Tag: travel
The brain in sleep state is a fascinating thing.
I have been awake for 30 minutes and the dream is lingering. While it’s not as vivid as when I woke up, the details are still there. Maybe it is a result of the Super Blood Wolf Moon. Or maybe its because I’m traveling today.
I’m in an airport casually talking to someone who has stopped me to ask me a question. I realize it is
That won’t work because my meeting starts at 10:30am. I’m meeting Person L and Person F there at Company B to pitch Company B on something. I’m wearing my normal work uniform (jeans and a Robert Graham shirt) but I’m nervous that I should be wearing a suit given Company B’s culture.
I try to figure out a solution with the gate agent. She’s nice, but she doesn’t have a solution for me other than the 10:30am flight. I start to get my bags and try to go to another airline, but both my Filson bag and my laptop bag are missing. My phone was on top of one of the bags so it’s missing also. I start to panic and ask the gate agent to help me find the bags. She points at a bunch of different bags that are just lining the gate area, but none of them are mine. I try to walk out the doors to the plane to find my bags but some burly guy stops me.
I go back to the gate agent to make sure she has my information in case she finds my bags. She says she does but I’ve never given her anything so I try to give her a business card. When I put it on the desk, I see it is for Person E. I try to write my phone number on the card but my writing is illegible. The gate agent isn’t paying attention to me anyway.
I remember that the document that I was working on is stored in Google Docs so it’s automatically backed up. But my suit is in my bag so I can’t wear it to the meeting. And I can’t call Person L to tell him that I can’t make it to the meeting. I decide to punt and go buy another phone.
I wake up feeling very unresolved.
I sometimes wonder what my computer is dreaming about when it’s in sleep state.
I’ve written this post in the style Geraldine used in her book. As you read this, assume that I’ve failed miserably at it and Geraldine is 1000x funnier and more clever than I am.
I had a weekend of books. Amy’s cold drifted over into my part of the world so I slept a lot, ran a little to try to clear out the goo in my head, and read until I feel asleep again. And I ate nachos, several times, which I never do at home.
Last week I ordered 51 hardcover copies of Geraldine DeRuiter‘s new book, All Over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft, from Amazon. I did it to celebrate that my 51st year on this planet coincided with the publication of Geraldine’s first book. I brought two of the books home – one for me, and one for Amy. I think I’ll make a chair out of the other 49.
Geraldine writes a popular travel blog called The Everywhereist. Amy has characterized it as “pee in your pants funny” which I’ve never actually experienced, but I think I understand. Geraldine’s book doesn’t disappoint, as I wandered to the bathroom several times while consuming the 274 pages on Saturday. I laughed out loud a lot, but I also drank two bottles of Pellegrino in an attempt to stay hydrated.
All Over the Place is a memoir masquerading as a travel book. Geraldine starts off strong with a disclaimer which points you at what the journey of this book will actually be.
“So, if there is any advice I could dispense, it would be this: it’s absolutely incredible, the things you can learn from not having a clue about where you’re going – lessons that emerge after making a wrong turn, or saying the wrong thing, or even after accidentally doing something right. And in my case, this was all undertaken not in the company of a new love, but one that has enough miles on it to circle the earth three, maybe four times, is now sufficiently jet lagged, and lost its pants somewhere over Greenland.”
If you know Geraldine’s husband Rand Fishkin, you may recognize him as the not a new love. I learned a lot about Geraldine and Rand in this book, including their experience with poop and toilets, but is gender reversed from the experiences Amy and I have had (hint: Rand and Amy are the heroes of those particular stories.)
The chapter titles give you a feel for what you are in for:
- Marry Someone Who Will Hel You Deal with Your Shit (see above paragraph)
- Home Is Where Your MRI Is
- The Contents of My Mother’s Carry-On Look Like Evidence from a Prison Riot
- Life Lessons from a Three-Hundred-Year-Old Dead Guy and His Boring Clock
- Gelato Is an Excellent Substance in Which to Drown Your Sorrows
I think y’all know I’m a big fan of chocolate gelato. Which is what I went out and got after I had an extremely uncomfortable phone call with Geraldine after realizing that she’d found out that FG Press wasn’t going to publish her book by noticing that we’d taken her off the FG Press website as a future author. Of course, this was totally my fault, as I’d told the FG Press gang a month or so earlier that I’d call Geraldine to tell her we were shutting FG Press down and, as a result, wouldn’t be publishing her, or any other, books. I apologized 49 times, went out and found a chair to sit in, and had a chocolate gelato. I think she eventually accepted my apology, kept working on her book, and found a serious publisher (PublicAffairs/Hachette) who did an awesome job with All Over the Place.
