Check out this video of my friend Ginger Costa Jackson singing in Verbier, Switzerland with Rufus Wainwright! I was so delighted by this I just had to share it. Ginger is one of the most talented and beautiful young opera singers.
I met her in Utah and she once gave us a little performance at our house. Set on the side of a huge mountain, this is a rather large house with a cavernous living room. She shook the rafters. The sound of her powerful voice traveled through my open windows, down …

My good friend Dan and I were talking shop about our recent business challenges. He works for Omniture (OMTR), the leading Web analytics software company, and is one of the top sales guys there. As an aside, we were both at the University Venture Fund when I sourced our Omniture deal and we had the privilege to co-invest with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Scale Venture Partners in one of Utah’s shining technology successes. Every quarter, my friend handily beats his quotas and makes good money doing so. Life ought …

In highly entrepreneurial hot spots like Silicon Valley, San Francisco where I grew up, Route 128, Washington DC, Seattle, Los Angeles where an impressive raft of social networking and new media startups has sprouted, and biotechnology-focused San Diego, critical mass of entrepreneurial activity organically attracts venture capital. In other words, a rich “ecosystem” – where entrepreneurs can assemble readily available capital, talent, and relationships – can only come about when entrepreneurs first satisfy the initial criterion of creating innovation and value to a significant degree. In emerging hot spots such …

Macro

Once again, Mark Zandi and his team at Moody’s Economy.com (MCO) comes through with something interesting. Click through on the image below and interact with the map to find out if your state and county is in risk of recession. My home state of California is definitely at risk, dragged down by rapidly falling housing prices. I currently spend most of my time in Utah, one of the few places that has seen strong economic expansion and even strong real estate price appreciation. Forbes recently named Salt Lake City first …