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.