When Ryan and I moved to Boulder a little over 2.5 years ago, we both bought homes on Pine street in downtown Boulder (random, not planned).  To our dismay, the online mapping services didn’t know where we lived, despite our homes being built over 100 years ago.  Ryan blogged about it at the time.  It really sucked as every delivery person, cable dude, etc. ended up at the wrong Pine street in Boulder county.

Today, I decided to take a car trip and check out some of the wonderful mountainous terrain around Boulder and on the way home stopped by the "other" Pine street.  Clearly this Pine street is much different than downtown Boulder.  It was nice to see what all the delivery folks got to see. 

If you are a regular reader of the this blog, you know that I don’t ascribe to much of the doom and gloom that everyone wants to wallow in.   

This isn’t to say that I have my head in the sand.  I realize that many people are losing their jobs and that companies need to run their businesses extra efficiently, but this isn’t exactly "R.I.P" for the good times, despite anything other venture firms may say.  The sky is not falling and it’s not "game over."  The economy will bounce back. 

Also, if you are a regular reader, it’s possible that you’ve picked up my issues with many law firms’ billing practices.

What do these two topics have in common?  Where there’s a crises, there is always a lawyer willing to make some money on it.  Today’s candidate:  Proskauer Rose. 

I just read that Proskauer has created an "Economic Crisis Response Group" to deal with the uncertainty we face.  I’m not sure who in the marketing department came up with this, but I about fell off my chair laughing.

According to the press release, the group:

- Includes lawyers from different practice groups;

- Who quickly respond to clients affected by the current turmoil; and

- Who monitor, analyze and disseminate information on new developments as they arise.

Uh, isn’t this what ALL law firms do?  In fact, if you weren’t doing this before, what exactly where you doing?  I’m sure that with all specialty groups, they’ve found a way to bump up their hourly rates for this elite group, but maybe this is just marketing gone really wrong.  

Do they get to wear cool super hero uniforms?  If so, I’m down with that. 

Sigh, just more noise being added to the system.  Not exactly what we need right now.

I’ve always been a huge fan of Southwest Airlines.  Whether it was how they battled American Airline’s predatory pricing tactics in their early days to former CEO Herb Kelleher arm wrestling for the right to use a tag line, I’ve always found Southwest to be different than all other airlines.  They are what they are and they are usually on time.  And more often than not, their employees are friendly and highly competent. 

They’ve also done a great job weathering many economic storms.  They are by far the most consistently profitable airline in our country.  Some of this was based on the fact they locked up long term gas contracts (although I’ve heard these are no longer in operation), as well as flying only one type of aircraft.  And a lot of it is that they just seem to run more efficiently and less stupidly than the other airlines.  (Are you listening United?)

That being said, today was a ominous sign.  On the way to LAX from DEN, Brad and I were 2 of 15 people on the entire plane.  I really like flying empty planes and it was the most mellow flight that I’ve had in a long, long time, but not a good sign for my favorite carrier.  See the follow picture which I took from row 7 just after pulling to the gate.  These were all the people sitting behind me on the flight. 

Yesterday, Micah Baldwin told me and a few other Colorado-based bloggers about the DonorsChoose Challenge.  I decided to put up the DonorsChoose widget on my blog. 

There are already got a bunch of great Colorado projects up on the DonorsChoose website.  Look for the sidebar on the right of my main page or click through on the DonorsChoose website link.  Any amount helps.  Thank you.

In all the upheaval of the financial markets, it’s nice to see someone with a sense of humor.  My friend, Eric Jensen sent this to me today.  Get your picks into me.  The winner will receive Lehman or WAMU, your choice. 

Also interesting, is this this document on the "vanishing act" of investment banks.  It shows the time line and current state of affairs of the banking industry.  Scary.  Hang onto your hats everyone. 

For all of you Boulderites, mark your calendars for August 14^th, 5:30pm at the Foundry Roof Deck.  One of the TechStars teams that I mentor, Application Experts (App-X) is having a party to not only celebrate their successful summer in the TechStars program, but more importantly to highlight the importance of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado (EFCO). 

I’m happy to report that App-X has joined EFCO.  You can get involved too, by drinking free beer.  How?   EFCO will buy you a beer at the Foundry on Thursday night if you sign up to volunteer for their August 16^th event.  Alternatively, EFCO will buy you a beer if you make a cash donation on Thursday night.  They will have a table set up as you walk up to the Foundry Deck. 