I’m extremely proud Geraldine. Her first book is extremely true to her writing, her soul, and her soulmate. I learned a lot while reading it, and not just about Geraldine and Rand, but about life.
As I schlep through the San Jose airport at 5:30am to catch a flight to Los Angeles, I have a moment of nostalgia. I haven’t been here in a while since I’ve dramatically cut back on my travel, but I’ve probably wandered through this airport pre-dawn 50 times.
Thirty minutes ago when I got here, the airport was empty. I just had a morning call with Amy and now I’m watching the gate area fill up with mostly sleepy and occasionally noisy people. The smells are a complicated mix of antiseptic, sweat, deodorant, and perfume with cooking food mixed in. It sort of feels crisp and contemporary here, but in a way that I know will feel dated in a decade, like most airports.
Today is only the third day on the road and I’m already exhausted. Monday was a full day that ended with a flight to San Francisco. I spent the night in Sunnyvale and then had an early morning of video conference calls before going to over to Return Path to have a long board meeting followed by dinner.
As I crawled into bed last night, I knew it would be an early morning since I’m on a 6:30 flight to Los Angeles. I have a meeting in downtown and then head back to the airport for a flight to Seattle where I’ll spend some time at Techstars at the end of the day. Thursday I have a morning meeting at Glowforge followed by a Moz board meeting and dinner. Early Friday morning I fly back home to Denver.
I did something resembling this every week for the better part of 20 years. I suppose I enjoyed it for a while or else I wouldn’t have done it. But whatever it was that I enjoyed eludes me this early morning.
After a year of zero travel for business, I’ve started to venture out into the world again. I just got back from my third business trip this summer – this time to Seattle for the past three days.
After 20+ years of traveling 67%+ of the time for work, I was sick of it. So I’m wandering back in with a little trepidation.
I’ve decided to take a very different approach. Historically on a three day trip to Seattle, I’d have 10 meetings a day, starting early in the morning and going until after dinner. I’d pop from place to place, taxi-ing (now Uber-ing) around town. I’d check my email in cars between meetings, and I’d be a sweaty, smelly mess by the end of the day. I’d meet with every company we are investors in (Moz, Cheezburger, BigDoor, Rover, Techstars, and Impinj), meet with a bunch of entrepreneurs for companies we might be interested in, hang out with a few of my long time Seattle friends, visit at least one or two Seattle VCs, and do a public event or two. And then I’d stay up until 1am trying to grind through my email.
This time I planted myself at Moz on Monday and Tuesday and then Cheezburger on Wednesday. While I had plenty of meetings at Moz, they were all about Moz. I spent Monday with each of the four product teams, going really deep on the existing products. I spent time with people on the leadership team, including significant time with Sarah Bird (CEO) and Rand Fishkin (Founder). I had a dinner with Sarah Monday night followed by a hangout at Rand’s house with Rand, Geraldine, Sarah, her husband Eric, and the tireless Jackson-child. We had a board meeting on Tuesday along with a bunch of 1:1 meetings. Tuesday night I had an awesome meal on the roof of Terra Plata with the Moz leadership team. And just for fun on Tuesday morning I went for a run on the waterfront with my long time friend TA Mccann, who if you know our origin story includes a run at the first Defrag (where he kicked my ass, just like he did Tuesday morning.)
I slept in on Wednesday, did some email in my hotel room, made a few phone calls, and had a late breakfast with Andy Sack at Purple. I then had lunch with Ben Huh (how’s that – breakfast and then lunch, with nothing in between – what more could you want out of life) followed by a great board meeting at Cheezburger.
As I napped on the flight home last night, I felt very different returning home. I love Moz and Cheezburger – and the people I get to work with there. Each company has had different challenges over the past two years (like every company I’ve ever worked with), but both feel like they are in a great place to me right now. When I was walking to lunch with Ben, he asked me a question about how I was feeling in general and I said that at this point I believe that I’m only working with entrepreneurs who I love, adore, have respect for, and am friends with. That’s a big part of it for me. I know this doesn’t always, and won’t always happen, but as I’ve gotten older I realize it’s an important part of my value system and selection criteria for who I work with.
