• TechStars » Seed capital and mentorship for startups – Documents that TechStars uses as a starting point for seed stage financing for their companies. Aimed to be model documents for an angel or seed financing in the $250k-$2M range. They represent a “light” preferred equity financing and have very simple terms that are generally “balanced” but if anything lean toward the entrepreneurs and represent a great deal of trust in them, which they think is appropriate for angel deals where you are primarily investing in the people at the early stage.
• 5 Lessons I Learned After a Year as a Digital Nomad – The best piece of travel advice I've heard in a while: know the difference between traveling and living. If you're going to some place interesting, don't expect to have time to do other stuff like work. You'll just end up choosing between missing out on all the cool things to do where you are (and thus resenting your choice) or feeling guilty about not doing whatever it was you thought you were going to get done.
• Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy? | Video on TED.com – Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we'll be miserable if we don't get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don't go as planned. This is a really great talk. Well worth the 20min it takes to watch. You will be amazed at the empirical evidence on how bad humans are at predicting our own happiness and how subjective and relative happiness actually is.
• Kareem Mayan’s Weblog: customer experience, emerging technology, media, and more – A great (old) blog post by Kareem on what makes people truly happy, how bad we are at predicting it, and how so few of us actually pursue it. Kudos to Kareem for taking his own advice and deciding to align his life to best pursue his dreams of traveling around the world (http://howsthewifi.com). The video at the end of this post is a must watch. Unfortunately, the embed is now broken – so, go see it here: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html
• random($foo): Online Tools for A New Small Business – Leonard Lin's list of recommended business tools for startups. Covering accounting, CRM, marketing and development.
• Why Should I Care What Color the Bikeshed Is? – "The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it. This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change."
• FT Alphaville » Blog Archive » Happy Boycott CNBC Day! – "The real problem with mullets and Pabst and Toby Keith songs, and with CNBC, is that there are people, large swaths of humanity, in fact, who apparently regard the above unironically."

This would be my first trip to South America, and I guess I kinda wanna do something a little more adventurous than just hang around Buenos Aires and environs for a week and a half — not that it doesn’t sound fun. I just feel this is a potentially unique opportunity to do something really fucking cool.

So, if you have any ideas or wanna meet up down there, drop me a line at jonathan[at]jonathanhstrauss[dot]com. I’m gonna hold off on buying my tickets for a couple more days to see if we can come up with some reasons to extend the trip.