Josh,

Two uber-trends that I did not see on your list are:

(1) Search engines are poised to disintermediate marketplaces. We're already seeing the power shift; Google, in particular, is becoming the "go-to" starting point for an increasingly large percentage of product purchases.

(2) We're seeing a massive acceleration of real-time shopping, from Groupon to Dubli, which adds an entirely new dimension to e-commerce.

These are, indeed, exciting times.

Please everybody, listen to Brad. Self-induced paralysis is our worst enemy. We need to remind ourselves, our investors, our customers, that value creation did not end because Lehman folded.

And don't get me started about the old media hype machine on this issue.

It is perhaps best put by Louis Rosetto, WIRED magazine's founder, in a letter he wrote to his kids: "Faced with fierce competition for... eyeballs, Old Media is hawking the apocalypse."

He goes on to channel John Perry Barlow and remind us that the purpose of media is "to sell our eyeballs to advertisers. And how better to do that — if your monopoly is being eroded by this newfangled Internet — than to scare the shit out of us? Then we're so paralyzed that we stick around through the commercials."

You can read the whole letter here:

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-06...

I would love to see the same visualization applied to Starbucks.

The Entrepreneurs Foundation looks like a terrific program. My anecdotal experience is that philanthropy seems to have an age-driven component. When you are young, your main goal is accumulating wealth to secure your unknown future (will I have health problems? How many kids will I send to college? Will my startup need more cash?). As you get older, you get more visibiity into the end of your life and you can envision giving up a larger portion of your wealth.

In the meantime, young entrepreneurs can help charitable causes in a number of practical ways, and I believe it is important to show leadership in these areas:

1. Yearly giving. Even if the gifts are small, I propose a culture of philanthropy that starts with yearly giving. Every year, list your top 10 causes and commit to giving something to each. In bad years, your giving might be measured in hundreds of dollars. In good years, tens of thousands. The point is 100% of your causes get a gift every year. If you want a small donation to make a huge impact, find a local organization with a tiny operating budget.

2. Future gifting. I love the EFC model where entrepreneurs are encouraged to give early, something that is relatively painless to offer up (equity) which could pay off largely down the road. It would be extraordinary if the EFC model could be replicated within the VC community.

3. Corporate In-Kind. Startups underestimate how much they can help non-profits with the donation of their services. A good model that comes to mind is ESRI. Their software gifting program has empowered the land conservation community with some amazing mapping tools... For those wearing the green eye shades, I am sure the program has paid dividends to ESRI in the form of PR and downstream sales.

Brad,

I had no idea you were such a land conservationist! I have been on Trust for Public Land's national board for seven years. It is a terrific organization and this is one of the largest land conservation projects I have ever seen. I have been wondering how to connect land conservation to the technology generation; it seems a good fit, but there is a surprising lack of overlap. Any ideas?