Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about cleantech and – more specifically – the ethanol market.  However, I do understand basic economics reasonably well and have pretty good reasoning skills, although I’ve probably forgotten most of the math I learned in grad school about IS-LM curves.  Oh – I’m also a huge tree hugging environmentalist.

My PIDS (personal information discovery system – aka Amy) has continued to catch up on her RSS feeds and forwarded me an article by Daniel Gross in Slate titled Is The Ethanol Boom Going Bust?   It was short enough for me to read on my handheld while filling up my car with E85 (just joking – I can’t seem to find a gas station nearby me that actually has E85 – it seems to kind of defeat the purpose to drive 30 miles each way to fill up with E85 – although the article was short.)

I think the free market dynamics around ethanol – and the second order effects – are fascinating.  Gross does a good job – in a short article – of highlighting some of what is going on in the market.   My favorite paragraph is his nice linkage back to the dot-com boom, a market I’m very familiar with.

“In other words, the lion’s share of inducements have gone to production—call it supply-side energy policy. But crudely stimulating this ethanol is actually the cause of the ethanol backlash. As production increases, the price of the commodity used in the process (corn) rises. So does the price of the expertise and materials needed to build capacity. During the railroad boom, the cost of steel and the salaries of engineers rose. During the dot-com boom, the cost of fiber-optic capacity and the salaries of Web programmers rose. The Wall Street Journal reported that the cost of building a new ethanol plant has risen from $1.50-per-gallon last year to $2.20 per gallon today.”

An earlier article of his, titled The Ethanol Backlash, is equally fascinating.

Supply-side energy policy and inflation anyone? 

There are many great things about being married to Amy.  One of them is that she reads piles of things – like Wallpaper – that never make it on to my pile.  Not only does she read them, but she tears out stuff that she thinks I’d like.

An article titled Cuter computers showed up on my “from Amy” stack with an interesting article about the NextGen PC Design Competition.  Microsoft and the Industrial Designers Society of America are co-sponsoring it.   The website appears to be borked right now (e.g. “Due to technical difficulties, we are not able to collect submissions at this time”) – hopefully it’ll be back in submission collection mode soon.

Another great thing about Amy is that she doesn’t yell at me when I wake her up at 5:30am with a pair of dogs with porcupine quills in their snouts.

Ok – enough of that announcement stuff on a Sunday morning (although I can’t resist inviting you again to the CSIA DEMOgala 2007 event.) 

I regularly get emails that ask questions like “I wanted to ask if you ever considered writing a post on your blog about your method of keeping your priorities organized, deciding where to spend your time, and your ability to accomplish so much. If only the rest of us could be as productive as you!  I thought of it as I read in your Q3 post, “this past year has required unyielding focus.”

I was pondering this in the background as I went through my daily morning routine.  It’s currently 6:51am and I’m about two hours into my “wake up, feed the dogs, make a cup of coffee, clear my email inbox, read my daily web stuff, read my RSS feeds, write a blog” cycle.  I do this almost every day (Monday through Friday + 1 weekend day) and use it as my daily “stay organized” anchor.

As I reflected on this – and the question posed above – it occurred to me that “staying organized” and “staying focused” are two entirely different things.  Rather than try to tackle them both, I’m going to only riff on staying organized this morning.

I’ve never used any particular organizational tools or methodologies.  Rather, I’ve created my own and borrowed from whatever interesting trends appear.  For example, a long time ago (twenty years?) I heard someone say “don’t ever touch a piece of paper more than once – do something with it immediately.”  This concept has evolved and is often embedded in many self-help books, but it’s at the core of how I stay organized. 

I have a long list of tactical stuff that I do such as always have an empty inbox (e.g. don’t use your inbox as a todo list), schedule everything, use a task list rather than email folders, and process all paper immediately, but I realized as I thought about this that the most important construct that I use to stay organized was non-tactical.

Specifically, I believe in rhythms.  Short term ones (daily / weekly), medium term ones (monthly, quarterly), and long term ones (annually, deca-annually.)  I use rhythms to stay both organized and focused – the short term ones are all about staying organized and the medium / long term ones are all about staying focused.

I’m a morning person, so my days usually start at 5am (unless I’m fried) and end around 10pm (when I’m basically useless to the world.)  I use the first four hours of the day to do three things: (1) sit quietly in front of my computer and do my daily information processing routine, (2) run, and (3) connect with Amy.  I try to use the last hour or two of the day to connect with Amy (e.g. no email or calls after I get home at night, unless something is previously scheduled.) 

I aggressively schedule the balance of my day so I know what to do next.  I have a “random day” every other week to meet or talk to folks I don’t really know but want to spend time with.  I make (and take) very few unscheduled phone calls throughout the day so I leave myself room to get through my schedule.  I schedule everything for a minimum of 30 minutes so I have plenty of slack time (most things take 5 to 15 minutes) to respond to email, make calls, chat with my partners when things come up, or deal with the classical “urgent high priority” things that inevitably appears independent of one’s schedule.

If I have to write something that will take more than 10 minutes, I schedule it.  I don’t fantasize that I can squeeze anything in – over the last 20 years I’ve learned that approach merely results in endless procrastination for me.  I clean up on weekends – my best weekends are ones where I don’t have much cruft from the week sitting around and I can just chill out.

