As you may have seen on the Bootup Labs blog, I'm "getting off the roller coaster" - I'm leaving my "day job" activities at Bootup and am moving on.

As Danny said, we've been pushing on this seed accelerator piece of string for 2 years now. I jumped into it right after parking Bryght with Raincity Studios and helping with the transition there, from one unfunded startup to another.

Of course, Bryght is the main reason that I felt that I had to create something like Bootup. While I'm still very proud of what the team and I accomplished with Bryght (I only have to look at the 3000 person Drupalcon in San Francisco or the Aegir mass deployment tool for Drupal to see some of that legacy), we could have done so much more within the right environment.

The design for Bootup is to fix the main two things that were (and still are) missing from the ecosystem in Vancouver / Canada: mentorship and funding. I still believe in this mission 100%. My moving on has everything to do with needing to earn more money for myself, today. 

The seed accelerator I helped found, Bootup Labs, is getting lambasted in a number of public forums this evening / early morning.

It all started with Jamie of Status.ly's post. I'm disappointed in lots of the original wording, and that it could have been written in a more factual tone.

I worked with Danny to put up some combined news / background. It's not a direct response to Jamie's post, but has some added commentary since we weren't planning on posting the other news until tomorrow.

I appreciate the balanced response from a number of people who actually know us and the situation.

I read a number of comments / response to me directly that suggested that we should have been more apologetic. We leaned towards the factual. I can say that I know I broke a personal commitment and that I feel like shit about it and have already said my 'sorrys' in person.

I read another round of comments that said that we shouldn't be commenting in public at all. I kind of know how to use these tools, and engaging where the discussion is taking place seems to be the right thing to do. Our instinctive response is not to call in the lawyers … because, you know, we're actually entrepreneurs / startup guys ourselves.

On the other hand, there are many commenters that should probably stop throwing around the word "legally" about the situation without knowing the details or, you know, being lawyers.

Here are some of the threads you can read (other than the posts above) with discussion / commentary to form your own opinion.

• Hacker News - lots of angry startup devs wielding pitchforks, but I'm apparently a biz guy, and have only ever gotten downvoted there
• Read Write Web - main opinion here is that Jamie burned a lot of bridges today - I actually don't think that's true, but this has been relatively public and messy, which never reflects well on anyone involved from an outsider's perspective
• Techvibes - for completeness, and because Jamie left a very nice complimentary post - "There's no doubt in our minds that we're sitting with the future web in this room right now, it's beyond exciting. This is groundbreaking." - a post on his first day at Bootup

The New Year is kicking off with a bang. Bootup Labs moved into our new offices on Sunday (Cambie at Hastings, the Flack Block - come visit!) On Monday morning Danny was in the Financial Post (actually, @trevoro from @layerboom has much longer quotes on page 2). Then on Tuesday (technically yesterday as I'm posting this), I got a call from @lalondetcbc and ended up with a short CBC TV segment talking about whether bloggers should be legally required to disclose payments and other bonuses they receive. I was "opposite" Rebecca / Miss 604. That is, it was supposed to be opposing view points. Rebecca is an excellent blogger. She is a professional blogger (i.e. makes her living from her blogging activities). It's great that she's decided to use CMP.ly to indicate her disclosures: it shows the kind of honesty and transparency that makes her a great blogger. Do we need a law for it? Well, the FTC in the US thinks it does, but the guidelines seem over broad - a $5 discount at a restaurant and a positive review could net you an $11K fine? Of course, they say it will be on a case by case basis. Hmmm ... a law that is hard to enforce and is applied inconsistently? Sounds like trouble to me! I like John Chow's disclosure policy -- everything he posts he's making money from. This is a pure case of media literacy - people need to learn about the sources they are consuming and make their own decisions. Of course, journalists aren't covered under these laws at all. Why not? Good question, and quotes like this one in a Reason Magazine article don't inspire confidence: "Yet I don't remember any reviewer in any print publication ever disclosing that the record, the movie, the meal or the vacation was free." Lastly, it seems like Rebecca and I were set up to have opposing viewpoints, since we seem to be on the same page. Oh well, at least they spelled my name right :P I have a few quotes bookmarked under the tag FTC Endorsement Guidelines for further reading.

Dave Olson sat down with me at the beginning of this week and did a long (50 minutes) podcast over at Raincity Radio.

We covered a lot of ground. Here are some short notes with related links on what we talked about:

It seems that when I am working with a lot of different ideas and companies, that what I post here really dries up. And that's the case right now.

I went through 8 startup presentations yesterday at New Ventures BC, check out my post at Bootup Labs:
New Ventures BC 2008 Mentor Panel Two

So, between one day mind melting events like the NVBC mentor panel and all the new companies and founders I'm being exposed to at Bootup Labs, I'm processing lots of information and giving direct, "live" feedback. I've still got lots of ideas floating around, they're just not making their way into blog posts :P

And yes, I really am not posting local Vancouver tech event stuff here anymore. Check out the Bootup Labs event listings page.

Have I mentioned that most of these startup / tech events I'm posting full details on at the Bootup Labs blog? For now, you'll have to suffer the cross posting:

• April 3rd: DemoCampVictoria01, with Mark Lise posting a buzz summary on his blog -- anyone else heading over to Victoria for this?
• April 10th: DemoCampVancouver06, a full posting including speaker details over on BUL
• April 14th - 15th: Open Web Vancouver, a great new event put on mainly by the Vancouver PHP crew that is expanding to cover the entire "open" web.

A bit of an embarrassment of riches, really. We've got lots of great tech related events happening here in Vancouver, and more to come.

Update: oh, yeah, and of course Bridging Media is this coming weekend, March 29th, but I think they may already be full (I'm speaking).

A few highlights from posts elsewhere. Yes, I have to figure out a combined feed strategy.

I'm attending the CCI2008 conference here in Vancouver, and did a first post about it on the Raincity Studios blog. I'm speaking on Friday, covering data silos, content sharing, and open source.

Looks like I'll be on BNN tonight, with my first TV appearance representing Bootup Labs. See the BUL blog for the details, 6:45PM EST on cable.