I am having a great time at The Fortune conference in Aspen. I have gotten to see some old friends and make some new friends.

Our (Social Leverage) portfolio company WagWalking has a new CEO Hilary Schneider, who I have never met, and we got to meet because she is at the conference.

I ran into David Lawee who I have not seen for over 30 years. David went to the same university as me (University of Western Ontario) and we shared a great group of friends. David is a veteran of Google, ran mergers and acquisitions for them and now runs Google Capital. Fellow Torontonian Lorna Bornstein (David’s wife) joined us. She launched Ebay Canada back in the day and today is the founder of Grokker. Over lunch we chatted about our kids and self driving cars. David and Lorna sit in unique seats in the tech world so I had a lot of questions. I am happy they share my optimism for technology companies.

Aspen is a jewel of a place

Ellen joined me for the week and we are staying with our friends Brad and Amy Feld. Here are Brad and I in his backyard:

I rode with a group of attendees to the top of Maroon Bell and though I struggled with the altitude, I made it. Lance Armstrong happened to be at the top as well with a group of his friends, so naturally I asked for a photo:

When they took off, I decided to trail them. I managed to keep up for 100 meters before they went into a downhill tuck and took off like rockets.

Since I am on the continuing topic of Nasdaq 10,000 the last week, Brad (a founder of Foundry Group) has a great post about the 3D printing Industry that I truly do not understand. It is titled ‘The REPL for Hardware“. It is this technology that I cannot explain or understand that is continuing to be developed and written about on page 10 of tech news that will push us past 10,000.