I’m off for Sun Valley tomorrow, on the eve of VCIR Fall – the Venture Capital in the Rockies Fall conference.

I love participating in events revolving around startups and funding, and this one promises to be exceptional, given an active group of VC’s and entrepreneurs from around the region, and a region I think is really enjoying a startup culture growth spurt from Boulder to Missoula. The format is one day of startup company presentations interspersed with talks from Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, HP, and others, bookended by socializing and networking evenings.

OK, I’m sure the setting won’t be bad either, though I have a bit of a dilemma in that my cold weather and flyfishing gear won’t fit in the same weekend bag. Oh well, I guess I’ll be cold!

If you’re in the area – or even just interested – come check it out.

I’m going to let this speak for itself:

Frista updte – Uganda

Frista talked exitedly to me about her brewing process. She is now able to sell over six jerry cans full of her home made brew each week. The loans have enabled her to buy a sugar cane plantation and repair her grinding machine. This has improved the flavour and the efficiency of her beer and she has increased her sales as a result. She sells each jerry can of beer for US$18. She thoroughly enjoys her work and the fact that her customers are always happy (and drunk!). The process of making the beer from sourgum takes about a week and she enthusiastically mimed to me the entire process.

She has recently has to pay the last furneral rite of her late father and now she is able to use all the loans for her business. The business is able to support her and her eight children.

Original post at kiva.org.

I’ve been following with interest the controversy surrounding Jason Calcanis’s post How to save money running a startup. I’m not sure why people get so huffy about these things, but in any case there’s not a word in his post I don’t agree with.

But there’s a missing ingredient here: leadership. Because there’s a name for a place where people work 24/7 without coffee or lunch breaks, optimize their workspaces so they can multi-task and be more productive while working, then take their work home with them, and continue this ad nauseum. It’s called a grind. No matter how passionate people are about the company, eventually they will run out of gas.

Successful leaders of small teams, in a startup or otherwise, are able to create both a vision for the long-term and a sense of urgency around reaching each of the many serial interim milestones. And, equally importantly, to find ways to celebrate and blow off steam between sprints.

Whether it’s bottles of wine that double in size for different user-number goals and are then drunk and signed by the team, outings tied to revenue goals, or just good old-fashioned partying after the big release (all of which I’ve used or seen work), how you infect other people with your passion and drive is probably even more important than creating the conditions that optimize for them.

On the few occasions I’ve had to hear Tim O’Reilly speak, I’ve never failed to come away inspired.

A couple of choice anecdotes and quotes from his opening keynote at Etech last night:

• “Hackers change the world while having fun”
• On Col. Kittinger, the guy who went up in a weather balloon, skydove out, hit the speed of sound without a vehicle, and was laying out of it on the ground — his friend ran up and gave him the finger to celebrate his statement: “There are always people who say it can’t be done. Just give ‘em the one-finger salute and keep on going.”
• Wrestle with the angels. Attack the hard problems.
• Things they are paying attention to at O’Reilly (and represented at the show):
• open-source hardware
• sensors and ambient computing / data mining open platforms and implicit web
• bionics / people hacking / brain hacking
• personal genomics
• collective intelligence (“Larry Lessig is the Matt Cutts of government.”)
• climate change
• Rilke’s “The Man Walking”

In talking to an entrepreneur considering several projects of various levels of commercial strength, he was reminded of the Cookie Monster winning a game show on Sesame Street. Behind Door #1: a million dollars in cash. Door #2, a castle and a yacht. Behind Door #3: a cookie. You know where Tim’s going. . as the audience starts chanting like the Cookie Monster. . .

“Choose the cookie!”

Create software that supposedly enhances your users’ convenience by enabling them to do web-based things more efficiently and offline. Require them to download extensive software framework that locks their registry files. Make sure said framework is a slow, painful download, disables the cancel button, continues to log all the scary things it’s doing for maximum effect, and then crashes the computer. Give completion messages with dingbat characters and typos, and then format it incorrectly. On restart, make sure your user knows his performance lags by at least 100% now.

Then, make sure your program hangs on startup. Work on 2nd or third try, with bugs and prompts for serial numbers that you don’t know if you have or why you would need, and make him think, WTF? Let your user figure out a way to get past that.

Be completely non-intuitive on first use to a new user trying to use it to blog, and who has invested so much time and pain in trying you that he is desperately hoping there’s some fantastic payoff. Have some cool features, like Flickr integration, that seem really promising, then totally blow one of the easiest API’s to get right.

Thanks, Ecto! This will be the first and last post I’ll write using you, because I’m going to have to log in on the web interface anyway in order to include the photos of your sucktardedness that I’m going to upload to my flickr account.

Then I get to spend another hour uninstalling everything and hoping it doesn’t smoke my machine.

Please get yourself a copy of Getting Real, kthxbai!

N.b. – As is probably obvious from the above, this refers to the Windows version. . . .

I’ve been brewing on a couple of threads over the past few days that I think come together in a complicated but interesting point. We’ll see.

First, I flew over the entire Baja peninsula on the way here. It is almost entirely devoid of anything other than desert life exept at a few very small points. On farms and construction sites, they drive water around in tank trucks, with the water splashing out of the valves. As I sit in a vertiable water-works of a resort without any clue how they get water down here, I am thinking this is not environmentally sustainable.

Second, I see a lot of Volkswagen Beetles on the road, still. As the owner of a ‘71 Ghia built on the Beetle platform (aka VW Type I), I came to the realization that VW Beetles are one of history’s finest examples of an open-source platform. Viz:

• a large number of cars in many varieties built on a common, simple platform
• wide availability of parts (original, refurbished, reproduction) without any that are “proprietary” to VW – you could literally build one from scratch using after-market parts and VW wouldn’t come after you
• a large number of mechanics who know how to work on VW’s
• a robust after-market modifications and add-ons trade (think Baja dune buggies, etc.)
• truly anyone can hack on one without specialized training – if you can build Ikea furniture, you can probably adjust the valves and carb on a VW

Third, I’m here with a bunch of fraternity brothers, a significant number of whom are investment bankers, analysts, or techies. It’s led to some interesting discussion points – among many others, that poverty in China is appalling beyond description; that “small hedge funds aren’t interesting anymore – the consolidation has already begun”; that autism rates are climbing dramatically, and well-educated and affluent people in the U.S. are afraid to trust the food they eat; that “it’s surprising and a little sad that none of us are doing much of anything creative.” (I like to think I’m doing something creative, but the point is well taken given the breadth and artistic creativity of the people we were in college.)

Fourth, I started reading Paul Graham’s (so-far excellent) Hackers & Painters, thinking about value creation and software.

What I’m building up to is a point that the problems of the world are becoming more and more severe, more inter-related across local geographies, increasingly cumulative, and more and more addressable only at an institutional level. The size that institutions need to be to be players is growing – and I personally believe that government is broken.

Small players and startups can take whacks at global-scale problems, and can certainly create value in doing so. But there is so much more leverage if they can slingshot their distribution off a platform. And certain kinds of problems are going to really benefit from the kinds of contributions only an open-source movement can make.

Specifically, I would love to see another generation of open-source vehicles, this time around with an environmentally friendly bent. There would be plenty of motive for this to come from a single source – after all, the VW Beetle was the longest and most produced single-design vehicle in history. But it seems to me the Who Killed the Electric Car? problem largely goes away in an open-source context. People who hack Priuses are on the right track, but we need something more accessible to laypeople, and more modular.

I would also love to see open-source variations on Kiva and KickStart – perhaps with a Cambrian House approach to development and distribution. If you can invent a better human-powered irrigation pump that can increase productivity in developing world rural farming, distribution should not be a barrier.

Finally, we all need to be thinking about the power of the institutions we work for, and how they can be better harnessed – or at leasted “opened” – to potentially powerful, world-changing uses. Because as a society, we’re not going to be able to fly to remote desert destinations and splash around in abundant water forever.

