ReadWriteWeb

Richard MacManus, ReadWriteWeb founder, and Mike McCue, Flipboard founder and CEO

With the angst from the angels and venture capitalists debate still hanging in the air, and the thickening plot of "Angelgate," it's easy to forget that courteous, polite and gracious behavior can save your startup from easy pitfalls. In an industry that functions largely on connections, burning bridges is never a smart move, intentional or not. Here are a pair of examples from seasoned venture capitalists on how playing nice can go a long way.

Now and then a polarizing topic will make its way through the venture capital industry and several prominent investor/bloggers will chime in with their collective opinions in quick succession. Tuesday night TechCrunch's Michael Arrington dropped a bomb on the industry, accusing Silicon Valley's top angel investors of a collusion and price-fixing conspiracy. It goes without saying that while some intentionally chose to avoid the issue, many important VC industry voices have made their opinions heard on the topic this morning.

This weekend, venture capitalist and avid blogger Fred Wilson pointed out an interesting blog post written by Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood. In the article, Atwood explains how his company takes advice from Charles de Mar - a character in the 1985 movie Better Off Dead - who rather bluntly tells a first time skier to "go that way, really fast." Atwood says his company has focused mainly on speed, and believes speed of iteration is more valuable than quality.

Net neutrality has been in a the news recently due to rumors, speculation and interpretation surrounding Google and Verizon's newly proposed legislative framework for the enforcement of net neutrality. The key principal behind net neutrality is ensuring service providers (like Verizon) cannot forge agreements with companies (like Google) to exclusively provide an unfair advantage by means of, say, increased bandwidth - thus maintaining neutrality. For startups and entrepreneurs, the debate is one to be monitored with a watchful eye, and some venture capitalists bloggers have begun to chime in once again on the issue.

When veteran blogger and venture capitalist Fred Wilson addresses an audience on the business opportunities in geolocational services, you can't help but listen. While we have our own opinions as to why users have gone geoloco this year, Wilson explained his perspective from an investment standpoint at today's Geoloco conference.

The United States Congress, which has been debating the issue of carried interest and capital gains tax for quite some time now, may be inching towards a solution as a vote is expected on the issue some time this week. As we've discusses as recently as last week, Congress, in an attempt to raise money, is considering hiking taxes on capital gains - the income a VC might make on a long-term investment with a startup. This week, as Congress nears a resolution, VCs have begun raising their voices against these tax increases.

The great thing about following the hundreds of venture capitalist bloggers is that every now then when one of them writes a rather poignant entry, several other VCs will latch on and provide their opinions on their blogs or in comments. Such is the case surrounding a recent article by Mark Suster of GRP Partners about the "agile board," a phrase he has coined to explain the techniques startups should use to keep their board members more actively involved in the business. Since being posted to Suster's blog, Both Sides of the Table, a handful of other VCs have weighed in with their opinions on the subject.

Although being overwhelmed by email is a fairly common complaint, entrepreneurs would be wise to take note when two renowned VCs - recipients perhaps, of your email pitches - speak out about their struggles with overflowing email inboxes. On Monday, Fred Wilson declared email bankruptcy. And Mark Suster followed suit a few hours later.

Back when I was in graduate school getting my masters in journalism and mass communication, I worked on various "lab projects" which were challenges faced by media organizations that they wanted to tackle but didn't have the means or the resources to do so. So basically, the students at my school were a think tank for the local media. One of the first issues we were tasked with investigating was finding a new way to allow comments for online news stories to be more efficient and less offensive.