Venture Money, now and in the near future

One of the things I am doing these days is working with young companies. From Linked In to old friends, to guys who read this blog I routinely get contacted for ideas and advice. I am looking very hard for my next opportunity and one of the the things I am struggling with is should I go start up, or should I go back to my roots in the supply chain world. Be that as it may I am keeping my ear very close to the smart people in the web venture world these days for a variety of different reasons.

Brad Burnham, partner at Union Square Ventures in Manhattan is a really bright guy who is about as dialed in on web now and web future as you are going to get. If you are an entrepreneur or an operator, you should listen to what he has to say. The above interview is about 5 minutes long. I highly recommend it.

No 1 of Consequence

International travel is yucky

Please forgive the lowbrow title, but I am exhausted. I am in Geneva this week and after spending labor day on various planes getting here. Between all day overnight travel on Monday and working all day and part of the evening on Tuesday I am still not totally recovered. I slept well last night, but am still jet lagged to a significant degree. I will start to feel better tomorrow and Friday, right in time to waste my entire Saturday traveling home.

This place is so absolutely gorgeous it is almost worth the trip. It make me wish I could paint.

No 1 of Consequence

Live from the United Kingdom, China's got problems

In the business I am in, I often hear people in the US raging against China. They worry that China is stealing their jobs, their money and their future. They worry about the power of the Chinese economy and how much of our foreign debt the Chinese government holds. I hear the voices of fear and in many ways those fears are founded. However China's internal struggles are enormous, and could be potentially crippling. From the oddities of having a massive migrant population to the atrocities that people seeking freedom have to endure China is poised for major change in the next quarter century and all the changes it will see won't be positive ones.

Read this article about the Great Firewall of China and you will get an understanding that the information revolution in China could be the first tumbling stone in the avalanche of actual revolution and I don't mean the perpetual revolution Mao Tze Tung was talking about when he wrote the Little Red Book.

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As a general side note, TV in the UK absolutely sucks. Thanksfully I brought the first two seasons of Rescue Me on DVD with me. I watched a few episodes last night and they were as enjoyable as my brother and the annoyed guy promised.

No 1 of Consequence

Look out time management

One challenge I face being an abnormally inquisitive person about the world at large is that I will occasionally suffer a massive time drain to something I find compelling. This puts me behind at work and that causes me serious problems. This doesn't happen often, but it does happen. I am in terrible danger of it happening today. The guy's who wrote Freakonomics have a blog. I did not know this before today. I am in danger of losing the whole day reading it. I must be discliplined. I must be disciplined.

No 1 of Consequence

Civility

I just read this article by Joe Klein. It interestingly details how he was slightly misled by a politician only to be completely lambasted by left wing bloggers. The politician called to tell him the misleading statement was unintentional and apologized. He printed the apology and got crushed again by the writers carrying the banners of the left.

I am absolutely a left leaning guy. Some would say I lean so far left I am actually laying down. They might be right. :-) My point in this little foray back into the political is that the inability to argue points with civility is what prevents progress. If someone is hateful, spiteful and vindictive is drags down their entire cause.

I fall into it sometimes, as do most people. I freely admit that the mention of Ann Coulter causes me to lose all ability to reason. Overall though, I try and keep an open mind.

Raising the level of debate in this nation is important. We have to ask more of ourselves and our countrymen. We have to focus our eyes on what is important and definitely learn to separate the things that aren't from the national stage. Publicly eviscerating people for making minor errors doesn't help anything or anyone.

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Some notes from the UK

- TV here sucks. It just out and out blows. I was stuck watching reruns of Bones last night and felt like it was almost a good show because I was that bored.

- I don't sleep well here. It is hard to be super productive when I am dog tired a lot of the time.

- My brother calls my international cell phone to talk about fantasy baseball. I love that.

- I found out that significant time in Geneva is going to be in my future. I am note sure how I feel about this. Of course it means I will probably hit platinum medallion status on Delta.

- I really like the guys I am working with here. This consulting bunch is fantastic. They are a LOT of fun to work with and while I don't enjoy being away from my family that much, it could be a whole lot worse than it is.

- The UK is so damned expensive I can't even begin to tell you. The US needs to get the dollar back under control and they need to do it very badly.

- I found yesterday I have a new boss... sort of, maybe two new bosses, it still hasn't fleshed out and I am not really thrilled about it.