Live music will also be present courtesy of Something Underground.  This should be a fun time with friends, colleagues and all for a great cause.  Congratulations to App-X for sponsoring. 

This from my new friend Alfred Levitt…

He was watching CNBC today and noticed that they elected to carry Bernanke’s remarks to the Senate Banking Committee rather than President Bush, who was addressing the nation about the economy. 

While a obvious choice in some respects, I believe it says something very important about what the country is thinking, not merely CNBC or its editorial choices.

I think it says that most people see the current economic situation as much more grave than previous economic downturns.  It’s starting to make the Internet bust look pretty tame in comparison. 

Dollar cratering, inflation at 27 year highs, credit markets decimated…. what next?

This one is getting scary folks.  Hang onto your life jackets.

Yes, you read the title correctly. The five of us employ an executive coach and we love her. Who is she and what does she do?

Her name is Nancy Raulston and she is the founder of perspective2. What she does is facilitate human capital and executive team development in ways that we aren’t qualified to do. No, this isn’t “sit on the couch and tell me about your mother,” rather she has taken the time to get to know each of us and has been a tremendous asset in helping us explore our strengths and weaknesses as a team and as individuals.

We decided to use her when Ryan and I moved to Colorado two years ago to help start Foundry Group. While we had all worked together for 6 years then, we had never worked in the same office and we thought that a good 360 degree management review would be a helpful exercise.

She interviewed each us, folks in the industry and our staff about us and came up with a detailed analysis of each of us including how we fit together as a team. Which of us likes detail? Which one of loathes the small stuff? Which one of us doesn’t like to be the first to speak in a meeting? It wasn’t that anything was so surprising in that it changed our opinions of one another, rather when it was clear who was more and less comfortable with certain things. And with this knowledge we were able to help and encourage each of us to be better-rounded.

Since then, we’ve invited Nancy back on a regular basis to help monitor and tune our development. For a guy from Michigan who is generally leery about similar professions, I’ve become more and more impressed the more that we work with Nancy. I can confidently say that each of us has explored areas that we once shied away from and in so have become an even better functioning team. I think it is important to note that we didn’t have an “issue” that was the catalyst for working with Nancy, rather we thought we’d give it a shot while everything was great and see what the value proposition was. We’ve been very happy. I’d encourage anyone to give her a try.

Given how much of a focus music is in my life, I decided to dedicate a separate page to music. While I will blog plenty about music, I wanted some persistent content to remain available. Thanks to our IT guy, Ross Carlson I’ve got a music tab that has some cool features.

First up are my current recommendations for musical acts that you may not have heard of. I’ll update these over time. I’m super excited about the three current and inaugural picks.

Next up are some musical tracks that I’ve been involved with. These will rotate over time, for sure, but feel free to click and listen away. Yes, comments welcome. Remember, I have a day job.

Lastly, I have some promo material from Toothless Monkey Records, a record company that I co-own with Ryan McIntyre and Nick Peters.

By the way, if you like VCs who blog consistently about music, definitely check out Fred Wilson’s music blog. He’s always coming up with reviews of great tracks and he’s great for discovering new artists.

Hello World! It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve decided to create “Mendelson’s Musings – tales from a reformed drummer, software guy and lawyer.” While I’ve been blogging for years on Feld.com and AskTheVC.com, I’ve generally stayed to professional-related topics like term sheets, LOIs, 409A and the like. While it’s been fun, occasionally I’ve had the urge to break out and talk about some personal thoughts.

I’ve been a musician, software engineer and lawyer and now I am onto career number four: venture capital. Along the way, I’ve had the great fortune of always having intellectually stimulating and fun work. Most of the time, I’ve actually gotten to work with good people, too. From this, I’ve acquired a unique view of the world and now look to impart some of my warped views on others.

We’ll see where this all goes, but the current plan is to talk about things that tickle my brain. Hopefully you’ll find some of this interesting as well.

For those readers of AskTheVC.com, don’t worry – we aren’t going anywhere, rather this is a more personal forum where you’ll get some edgier comments than would normally appear elsewhere with my byline attached to it.

Thanks for taking a look, comments and topic ideas are welcome.