While I’m not going to turn the travel spigot back on in a radical way, being very deliberate about how and why I’m traveling is part of my new trip planning mantra. We’ll see how it works on the next ones, which are to Austin, LA, and New York.
I stopped travelling mid-May (I arrived home in Boulder from San Francisco on 5/17). I’ve decided not to travel at all for the rest of 2013, except for three personal trips (my parents 50th anniversary, Amy’s birthday, and my birthday.) After travelling 50% – 75% of the time for the last 20 years, I needed a break.
It has been awesomely mindblowingly great to not travel.
I’ve had three other periods of extended no-travel in the last 20 years. I stopped travelling for three months after 9/11. Two summers ago Amy and I spent 60 days together in Europe (half in France / half in Tuscany) just living (no travel). Last summer we spent 90 days at our house in Keystone. It’s clear I had a taste of this, but nothing like where I am right now.
Even though it has only been seven weeks, when I look forward to the rest of 2013 I feel huge amounts of open space and time in front of me. I know this has helped me come out of the depression, which I just wrote about in an article in Inc. Magazine, that I struggled with for the first part of this year.
But it’s more profound than that. In a few short months, I’ve changed my work pattern a lot. I feel so much more rested and alert. When I’m doing something, I’m in the moment. The companies I’m an investor in are all over the place, but I feel like they are actually getting more of my attention because I’m not being torn in a zillion different directions.
I don’t feel like I’m constantly trying to jam in the “work” around all the friction time – in airports, in taxis and cars being driven to things, before I head out to yet another dinner on the road, or late in my hotel before I go to sleep. My environment is familiar and comfortable and things just flow.
I’m mastering video conferencing – I’ve now got every configuration a human could need. I figured out three big things that solve for 99% of the strangeness of it.
- Make your video conference full screen – don’t have ANYTHING else going on your computer other than what is in the meeting.
- Use a BIG monitor – seeing heads that are normal size makes a huge difference.
- Make sure your audio and video are on channels with enough bandwidth. Shift to a conference call for audio while keeping video up if you are having performance issues.
I’ve also started using my Mezzanine video conferencing system extensively – it’s just incredible. More on that in a separate post.
I love Boulder and I’m finding myself running a lot again. It’s hard to run as much as I’d like when I’m on the road – early morning meetings, fatigue, and being in random places gets in the way. But here, I just put on my shoes and head out the door for one of my favorite trails. With or without Brooks the wonder dog.
On that note, I think I’ll go for a run right now.
I was at the annual meeting for one of our LPs yesterday. Promptly at 10am the took away the breakfast buffet. I was getting a new cup of tea at the time and watched them haul off trenchers of food that would easily feed 50 people. I had the same experience the previous two days at the SERGE event as several of the meals were buffet style and at the end of the meal there was still food for a group that was equal to or larger than us left.
Tuesday night dinner at SERGE was a sit down meal in a ballroom. The food was “ok” but not awesome and when I looked around there was a lot left uneaten, especially the dessert which was about as many calories as the main course. It was a pretty simple four course meal – soup, salad, main, and giant dessert. I found out after that the cost for each person was $300. Now – I’ve had my share of $300 meals – the one we had that night was a $50 meal at best.
I probably wouldn’t have noticed this if I hadn’t had three things connect – the giant waste of food on Monday and Tuesday (which I mentally noted on Tuesday at lunch), the trenchers full of food being hauled away Wednesday morning, and the $300 / person ticket for the mediocre meal at a top end hotel on Tuesday night.
It feels a lot like getting charged $15 / day for Internet service when you stay at a $400 / night hotel. The hotel is just jacking you on price because they can. But it feels worse when it’s a perishable good, like food, that is going to just get tossed in the trash.
I have no clue what to do about it but figured it was worth a rant. Maybe some of you have constructive suggestions.
I travel constantly – at least 50% of the time and sometimes as much as 75% of the time. My partners at Foundry Group all travel a lot – think 100,000 miles per year for each of this.. We committed to this when we started Foundry Group as our strategy was to invest across the United States while being based in Boulder. We knew that we were signing up for a lot of travel.
