“Amazingly, in this economy it is hard to fill key positions.  Zayo occasionally looks to fill senior positions.  Usually though, we are looking to complement our veteran team with recent grads who have engineering, IT, construction project management, and finance backgrounds.  We are looking for ambitious, hard working and entrepreneurial people, especially women and minorities as well as Iraq/Afghanistan veterans.  We are an ideal home for those who want to accelerate their career development and hone their entrepreneurial skills.

We are looking for the following positions:

1. Senior Product Management
2. CFO for internal business units
3. Recent grads in engineering (learn how the Internet really works)
4. Recent grads in IT (learn Salesforce.com and GIS)
5. Recent grads with an interest in operational finance
6. Construction/project management who understand telecom projects (or recent grads)
7. Recent grads with an interest in technical sales”

If you are interested, send your resume to Kellie Lemmel at Kellie.Lemmel at Zayo dot com.

First, to suggest that there is a supply constrain on lawyers is laughable.  Whether I’m wearing my client hat where I hire lawyers, or my professor hat (I am an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado), there aren’t nearly enough jobs to place all the lawyers this country is graduating.  In fact, the amount of applications to law schools has been INCREASING over the past few years and this is despite the costs going up and the number of jobs going down.  I’m shocked that the authors, one of whom is a professor and another an attorney at a large law firm don’t see these trends.  Perhaps given the rankings of their institutions these realities don’t effect them, but to the rest of us, it’s quite apparent that the system doesn’t suffer from a lack of supply.

Secondly, the idea that one can train good lawyers out of an undergraduate program is misguided.  Clients pay lawyers for judgment, first and foremost.  It isn’t about wrote laws and rules, but rather, whom do you trust to be mature and wise enough to help you with your issues.  I’ve always thought that law schools do a disservice by allowing students to go straight from undergraduate school to law, when they should be copying the business school model of pressuring prospective students to have real-life work experience before attending a graduate program.  As both a client, a professor and former attorney, I believe that on average, those who have some real life experience are better suited to attend law school and become lawyers.  In any event, I can’t imagine wanting to pay for a 21 year old recently-graduated lawyer.  What experience in life do they really have?  Even if a student goes straight though, at least they are 25 years which is a different world than post undergraduate.

The authors talk about paid apprenticeships, but this still doesn’t get around the problem that lawyers would then have no work experience outside of the law.  Simply put, I don’t believe the average graduate has enough maturity to be a lawyer.

The authors also put for thehe concept that we would still have JD programs alongside undergraduate programs.  This makes no sense to me.  At best, we create a two class legal system between the “haves and have nots” and at the end, I don’t see market economics (price) differentiating, rather some folks will get good legal services and others will not.  Passing the bar exam doesn’t mean one is ready to be a lawyer.

Finally, the $275,000 is based on the assumption that actual school costs $150,000 and that with opportunity costs for “bright students with attractive career opportunities” the number, fully loaded is $275,000.  I would have stopped at the $150,000.  yes, that number alone is too high, but the rest is a complete fudge factor guess.  As previously mentioned, many students (maybe most) don’t have a better option than going to law school and thus the opportunity costs are a made up number.

I do applaud their ideas that a legal education should be more well rounded.  At CU, we are actively engaged at trying to bring more diverse subject matter into the classroom.  This is a key for going forward legal education.

In short, I agree with the problem, but the solution doesn’t work here.

This is the first BDW course inviting community members to join  graduate students and engage in the graduate curriculum.  StartUp is immersive and transformational––both theoretical and practical. It begins with the premise that entrepreneurship, rather than being the result of genius and magic, can be learned;  Startup then proves this premise through the actual conception, build, and launch of an original product or service by student teams within a single semester.

Led by serial entrepreneur Robert Reich with a supporting team from a variety of sectors from the contemporary entrepreneurial world, this course puts students inside the mind of the entrepreneur and immerses them in the daily leadership and innovation challenges of the startup environment.

While its primary focus is the startup and what it demands, this course is also a clinic in thinking, decision making and mental agility that will benefit any area of business––not just startups.

Download more detailed information on the course and the application to enroll here, or email bdw.info@colorado.edu for details.

Here is a great video talking about the program, too: http://vimeo.com/32882215

As part of our trip, we are going to hang out for an hour or so and would like to meet with anyone who wants to come hang. We’ll be at the Advisors-in-Residence which is 320 East Vine Drive, Suite 120 starting at 11am.  If you want to come talk startups, you know where we are.

An Academic Entrepreneur to Build New Programs  – Director of Special Projects

I’ve always thought that Ann Arbor has all of the raw materials to become a hot bed for startup activity.  The University of Michigan is a great anchor tenant university, there are excellent students, professors and researchers and it’s a place where people want to live.  To date, I have been unpleasantly surprised with the general process, outside of some notable wins in the biotech and medical industry.  But that all might be changing.

