I finally got around to reading Steve Jobs’ commencement address from earlier this week. It’s made the rounds on the Internet and lived up to the raving about how great it is – it’s must reading for any entrepreneur. Perfectly told stories, simple yet powerful messages, in a nicely consumable format.
Amy has a magnificent photo of her old Mercedes CLK55 on fire up on her blog. This apparently complements the thrill she got from driving 120 mph in my SL55 tonight on her way home. And – yes – Mercedes did the right thing and eventually replaced her car (that’s a long story for another time) and my car appeared to still be in one piece when she parked it in the driveway tonight.
The second time Greg Reinacker and I got together, we had a nice three hour dinner and covered a wide range of topics. One of them was that he loved to race cars. As we were heading back to my office from dinner to pick up his car, I tossed him my keys and said “have at it.” It was a spectacular Boulder early summer evening (80 degrees, zero humidity, clear sky, bright moon), we put the top down, and he took off on Highway 36. Within 10 seconds I grabbed onto my door handle and looked over at the speedometer – 130–something. I think I said something like “holy shit, Greg.” I vividly remember him turning his head slightly – as he kept his foot on the gas – and giving me an amazingly silly grin.
Note to self: Do NOT let Amy and Greg get in a car together.
A few days ago I posted about turning on the Pipelining feature in Firefox. In many cases, I’ve seen a dramatic performance improvement. However, now that I’ve been using it for a few days, I’ve run into some sites that it simply breaks, including the Wall Street Journal site.
One of my comments suggested that I try the Tweak Network Settings Firefox Extension. It’s great – it exposes the same options but also gives you and easy off button (“Default”) and on button (“Power”) through a menu option in the Tools menu within Firefox. Interestingly, when I used the “Power” settings (which are slightly different then the ones I had listed in the previous post), the Wall Street Journal site automagically works again.
At lunch today (sushi) with Amy and my two nephews, the song “Fish Heads” suddenly inserted itself in my head. No one at the table remembered it, but the waitress did and we struggled through the chorus together. I whipped out my trusty T-Mobile Sidekick and googled “Fish Head Song.” Voila – lyrics:
Chorus
Fish heads fish heads
Roly poly fish heads
Fish heads fish heads
Eat them up
Yum
(Repeat Chorus)
In the morning laughing happy fish heads
In the evening floating in the soup
(Chorus)
Ask a fish head anything you want to
They won’t answer they can’t talk
(Chorus)
I took a fish head out to see a movie
Didn’t have to pay to get it in
(Chorus)
They can’t play baseball they don’t wear sweaters
They’re not good dancers they don’t play drums
(Chorus)
Roly poly fish heads are never seen
Drinking cappuccino in Italian restaurants
with Oriental women
Yeah.
(Chorus)
(Repeat Chorus 2X)
(Repeat Chorus a capella)
Yeah
This was from Barnes & Barnes’ debut album (yeah – huge success those Barnes & Barnes guys). Dr. Demento (remember him all you 40 year olds – well – he’s still around) claims it was the all time most requested song on his show. Yum. Yeah.
Sorry for the multiple posts – I was trying a new posting editor and it was an unhappy experience.
As chairman of the National Center for Women & Information Technology, I’m always on the lookout for real evidence that there is causal impact between various programs aimed specifically at women in helping with IT and entrepreneurship and long term competitiveness and economic development. The Center for Women’s Leadership at Babson College just released a study that shows that Women’s Business Centers (WBC’s) are driving entrepreneurship among economically disadvantaged women. WBC’s were created in 1988 through the federal Women’s Business Ownership Act – there’s some good stuff in the report summarizing the current state of play of WBC’s.
This study was done in conjuction with several organizations (including the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation which I have a long standing respect for an a historical relationship with) and – if you are interested in this sort of stuff – worth taking a look at.
Royal Farros is has now joined the swelling ranks of Microsoft bloggers. Microsoft bought Royal’s company (MessageCast – which we were investors in) a month ago. Royal has been a long time friend and collegue – he was my partner Heidi Roizen’s business partner in their first business (T/Maker – thanks for the clip art Royal) and then we backed his previous company iPrint.