The travel itself sucks much of the time, but I’m come to terms with it and just thinking of myself as baggage when I get to the airport. I’m baggage until I leave the airport that is my destination. I’m good at sleeping on planes so I often get to experience time travel – where I go to sleep before takeoff and wake up at landing.
However, the process of making travel reservations absolutely sucks. My amazing assistant Kelly takes care of it and uses plenty of different tools available to her, including a travel agent. But the online tools, travel agent, endless email coordination, and calendar madness sucks. And then it gets worse as I constantly change my mind, have new things move a trip around, or travel changes occur in the middle of a complex trip. Add in trying to coordinate my wife Amy’s travel to overlap with mine when we go, or end up in, places together and you have a giant, soul crushing, time suck for Kelly.
There must be a better way. I don’t care if it costs more – I’d probably be willing to pay another $10,000 / year to make this 10x easier for Kelly. I don’t know how much of her time she’s spending on it at this point, but I know it’s probably the worst and least satisfying part of her job. Plus, I want her to get all that time back so she can work on other stuff!
Any suggestions out there? Software, services, or better approaches welcome.
At some point in the future, the machines will take over. At that time the machines can create Feldborgs if they so desire; until then there is only one of me.
After a day like today it’s hard to accept that I can’t go to every city on the planet and talk about Startup Communities. Today I was in LA – starting at LaunchPad LA, followed by a meeting with Ivee (so, so cool), then an interview with Jason Calacanis for This Week In Startups, and finishing up with a fantastic evening at Cross Campus, first with about 20 VCs who are the core of the LA VC community and then 300 or so entrepreneurs talking about Startup Communities until late in the night. It was an awesome day and my last travel day of the year.
On Monday, Kelly and I had a chance to go through my 2013 calendar and lock down commitments around Foundry Group and the companies I’m involved in, Startup Communities, and most importantly my beloved, Amy. While I am flattered by the plethora of interest in Startup Revolution, I don’t have the ability to do something physically in many of the cities (or countries for that matter) that I have been requested to visit in 2013. I’m tempted to revisit this after a great day like today, but I’ve made a commitment to myself and to Amy that I’m going to approach travel differently in 2013, and part of that is locking down where I’m going to be in advance of the start of the year.
However, just because I can’t be everywhere physically doesn’t mean I can’t participate remotely via Skype, Google Hangout or some other form of video conferencing technology. I’ve been gradually increasing this form of participation and have had great success with it. If for some reason I can’t make it to see you, but you think a remote session would be useful, just ask.
In the meantime, keep an eye on Startup Revolution where I will be posting book tour cities and dates for 2013 shortly. And – LA Startup Community – thanks for today. Y’all are awesome.
Put this in the “every business traveller thinks this on a regular basis” rant category. Sure – I’m whining, but I imagine I’ll feel better after I get done. I doubt it has any impact on the universe, but hopefully it’ll be a story that rings true to some of you out there who travel as much as I do. And to my friends at Starwood and AT&T, you made my day yesterday, which was already intense, a lot harder than it needed to be.
I just woke up, made some coffee, turned on my computer, and noticed that my hotel bill was shoved under my door. Last night before I went to bed I tweeted “Dear AT&T and Westin Hotel Wifi: I give up. Good night.” I rarely look at my hotel bills but this time I was curious so I grabbed it. $323.10 for the room, $32.32 for State and County Tax, $9.95 for Internet Service, and $180.76 for 10 telephone calls.
Remember that I said I rarely look at my hotel bill. I travel constantly and I’m what I’d describe as a high end utilitarian traveler. When I travel alone I’m not terribly picky about the hotels I stay at, generally prefer modern to classic, just want a dark, clean room that I can make cold at night, and want to be left alone. I try to be super polite to the hotel staff while simultaneously very low maintenance.
I used to be annoyed that I’d pay $500 or more for a room and get hit with a $14.95 bill for Internet access. I stopped being annoyed by that a while ago and just view it as part of the cost of the room. I don’t watch television so my time in the room is spent working on my computer, talking on my cell phone (or my computer via Skype or Google Chat), sleeping, or being in the bathroom. That’s it. Oh – and I appreciate the free coffee service in the room since I get up at 5am and there’s rarely a coffee option anywhere until 5:30am.
