Brad, Eric and I came up with the idea yesterday we’re calling Pitch Brad and Seth at Glue. The concept is pretty simple: if you’re an entrepreneur who is attending Glue (and you should be attending Glue) and you have a great business idea you’re working on and you’d like to get feedback from a few VCs (that would be Brad and me), we’d love to see you.  Here’s what you have to do:

1. Register for Glue (use "pitch1" to take $100 off the price)

2. Shoot Eric (or Brad or me) a paragraph describing what you want to pitch and why

3. We’ll pick 6 startups

4. Your pitch will be 5 minutes (in a room with just us, so no pressure and no big audience), and 5 minutes of honest feedback

While we’ve set this up for 6 pitches, we’ll be around the conference and looking to hook up with as many people as we can. 

For us this fits nicely with our driving goals behind Glue of using the conference to help participate in and push forward the national conversation around topics and themes that are important to us. I feel a bit like a broken record each time I write about what a great opportunity I believe Glue to be so I won’t repeat myself here other than to say that I hope to see you there!

On my drive in this morning I was trying to think of reasons for you to NOT come to Glue…and came up completely blank.

Glue is a unique chance to engage about some of the most current topics surrounding web technology with a national audience. Come talk with George Reese about securing cloud infrastructure (he has an upcoming O’Rielly book on the subject); hear about OAuth, OpenID and how they play into web architectures and services from Andrew Nash (PayPal) and Danny Kolke (etelos); debate the role of XMPP with Peter Stain-Andre, Jack Moffitt and Seth Fitsimmons (3 XMPP heavyweights); rub shoulders with Mitch Kapor (uber-angel/advisor, founder of Lotus Development Corp); geek out about cloud databases with Alex Iskold (AdaptiveBlue/ReadWriteWeb) and Stu Charleton (Elastra); and much much more (see the full agenda).

I’d challenge you to find another conference of this caliber.  And because the goal of Glue is to bring as many people to the conversation as we possibly can, we’ve aggressively priced the two day event at $495.  I don’t care what you think about the current economy – $495 to join a discussion at this level across two days and nights I think is impossible to turn down. You can register here for the event – do it now before you forget!

Todd Vernon approached me last week to tell me that his perception – and that of a number of people in the Denver/Boulder community – was that the VCIR company selection process was a complete black box. This was eye opening to me (being involved in the process for years, I thought we had done an ok job letting people know how things work) and as I thought about it I realized that we really haven’t talked a lot about how we find companies for the conference and what the vetting process looks like.

The reality is that the process is pretty well thought out and (I hope) very fair. We have a large number of people on the selection committee who help rate the over 100 plans that we receive every year and we’re very active in trying to encourage entrepreneurs from around the region to submit their ideas. Tim Connor has written a post that’s now up on the VCIR Blog that describes the process in more detail. You can check it out here.

In case you still haven’t signed up for Glue (see my compelling post on why you should be coming here) let me give you two more reasons: Josh Elman and Bob Frankston. Josh is the "platform guy" at Facebook (and is helping push a greater degree of openness at FB) and Bob is the co-creator of VisiCalc (and will be talking about how he’s thinking about the web as a platform). Both have signed up to give keynotes at the conference (along with David Heinemeier Hanson and Mitch Kapor both of whom I wrote about in my previous post about the conference).

You can see the latest agenda here. Note that we’ve also added a handful of new workshops and sessions to the program, which is really coming together nicely.

Glue is shaping up to be the conference for people who care about the web as a platform. Hope to see you there…