- There is a 99% chance that I am going to start doing podcasts. I just need to figure out if I can record using my Skype headset and Polycom Communicator.

No 1 of Consequence

Back in the saddle

You know, I haven't been very good to my faithful few for awhile. I love this blog, but I fall in to the age old chasm of lack of time. It is an excuse to be sure. One could say if I truly wanted to devote time to this blog, I would.

I have been traveling extensively internationally and that is going to continue through the end of June. Hopefully, come July, I will be able to devote some time to writing about some of the absolutely messed up stuff that has been going on in the world.

A guy with an almost incurable form of transmissible TB knowingly getting on an international flight. This hit very close to home, because I have been in Hartsfield Jackson airport in Atlanta more times than I care to count in the last couple of months and I have been on several trans-atlantic flights, with several more to come in the next few weeks.

The deomcratic party slowly but surely squandering its strategic advantage heading into the 2008 election.

The pathetic display of the New York Yankees on the field so far this year.

and much much more.

I have about a million things I want to write about. I hope to give you more to read soon. If not, please be patient, this blog lives.

No 1 of Consequence

Puppet

Lately I have been feeling like a marionette. I feel like I have not been in control of my own destiny. Work this last year has been tumultuous at best and while at one point I thought this position would bring me fortune, I am beginning to think that is not the case.

In the last couple of weeks I have taken steps to regain control of my destiny as it were. I have launched an entrepreneurial venture that could prove very lucrative should my partner and I be successful. He has a history of success in these types of ventures so he seems like the ideal person to be getting into business with.

Also, I have been working on an invention, design modification that will increase the fuel efficiency of Class 8 18 wheeled tractor trailers by a significant amount. I have been told that if you can save truckers 1 cent per mile your invention has merit. If that is the truth this is potentially worth billions. I have approached an engineer with a long history of achievement to assist me because while my little mind can conceive a great many things, I have NO idea how to actually make it work. I am meeting with a patent attorney this week.

I have a number of other entrepreneurial ideas bandying about in my addled mind, but these are the two that are getting launched within the month. Of course, the patent attorney could tell me I am late to this particular party and I will have to flush the idea and the venture with my non-engineering partner could crash as quickly as it took flight, but I am cautiously optimistic.

No 1 of Consequence

Where the heck have I been?

Good question. I have been working like a dog. I was actually in the United Kingdom for a week in the middle of my absence for work. Traveling on business has a lot of bad points and only a couple of good ones.

Bad points to business travel:

Long airline flights
Being away from the family
Not sleeping in my own bed
Working twice as many hours as normal (this is time zone related and kind of unique to European travel, because half of the US day or more remains when I get back to my hotel)

Having conversations like this over skype:

Me: Tell the baby I love him
Her, to the baby: Daddy loves you
Her, to me: He said, "Who's daddy?"
Me: Ouch

It was said in jest, but the fact remains that traveling is as hard or harder on my wife and kids than it is on me. As I said there are some good points to business travel for me and NONE for my family.

The good points to business travel:

Per Diem expense policy: If you are on a per diem expense policy and you are willing to sacrifice on accomodations or dining you can make a lot of extra cash. On my UK trip I got a hotel that was approximately 100 dcollars less than my per diem allotment and I brought enough food that I was able to eat about 75% of my meals without spending money. I profited close to $1200 on the trip and that money is basically paying for our family spring break vacation back to NJ. I also learned some valuable lessons about bringing food on trips and will be able to make even more money next time. If I had been willing to really sacrifice and stay in a youth hostel I could have made double the profit on the trip, but I am not a young man anymore and a youth hostel is not on the agenda.

The plush hotels: I have travelled twice to Europe in the last 6 months and stayed in 3 hotels. They were incredibly plush. The last one I stayed in was so sweet I felt guilty being in it alone.

Broadening my horizons: I like to experience new things and it is nice to be able to say I was here, I was there. I probably would never have travelled to the UK or Switzerland if not for my job, so that is nice too, even though there was no real time for sight seeing.

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Work has gone from breakneck to dangerously close to killing me in terms of intensity. We have launched one new product in the last couple of weeks that I have a LOT of responsibility for and will be launching the biggest new undertaking since the company itself took flight back in 1999. I have major responsibility for getting it ready.

