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I am a venture capitalist. I do my best to invest in the best people pursuing their best ideas.

As a result I’m in the people meeting business. I try to meet as many great people as possible and as often as possible. It could be online, on this blog, in my office, in your office, 3k miles away or in the park. The location doesn’t matter much.

I encourage entrepreneurs in our portfolio or outside our portfolio to also be in the people meeting business.

I am often surprised when I meet a founder that says he doesn’t like the VC on his board and he never took the time to get to know this investor beforehand.

Fund raising can be exhausting and a distraction even under the best conditions. But it’s critical to take the time and make sure it’s a good match. That’s true if you are a VC or a founder.

Consider that it could take weeks or months to find that killer vp marketing or engineering. Why shouldn’t it take that long to find the right investment partner.

The best way to get to know people is to meet them early and often (im talking about the ones that are the most interesting or helpful or provacative etc).

That way when it’s time to raise that round you will already have much more data to balance out your gut or basing the big decision solely on the firms reputation.

(excuse any typos. Wrote this post quickly on my iPhone at the airport)

Wow.  This Williams-Sonoma recipe for pumpkin ice cream (thank you, Google) turned out absolutely divine.  I doubled both the cinnamon and bourbon dosages. My token neighbor-who-steals-food Patrick is coming over to try it so I will have a second opinion soon.

So there might be six zillion things left to do for Thanksgiving dinner but the dessert is all done. Well, except for the crème fraîche to accompany the pie that Maya’s bringing but that’s like the simplest recipe in the history of humanity.

StashMate.com is live! After a weekend of very little to no sleep our amazing team of startup enthusiasts cranked out a working application that is pretty damned handy if I do say so myself.

The experience:

Friday night - 80 people (biz development, project managers, designers and developers) enter the Enterprise Center of Johnson County and pitches begin. A record (?) 47 one minute pitches are given and then voted upon by a show of hands. 8 are chosen to go on. You can see all of them here and look through other blogs on that site to see video updates and demos from the weekend.

After the 8 were chosen, teams form by people simply grouping together around the leaders. You go to the product that you felt strongest about and where you are most needed. Our leader, Jaime, is a contract Rails developer from right down the street in KC and already has some of the product built. I am first in, then we pick up, Rob, an amazing project manager from Des Moines, Cara a great UI designer from here in KC and Curtis a biz dev guy from KC. We got our room first and went to work plotting out the idea.

By the end of Friday night (we quit too early) we had a pretty good idea of our business model and potential features.

Saturday - We came in on Sat. and our PM Rob was already there with most of what we talked about the night before outlined on boards on the wall with sticky notes for process flow and such.. as I said.. he was a hoss. Almost immediately we began more discussion and once we were squared away on the plan we went to work. The dev got his code on while the UI designer and I did our bidness. Curtis recruited Mark to join us who I gather is also interested in business development and they along with Rob set to work on our presentation.

Everyone else left Jaime and I around 10pm except Rob stayed till 2am.. mainly just for support.. again.. a super hoss.. he even bought us sweet rolls from wendy’s at like 1:30. But I digress.

Sunday - Jaime and I worked through the night and our team was surprised to find us there in the same clothes at 9am on sunday. We kept on a working while they put together the presentation materials. I was done by 2pm. I almost passed out a few times by my brain wouldn’t let go. I went home to crash and Jaime kept working.

We all met back up at the Kauffman foundation at 6:30 for the presentations. They were all so amazing, you will see when you look at the final list. I was floored by the talent that was there and the products that were produced. Some could have used a good dose more design work, but 54 hours really isn’t a whole lot of time.

So that’s all. In short, it was amazing. If you DON’T go the next time they bring it to town you will kick yourself. Or I will kick you. So if you don’t want to get kicked.. SHOW UP!

Now, as for what is owned by who and is it real and all that..

Yes it is real.. you can sign up right now confirm your email and start using it. It is owned equally by those that created it. We are already working on ideas for the “beta” release and it will be AWESOME.

Next stop, business development. We are looking to co-brand with moving companies and storage facilities. Have them sell our product to their clients with their brand. Even if we can get some local small time storage places online it will help prove our business model to VC. After that.. insurance companies.. then the world.

Keep your eyes peeled. StashMate is on the rise!!