As the year draws to a close, I’d like to take a moment to thank the many friends and colleagues who’ve contributed to a great year and wish you the best for the holiday season.

I’m particularly grateful to all the entrepreneurs who have given me the opportunity to invest in them. It’s been great to see some like Demandware get liquidity in the public markets this year and put the IPO milestone behind them on the way to building a really enduring business.  Below is the celebratory video for the team.

Meanwhile, I’m thankful for the hard work of all my companies who have notched up some terrific milestones as well as some well deserved recognition such as Mass TLC “Private Company of the Year" and “#1 Fastest Growing Software Company in the Inc 500” for Acquia and “top places to work” award for Apperian as well as many other accolades in the portfolio.

At the other end of the spectrum, I’m really excited by what I’m seeing in the way of innovation in new projects in Open Source, eCommerce, Mobile, BigData and the Cloud. In Cloud in particular, it was particularly gratifying to see 39 leading companies come together to participate in our second annual survey. I’m happy to preview that the line up will be even more extensive and impressive in 2013 including a major new research partner.

For my own part, it’s been a tremendous year of learning as I was given the opportunity to build on my teaching at the Harvard Innovation Lab.   As the iLab reached out to innovators across the community, I was privileged to engage in a series of workshops called Startup Secrets – a framework that is intended to help guide entrepreneurs and innovators in early stages of business building.   

For those that are in a giving mood, I have a favor to ask. I took a big risk by deciding to learn to teach at Harvard. And while I've been truly flattered by feedback from the students who tolerated my first year, I know there is so much more we can offer and I'm hungry to learn and share more. So I'd like your help and feedback to review my first revisions of Startup Secrets linked here. Please give feedback of what's missing, what's to be improved and or purged. And better still, I'd love your participation next year if you'd be interested to join the curriculum as we expand it to include more case studies and examples of best practices to inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs.

And for those who know me more personally I continued my hobby of photography, encouraged by some feedback of the use of my photographs on this site. I’ve posted a couple of galleries here.

With that, I wish you and your families a happy holidays, and a healthy, activating and rewarding new year. I look forward to sharing it with you to the fullest potential 2013 can bring!

Warm regards, Michael.