Catch Ev Williams and Chamath Palihapitiya at the LAUNCH Festival, Plus over $300k in Investment Prizes!

It's just 17 days till LAUNCH Festival 2013 (#Launch2013) at the San Francisco Design Center, March 4-6 -- eek! @Jason and Tyler rehearsed with 25 of the 35 selected companies this week at Sequoia, now we just need to choose the final 15 startups for the stage from hundreds of applicants. If you applied, you'll hear from us by Friday, Feb 15.

Other awesome news to share with you:

1) Fireside chats with Ev Williams and Chamath Palihapitiya

We are honored that Ev (co-founder of Twitter, CEO at The Obvious Corporation) and Chamath (former FB exec & partner, The Social + Capital Partnership) will sit down with Jason for fireside chats!

You can catch Chamath at 9:15am on March 4, and Ev right after lunch on March 5.

Their bios are at http://festival.launch.co/keynotes.html

2) Wow, more than $300k in investment prizes!

Once again, a number of angel investors and funds have earmarked investments for LAUNCH Festival startups. These investments will be announced on stage, and of course are pending post-conference due diligence and paperwork.

 * Altimeter Capital (http://www.altimetercapital.com/) - $125k
 * TechStars (http://www.techstars.com/) - $118k
 * Attractor (http://www.attractor.com/) - $25k
 * Persefon (http://www.persefon.com) - $25k
 * Steve Chen (https://twitter.com/a5steve) - $25k

If you're interested in putting up a prize of $25k or more, please contact partners@launch.co.

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That Was Interesting

Wow.

Now I know why so many intelligent, considered and honest folks told me to not blog about race.

Over the last 24 hours I've been savaged by folks calling me clueless, "the problem" and a  racist.

I've also had 100+ emails from minorities telling me I was 100% right and that they were happy I had joined the discussion.

In other words, the feedback has been polarized -- but not along racial lines. Some of the most brutal commentary has come from white males in the media business. Some of the most supportive emails have come from African Americans, Latinos, Indians and Asian-Americans.

Man did I try to write a balanced piece. I really did. I've never had so many folks tell me I got it so right and so wrong at the same time.

My friend Anil Dash pointed out to me why some responded so passionately: my experience and views do not give enough focus to the fact that many people have actually experienced horrible bias in their lives.

He says I'm denying folks their own experience.

I never intended to deny anyone's individual experience. Sorry if that's the way it came across.

My main premise is that we're shifting from a world in which race drives people's behavior to a "post-race" world. Not that there is no racism or that we have reached the post-race world.

I also was super clear that I was only speaking only about the tech industry and tech blogs -- not all of society. I'm an expert on the former and a neophyte on the later.

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Doing the Right Things

‘When he came, in the game, he made his own lane
Now all I need is y'all to pronounce my name’
-- Mr. West

I’m a white guy so I’m not allowed to talk about race.

At least that’s what they tell me.

Don’t talk about it because it’s a zero-sum game -- and you’ll lose. White guys get all the breaks, and as such we can’t contribute to the discourse.

But I believe we’re on the precipice of a post-race world, and many of us took the leap long ago. We have mixed-race families, diverse startups and we -- gasp! -- select our music based on how it sounds, not the ethnicity of the performer.

We don’t have hatred in our hearts for people, except maybe for inefficient people. Oh yeah, and for the people who build bad products -- we have a lot of hate for them!

Sadly, we live in a world where race still is an issue because some folks haven’t made the leap. Those folks are old and dying in many, perhaps most, cases.

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Should We Talk about the Fact That Jody Sherman Didn't Just Die, But That He Killed Himself?

A very popular founder named Jody Sherman died this week. He was the founder of Ecomom, and had a wonderful reputation for being relentlessly positive, driven and fun.

We weren't close friends, but we were friends. I've received dozens of emails from him over the past two years, and he was on my podcast once. We had a 100 friends in common, as he was a human router who left an impression.  

But he didn't just die, he killed himself.

And it seems like folks are not ready to talk about that issue just yet. Which I can understand. My friend Sarah Lacy wrote a couple of days ago that she didn't want to speculate on his cause of death, nor draw any conclusions to another founder, Aaron Swartz, and his tragic suicide.

I don't want to draw any conclusions either, but I immediately thought of Aaron. Then I thought of Diaspora's co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy. They died at ages 26 and 22, respectively, and Jody was 47. All far too young.

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More LAUNCH Festival Judges! Yossi Vardi, Naval Ravikant, Vivek Wadhwa, Cyan Banister; Applications due Feb 1

We've selected some pretty awesome companies for the LAUNCH Festival at the San Francisco Design Center, March 4-6 -- but we can't tell you about those just yet :-)

What we can tell you is that we have another batch of impressive judges:

Cyan Banister, Zivity
Jeff Eddings, Turner Broadcasting/Media Camp
Dave Goldberg, SurveyMonkey
Clint Gordon-Carroll, Space Monkey
Jeremy Hitchcock, Dyn
Ted Maidenberg, The Social+Capital Partnership
Jason Nazar, Docstoc
Naval Ravikant, AngelList
Demain Sellfors, Media Temple
Mark Siegel, Menlo Ventures
Greg Tseng,Tagged
Yossi Vardi, investor    
Vivek Wadhwa, Singularity University & Washington Post columnist

PLUS a few more folks for the Grand Jury, the dedicated group that sees every demo over the three days:

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