The Colorado legislature recently passed a bill (Colorado Bill HB 10-1193) that basically seeks to improve the state’s ability to collect use tax on internet sales. This is a tax that most buyers of the covered products technically should be paying anyway but are rarely collected. Most people think those things they buy online are tax-free when really they were supposed to have paid the tax on their own rather than having it collected by the retailer. As we all know, people rarely do.

Colorado and other states have tried to fix this for a couple primary reasons. The first is simply money. They’d like to collect more revenue. The second is to level the playing field for in-state companies. It’s not fair competition if local companies effectively have to charge buyers more fo...

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"I've decided to write a book," I told my wife over a year ago.

She gave me that what-the-bleep-are-you-talking-about look. You may be familiar with your spouse.

"You've what?"

"I've decided to write a book," I repeated, slightly less confidently.

"On what?"

"Venture capital and entreneurship."

"Why?"

"Well, when I was an entrepreneur, I couldn't find any good books on how this mysterious capital-raising process worked and how to harness the resources and knowledge of the VC industry to help build my start-up. Now that I've seen it from the other side, I want to explain to entrepreneurs how it all works to help them be successful. There are good blogs out there, but no good books that pull it all together."

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Recently an entrepreneur extraordinaire I admire by the name of Chris Dixon touched on the two general paradigms people/institutions can adopt towards one another when conducting business. He first referenced the transactional/legalistic approach wherein labor is exchanged for money in the form of a contract that is enforced by organizations, (especially the legal system). The other approach is one based on trust, verbal agreements, reputation and is "enforced" (so to speak) by the community. As Dixon points out, the world of startups is overwhelmingly governed by the trust/reputation/community approach.

Let's just juxtapose these very different paradigms against the backdrop of the modern American university. As we've established in earlier posts in this series, it has now become fashionable and accepted for universities and their tech transfer offices to engage in the practice of spinning-off companies based on their intellectual property and know-how. In fact, according to AUTM statistics, over 600 university startups are created every year based on federally funded R&D.

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All eyes are on Toyota’s recall of 8.5 million vehicles due to faulty gas pedals and brakes. The recall has sparked congressional hearings, a probe by the U.S. Department of Transportation, possible criminal charges stemming from a federal grand jury investigation and numerous civil lawsuits, all in the name of driver safety.

This aggressive response to Toyota’s mistakes is appropriate, even though the human toll from its miscues has been, thankfully, relatively modest – 34 alleged deaths and a few hundred injuries. Not to downplay this misery, but in stunning contrast, consider this: More than 100,000 Americans die annually in U.S. hospitals because of avoidable medical errors, according to the Institute of Medicine (IOM), which also says that medical errors rank as America’s eighth leading cause of death. This is higher than auto accidents (about 45,000) and breast cancer (about 43,000). And the problems don’t end here. Studies show that approximately 19% of medications administered in hospitals are done so in error, injuring about 1.3 million each year, according to the FDA.

Something must be done to address this woeful situation. In addition to avoidable death and injury, it is costing the economy $60 billion a year. If recouped, those dollars could fund health insurance for a large number of those currently uninsured.

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I'll never forget my first marketing class at business school. Our professor peered at us with an intense glare as he pushed back on our standard, "chip shot" comments. At one point he asked the guy next to me to opine on the case we were discussing, which involved launching a new consumer product. "Well," my neighbor answered confidently, "I think it will be a hit because I can see my mother-in-law buying it."

"I see," replied my professor dryly and then turned to the class with a withering look on his face, "Steve appears to have fallen into that fatal trap of 'Mother In Law Market Research' - believing this new product will be a hit just because his mother-in-law likes it. Instead, let's look at the data, shall we?"

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* Mark Suster: What's it like being a venture capitalist?

* Jim McTague: FINRA must heal itself before receiving added responsibilities

* The No Prick Rule: “Hire the good, humble, kind human being first … skill-set second.�

* Morning Call: U.S. futures look flat, London opens higher, European shares climb, the Nikkei gains 0.3% and Hong Kong shares jump nearly 2%.

