As someone who generally uses a mobile device from the crack of dawn until it’s time for bed, this question is almost counter-intuitive. Yet, as I read about experiences from people who actually have flirted with a smartphone divorce, I’m intrigued. Why? Because there’s a common theme here: Those who have entered the limited-smartphone world appear to enjoy less stress, more peace and greater clarity.

The latest example comes from Brad Feld, a managing director at the Foundry Group VC firm. Feld stayed off his iPhone for 14 days, with the first seven days being completely offline. The following week, he connected to the online world through his MacBook Air and Kindle tablet. He’s using the iPhone again, but in a totally different way: Voice calls, the occasional map query and checking his calendar. The result?

“There’s some magic peace that comes over me when I’m not constantly looking at my iPhone. I really noticed it after two weeks of not doing it. After a few days of withdrawal, the calm appears. My brain is no longer jangly, the dopamine effect of “hey – another email, another tweet” goes away, and I actually am much faster at processing whatever I’ve got on a 27″ screen than on a little tiny thing that my v47 eyes are struggling to read.”

Surprisingly, given that I cover mobile technology for a living, I see merit to this approach, although I’m not advocating, nor willing to try a complete lack of smartphone use. I sympathize with the “always connected” stress that Feld has alleviated. There are some days where I wake up already feeling worn out by what I know is waiting for me: A smartphone filled with tweets, Facebook updates, emails, blog comments to respond to, friend requests on several social networks, and the list goes on….

There’s a good reason not to go cold turkey and dump the smartphone though, and Feld hits this topic spot on:

“Now, I’d love for there to be a way for me to know about high priority interrupts – things that actually are urgent. But my iPhone doesn’t do this at all in any discernable (sic) way. There are too many different channels to reach me and they aren’t effectively conditioned – I either have to open them up to everyone (e.g. txtmsg via my phone number) or convince people to use a specific piece of software – many, such as Glassboard – which are very good, but do require intentional behavior on both sides.”

I think this feeling of “I might be missing something important on my phone“ is prevalent among any smartphone owner that seeks to curtail their handset use. Regardless of the mobile platform you choose — I use iOS and Android daily, which could be adding to my particular challenges — one could use notifications to separate the noise from the signal on a smartphone or tablet. That’s probably an area I need to look at reconfiguring in my own mobile device use: I have way too many apps notifying me. But that’s just a start. Feld is on to something when it comes to the need for a better way to manage “high-priority interrupts,” as he calls them.

Clearly, emails, texts and other messages need responses. For this, Feld is relying on specific times to manage those activities and he’s doing so through devices with larger displays and keyboards. As I think about the emails that I need to respond to, most of them probably could wait a few hours and I may try living without an email client or web page open all day, every day as a result. [Ed. note: we frown on this ;) ] In Feld’s implementation, he found immediate benefits:

“Yesterday, it occurred to me that I was much more mentally engaged throughout the day in the stuff going on (I had a typically packed day). I had dinner with my brother at night. No phones were on the table, no checking in to Foursquare, no quick scanning of Twitter in the bathroom while peeing. When I got home, I hung out with Amy – no email. This morning, I just spent an hour and went through the 200 emails that had piled up since 5:30pm when I’d last checked my email. My inbox is empty.”

Completely ditching the smartphone isn’t the answer here; that’s not what I’m suggesting nor considering. However, as the smartphone has evolved over the past handful of years, I notice more “information anxiety” in my life is the effect: The smarter the phone gets, the more I use it. And the more I use it, the more scattered I often feel in my thoughts and focus.

I couldn’t easily live without my smartphone because I do get tremendous benefit from it: Socially, professionally, and personally. However, cutting back on the near-constant “face in the screen” activities might not be a bad idea until I see better software methods to manage my use of this mobile hardware.

As a follow up, even if a smartphone use reduction experiment doesn’t pan out, I’ll be looking at how to improve or focus notifications to reduce stress while also allowing for high priority interruptions. I’m open to suggestions in the meantime, as I suspect there are some tools to help. I also think there’s a tremendous opportunity for improvements both at the smartphone application level as well as in the native platform. I know I have to take responsibility for my usage patters, but a truly smart phone should help.

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Well, not so much. I looked at the list and found that Fred Wilson, who is one of the most-successful venture capitalists of the post-social era, is listed at #20. Wilson is a general partner at Union Square Ventures, a firm he co-founded, and his investments include Twitter, Etsy, Tumblr and Kickstarter.

