Month: December 2014
Yesterday I wrote a post titled Life Is Messy For Everyone building off of Nick Grossman’s great post Everyone is broken and life is hard.
I was in a nice rhythm after being back four days from my month long sabbatical. I felt completely relaxed, I had an awesome day long offsite with my partners, I was generally caught up with things and was loving being home. I’d scheduled a Monday trip to San Francisco to do something important with one of our portfolio companies and overall felt like I was ready to roll through the rest of the year, including committing to ramping up my running with a goal of doing another marathon in Q115.
The only thing that was bothering me was a sharp pain in my calf. I coincidentally had my annual physical yesterday afternoon. My doctor and I talked about it and she took a look at it. It wasn’t obvious what it was and she decided, after we went back and forth, to have me go to BCH (our local hospital – which is just awesome) and have an ultrasound.
I went over at 4:30pm. They finished at 6:00pm and put me on hold (e.g. wouldn’t let me leave until I talked to my doctor). That made me a little nervous. At 6:30pm I was at the ER in triage for a blood clot in my leg. I was supposed to have dinner with my friend Raj at 6:00pm – he left the restaurant and just came and hung out in the emergency room with me. Amy drove in. By 9:30pm, I had a full regiment of blood thinners, prescriptions, I’d learned to to give myself an injection since I have to do that for a week, and knew what all the risks were in the short term given the size and location of the clot.
I’m doing fine, but it’s yet another reminder that there are many uncontrollable things in life. I’ve got a good attitude about it, everyone in my office was amazingly supportive, Amy and Raj helped me stay mellow, and I learned something new yesterday (how to give myself an injection). Obviously I won’t be ramping up for a marathon (the cycle I’m going to be on is a three to six month one) and I’ve now got something new in the chain of health stuff that happened this year to process.
Even when things are amazing in your life, they are still messy.
I love today’s post from Nick Grossman at USV. It’s titled Everyone is broken and life is hard and he starts out with a clarifying statement.
“That’s a pretty depressing and fatalistic post title, but I actually mean it in a positive and encouraging way. Let me explain.
It’s easy to go about your life, every day, feeling like everyone else has their shit together and that the things you struggle with are unique to you.
But then, when you get down to it, it turns out that everyone — every single person I know — is dealing with profoundly difficult and stressful things. Sometimes that’s money, sometimes it’s health, sometimes it’s work or family or relationships.
It’s worth remembering this so that we cultivate some empathy when dealing with people — in general and in particular in difficult situations.”
I just turned seven squared. I’ve now been on this planet for 50 years. In my “normative case”, I’ve got 30 good years left. I’m hopeful I live longer but I’ve also accepted that the lights could go out unexpectedly anytime.
Amy and I used the “30 more good years” as the frame of reference for a lot of our talks over the past month while we were on sabbatical off the grid. We’ve been fortunate to have amazing lives, but we’ve each had our share of really difficult things to deal with, separately and together. And we know we’ll have plenty of challenges and messy stuff to deal with for the rest of our lives.
I read several biographies on our trip. My two favorites were one on Einstein and one on Ada Lovelace. Amazing people, but messy lives with lots of challenges. As I read these biographies, I kept thinking about the timing they lived, the stuff they struggled with, and how the cycle of challenges for humanity continues on endlessly.
It’s easy to get lost in the morass of misery. You can also end up in the “things are good for the other person, but fucked up for me” cycle.
It’s all messy. And we eventually die and it’s over.
Nick’s remember that it’s “worth cultivat[ing] some empathy when dealing with people — in general and in particular in difficult situations” just nails it.
Go read Nick’s post everyone is broken and life is hard. And take a deep breath and remember Everything is Amazing and Nobody’s Happy.
