I just flew back from Europe and boy are my arms tired [insert rimshot here]. Actually, I just flew back from Europe and boy are my eyes tired. I have this bad habit of accumulating magazines until I have a long plane flight then powering through 30 pounds worth of reading. My typical airplane reading starts out with a zillion of those alumni magazines we all get. If you can wade your way past the inevitable articles on anthropology, sociology and pop psychology,

If you have not yet experienced "Digital Natives" in their natural habitat, come on over to my house on any weekend. When I wander down stairs on a Saturday or Sunday morning, the scene is always pretty much the same. The TV is on and yammering away. But my kids are far more engaged in their respective laptops than they are in the TV making noise in the foreground. My 6 year old is likely buying a new go kart for his Webkinz monkey.

After watching a bazillion venture pitches, I've come to the conclusion that every VC Pitch should end the same way - with the ask. If you want to crescendo into it, feel free to summarize why it is your technology is life changing, but finish with the ask - "we are looking to raise six million dollars." Don't beat around the bush. Come right out and ask for the money. After all, that's what you're there for. There are a number of reasons VCs want to hear what you're raising.

Over the course of the last week, Fred Wilson has been writing about "Venture Fund Economics" at the newly-redesigned AVC . Fred has tackled topics like how venture capitalists are measured , the impact of management fees and carry on net returns , and the impact of big winners on venture returns . What's more, Fred has done the unthinkable - he has described venture economics in the context of his own fund's specific economic terms.

I was recently being pitched by a smart team of guys who are building an interesting business in the digital music space. The team has great domain expertise and plenty of credibility as entrepreneurs who have built a number of related businesses in the past. They were doing a nice job of selling the opportunity . . . until they got to the competition slide. I have noticed that often times when I am pitched on a business, the competition slide is treated as, at best,

Over the course of the many weeks of on-again, off-again MicroHoo madness, I did a fair bit of pontificating and speculating of my own about the would-be deal. After all, it was THE Bay Area topic of conversation )for one brief moment we all put our Facebook speculation on hold - I am so pleased that we can get back to speculating about Facebook now and, better yet, speculating about MicroBook, or is it FaceSoft?(.

When I first started talking to my now-partners about joining August Capital, I was stunned at the slow pace of the conversation. I couldn't imagine how it could take months to make a decision about whether or not to invite me to join the partnership. Admittedly, I wasn't coming from the most conventional background to enter the venture industry. But over the course of months,

I was having breakfast this morning with Salil Deshpande from Bay Partners . Salil and I were talking about assessing company progress and how best to measure that progress. Salil invests in super early-stage deals and has his companies report to him on their progress on a frequent basis. He said that he had one CEO who would report on his progress in such florid language that eventually Salil had to forbid his use of adjectives in his progress reports.

A little over five years ago, Andrew Anker and I started chatting about blogging. There was plenty of blogging going on already for sure. But no one in the Sand Hill crowd was thinking about it. At the time there was still a prevailing sense that venture investing was a black box and any view into the box was a bad idea. Andrew and I talked about the fact that we didn't buy that.

An interesting debate has broken out between Glenn Kelman and Mike Arrington. Glenn is the CEO of Redfin, a Seattle-based startup that is trying to modernize the process of buying and selling homes. Glenn's a smart guy and a great entrepreneur. And he has always struck me as quite thoughtful. Which is why I was surprised to read his recent blog post entitled, " How Green Was My Valley. " In that post, Glenn extolls the virtues of Seattle,

I am definitely late to the party in praising Marc Andreessen's incredibly great Blog . That said, my failure to extoll the virtues of Marc and his dead-on insights is not the result of me personally arriving late at the lovefest. I have been thrilled to read Marc's uniformly interesting and well-reasoned insights since blog post #1. I just haven't had the right opportunity to suck up to Marc and tell him how much I care. Thankfully, that moment has come!

Driving home from the city yesterday I was listening to a very interesting interview of Madeline Albright on NPR . Albright made a range of insightful observations about diplomacy, world affairs and the Presidency. During the course of the interview, one statement in particular jumped out at me. Albright said that she would rather have a President who was confident than a President who was certain.

When I first started writing VentureBlog, I used to talk a lot about entrepreneurship . At the time, not a lot had been written about pitching VCs or the Venture Capital process, so there was lots of virgin territory. Since that time, dozens of VCs have started blogging and much has been said about what it takes to get a VC down the isle. Bits and pieces here and there - a good Google archeologist can pull it all together.

I was recently reading some old posts on Venture Blog and couldn't believe how short they were. One might call them pithy. Or one might also call them lazy. Either way, they were short. I should really try that again. I have been teaching a class at Harvard Law School this winter semester called Venture Capital and the Technology Start-up with John Palfrey , the Executive Director of the Berkman Center . It is really fun to be back at the law school and working with John.

For the last several years there has been a lot of talk on Sand Hill Road about investing in China. To a certain degree there has been a lot of talk about all the BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India and China. But the most excitement is clearly around China. )Interestingly, while India is a relatively close second, I have yet to hear of a single Bay Area VC exploring investment in either Brazil or Russia(. Drawn by huge markets and a rapidly expanding economy,

I spent this week in Hawaii at a conference I hosted called The Lobby. The idea behind The Lobby was to gather together a fantastic group of people with a shared interest in the future of media and facilitate a conversation among the participants. There were no speakers on stages, no panels addressing broad themes, no big name mucky-mucks invited to draw crowds, just a fantastically engaged and engaging group of subject-matter experts eager to connect and talk.

One of the good things about being home sick is that you have time to blog. So let me catch up on a couple of quick things. Graphing Social Patterns Conference : The first one is that my friend Dave McClure has organized an interesting conference that is coming up called " Graphing Social Patterns: The Business and Technology of Facebook " The event is all about Facebook as a platform for other businesses and will have some great speakers like Tim O'Reilly and Reid Hoffman.

Hello VentureBlog readers. Are there still any of you out there? My hat is off to folks like Fred Wilson who blog religiously on a daily basis. While I post a thing or two daily to my personal Vox blog , that's usually a picture, a quote, a video. Fully formed sentences are a bonus on my Vox blog. But what it lacks in structure and depth, it makes up in cute pictures and video of my kids. Sure,

When I first met with the team at Splunk , they were working away on building a system that could accurately track a transaction as it traversed the entire enterprise stack. If the transaction broke somewhere along the way, their software could help IT discover the cause of that failure. While it was clearly a pain point for some businesses, there was no clear customer and the value proposition was a relatively hard one to articulate.

It appears that Shameless Self-Promotion Week has become Shameless Self-Promotion Month. Not that I am promoting any more companies than I had originally planned. I am still only talking about those businesses in which I have invested on behalf of August Capital. But, it turns out, it takes more time than I had anticipated to sing the praises of such a fantastic group of companies. Just this past Friday,