He invested in most of these companies during the early stage of their start-up life and long before they became household names and were successes. When investors put money in at this early stage, the returns they get from hit companies are much higher. His return on investment on those dollars is much, much higher than say someone who invested in Twitter at, say, a $3.7 billion valuation. I don’t know, say, John Doerr, for example, who is ranked at the #12 spot.

“Everyone in the industry knows USV is the top VC, so any ‘top list’ like Forbes that doesn’t include them is a joke,” tweeted Chris Dixon, an entrepreneur and partner at the Founder Collective. David Lee, who works with Ron Conway at SV Angel, added, “It’s like putting Andrew Luck at #20 in an NFL mock draft.” Bijan Sabet, who incidentally is #57 on the list and has invested in Twitter and Tumblr, added, ”Also list doesn’t take into account cost basis or ownership.”

The point is not to defend or talk-up Fred Wilson — he can do that himself on his blog, and frankly he doesn’t need to. The reason for bringing him up is that the list’s methodology is just weird and, well, ambiguous at best.

Do Forbes and its partners take take into account how much money was invested in Skype and how much of it was actually returned to the limited partners at Andreessen Horowitz? And how do they explain that Mary Meeker is on the list at #42 (ahead of say, Sabet), even though she has been in the business for — wait for the drum roll – 17 months. And well, if we are going to include Meeker on the list, then why not Brad Feld from The Foundry Group, who was an early investor in Zynga, one of the hot investments?

To be clear, I am not commenting on individuals, but more on the Forbes methodology:

For the Midas List, we created our data-based rankings again this year with TrueBridge Capital Partners, a venture capital-focused fund of funds. Also advising us on our final ranking was an expert panel made up of secret sources, including professionals from a premier global investment consulting firm and a leading foundation’s investment office.

The aim of the Midas List ranking is to identify the venture capitalists who are providing the best returns for their investors, while helping create the most valuable and impactful technology and life science companies. To assess performance, we looked at all venture-backed initial public offerings and mergers and acquisitions valued at more than $200 million over the last five years, since 2007.

When I worked at Forbes.com, I got to know a lot of people who worked on Forbes’ lists. There was a dedicated team that worked around the year and dug up little-known facts and details before assembling the final tally of America’s Richest or the Billionaires’ list. The effort that went into those lists was so comprehensive that you could take it to the bank. The  methodology for the Midas List, based  on Forbes’ own description above, is nowhere close to having that rigor. So, if Forbes is serious about this list, it needs to devote resources to it.

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“Recently, I’ve noticed a cambrian explosion of data among several of the companies I work with. The number of different numbers being tracked daily is massive. When you walk into their office there are screens full of graphs on the wall. Everyone in the company has access to the trends over time across a number of dimensions. These graphs are pretty, the numbers are dynamic, and there are often blinking lights to go along as a bonus.

A few months ago I stood in the middle of the office of a 30 person company and stared at the flat screen TVs hanging from the ceiling showing an array of graphs. I’m sure my mouth was open as I tried to process the data and make sense of it. I knew this particular company well and could reduce the number of different data points to a small set, but I was completely overwhelmed by the visual display. As I systematically looked at each of the graphs, I realized very few of them mattered much, nor where they particularly helpful in understanding what was going on in the business.

At the moment I realized these were no longer magic numbers. Instead, I was looking at wallpaper. Data porn. The entrepreneurial Aeron chair equivalent of 2012. Pretty, but a bad allocation of resources. The 30 people in the room might be looking at the graphs. They might be looking at one of the graphs. But they probably weren’t seeing anything.” [Brad Feld ]

PS: We will be talking a lot about data with/without context at our Structure: Data conference, to be held in New York on March 21-22. (Register for the event.)

Unfortunately, these bills, both in their substance and, significantly, the process by which they have moved along, fail this test. As such, they reveal a disturbing picture about the policy process in Washington, D.C. and threaten to create significant and unintended consequences if they are passed. And their passage was a real possibility before the tech and entrepreneurial communities spoke up.

The problems with these bills have been well-documented. I leave to others to discuss just how and why provisions authorizing a private right of action, or that leave an overly broad definition of affected websites, pose a threat to innovation and free speech. Rather than try to describe these problems, I’d like to explore what’s going on behind the scenes.

