I am a guest columnist in VentureBeat.  Having pissed off all my lawyers friends with my Law Firm 2.0 posts, I figured it was about time to trash the accounting profession.  Or at least a part of it. 

I hate the new accounting world of FAS 157 and I’m not alone.  Fred Wilson posted a great summary about how stupid this whole mess is.

Check out my article and let me know your thoughts. 

No, I am not talking about a bad Rodney Dangerfield movie, rather this week I’ve returned to my role as an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado.  I’m stepping out of my comfort zone and teaching a class on venture capital. 

Last year was my first attempt at teaching a full class.  I was extremely fortunate to enlist Brad Bernthal, who is a real professor at CU, to teach it with me.  We had a blast and our student reviews seemed to indicate that they appreciated our efforts.  We call our class "VC 360" and try to teach a cradle to grave course on everything in the VC ecosystem, including from the eyes of the entrepreneur, which we do by including guess lectures from local CEOs. 

We tried to not only teach about how the startup ecosystem worked, but get them all involved in the community through outreach events, seminars and Boulder-based events.  Our goal was to put what we taught in real life context. 

This years class is an even more diverse group of law and business students.  Perhaps more interesting (with no slight intended toward folks paying tuition) is that we have three Computer Science instructors auditing our class.

Today was class number two and I’m already excited for lecture number three.  It’s highly rewarding to see so many people interested in startup culture and hope that our class, in a small way, can be additive to the Boulder community. 

Thanks to past and present students – you give back more than I put into the process and I’m very thankful.  I’m looking forward to another rewarding semester. 

Eric Marcoullier, CEO of Gnip has set up an email list exclusively for Boulder / Denver-based startup executives.

Eric’s hypothesis is that Boulder executives need a forum to better connect, access and spread knowledge bases. 

The rules are simple for membership:

1. Your company must be funded (at least some angel money);

2. C-level and VP level folks only; and

3. Open to all verticals, not just IT / Internet, etc.

Unfortunately, I don’t qualify, but would encourage those who do to check it out.

Every once in a while, I get around to updating the "Music" tab on my blog to include new music that I’ve discovered.

Today is the day.  For those of you looking for some good tunes, don’t forget to check out the music tab.

Also, for those of you interested, I’ve posted some of my personal tracks up there as well.

I posted a blog today on the Foundry Group site about our trip to CES.  Among the topics discussed are why you shouldn’t buy a TV for the next 6 months and why Nobu is simply my favorite sushi place that I can dream of.

Also, for some reason, it’s harder every year for me to go to Vegas.  I must be getting old. 

Last week, I posted about the porn industry’s proposed bailout and received many interesting comments.  (Thanks).

One comment, from a regular and appreciated reader was particularly interesting, so I had to post a new blog.

A San Francisco restaurant has received its second bailout in the last 4 months from the city of San Francisco.

Yoshi’s just received another $1.5m loan from the city after at $1.3m loan last September, this all following an original $4.4m from the city to start the restaurant.

Wow.

The city of San Francisco must be rolling in dough to provide this type of support.  Having lived in the Bay Area for 10 years prior to Boulder, I’ll provide the opinion that it doesn’t have the funds to do things like this.

It’s not that I’m biased, despite the fact that the restaurant wasn’t very good and that the staff were terribly rude on my last visit.

It’s just sickening to think of what other good uses this money could go to in a time like this. 

I’m feeling a bit cheeky from attending CES while there are adult film stars walking around all over the place.  (For those of you who don’t know, CES is held in Vegas the same time the Adult Video Convention occurs at the same location.  Egads).  That being said…

I know that you can’t believe everything on the Internet, but several sources are reporting that the porn industry is asking for a $5 Billion dollar bailout from Congress. 

I’m sick of the word bailout.  I’ve got to hand it to these guys they’ve done a good job of self promotion.  I don’t think pumping cashing into a limp industry trying to get it through soft times is the way to go.  Let them make the old fashioned hard choices and reform their industry for the future, not use the current economic environment as a backdoor for greed. 

I can tell you that if I was in Cleveland, or any other hard working town, I’d be pretty steamed if my tax dollars were used this way.  If Congress even takes a meeting with these folks, we should punch them donkeys hard.  It would be very hard to swallow injecting any form of subsidy into this industry.  I find it hard to believe that a few quarters of economic turmoil will bring the adult film ecosystem to its knees. 

Every time we make an investment, we blog about it on our Foundry Group site.  Today, I’m especially excited about our latest announcement, as the company is a "bulls eye" in my Law Firm 2.0 thesis. 

You can read all about FirstDocs on the Foundry post, but what I’ll tell you shortly here is that they are a Westwood, MA located legal process automation company that I believe, are poised to change the way law firms and in-house legal department deliver value to their clients.

I’m particularly excited about this opportunity given that the CEO Dan Gaffney reached out to me after having read several of my posts about the inefficiencies in the legal ecosystem.

At the time, Dan thought it would be nice to get to know me, see if I could provide him any customer leads, show me the demo, etc.  Being a venture capitalist, I wasn’t sure if I was getting the softest fundraising sell of all time, or if they didn’t need any money, so I asked.   

Dan said they were all set for money and had customers.  I remember being a little sad, but still excited about what they were doing, so we kept in touch. 

Over the next few months, however, our conversations really intensified and the ideas on how to take their already released product to a completely new level began to take shape.  It was at that time, I began to sell the Foundry Group to Dan in hopes that he’d consider taking some money from us and thus, allowing me to join the board of directors.

I’m happy to say – mission accomplished!  I’m very excited to work with Dan, Luke, Anil, Muthu and the rest of the FirstDocs team.  Hopefully one day I’m writing a Law Firm 2.0 post about the increased efficiencies of lawyers!

For those of you who want to know about our portfolio company, Topspin, they’ll be at CES this week.  Foundry folks will be there as well.

I just returned from a week’s long vacation in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.  (And as an aside, if you are going and want restaurant recommendations, I have some good ones).

I have an iPhone that I’m generally pleased with.  Yes, I gripe like everyone else about the lack of cut and paste, the lack of a sideways keyboard on email and other complaints, but I think it’s the best machine out there by far.

The one thing that I’ve not understood, however, is the general speed of the device.  I’m never sure if the latency I’m experiencing is local or the AT&T network, but I don’t think it’s "really fast" like Apple claims.  In fact, in the U.K., Apple can’t advertise this claim at all. I think that my old Motorola 9m on the Verizon 3G network was a bit faster, even running Windows mobile. 

When I landed in Mexico, I wondered what coverage, if any I would have.  I was shocked. 

The speed was incredible.  Web browsing, texting, local apps that require external content were all screaming fast.  It was like iPhone 4G, except that it was today! 

Well, actually it was yesterday, because today I’m back in the U.S. and back to my regular speeds.  And now I’m even more disappointed having seen what my iPhone can do on a better network.

Sigh.  Nice work Apple on the device, but wish that you had chosen a better network partner.