I’m very excited about this morning’s announcement that Yahoo! has acquired MyBlogLog.

As a beta user of the reader roll and an instant fan of the analytics, I’ve been hooked on MyBlogLog since I started using it and immediately became an internal proponent of this deal, which has been a treat to watch move forward. I’ve also had the pleasure of getting to know the team really well – in fact, Eric Marcoullier and I first got in touch via the “welcome” email he sent, to my personal address, when I signed up. Congratulations Scott, Eric, Todd, John, Steve, and the rest of the MBL team – I’m delighted for you and look forward to working together at Yahoo!

The deal also afforded me a chance to watch some of Yahoo’s thought leaders in action – Chad, Bradley, and Jeremy were the key ones who made this happen, though I was delighted to see how many folks at Yahoo! got it so quickly and made the wheels turn so smoothly. There were other suitors for investment (and a veritable swarm of interest at the Web2.0 conference); even though this is an early-stage company, it’s great that Yahoo! collectively recognized how good a fit this is for our community and publisher services offerings and figured out a plan to preserve this burgeoning community while bringing it into the Yahoo! fold.

I’ve also had a front row seat watching the pros in our corporate development department do their thing. Fascinating – and a very interesting perspective on the value of startups and VC in corporate innovation.

There are a lot of reasons why I think this is cool for users and great for Yahoo! Among other things, it’s a nice little tool for distributed aggregation on the community front. (My more official post on the subject will appear over here shortly.) The MyBlogLog team seems pretty excited about it too; here’s their announcement.

UPDATE: Lots of additional coverage:

• Forbes CES blog
• GigaOM
• TechCrunch
• Yahoo! Developer Network Blog
• And plenty more. . .

There’ve been a lot of “big in ‘07″ prediction posts (VC Mike has a good roundup). Although I initially sort of tuned out and didn’t feel the need to pile on my own opinion (after all, New Year’s is a totally arbitrary milepost from which to make industry prognostications), the meme did stimulate me, and a few thoughts have filtered to the top that I want to write about.

Rather than focus on predictions for the calendar year, though, I thought I’d muse on a few ideas – just notes from my own trench, really – that are interesting conversation points and that I think may accrue to be “winning themes” in different segments of the industry, but that may or may not reach maturity in the next four quarters.

I’ll do those in individual posts after this one and over the next few weeks. (I’ve added a new category, “2007″, as well.)

Of course the big overall theme here is innovation, which seems boundless and ever-cheaper, and continues to stimulate the startup community, the internet economy, and the media industry in general. 2007 will undoubtedly make for an exciting year no matter which individuals turn out to be right.

After an unexpected minor windfall, I’m funding another African entrepreneur.  Yao Adjété NOUWOKLO, president of his village development committee in Alinka, Togo, is setting up a well and local water distribution.

In follow-up to my Thanksgiving post, I made micro-loans to two African entrepreneurs through Kiva.org: Jerioth Wanjiru, a 27-year-old hairdresser in Nakuru, Kenya who needs expansion capital to effectively service her growing customer base; and Mary Gachai, a Kenyan landlord who uses her rental income to support orphaned children.

I was delighted by how easy it was to browse by region for entrepreneurs in need (I wanted to focus on east Africa because of my sense of the tremendous opportunity and need for entrepreneurial infrastructure there during my visit in 2001), read profiles to select loan candidates, see what organizations are tending the investments locally, sign up, and donate via a nicely integrated PayPal. Their “marketing” has just the right touch – when you check out, they very nicely suggest a 10% match to Kiva itself to keep the lights on). As Fred W. would say, there is authenticity here.

In addition, Kiva has some very cool social features, like badges you can put on your site to track these entrepreneurs, and the ability to see who else is participating in your loans and create a profile page others can see.

I’ll add badges to my site soon and keep you all posted on how things play out with my load portfolio – in the meantime, please check out Kiva.org if you’re in a mood to do some good this year.