I have another set of open office hours coming up – this Thursday, November 5th.  If you are interested in getting together, you can sign up here.  The TechStars bunker is where I’ll be and I hope, that like last time, I’ll get to meet some new friends.

When I first moved here 3 years ago, I started the Boulder Open Coffee Club to meet new people and take the occasional “random meeting.”

What I’ve found, however is that the group discussion is always so engaging that I usually don’t have enough time to meet folks one-on-one.

So, following Brad’s lead of setting aside time for random meetings (one of which turned into Techstars – not bad!), I’m going to hunker down in the Techstars bunker and hang out ever once in a while.  Anyone is free to come, sit down and chat.  My partners Brad and Seth are going to do as well. 

We’ve set up a self-service wiki for people to sign up. The rules are pretty simple – set up an account and then pick a date and time slot. Fill in your name, email address and a description of what you want to talk about. These are intended to be introductory meetings, so don’t let the short time be a deterrent – there’s plenty of opportunity to follow up (and I imagine the days will be pretty flexible as well to allow for more time as necessary).

Let me know what you think.  See you at the bunker!

My partner Brad is going to be hosting a party in Seattle on the 25th of February hanging out  with the entrepreneur and venture capital crowd.  If you’ve ever wanted to meet him and happen to be around, stop on by.  Here are the details.

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.

Just reading the title that I just typed is really unbelievable, but in hindsight it’s true.

I’m not good at taking time off.  Part of it is that I love what I have done professionally, but a lot of it are my issues.  Vacations are not a natural act for me.

That being said, even when I have taken vacations, I’ve always been under the impression that the re-entry to email would be worse than staying in touch.  My behavior has been to take a day or two off from email, but then to check in to make sure the email queue didn’t grow too large.   

Inspired by my partner Seth who recently went "off grid" and teased by the rest of my partners, I decided to take a week off email recently. 

It wasn’t easy at first.  What I realized is that I probably suffer from a mild addiction to working my email queue down to near zero every day.  When my mind would settle, my instinct was to check email.  And I was in Mexico, so it wasn’t like I was sitting in snow-bound Boulder with nothing to do. 

After about 4 days, however, this changed.  I broke the cycle and was enjoying y time away from email so much that I’ve know decided that there is no other way to take a vacation.

When asked how long it had been since I’d been off email for a week, I spent a bit and realized that it had been 1994.  Egads. 

So I’d suggest that if you are like me and can’t be off your email for more than 48 hours without feeling your heart rate kick up a notch or two – fight the feeling and get over the hump.  I hadn’t realized that my vacations really weren’t vacations until very recently.  It’s all the difference in the world.

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.