We’ve just closed a financing in Borrowed & Blue and Jason joined the board. Given that Jason is also on the board of Craftsy and Havenly, I’m going to bring up the idea with my partners today that we create and design a new theme around arts and marriage. See what I did there? A friend of mine sent out a wonderful note (well – actually an FAQ) last night about eloping. He and his now wife are in Hawaii at an event and tied the knot over the weekend. I’m psyched for them as we talked to him recently about whether they should elope or not. Amy and I eloped so while we are a fan of weddings, we realize how stressful and expensive they can be.

I’ll be in Santa Barbara on 11/1 doing a fireside chat at UCSB from 5:30 – 7:00pm. If you are in Santa Barbara, come hang out and ask me questions.

I attended the 20th Reunion of the Kauffman Fellows on Monday and Tuesday. I’ve recently joined the board of directors and enjoyed spending two days in Kansas City immersed in things with the Kauffman Fellows, a bunch of friends, and a number of LPs and GPs that came to the event. As part of it, I gave a talk and did Q&A with Lesa Mitchell (now the Managing Director of Techstars Kansas City). We covered a lot of ground around startup communities, investing, government, multi-turn games, and other things I can’t remember anymore. Buried in the middle is a story of my experience with Startup Weekend Tehran and a long rant on transcending geographic borders.

The third edition of Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist is going to print and pre-orders are up on Amazon. For everyone who has purchased, read, or reviewed our previous editions, thank you! While it’s difficult to know exactly how many copies have been sold (the joy of publisher metrics), it’s around 100,000 to date, which blows our mind since we had no expectations around this when we wrote the book in 2011.

At the end of the day yesterday I gave a talk at the opening of Galvanize Boulder. After, during the Q&A, someone brought up depression and I went on a long ramble about my own struggles over the years, how I’ve grown and developed, how it has impacted me, and what I do today to work on my mental fitness. During another ramble on introvert / extrovert, I told the crowd I was exhausted from the past few weeks and rather than stick around and mingle, I was going to head home to spend a quiet evening with Amy immediately after my session because I needed to recharge.

If you are a VC then you know Dan Primack. You also probably know that yesterday was the last day he wrote his magnificent daily newsletter The Term Sheet. It’s been a daily read of mine for – well – as long as I can remember. So I was delighted to see this tweet from Dan first thing this morning. Of course I’m gonna write another email newsletter. Please sign up here: https://t.co/pF6NWEkK5s — Dan Primack (@danprimack) October 26, 2016

As we come to the end of a particularly noisy and contentious election cycle, a thought echoes over and over in my mind – we need more entrepreneurs in Congress. As I continue to believe that innovation and entrepreneurship are the key drivers to our economic future, it’s frustrating to hear such little cogent discussion around it. I recently got a call from a long time friend, Martin Babinec. Martin is running for Congress in Upstate New York (District 22) as an Independent. We met in 1991 when Martin had just started his company (TriNet – now a public company) and Feld Technologies (my first company) was a dozen people. We’ve been friends ever since and when he told me he was running for Congress, I smiled, gave him feedback, and listened to his reasoning.

This is a line my friend Jerry Colonna uses when something like the AT&T – Time Warner deal occurs. As time passes, the line has shifted to “We were right – just fifteen years early.” Jerry was Fred Wilson‘s partner at Flatiron Partners. We were all investing in Internet-related stuff at the end of the 1990s. Jerry and Fred had one of the most successful VC funds during this time period until the Internet bubble burst and blew us all up for a while. We made plenty of investments together and I sat on a number of boards with Jerry – we had some big winners and a handful of craters in the ground.

On Tuesday 10/25 from 4pm – 6pm I’ll be hosting a discussion and happy hour with David Cohen where we will discuss what’s next for Techstars in Kansas City. If you are around and interested, or just interested in saying hi, come by and have a drink with us. Register here.