Archive for July, 2009
The other morning while I was on the elliptical I watched a news excerpt on Walter Cronkite’s funeral. It was described as “a celebration of a life well lived.”
A life well lived — great words to live by.
During my upcoming vacation, in addition to detoxing off alcohol, caffeine, red meat, glutens, twitter and email, I am going to try to give some thought to just what makes a life a well lived life.
Yes, it was a busy week at the Dog Patch Lab at Pier 38!
In addition to our Product Guy Project kickoff dinner wednesday night, on Thursday we hosted a Customer Development Workshop led by Eric Ries and Sean Ellis (see Sean’s blog here). We had 20 participants, all of whom were Polaris and/or Dog Patch Lab entrepreneurs. It was a huge success, and we’ll be having more on both the West and East coasts.
Wednesday night we hosted a dinner at Dog Patch Lab with a bunch of friends from the biz to help us brainstorm our Product Guy Project.
Our objective is simple: find the very best product talent in Silicon Valley — to place in our portfolio; to back someday; and/or to work with in some capacity.
Thanks to the terrific group who joined us for a few hours of good talk on the topic together with some kickass barbecue and beer: Bryan and Maggie Mason, Narendra Rocherolle, James Currier, Hunter Walk, Hiten Shah, Ryan Spoon, Zach Allia, Daniel Clemens, Maureen Fan, plus Bob Metcalfe, Lindsay Barnett and myself from Polaris.
We had a great discussion, and have some really good ideas that are STARTing to brew… Stay tuned, you’ll be hearing more.
…of Windows, that is, and the hassle of running it on a Mac.
My office runs on MSFT Exchange, which means I do too. But running Microsoft Office on a Mac is just a lousy experience, no matter how you do it, Entourage, Parallels, etc etc.
But I just forwarded my inbox to gmail, and synched my calendar with Google Calendar. So now I can do everything through a browser with Google Apps.
I’ve been remiss at checking out the no-linger-new Post by Email functionality WordPress rolled out a little while back. So I am trying it now. If this works, then it is WAY cool.s
Today I had the chance to spend about an hour catching up with Angus Davis. Angus interned at Netscape after his senior year of high school, and was so into it that he blew off college to be a young star at Netscape. He went on to co-found TellMe, which he sold to MSFT. Angus left MSFT a couple months ago to return to his home state of Rhode Island.
What was especially fun about my visit with Angus is that we hadn’t spoken in about 12 years but shared a fascinating experience back in 1997. While at Netscape Angus was sent to Washington DC to help educate Senate staffers on the Microsoft-Netscape browser wars. You may recall that the Senate held a series of investigations on the topic. I was in charge of those hearings, and met Angus in that context.
Angus shared with me a great anecdote: at the time, he didn’t own a suit. Being about the same size as his dad, he had is dad fedex a suit to his DC hotel room, and then wore that same suit during the several days of his DC meetings. Dark suit, dark rooms, nobody notice.
How times have changed. Angus is now the super successful entrepreneur who I am sure has a closet full of Armani suits! And, I am happy to report, I am the guy who doesn’t own a suit (I do own a Brooks Brothers blazer which I wear exactly once a year to our annual meeting…)
I spent this morning at TechCrunch’s CrunchUp Conference, which reminded me why I limit the number of conferences I attend.
Remarkably the WiFi didn’t work, plaguing both me and demo’ers.
Ran out of coffee.
Nobody had anything interesting to stay.
I left at noon.
Portfolio promote of the day: Jessica Vascellaro has a good piece in today’s WSJ on Quantcast. Check it out!