The way I see it, SOPA / PIPA is a very simple case of a small, very powerful set of industry incumbents (in this case, certain media companies, led by organizations like the MPAA) trying to use complex legislation to slow down the disruption of their industry. Ultimately, this becomes a debate between the incumbents and the innovators, the old and the new, the disrupted and the disruptors. In such debates, the incumbents tend to prevail, and the voice of the innovators — many of whom are too busy with their companies to focus on Washington or who may not yet exist — are rarely heard.

Talk to your representatives

I first heard about SOPA and PIPA in the fall. I sat down in a quiet space, printed out each bill, and read them carefully. If you’ve ever read a congressional bill, then you know that it’s hard work; they are written in a special version of English that only a lawyer could love (and I’m not a lawyer). As I read them, I got increasingly nauseous. I checked with a few friends who were lawyers to make sure I understood them, and when I did, was appalled. In my least charitable moments, I wondered why our Congress was spending time on this when there are so many more pressing issues for our country to deal with.

I then started exploring how these bills came together. I started by talking to my representative in the house, Jared Polis (D-Colo.). Jared is a very successful Internet entrepreneur (founder of BlueMountainArts.com and Provide Commerce) who has led the charge in the house against SOPA. Jared is one of the few people in Congress who has direct experience with and understanding of the Internet. I then spoke to my Senator, Mark Udall (D-Colo.). Mark just came out against PIPA and, while he is not an Internet entrepreneur, he is a huge believer in innovation and willing to explore, in-depth, the dynamics of legislation regarding innovation.

In each case, the story of how this legislation got this far is distressing. I watched the House Judiciary hearing where the chairman, Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who is also the sponsor of SOPA, unilaterally shut down virtually every amendment being proposed to improve SOPA so that it made sense. I then learned that Chris Dodd, a former Senator is now the CEO of the MPAA, which had a deep hand in crafting PIPA.  As I dug deeper, the insider game got worse.

Entrepreneurs don’t support it

More distressing, I searched in Colorado in the business and entrepreneurial community for anyone who supported either bill. I could not find anyone. Most people had never heard of either bill (this was last fall) and, when they heard about them, they had the same reaction that I did. So I started speaking out against the bills, publicly, and loudly.

Initially, those promoting SOPA and PIPA responded by being more forceful. The backlash quickly built, and starting in mid-December, the innovation economy and Internet community kicked into full gear decrying these bills in terms ranging from idiotic to unconstitutional. Then the politics really began. The proponents of these bills started referring to them as “jobs bills” and talked about the massive loss of jobs if they were defeated. Senior executives at large media companies forcefully defended the bills and lied about what was in them, and what their impacts would be.

We are now in an untenable situation. Both SOPA and PIPA are toxic. My view is that anyone who supports these bills either doesn’t understand what they are supporting or is simply no friend of innovation. And, if you are no friend of innovation, I can’t support you in any way, as innovation is the lifeblood of our economy, our country, and what I’ve dedicated my life to.

So, let’s call on our Congressmen to stop this nonsense, hit reset, and, if this issue is one that they really want to address, do so in a balanced, thoughtful way. It’s time to bury both SOPA and PIPA, and try again.

After all, it’s not every day you get to talk to someone whose startup investments spawned esoterically labeled sectors such as “Glue,” “Human Computer Interaction,” “Protocol” and “Distribution” by backing companies such as Oblong, Memeo, PogoPlug, SimpleGeo and Zynga. Foundry also invested in Sling Media, which was subsequently acquired by Echostar for $380 million.

During a 20-minute video chat he talks about his journey from Boston to Boulder and says that while it isn’t important for an investor to be in an early-stage startup’s proximity, it is important to be in the flow of things. His approach is unusual; the conventional wisdom on Sand Hill Road is to invest in companies that are within driving range.

We also discussed the myths of entrepreneurship, notably why sometimes people look at first-time successes such as Mark Zuckerberg and forget that entrepreneurship is a life-long endeavor, not a “two-year game.” We also talked about why fewer and fewer people think about the long term at all, instead focusing just on what’s coming up next.

After our conversation was over, it occurred to me: Feld talks the same way he writes on his blog, Feld Thoughts.

Here are some of the gems from our conversation, which include some great advice for startups and entrepreneurs:

* Focus on doing something you’re passionate about.
* Entrepreneurship is not a two-year game.
* Learn how to do something you’ll apply over and over again.
* A chip on your shoulder can be good
* Break out of the context you’re in and look broader.
* Pick your 2 percent — then own it. (That one comes courtesy of Feld’s dad)

Video shot and produced by Chris Albrecht

Sure, plenty of VCs can pay high-minded lip service to the question of how, and why, they vet ideas the way that they do, but Feld’s essay offers one of the clearest — and therefore most credible — explanations I’ve heard yet.

