“May you live in interesting times” is a phrase that has been bouncing around in my brain the last few weeks.  This quote, attributed to an ancient Chinese wise man, is often described as a curse –the Confucian equivalent of a Jewish mother’s exclamation “you should only be so lucky to have a son like you.”  As I watch the news reports about our government’s actions regarding the financial crisis and the economy, I often ask myself “What did we do to deserve this mess?  Are the politicians paying attention to what’s going on outside of Washington?”

We announced today the establishment of the Amplifier Business Accelerator Program. The link to the Program is here.  We did this for a number of reasons. The largest one is that as we looked at the local early stage community we saw that the recession has caused an almost a complete breakdown in the local company formation ecosystem.  For many years  there has been a tendency to couple an entrepreneur’s desire to obtain experienced help and access to contacts with the need to obtain an investment from a VC firm or an Angel group.  This worked very well when times were good – or at least there were enough successes stories when times were good to obscure the entrepreneurs and companies that didn’t get venture capital funding and missed out on its benefits.