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A few weeks ago, I received a call from my friend Robert Neelbauer at about 11 pm. He wanted to talk about innovation and technology startups in DC. For those who live around here, you know there’s not a lot of them. Mostly project-type things that entrepreneurs who work day jobs have cooking. And of course, even though DC is home to Launchbox Digital an accelerator program in the order of Techstars or Ycombinator, there remains a dearth of Silicon Valley style startups.

This call got me thinking about the landscape in DC. It is, as it always has been, a center of government. Those of us who live here joke about the difference between Washington, the center of government, and the District, a wider culture of arts, nightlife and activity outside of government. The reality is, however, that the two are inexorably fused at the hip. Spending Friday nights enjoying nightlife inevitably means spending time among people connected in Washington, on Capitol Hill or other parts of government. It is difficult to live in this city without being part of the Washington-culture somehow.

The Valley, which has so far been most unaffected by the downturn in the economy, may be reaching the end of it’s golden thread. Sequoia Capital, one of the largest Venture Capital firms in the Valley, had a meeting with their portfolio companies advising them to “tighten their belts” according to Om Malik of GigaOm.

Late last night I was finishing up a presentation for a class I’m taking when Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester made a statement on Twitter which made me cringe. The statement, though profound to someone living in the heart of Silicon Valley, is completely absent any reason to the observer outside of the Valley. Keep in [...]

It’s sort of a little oasis of 1999 in a desert of 2004, if you feel where I’m coming from. It’s wall to wall tech folks from Dot Coms and their lives revolve around this fact. Take, for instance, Jeremy Zawodny’s story
I headed up to San Francisco last night with Mark (another Yahoo) to Meet [...]