He writes: “Every day I tell at least one entrepreneur that I am passing on investment in their company. Some times I tell 10. I don’t know what the most in one day is, but it’s probably more than 25. [So] I’ve come up with a set of filters to quickly turn down deals. This is an important process as [I] want to maximize my time working with my existing portfolio companies.”

Who can argue with that rationale? (And there is always comfort in numbers!) So, Feld continues:

My first pass filter has three parts to it.

1) … “is this in a theme that I’m currently interested in.”
2) … whether or not I think the people involved can create a huge company.
3) … “is this deal potentially in the top five things we are currently looking at.” [emphasis ours]

Clearing the top five priorities in Feld’s field of interest seems a discouragingly high bar, but it makes perfect sense…

You want a VC who will be enthusiastic about and prioritize your company, don’t you?

But a word of caution here: even if you make it through Feld’s “first pass filter” (or any VC’s fist-level vetting) it doesn’t mean you’ll get funded.

We’ll only make a half dozen new investments or so a year [and] the cumulative number of “top five deals” we [see] in any given year might be 50 to 100…we are going to spen[d] real time with a lot of companies that we won’t invest in.”

This is where the process can seem arbitrary, Feld admits. “There are different triggers for each company and it’s not predictable. I imagine this can be frustrating for an entrepreneur because it feels like you are making process with us when we suddenly say ‘we are passing.’”

But of course, the sooner you hear ‘No’, to sooner you can move on to a VC who will prioritize your company. You want to be one of the “top five” — not just “top five”-qualified.

Anyway if you’re thinking of fundraising, do read Feld’s whole post. In fact, print it out and put in your wallet, or on your wall — where you can review it after every rejection you get in the future, because we all know there will be many!

One post script: Feld (refreshingly) considers how his decision-making process impacts the entrepreneurs he meets — and especially those he does engage with but still turns down:

I’m wondering how entrepreneurs that I’ve passed on perceive this…. I encourage public or private (whatever you are comfortable with) feedback on this – did you feel like the experience with me was a rational one or an arbitrary one?

Is the first time I’ve seen a VC ask for such feedback. Take him up on the offer!!
Read more from Feld on his blog, Feld Thoughts.

Have you been told ‘No’? what was it like for you?

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Writes Feld:

Burning out is a chronic problem with entrepreneurs. In the early 1990′s – for a year before and after I sold my first company – I went through a tough period where I got very depressed. I held it together and got through it, but the memory of how I felt is never far away. I was completely burned out. I’ll be forever grateful to Amy and my business partner Dave for putting up with me during this time period since they were the ones that had to deal with the brunt of my depression.

Sound familiar? Are you suffering from burnout yet? Here’s a great post that outlines The Four Stages of Burnout. They are…

1. Physical, Mental and Emotional Exhaustion
2. Shame and Doubt
3. Cynicism and Callousness
4. Failure, Helplessness and Crisis.

Founder Andrew Hyde, the creator of Startup Weekend, succumbed to burnout and wound up having to take a month-long hiatus to recover. It took “a full month to be able to really recover, complete tasks, find neglected projects and really get excited about the project again,” he writes his recent post about what the experience taught him. Four whole weeks without working!

Hyde adds:

I am still trying to figure out why this is really important. Today I looked back at the pages of notes and figure out lessons and trends I would have forgotten about.

Lesson: Burnout = Distraction = Lost Opportunities

Burnout can also create unnecessary conflict: business conflicts due to lost opportunities; as well as personal/personnel conflicts, because it always affects those around you when you’re suffering from it.

So do what Andrew Hyde didn’t do: listen the people who caution you to slow down. This means your friends, your parents, or the parents of your friends (it might not be your investors!).

And, as Feld suggests, sleep more. Scientific studies prove more sleep makes your brain function better. Feld recently started to feel anxious again, he writes, but this time he spent 14 hours in bed. The next day, “whatever vestiges of my cold, fatigue, or anxiety were completely gone.” And so we close with Feld’s parting counsel …

HOW TO AVOID BURNOUT

I have simple advice for all entrepreneurs – listen to your body. Remember the quote from Dune “Fear is the mindkiller” and remember that most fears and anxiety are born of fatigue…Don’t worry about “pacing yourself” – that’s probably not possible – but when you see signs of burn out, take it easy for a little while.

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