Royal is endlessly delightful, insightful, and often – as Amy (my partially Irish wife) would say – full of the ole St. Nick. He was on the receiving end this year as Heidi pulled one of the greatest ever April Fools Day jokes on Royal this year – it’ll be echoing in the halls for many years to come. Let’s just say that since the MessageCast deal closed in mid-April there was a linkage between the April Fools Day joke and Royal’s soon to be future (and now current) employment at Microsoft.
MessageCast (and Royal) totally get blogging and RSS – so look for some good stuff from him about what he and Microsoft are up to. Plus – Royal’s got the mind of a maturing Jedi Knight when it comes to the software industry, as witnessed by the following recent post on his blog from a speech he just gave at an OMMA panel:
For years, I would say, “I’m Royal Farros and my company, MessageCast, does real-time alerting.” I found myself blurting out my standard opening… but stumbled as I remember I’m now Microsoft. I recovered by saying: “I used to say that we did real-time alerting… but now that we’re Microsoft, I guess we pretty much do just about everything in the entire world!” That’s another thing you can’t say everyday, eh?
Royal – dude – can you send me one of those cool Microsoft Office T-Shirts?
It’s the end of the quarter and many of the entrepreneurs I know are crunching hard to get their quarter end deals done. I was riding in the car with the CEO of one of my companies who is in a particularly challenging negotiation on a large deal. We were in a Jaguar that he’d rented from Hertz and he made sure to point out the sign in the car that said “Hertz #1 Gold Club: We appreciate your business! Please enjoy our complimentary upgrade.” I smiled – told him I knew he was cheap and wasn’t worried – and waited for him to say something like “yeah – but the point is that the Hertz Gold Club membership was free also.”
As we talked through the huge deal he’s working on, he described the negotiating dynamic he’s been dealing with. The end customer badly wants the deal to get done. The deal is “stuck in procurement” and the CEO is negotiating with the “procurement officer” (not the end customer). The conversation goes something like this:
Procurement Dude: “I think our relationship has become strained.”
CEO: “Strained? I’d say it’s hostile.”
Procurement Dude: “Well – you’ve got us over a barrel.”
CEO: “You’ve got to be kidding. That’s like saying the mouse has the elephant by the toenail.”
That got a laugh (apparently from the Procurement Dude as well as me). It’s still a battle, but at least we got a good line out of it so far. I expect that anyone that’s ever done a multimillion deal with a Fortune 1000 company has a similar story. Since we are a private company, we’re perfectly happy to wait until next month to finish the deal when the end customer even more badly wants our stuff. In the mean time, the end customer has to cool his heels while Mr. Procurement plays hard ass for a few more weeks.
I’ve been using Firefox for a while and love it. I’m waiting patiently for my beta of IE 7.0 to see how they’ve done, but for now I’m addicted to Firefox. My partner Greg Galanos (another software nerd – he used to run Metrowerks) sent me the tweaks to turn on pipelining in Firefox. The performance improvement is awesome. If you are a Firefox user on a high speed line (don’t try this on dialup), try the following:
Go to the address bar in Firefox and type in “about:config”
Look for the following lines:
Change them to (by click/double-click the line):
This configures the browser to make 30 requests at once and not wait for a reply to the request before making another request
Then you need to create one new option:
This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. You need to restart Firefox for this to be enabled. On sites that support pipelining (not all do) the results are dramatic.
I’ve been thinking about “Innovation” a lot lately. A big part of the NCWIT theme is that having women in computer science is critical to the innovation process. I recently read my doctoral advisor Eric von Hippel’s new book Democratizing Innovation and re-engaged with Eric around the research he’s doing about user-driven innovation, especially in software around open source communities. This morning, I finished reviewing proposals for the MIT Deshpande Center’s next grant cycle.
Now – I know that reading grant proposals on a Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning is a particularly nerdy thing to do. I did manage to tear myself away from the computer and go see Mr. and Mrs. Smith with Amy which had little to do with innovation, but was fun. However, the proposals I reviewed (a subset of the overall proposal set) included:
While this isn’t stuff that I’d fund (I’m a software guy after all), it stimulates an important part of my brain. The depth and intensity of the early stages of the innovation process are similar across any domain set and it’s powerful, fascinating, and inspiring to think about. It’s also very enlightening to take a step back and think about the core R&D process and subsequent evolution from innovation to commercialization, using MIT-based research as a starting point. I continue to be really impressed with how the Deshpande Center is approaching this.