Yesterday at about 2pm I arrived at the Westin Arlington Gateway. I’ve got a set of meetings tomorrow at the National Science Foundation so I’m staying down the block. My amazing assistant Kelly had scheduled a dozen phone calls between 2pm and dinner so I figured I’d just sit in my room and grind away on calls and email. A few of my calls where Skype calls and my phone number is a Google Voice number so I’d just sit in front of my computer and work in between the calls.
When I checked in at 2pm, the room they had assigned me to wasn’t ready. The guy checking me in was super nice, asked me a bunch of questions (do you want a high floor or a low floor, near the elevator or away from the elevator) to which I answered “I don’t care – whatever room you have will be fine, and found me a room. He informed me that my Starwood preferred number was on file (whatever that means) and was very polite.
I plopped down in my room, took out my laptop, went through the “connect to the Internet” process which appeared to cost $9.95 for the day, and got to work.
After 10 minutes I knew I was screwed. The Internet performance was painfully slow. Since I had back to back calls, I didn’t have a window to call “tech support” and have them take a look so I put up with it for a little while. I figured I’d use my iPhone as a hotspot as the backup and switched over to it. That was even worse. I tried to make a phone call with my iPhone instead of Google Voice. It took three tries for it to go through and then it dropped after 60 seconds.
I was officially in RidiculousTelecommunicationStan. I struggled through the first few calls (anyone on the other end, especially the poor souls on Skype, could probably sense my frustration and theirs was probably higher) before giving up and switching to the landline in my room. Yes – a landline. I had to think for a moment whether to dial 9 first or 8 first (remember that I’m in a hotel), got it right, and simply made all the calls from that phone. Internet performance was still miserable, but by using Sparrow I managed to work “semi-offline” and the emails went through what seemed to be simulating a 2400 baud modem.
Eventually I had 15 minutes between calls so I pressed the “Service Express” button on the phone to ask for Internet tech support. The nice person took down my info and said someone would call me back. They did 15 minutes later which overlapped with my next call. I eventually called them back just as I finished up but before I left for dinner. We did all the standard troubleshooting things which indicated that the Internet was slow and after an escalation, resulted in someone “resetting a router” remotely. I went to dinner, was about 15 minutes late, but was optimistic that when I got home I’d be able to jam through another hour or so of email.
No such luck. After calling Amy on the land line and saying goodnight, I struggled through 15 minutes of email before deciding to just screw it and go to bed. I tweeted out my frustration and quickly got a response from @StarwoodBuzz that said “Sorry about that. If you can DM us your stay details in full, we can do our best to help. We’ve followed you.” Nice, but I was done for the night, closed my laptop, and will DM them this blog post and see what happens.
And then I woke up this morning, started a cup of coffee, and noticed by $180.76 bill for 10 phone calls. Total stupidity on the part of Starwood where I’m apparently a “not very preferred guest.” It’s been a long time since I resorted to using the landline in my hotel room and it didn’t even occur to me that they’d rip me off like this. I remember staying in a Marriott near an airport recently and the cost for Internet and unlimited long distance phone calls was $9.95, so I’m doubly perplexed. And I don’t see any of those little plastic signs saying “if you use this phone to make a call we are going to charge you $2 per minute” (which is what it appears they were charging based on a few of the calls.)
I can’t remember the last time I made a fuss when I checked out over a hotel bill. I’m sure I eat some extra charges her and there, but whatever. This morning, when I head downstairs, I’ll ask to have all the phone calls taken off my bill. We will see what happens.
In the mean time, I’m going to keep reminding myself that this is 2012, not 1996, where we are just discovering the expensive magic of Internet in hotel rooms. I look forward to 2024 when I no longer have a landline in my room and the Internet works flawlessly for the $9.95 I pay a day to use it. Or maybe AT&T will work in the middle of Arlington, Virginia. Or maybe pigs will fly.
Update: The manager at the Starwood Arlington left a message for me that he had reversed all of the charges. So he did the right thing and I appreciate that. An AT&T customer service person also called and assured me he would talk to the hotel and explore if there is a dead spot in the area. I’m now on Acela to NY where their Wifi doesn’t work for shit but AT&T is tethering ok today. Now, if I could only get the soccer mom two rows up to stop telling stories about her 7th grade son’s soccer team I’d maybe be in a less grumpy place.