived back at the room at 10pm, I was done / baked / toasted / wiped.

Everyone has a junk drawer. Or two. Or ten. One of mine is to the left. So does every company. It’s now often referred to as “Labs” (as an homage to the infamous Google Labs which was disbanded in 2011.) We’ve seen a lot of companies spin up a Labs as a way to try to create new products. In most cases, after about a year, it’s a junk drawer of random shit.

At the MIT Celebration of 50 Years of Entrepreneurship in November, I heard a number of fantastic lines that have stuck with me. One of them was from Noubar Afeyan. “Entrepreneurship is intellectual immigration.” As I sat in an audience of about 200 extremely accomplished MIT graduates spanning over 50 years, I thought to myself “he just fucking nailed it.” I’m a huge fan and supporter of immigration, especially around entrepreneurship. If you look at the landscape of success entrepreneurs in the United States you see a remarkable number of first and second generation immigrants. We can argue about immigration policy all day long (and plenty in DC do, mostly to insure that nothing actually gets accomplished) but the historical statistics around immigration and entrepreneurship in the US are undeniable.

In November, during the week of the presidential election, I was at MIT for the Celebration of 50 Years of Entrepreneurship at MIT. The Friday night event included a keystone from Simon Johnson, an MIT professor who became famous during the financial crisis because of his superb analysis along with his almost daily blog The Baseline Scenario and his willingness to openly challenge an enormous amount of conventional thinking. I remember hearing Simon for the first time at an MIT Sloan Dean’s Advisory meeting in the basement of a fancy hotel in NY in the middle of the financial crisis. Many of the advisory board member attendees looked like hammered dog shit as they were part of the New York financial services and real estate world. Simon gave a clear eyed, extremely compelling pep talk that challenged everyone to ask questions and think hard, rather than just retreat into gloom.

I’m giving two talks this year at CES as part of Startup Stage at the Sands, Level 1, Hall G. The first is on Thursday 1/5: 1 – 1:45: Fireside chat with Fitbit: From Inspiration to IPO. The second is on Friday 1/6: 1 – 1:45: Diversity in Tech If you are around and interested, come listen and say hello.

I’ll be at CES from Wednesday to Friday. I went for many years, punted for the past few years, but decided to go again this year. Techstars runs a big program called the Startup Stage that has three days of programming. It also co-hosts Eureka Park, at the Sands, Level 1, Hall G which is a collection of around 600 startups. I’ll be hanging out there when I’m not walking to CES floor, which typically takes me a day.

Ok – first nerd joke of 2017 for me. Yup. 2017 is a prime number. But 2017 is a pretty special prime. In fact 2017 is a sexy prime with 2011 – bet you didn’t know that! The Shrike né Predator and I wish you a Happy New Year. If you need a great blog to start 2017 with, give yourself the gift of following the Daily Overview. And, buy the book – it will blow your mind.

As we head into 2017, I have a steady stream of operating plans hitting my inbox. Since many of our investments are companies that are scaling, vs. companies that are just getting started, there are a lot of derivative metrics in these plans. Q1 is the easiest quarter to make your plan, so most of these companies are getting a free pass for the next three months after fighting the good fight of making or beating plan in Q3 and Q4. For the SaaS and recurring revenue companies, if they missed by more than 5% in 1H16 and didn’t reforecast, they’ve had a particularly grueling uphill climb for the past six months.