Apologies for the delay in posting.  I had a great vacation last week in Ketchum/Sun Valley, ID with the family and had a mountain of work awaiting my return.  Lots to share about the week in Idaho and great stuff going on at Gist so please stay tuned. 

You can also always follow me on Twitter @ReplytoAll or check out my Gist activities on @RobertatGist.  I'm finding that sometimes 140 characters is easier to share than a full blog post.

I'll be down at the Bell Harbor Conference Center for a bit tomorrow for the WTIA's Fast Pitch Forum.  Gist is on the agenda mid-morning and there are lots of great companies lined up to do (very) short presentations.  If you are going to be around and would like to connect, let me know – robertcpease at gmail dot com or twitter.com/replytoall.  I'll try to share some highlights from the sessions while I'm there.

Apologies for the light posting the last few days.  Have lots to share just need to find the time to write it down including a full debrief on Glue last week and a few additional items.  Will be back at it shortly…

If you are attending or in town and want to connect, let me know – robertcpease at gmail dot com or http://twitter.com/replytoall.

Looking forward to a great couple days at Glue. Eric Norlin has put together a cool event with a solid agenda.  If you miss this one, be sure to put Defrag on the calendar for November.  What's Glue all about?  Good question.  Here's the answer from the site:

Glue
is the only conference devoted solely to this
new problem facing enterprise architects, developers
and integrators. At Glue, we'll explore the
new technologies that are forming to solve the
web application integration problem-set."

I had a super busy day today starting out around 4am pacific ahead of the Gist funding announcement after a late night putting all the pieces in place.  Yes, I know I get no pity from my East Coast brethren for early mornings as our day starts as it is lunch time there – which is why we were working on eastern time today.

Here's the link to the press release and here are some additional details about it on the Gist blog.  It's definitely very exciting to have the guys at Foundry Group involved in Gist.

If you are looking for a Gist beta invite, drop a comment in this post or send me an email (robertcpease at gmail dot com) and I'll get you set up.

The latest MBA program rankings are out from US News and World Report and the usual suspects are at the top of the list.  What really struck me were the price tags and continued dominance of private versus public universities in the top 20.  In many cases, the business schools at public universities that are in the the top 20 have different tuition structures than the other programs and schools at that university and are essentially private schools. 

Now, admittedly, I am a state school boy and was fortunate to be able to attend business school at the University of Tennessee (#54 on the list) directly after doing my undergraduate work and had an assistanship to help pay for it so I am coming at this from that perspective.

Is the price tag of a top private school worth it?  I guess that depends on what you are looking for.  I personally believe the importance of where you go only matters until you do something else significant and have met lots of folks that think getting an acceptance to a top school is the end of the journey not the beginning.  I have friends who have attended the top schools on this list and some who have no college education and they define themselves by their successes not their academic credentials.  That is why they are my friends.

The investment justification seems especially difficult now that lots of high paying jobs have evaporated on Wall Street and the pace of MBA hiring has subsided.  Every school in the top 20 is over $40k per year for tuition alone (I am looking at out of state numbers for state schools) and most are located in cities with a high cost of living.  You easily spend over $100k plus two years out of the workforce where you were probably making $40-70k per year.  The investment hurdle easily becomes over $200k to recoup. 

If you can score a grant, fellowship, scholarship, generous corporate sponsor, or if someone in your family (including you) has deep pockets the math is much easier to swallow.

I believe education is one of the most valuable things we can spend our time and money on but the price tag for a "top MBA" is daunting and seems like it will force really bright people to take jobs to pay off debt (if they can be found) vs. having the freedom to put their newly acquired skills to work in more entrepreneurial efforts.  I suppose that begs the question of whether or not an MBA matters for an entrepreneur.  A topic for another day…

I'm not sure I totally agree with that statement in this video (via Rod Drury) but thought this was just too rich not to share.  Know anyone like this?

This is an important trait if you seek to start a company or embark upon a new adventure.  There will be many naysayers and it takes a true optimist to take the negative in stride and see the positive in it.  Like Lloyd…

Today marks the two year anniversary of my blog.  574 posts over 730 days…wow.

Rather than share stories of vast financial riches generated (there haven't been any) or my traffic rank (not very high), I just wanted to say thank you to all who routinely read it and those who have stopped by for a bit. 

I really enjoy blogging and the motivation is more selfish than anything else.  It allows me to satisfy my urge to write, to learn new things as I write, and to connect/reconnect with great people.

I look forward to many more years of it…

Great to see Gartner Group analyst Matt Cain include Gist in the "Cool Vendors in the High Performance Workplace" for 2009.  Here's the post on it over on the Gist blog.

Here's my favorite quote from the Gist write up: