Well, in light of the past few weeks in the financial markets and all the doom and gloom being reported and pontificated upon, 2008 just may well go into the history books as the vintage year for the “Mattress Fund”.  What do I mean?  Let’s put it this way, when one of the hottest selling items at Walmart the past couple of weeks has been home safes…something is going on.  So, is this the year of the Mattress Fund???  I honestly don’t know.  What I do know, however, is that all capital markets are cyclical and what goes down will eventually go up and that time can reward patient investors.  One of my long-held beliefs is that fear and greed drive all capital markets, be they public or private, and understanding where the market is on such spectrum facilitates good investment decisions.  I also tend to subscribe to Warren Buffet’s adage of being fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful so I’m actively looking for good investments as we are clearly in “fear mode”.  There are 2 weeks left until the elections and 10 weeks left in 2008 so I don’t see much changing for the time being, but I guess that’s why they say patience is a virtue…  Until next time, happy venturing.

I spent last week on the couch with some sort of cold or flu bug and so I spent a lot of time thinking about the financial markets and my previous post on Venture Capital being a safe haven… in light of more recent posts about the potential gloom and doom to the the VC industry and was preparing to clarify my thinking with another post when I ran across Brad Feld’s post Let’s Get Practical.  Enough said.  Thanks for reading my mind Brad.

Lunch 2.0 is coming to The OC on October 24th.  To view the logistical details and register to attend, pleas click here.  For the uninitiated, Lunch 2.0 is a casual network gathering of Web 2.0 type folks that include entrepreneurs, investors, and others involved in consumer internet.  While Orange County is not necessarily known for consumer internet companies, we do have a few here and I’m sure there are many more waiting to be launched out of the dorm rooms of UC Irvine, Chapman University, and Cal State Fullerton in the years to come.