In 2003, my trip led me to almost give up hope.  There literally was no activity on campus outside of university supported research.  I was told by one administrator that Ann Arbor would focus on biotech, medical and manufacturing and that software “was stupid.”  In meeting with students, especially in the engineering department, I felt there was more apathy toward entrepreneurship than excitement.  That trip left a very bad taste in my mouth and I wasn’t sure if / when I would return. (Outside of returning for football games.  That would be stupid to not).

In early 2009, however, I gave it another try and there were signs of life.  Community leaders (outside of paid U of M employees) began to emerge.  Community events and mentoring, as well as burgeoning campus support was seen.  I wrote a blog post here about my thoughts back then.  Instead of apathy, there was a strong level of frustration, which left me hopeful. Normally, frustrated entrepreneurs find fixes to what bothers them.

Fast forward 2.5 years and the energy and progress has leaped ahead.  I was energized by the grass roots organizations like Tech Arb and Tech Brewery.  The sheer amount of younger folks involved in company creation was exponentially higher than just a short time ago.  Instead of apathy and frustration, there was a real sense of excitement, accomplishment and hope.  Also, the whole attitude of the community seemed to have change.  Whereas Michigan has always looked poorly upon failure (which is a natural part of entrepreneurship), people that I spoke to inside and outside the innovation economy looked at these company builders as rock stars.  That, alone, is a huge component to a successful startup community and one that has been sorely lacking previously.  And instead of infighting among the different entities that try to support entrepreneurs, they were much more coordinated and congenial than they were during my last visit.  My partner, Brad, was equally impressed and wrote up a summary of his thoughts here.

There are plenty of other signs that others are noticing including the recent activity of California-based VCs funding Ann Arbor companies, Sam Zell donating $5 million to the law school for entrepreneurial studies.

There are two people, too, that really shined in my visit.  If you are part of the Ann Arbor tech scene and don’t know them – get to know them.

First up is Wes Huffstutter.  Wes works at the Tech Transfer office.  Normally, I avoid folks like this like the plague.  Not Wes.  He is totally tied into all the activity going on and is a super connector.  But he’s also a mentor.  Perhaps my favorite part of the trip was when one of the Tech Arb teams complained to Wes that he missed his mentoring office hours that day, as he and I spent the day together.  Seeing that type of reaction from a startup really showed me Wes’ range in helping out folks.  That, and he completely set Brad and I up to meet all the right people during our  trip with no work from us, whatsoever.

Second up is Dug Song.  This guy is a monster.  (Good type, think Cookie, not Godzilla).  I met Dug the last time that I was in Ann Arbor and we shared some thoughts about how to jumpstart the ecosystem.  Dug gets a ton of credit for creating and mentoring a lot of the activity locally.  If you want to see how thoughtful he is, read his open letter to Brad and I.  It talks about a lot of his and community’s accomplishments (not in a boastful way).

Oh yeah, and the weekend was fun too, as Michigan crushed Nebraska 45-17 and that didn’t suck either.

Bottom line:  Ann Arbor is getting its act together.  There is still a lot of work to be done, but I’ve never been more optimistic.

Now if they have real deep algorithms in search that are patented, I can get my head around it.  What I fear is that their “social networking” patents are business method patents that will cover business process ideas, but no real innovation.  And they’ll use these patents either to sell or to offensively go after real innovative companies like Facebook.  The article suggests that something like this could potentially derail a Facebook IPO even.

I can’t event begin to tell you how furious all of this patent trolling activity makes me.  My partner Brad wrote yesterday a great piece about Another Day, Another Patent troll.  There is a lot more behind his post than just what he says, but, unfortunately, we aren’t at liberty to talk about particular portfolio company situations.

If only the Supreme Court had not allowed itself to become politicized and actually decided Bilksi on the merits, then the world would be a better place.  I was at the oral arguments for Bilksi and I can assure you not one single justice was even partially sympathetic to Bilksi’s case, but evidently politics won out over reason.

Yahoo!  Don’t be evil.  Try competing on the merits of innovation, not the perverted incentives of a broken patent system that this country currently “enjoys.”

As a complete non sequitur, I had a lot of fun last year making an Xtranormal Video that portrayed my good friend and partner Brad Feld as nothing more than a huckster for his book, Do More Faster. Coming off of that, I was inspired to make a video of my own, I’m a VC which proves that I’m nothing more than a huckster for my (and Brad’s) book Venture Deals, Be Smarter than your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist.

So what do these two seemingly unconnected stories have in common?  Simple, I like to have fun with videos and figured it was time to turn my sights on Techstars.  So here is my Xtranormal “homage” to the Techstars Network.  Congrats guys!

Techstars Network
by: mendelja

Each year, we have a pitch day where one entrepreneur comes in and pitches me.  The students get to watch.  The entrepreneur and I get an hour together and then the students get to ask questions for 20 minutes.

This is a real pitch.  It’s not any different than if someone comes to our offices, but there is a “studio audience.”

So if you are interested in pitching Foundry Group and want to do something great for the Boulder education community, let me know.  I can only take one.

The pitch date is 10/31 at 8am in Boulder.