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I hope to get back to a regular posting schedule. I don't like not writing and I am not going to let the blog slip away. I just have to be more disciplined and take time that I spend watching TV to decompress at night to generate content for the blog.

Keep checking back. More to come.

No 1 of Consequence

This week in the world of no one.

This week I am learning an advanced software testing package as part of my new job responsibilities. I have never really worked in an information technology role so this is all new to me. I am a bright guy, but a LOT of this is beyond me. Things like custom scripting and regression testing are beyond my current skill set. I am ramping up quickly, but trying to learn an entire new profession ini 5 days is like... well, trying to learn an entire new profession in 5 days. It is as daunting as it sounds.

Some of the people in the class are very senior programmers. One interesting thing I found is that I am finishing the exercises a lot faster than they are and with few if any mistakes. I couldn't figure this out until this afternoon. It turns out being an IT dummy is actually helping me in these situations. I follow the instructions in the book to the letter and make no mistakes, they try and do fancy IT stuff and ignore the interface and screw it up. Being dumb in this instance is cool. :-)

No 1 of Consequence

4 books I intend to finish before Feb 12

Why on Earth is February 12th the goal? Well, I have accepted a role on the global management team of my company and I am starting some intense training on that date. After that, things are going to be a whirlwind with multiple trips to Scotland on business, countless hours working, and very little time to focus on any leisure reading outside of news and keeping up with my various fantasy baseball teams. So this is the goal I have set for myself.

I have a legitimate shot to finish three out of the four, mainly because I have already started reading three of them. The 4th is over 1000 pages long and apparently the beginning of a rather intricate tale.

So let’s begin the latest installment of what is No 1 Reading:

Watchdogs of Democracy? The Waning Washington Press Corps and How it has Failed the Public. By Helen Thomas

This work is extremely critical of the White House press corps and the press in general, essentially accusing them of being complicit in the abrogation of our constitutional right to know what the hell is going on with our government. She accuses them of being fearful of falling out of favor with a bully of a White House and not asking the tough questions. Helen is a long time Washington correspondent and has been continually snubbed by the President and his handlers during press conferences because of her desire to find the truth for the people.

Why am I reading this? Well, I have been making a similar argument for a long time. No Best Man of Consequence works in the media and I often challenge him and the industry by proxy when I see what I feel are significant injustices taking place in the world. He always comes back at me with the “people don’t care about anything anymore argument,” which I partially agree with and we usually move on to something else. (I have a partial post about our distracted society and how we all suffer for it, but that is a different discussion for a different day.) Anyway, he usually has me outclassed in the argument because I don’t have anything empirical to back me up when we talk about it, so I am trying to broaden my mind in this particular area.

Phil Gordon’s Little Green Book – By Phil Gordon

This is considered by many to be the best poker book ever written. I am only a couple of chapters in and am already enthralled by his simple and concise style. Annoyed and No Brother both recommended this book very highly and since I respect their opinions and their poker abilities I definitely want to finish this book.

Why am I reading this? I want to be a better player. I do well in my home game here in GA and I do well online. I, hopefully, am going to be in Atlantic City in late February and am definitely going to be in AC in early April and I want to be at the top of my game. Digesting the information in this book and integrating it into my personal strategy of play is one good way I can do that.

Now I Can Die In Peace – Bill Simmons

Anyone who reads this blog knows I am a big fan of Bill Simmons. I read anything he writes and I enjoy about 80% of it. The odd thing about my liking this guy is that he is a huge Red Sox fan and this book is a collection of articles and associated commentary leading up to the Red Sox defeat of the Yankees in 2004 and their World Series championship. I have been reading the book for awhile and I am really enjoying it. I am planning a detailed post related to it because it offers such a unique perspective to a Yankees fan. Also, for a Red Sox fan Simmons has a very good understanding of the mentality of Yankees fans even though he calls rooting for the Yankees the same as “rooting for the house in blackjack.”

Why am I reading this? You have to support people who have entertained you that much in your life. Even though the subject matter is not something I am terribly interested in the writing is good and I have been entertained throughout.

Game of Thrones – George R.R. Martin

This book is the first in a significant series. HBO is turning it into a TV series. When they made the announcement, No Accountant of Consequence, who is an expert in this particular genre, was very excited. He highly recommended it so I picked it up.

