Hmm... its funny that the most interesting posts of yours have the least comments. Or at least, the most ethical/moral/"hippie" posts. Do you find that people seem to disrespect people that stick to unpopular morals? (Being against software patents would be an unpopular moral to have in the business world, I imagine.)

True, I suppose. Sorry I misunderstood the purpose of TechStars. :)

Hey Brad, this is for your friend, but some of the best writers of our era were rejected by agents, many many times. Stephen King himself, master of the macabre, Titan of the Top Ten list, received well over 2000 rejections before he was published. It really is not them, and I understand that for any sort of service that people provide, wether it be publishing, or being a VC.

Brad, I know you run something similar to Y-Combinator. How do you feel your incubator performs as compared to businesses that start up without the incubator?

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Basically, GAPE(Google App Engine), is a tool for rapid deployment of an interactive website. Because it supports Python(and by extension, Django) Basically... it can give a startup first mover advantage. It lets someone build a Digg-like site, or a wiki site in almost literally hours. Again, this is great, lowers costs of startups, lets VCs like yourself fund more startups, and logically make more money(You get a return on about 1/10 of all startups... if you fund more... more will succeed. )

EC2 is scalable, cheap(ridiculously cheap), and yes, you still do need sysadmins. But I consider EC2 a second stage solution. Basically, GAPE lets people get set up, get their ideas operational quickly, and thus, hopefully, making money. Once they reach that point, and want to scale up, then they can move to EC2. Of course, the third stage is where they run localized data centers all over the world like Google. Most startups will never reach that point.

One of the old Paul Graham articles(Older is better with him... his new stuff isn't so good) mentioned one key difference between his company and the competition. They used Lisp, which made them faster programmers. They used a better technology, to move faster. This is, I think, part of what makes a startup succeed or fail.

Patents for electrical engineering all depend on the method by which you cause something to happen. If my method is demonstrably different from there method, then I can get a patent. ;)

Hmm, I know its an april fool's joke, but this leads me to wonder and think about wearable computers. Imagine looking at your sleeve, and your emails and social feeds are displayed right there for you to see. A little palm computer in your pocket, connecting by ubiquitous mesh wifi that we've been promised for five years now. Then, using an array of Wearable LEDs(patent pending, patent pending, patent pending), one could display the information.

I'll take the money in Canadian denominations please.