Amy

Amy and I are celebrating our 29/26/23rd anniversary today. It’s the summer solstice, which is a special day for us. 29 years ago we officially started dating. 26 years ago we declared ourselves married (and eloped.) 23 years ago we signed an official piece of paper that was witnessed at the Boulder County Clerk’s Office because it was a pain in the ass to not be officially married. When I reflect on the last 29 years of my life, it’s been a remarkable experience to get to share it with Amy. When we started dating, I was 24 years old. I lived in Boston. I was running my first company. I lived in a 24,000 cubic foot loft. I was struggling through a divorce, a failed Ph.D. experience, and a very stressful software consulting company, that, while performing well, consumed 100 hours a week of me. ...

Happy Anniversary Amy . We’ve been together for 27 years and we’ve been married for 24 of them. It amazes me that you put up with me. I look forward to spending as many years together as we get on this planet. And, if we are lucky, some technology will get created before we vanish that allows us to spend infinity together, although I’m not sure I’d wish me on you for infinity.

Fred Wilson , Joanne Wilson , Amy , and I are doing our second Monthly Match. This one is in support of the National Immigration Law Center . We will be matching $20,000 of contributions that our respective communities make to NILC. We’ve made it easy to contribute – simply go to this page on Crowdrise . Any level of contribution is super helpful. Since we are matching 1:1, each dollar you contribute gets NILC another dollar. ...

My mother-in-law (Amy’s mom) passed away last Sunday. The funeral was in Hotchkiss, Colorado yesterday. At lunch with her extended family, someone said something that stuck with me. “No one gets out of this alive.” I went looking for the source this morning and couldn’t find one. Amy thought it was Woody Allen, a Google search turned up Jim Morrison (due to the name of his book), Robert Heinlein was cited as saying something similar, but in the end I decided it didn’t matter. I just liked the statement. ...

On today, the first day of the new year, I give to my wife Amy Batchelor the gift of a lifetime of uncomplaining tech support. While in Bora Bora, one of the books I read was Stewart Friedman’s Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life . It was “ok” so I ended up skimming a lot of it. But I picked up one great thing from it which made the entire book worthwhile. ...

After spending most of the day at littleBits yesterday, I finished it with an annual tradition that is one of my favorites. At 6:45pm Amy and I met Joanne Wilson , Fred Wilson , Matt Blumberg , and Mariquita Blumberg at Marea for dinner. Fred and I are both on the board of Return Path , the company Matt has been running since he co-founded it in 1999. For over a decade, we’ve been having an annual dinner as a group when Amy and I are in NY, usually in the fall. ...

Lots of people get married on the summer solstice. To all of them – including those getting married today – congrats and welcome to the club! It’s a particularly sweet club on your 21st anniversary if you are a numerophile, which is a word that Amy and I just made up that describes people who love numbers. And blackjack. And Dragons. And Daenerys – what a serious badass she is. And Arya also. But I digress. Can you tell that we recently figured out how to watch the Game of Thrones season finale up in Homer? ...

This is a picture of me completely and unapologetically engrossed in a game of Space Invaders on a VIC 20. Here’s an early commercial for it , featuring the one and only William Shatner. Several weeks ago the team at the Media Archeology Lab (MAL) celebrated their accomplishments to date by hosting an event – called a MALfunction – for the community. Attendees include founders of local startups, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Colorado, students that are interested in computing history, and a few other friends. The vibe was electric – not because there were any open wires from the machines – because this was truly a venue and a topic that is a strong intersection between the university and the local tech scene. ...

20 years. Just amazing. You are my favorite person on this planet. Here are some pictures from the past 20 years. Fashion has clearly never been my strong sense. Fortunately, my t-shirts are rubbing off on you. ...

The second book in the Startup Revolution series, Startup Life: Surviving And Thriving In A Relationship With An Entrepreneur, is shipping in the next week or so. My wife Amy Batchelor and I wrote this one, with contributions from about 20 other entrepreneurial couples. Amy and I have been friends since we met in college in 1984. We have been together as a couple since 1990. We got married in 1993. Our marriage almost ended in 2000. Today, I am ecstatic in my relationship with Amy. We’ve worked hard over the past 11 years to figure things out, get it right, and build a long-term, sustainable relationship. ...