Why am I reading it? The recommendation is a big reason, plus HBO’s de facto endorsement of the content carries a lot of weight with me. Of all 4 books I have going right now though, I will probably not get this one finished by my deadline.

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Some quick hits not related to what I am reading.

I have about 10 posts in draft and this causes me to be significantly irritated with myself. I really want to write more, but I won’t just throw anything up and a lot of the topics I want to cover require research because as most of you know, talking out of my ass is something I don’t really like to do.

Pitchers and catchers report to spring training imminently. (Feb 14) I am very excited for the coming baseball season.

Work has taken a lot of interesting twists and turns this year. This is my 24th month with the company and if you had asked me in my 4th month if this is the way it was going to go I would have told you that drugs were bad and you should really get your head checked.

Projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea from your almost one year old baby is not really fun. There is just something about a very sick little baby that is especially pathetic. There is also an acute feeling of powerlessness that happens when your child is sick. My little man has the flu right now. He can’t keep anything down and he is just miserable. It just sucks that there is nothing we can really do for him.

Disney World is an incredible amount of fun, but while it may be the most wonderful place on Earth, it isn’t even the 1000th most relaxing place in Florida. I still have blisters on my feet.

The Last Day of the Month

The last day of the month is an interesting time at my office. My company is doing very well financially and while it hasn't been as much fun for me lately as it was when I started, this is a great place to work.

The last day of the month though is about one thing at any company that is driven by the sales team. Booking revenue. The sales team is a bunch of young hungry guys and they walk in the last day prepared for battle. The office smells like toasting bagels in the morning and catered whatever around noon. If you walk over to the sales bullpen you can feel the buzz. The phones are ringing or keypads are being pounded. Voices are raised as the team passionately tried to close deals. Everytime someone walks to the board to put up a sale there are high fives. It isn't a boiler room environement per se, but there is that kind of a feel. The energy is burning in the room. Cans of Red Bull are pounded as the day goes on to keep energy levels up. The rest of the month, sales styles clash and tensions run high but on the last day of the month, when team bonuses and records are in reach there is one goal. As headsets are tossed aside and beers are opened at the end of the day, the sales team has almost always crossed the finish line victorious.

No 1 of Consequence

Where have I been? Working my ass off motherf*****!

I have really wanted to post, but I have just been completely slammed at work. We are very close to a record month and it is incredibly busy. I was recently describing the upcoming situation to my staff and I said something to the effect of, "I am looking at the calendar here... and umm, yeah it is going to get busy next week and not slow down until June of 2007."

I absolutely have no time at all to post but then I saw this article. It is from the Shreveport Times. Apparently some black students were told to move to the back of their bus so some white students could sit up front. I read this. After I threw up I thought about it for a long time.

Racism is right there folks, bubbling under the surface in a lot of different places. Anti-Semitic, anti-black, anti-immigrant hatred is boiling again in a lot of different places. Pat Buchanan has the top selling book on Amazon.com. Suddenly my gut is roiling again.

Real problems are not solved with reactionary responses and protectionist views. Our social problems and our economic problems will never get better unless we begin to look at them in a different way. One that isn't colored by hatred, ignorance, and petulance. We need a new social theory that is unifying, freeing, and collective.

I am going to paraphrase this quote because I can't seem to find it but Buckminster Fuller basically said this, "We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth much longer if we don't start to look at ourselves as one planet of people and our destiny as collective." Our ideology and strategy needs to be inclusive. It needs to be compassionate and it needs to start now.

No 1 of Consequence

Victory.... ouch

Yesterday my company received the largest single project it has ever had to process. It is really more than we can handle, but my people are putting in a major effort to get it done. I am trying to help but upon my return from lunch yesterday I was afflicted with some of the worst lower back pain I have ever felt.

It has pretty much crippled me. Walking to the bathroom is an exercise in torture. I really need to spend a couple of days on my back resting, but I am so busy right now I can barely take a breath. I guess this is a good thing because breathing hurts.

Ugh!

No 1 of Consequence

So busy... and then, not so busy

Work has been kicking my ass the last couple of weeks as we are ramping up for the fall and what will basically be the coming out party of my company on the national stage. My job is as exciting as ever and even though it has been frustrating for me the last couple of months I can still say with much delight that I have never awakened since taking this job with the thought that I didn't want to go to work. In this day in age, that is saying something. So, of course, when I came in this morning everything was so crashed I am going to have about 3 hours to kill. Maybe I should go to the DMV and get my license changed over from NJ to Georgia. I mean, it has only been a year.

