Being smack in the middle of Entrepreneurship Week, I can’t think of a better link to point my startup readers to today than this blog post by Will Price, which he published yesterday. Will is a VC at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. In this very thoughtful piece, he nails one of the most important, yet little talked about, aspects of preparing to pitch VCs. Okay, it’s somewhat academic — yes, we’re talking here about “conceptual metaphors,” people. But this is great stuff! And, after all, conceptual metaphors is really what mathematics is all about, right? So, startup founders out there who are programmers and engineers can especially relate. [There’s a reason, I’ve come to learn, that so many successful entrepreneurs and VCs were math majors, or had a heavy dose of it in engineering school. This piece kind of brings this reality home.]
I now have this post on my Recommended Must-Read List for anyone even thinking about ever approaching VCs for money. Save this link, friends, and learn and practice what it’s telling you. You will need it!
While we’re at it, there’s another great piece you should check out today on Startup Journal: Young Entrepreneurs Face Higher Hurdles — worth reading even if you’re not so young.
The partner on the deal is, of course, Michael Gorman. Yes, that’s a lot of money in a single round for a MN tech firm. And it now means that 
It must be a good market, because for this much money to be invested, and now the conservative late-stage guys coming in, there has to be a big payback seen just over the horizon. [IPO?] Well, less so of a payback for the late-stage money, I guess…
So, take that Google! It previews the content of a web link without clicking on it — by studying the language, the linguistics, behind it. Pretty heavy stuff, but this team of developers has been working on perfecting this technology for years, so this is certainly no upstart. Perhaps they’re onto an application of it now that will stick, and that the powers-that-be will allow to happen. User acceptance will tell the story, of course, and that’s why reaction in the blogosphere will be big for these guys. Smartly, they’re opening the technology up via open source XML web services, I learned last week.
I saw this company debut at DEMO last year. They thought widgets were gonna be big….and they were right! The company’s been going great guns since then, becoming an amazing source of every kind of widget imaginable. They partnered with Typepad to introduce this “blidget” (blog+widget) concept. Mine looks like this: 
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