* Nick Hasell: Have London's listed private equity firms turned a corner?

* Kevin Kelleher: The spark that could ignite Web M&A

* ABI Research: RFID market to reach $5.35 billion this year, and $8.25 billion by 2014

* Steve Rosenbaum: "Curation, whether accidental or intentional, is rapidly becoming the future of media and publishing."

* David Biello: "The Bloom box makes no economic sense whatsoever without various government subsidies, particularly a federal tax credit paired with incentives from the state of California."

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* Can California declare bankruptcy?

* Business schools revamp their applications

* Bijan Salehizadeh: Friendly advice for first-time CEOs

* Morning Call: U.S. futures point lower, London falls early, European shares slip, the Nikkei loses 0.1% and Hong Kong shares gain.

* The end of WiMAX? Cisco is the latest to bail

* Liz Gannes: When it comes to social sharing, don't forget about email

* Tickets are now on sale for the next peHUB Shindig. Takes place March 31 in Boston (details about a San Francisco event will come next week).

* John Carney changes his mind on carried interest taxation, moving from the light back into the darkness. His basic argument is an old PE standby: LPs deserve all of the profit, and also the right to (preemptively) divvy up that profit as they see fit (no matter who originally put the capital at risk). Of course, that same argument wouldn't apply to those who receive a corporate bonus (based on firm profits) in lieu of salary. Or someone who hires a contractor to redo a kitchen, sells the house at a profit and then pays the contractor with the proceeds (guess what rate the contractor must pay?). John handles all this by claiming the tax code isn't consistent -- he's right -- but doesn't that actually argue for a rule change (carried interest) that would make the code a smidgeon more consistent? As you can tell, I feel a blog post coming on later today...

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Chris Dixon, 38, may be the ultimate founder’s founder.

He’s running his second startup, Hunch, after selling his first company, SiteAdvisor, for $74 million dollars four years ago. He’s an active angel investor in nascent startups and co-founded the $40 million seed-stage fund, Founder Collective, last year. He’s a champion of the early-stage scene in New York, where he lives and works. And Dixon, who’s as connected as they come on both coasts, is a prolific blogger who writes in plain English about the challenges of entrepreneurship, technology and venture capital.

I talked with Dixon this afternoon about how he juggles his life as an investor with that of running a company that aims to be as big as Google and Amazon some day -- once it works out some kinks.

What follows is Dixon on investing. Tomorrow, I'll post our conversation about Hunch, which Dixon launched last year with Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake:

Recently, there was a widely read post by a New York entrepreneur who argued persuasively that New York is still a tough place to launch a startup -- unless you’re “Chris Dixon or anyone else who's already built a successful company and had a real exit under their belt.� Do you agree? Disagree?

I do think there should be more seed investors, which is partly why we formed Founder Collective last year, a fund that’s location agnostic but mainly focused on New York area startups. There’s no lack of money in New York; there are plenty of rich people. But there hasn’t been the kind of smart money, if you will, that understands how to help a company get to the next stage and raise VC after seed money. You’re starting to see more of that -- New York is improving -- but I’m not in radical disagreement with him.

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* Marion Maneker: Subscriptions are micropayments

* Gregor Macdonald: The myth of energy breakthroughs

* Ex-Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz: "I feel for Google – Steve Jobs threatened to sue me, too."

* Morning Call: U.S. futures point higher, London rises early, European shares flatten, the Nikkei remains unchanged and Chinese shares slip.

* The perils of nonprofit recruiting

* Bank books reveal depth of problems

* Spark Capital's Bijan Sabet: Scale first, monetize second

* Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley: Facebook isn't for real-life friends anymore

* More than 250 of you have bought tickets to the peHUB Shindig in Boston. Get yours here.

* Making a killing: "Billions of dollars in corporate bonds sold to retail investors come with an unusual provision that could be used to generate a fast profit. There's just one catch: Investors must team up to buy the bonds with someone who is about to die."

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