No 1 of Consequence

Sense of urgency... or not.

In the first incarnation of this space I used to bitch about my job all the time. As a matter of fact it was the dominating theme of the blog. I worked for a company with a great concept but was a massive failure in terms of execution. After they unceremoniously canned me and tried to cheat me out of money they owed me, I found my way here, to Georgia.

The company I work for now has perfected the concept the the other company botched. I LOVE my job and I am very good at it. I work ALL the time. My company is on the cusp of breaking into the big time in our industry and I find it very rewarding. The problem I have is that I don't see the same sense of urgency from some of the other people that work here.

One of these people seems to have his own agenda. He is already two months late on something that is critical to our growth and it looks like he is going to miss the latest deadline. He has brilliant tools. He is creative, he is technically adept, he is charismatic, but at the end of the day there is no sense of urgency. He doesn't seem to care about the big picture. I am growing increasingly frustrated with him. Why am I giving maximum effort when others are not? It is a little demoralizing.

In my opinion, if you are one of the senior members of a company, and you have your own agenda, you should not be with that company anymore. For a low level grunt, I think it is different, you have the right to look out for yourself, because your future may or may not be tied to that of the company. However, as a member of the executive staff, who holds equity in the company, to not show a significant sense of urgency in your work, is absolutely disturbing.

No 1 of Consequence

DBA's rock, the Jets do not & Politics A Go-Go

I love my job. I work for a growing company that is really on the verge of something special. However, as with all growing companies we are experiencing some growing pains, specifically with our website performance and our ASP application. We recently added a new database administrator to the staff and there were great promises made about what he could do for the company and how he would single-handedly improve the performance by reorganizing the data. You hear things like this and you nod along. You hear things like this and you roll your eyes. Promises have been made in the past, you see, and nothing has ever improved the situation. Usually we muddle through and fight onward. However, when I got in this morning, the promise had been delivered upon. My backside application is working with a fluidity that I have never seen and our front side, client facing application, is absolutely smoking fast. The new DBA has not come in yet, he probably is taking a comp day after working the whole weekend, but when he gets in he is getting a major high five from No1ofConsequence.

Onward to far less important things.

In other news, the Jets snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. This, of course, plays right into the duality of Jets fandom, yes, obviously you want them to win as many games as possible, but once they miss the playoffs and there is no hope of Super Bowl dreams being fulfilled, you kind of, and I say this gently, want them to lose every week so they get a good draft pick. I know, I know, I am a bad person for actually being happy that they blew the Dolphins game this weekend, so be it. Now, of course, you don’t want them to throw games, because that damages the integrity of the league, but when you have the opportunity to land a Reggie Bush, you want to get him.

This leads me to a knucklehead conversation my brother and I had while he was visiting me a couple of weeks ago. Millions of Americans participate in Fantasy Football. I haven’t really enjoyed it since Barry Sanders retired, but I am still in about three different leagues on Yahoo. You play head to head against other people in the league, with your players and their players accruing points. At the end of the season the best two teams play in the Fantasy Super Bowl for that league and the winner takes home the top prize, usually some cash. However, the two worst teams also play head to head that same final week and the winner is crowned the Toilet Bowl Champion. The loser usually wins some money also.(about the price it costs them to enter the league) How have we not instituted this in the real NFL? The two worst teams play the Sunday before the Super Bowl and the winner gets the top pick in the draft. Who would be against this? The players would get an extra pay day, the league would have something else to promote and the week before the Super Bowl would not be dark. Also in terms of sponsorship, American Standard, Kohler and any other bathroom fixture company would go crazy to sponsor an NFL sanctioned toilet bowl. It would be a bonanza, plus, you know Vegas would love it.

Politics - a go go

I am not going to write much about President Bush’s speech last night. I don’t like to dive into the political realm without having well researched data to support my contentions. I just don’t have that kind of time right now. I will ask this, has there ever been a less inspiring speaker in the history of the White House? You would think after 5-6 plus years (including campaigning) the guy would loosen up in front of a camera, but President Bush continues to be a complete stiff. There is a new parody on Jib Jab. If you haven’t checked out their stuff it is pretty clever, usually.

No1ofConsequence