I realize everyone is different.  Some folks operate (at least in their minds) effectively at the other end of the spectrum – namely “no scheduled meetings.”  I can’t deal with this – I love the comfortable rhythm of “a day.”  While each one is different, the basic structure gives me plenty of touch points that help me crank through an enormous amount of stuff.

Remember – this is about being organized – not about being focused.  I’ll deal with “staying focused” separately in some other post.

Another week, another new member for the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado.  My friends at Solidware have just pledged their philanthropic support for the future of Colorado.  A big thank you to Sue Kunz – Solidware’s founder/CEO – and her team.  Thanks gang!

If you are in Colorado this Thursday (October 11, 2007), I encourage you to register and attend DEMOgala 2007.  This is the CSIA’s (Colorado Software and Internet Association) third annual day long conference highlighting some of the most innovative companies in Colorado. 

I’m giving the opening keynote starting at 8:30am at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Denver.  I’m going to be sharing the stage with Colorado Governor Bill Ritter who – in addition to discussing the drivers, issues, and opportunities facing Information Technology and Software Innovation in Colorado – will be making a special announcement.

The day is packed with panels – there are four tracks running in parallel: Innovation in Education, Innovation Creation, Innovation in Business, and Innovative Technology Trends.   The list of speakers is spectacular and includes some of the brightest and most articulate entrepreneurs in Colorado.

In addition, there is a DEMOgala Innovation Showcase with about 40 companies showing off their stuff.  The day ends with a dinner keynote by Tim Armstrong (Google’s President of Advertising and Commerce for North America.)  Tim is also the chairman of Associated Content, a Colorado-based social media publisher also known as The People’s Media Company.

Register and come join us at what will be one of the important events this year in Colorado around technology and innovation.

Charlie Wood reminded me in his comment to my post The Purpose of Numbers on a Y Axis that Greg Reinacker’s first pitch to me had a revenue graph lacking Y Axis values.  For those of you that don’t know Greg, he’s the founder / CTO of NewsGator, a company that I was the seed investor in and am very proud of.  Here’s that graph from the first presentation.

Fortunately (for both me and Greg), he had plenty of other slides in that first presentation, including the money shot that was the vision slide.

This was spring 2004.  I didn’t know what RSS was, nor did the vast majority of people who know about it today.  Greg was way ahead of the curve, explained it to me in a way that helped me overlook his lame revenue chart, and resulted in our investment in NewsGator in the summer of 2004.

While this demonstrates that I can get past my pet peeves, please put numbers on your Y Axis.

Every day I get a fresh pile of emails containing executive summaries and powerpoint presentations (keep them coming by the way) inquiring whether I’d be interested in exploring an investment.  I try to quickly look at them all and decide immediately whether or not I want to spend any time considering investing in the business.

There is an endless list of nitpicky things I could suggest that would improve these executive summaries and powerpoint presentations.  I’ll spare you those.  There is also an endless list of substantive things I could suggest.  For example, what is wrong with the following graph?

Um.  Not useful.  I got that you’ve had relative growth but you are missing the numbers on the y-axis.  If you think I’m a total buckethead, you’d assume I’d be impressed by this growth.  However, my first question is “so, what is the 2007 revenue?”  I looked at the next few pages in the presentation and it was nowhere to be found.

If you trust me (or are interested in me) enough to send me a ppt unsolicited, please at least give me the real quantitative data for me to react to – assuming you think it’s an important part of your presentation.  If it’s not an important part of your presentation (e.g. tiny numbers so far – nice yoy % growth, but tiny numbers) don’t include it!

At least I got a blog post out of this one.

Semantic Web.  Implicit Web.  Web 3.0.  Lot’s of happy new buzz phrases being tossed about.  Of course, the academic one is “semantic web” – all the rest are made up trendy things. 

While there are plenty of abstract ideas about this, and lots more simple instantiations that are tiny pieces of the concept, Alex Iskold of Adaptive Blue is going after the whole enchilada in a way even my father would enjoy.  I’ve known Alex for a while via his writing and my small investment in Adaptive Blue and I love the way his brain works around a variety of topics, including The New Rules of Technology VC.

Jennifer Zaino interviewed Alex the other day in an article titled The Semantic Curmudgeon and nailed a bunch of stuff.  If this topic interests you, it’s a good read.

I’m going to pile on to Fred Wilson’s post titled Web 3.0 Nonsense where he suggests that Jason Calacanis’s Web 3.0, the official definition is “nonsensical versioning.”

I’ve never liked the Web 2.0 label.  I don’t like the Enterprise 2.0 label.  I don’t like anything about the 2.0 label.  I can’t even begin to think about wrapping my mind around the 3.0 label.

I was in a meeting with an entrepreneur the other who I like a lot.  He’s got a neat company, is making great progress, has a good understanding of what he is trying to do, and is now out in front of customers with his product.  However, his investor presentation had “2.0” littered through it.  Web 2.0.  Enterprise 2.0.  Community 2.0.  Marketing 2.0.  After the meeting, I gave him a lot of feedback, including my allergic reaction to all things labeled 2.0.

Labels should be evocative.  2.0 might have meant something once – when the energy around the Web began emerging again out of the rubble of the Internet crash of 2001.  But it doesn’t mean anything to me any more.  Be wary of labels that mean nothing.