I have been talking, writing, and helping advocate for women in technology for a long time. While my most visible role is as chair of National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) since its inception in 2006, I’ve tried to be actively involved and supportive of as many initiatives as I can. My partners and I are focused on promoting diversity in our fund (here’s a run-down of our stats) and have recently back several female CEOs, with a few more about to happen. At Techstars, we’ve put a huge amount of energy into building a pipeline of female founders and getting women involved in Techstars in many roles, especially at the leadership level in companies and the program.
Six months ago, two Boulder entrepreneurs and angel investors approached me and my partners about investing in a new accelerator targeting women-led companies. We’ve known and worked with both Elizabeth Kraus and Sue Heilbronner and deeply believe that each are committed to the “give before you get” ethos of our startup community in Boulder.
Our respect for Elizabeth and Sue, combined with our passion for their objective, led us to invest personally in MergeLane, which has secured strong support from a tremendous group of mentors, investors, media, and the Boulder startup community.
In order to be considered for admission into the 12-week program, which begins on February 2nd, companies must have at least one female in a leadership role. The program is industry-agnostic, but startups need to have some level of traction. MergeLane requires only three weeks of residency in Boulder in hopes of accommodating founders that can’t relocate for a full three months.
The deadline to apply for MergeLane is December 15th. Take a look and apply at www.MergeLane.com.
One of the dynamics of going away for a month off the grid is that you come back to a wall of data. I’ve been absorbing it the past two days and it’s fascinating to ponder how my brain is processing it versus the normal continuous flow of information on a real-time basis.
I’m not a predictor. As we enter the time of year where every media-related thingy publishes it’s “best of 2014” and “predictions for 2015” lists, I simply pass on participating in all of them and read none of them. So – I’ll start with that – this is not a prediction, rather it’s a hypothesis, which is as long as there isn’t a cataclysmic macro event, Q115 financing activity is going to be insane.
The number of large, “later stage” financings are remarkable – both in size and velocity. We had several close last month and have some more in process. The number of companies I’ve heard of (mostly outside our portfolio) who are “getting ready to raise money in Q1” is a very long list. I’d noticed this before I went away, but the wall of data that I came back to reinforced it in a way I hadn’t completely processed.
The deals tend to fall into two categories – easy and immediate, which multiple bidders generating an rapidly escalating valuation or a long slow slog through lots of “almost there but we are passing because of some arbitrary reason.” If you translate the passes into english, they seem to fall into one of three categories.
- You aren’t growing fast enough. If you are less than 100% year over year growth or have declining year over year growth rate you are likely in this category.
- We are worried about some exogenous thing you can’t control or influence.
- There is some characteristic about your business we don’t like.
At some level, these are obvious reasons. But they are often extremely frustrating to strong, mid and later stage companies growing 25%+ year over year. They are maddening to mature CEOs who have built real companies that dominate their market segment but are in either an out of favor segment or using an approach (e.g. enterprise software license sales) that is no longer trendy.
In our world, none of this matters that much to us. We aren’t momentum investors. We are syndication agnostic and are happy to continue to finance strong, later stage companies in our portfolio with or without new co-investors. We are transparent with our financing intensions early in the process. We are happy to support whatever process an entrepreneur wants to go through.
Regardless, it feels like it’s going to be an insanely busy Q115.
I’m back after a one month sabbatical with Amy. We spent the month in Bora Bora, completely disconnected from everything. It is one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself.
At the beginning of 2014, my partners and I had a discussion about ways to sustain the pace of how we’ve been working. We were all tired and were searching for something to try. We decided to each take a one month sabbatical, completely off the grid, during the year. While one person was gone, the other three would cover for him on anything that needed to be taken care of or decided.
Seth went first and went to Europe and studied French with his family. Ryan went next, traveled all over Europe, and won the grand prize in a Lego-building competition. Jason went next, got married, and took a honeymoon for a month in Europe. Amy and I just returned from a month in Bora Bora.
I’ve had a fantasy for a long time about taking a month off. Since 2000, Amy and I take a week off the grid every quarter. It’s been a marriage saver for us. One week – just the two of us – no phone, no email, no work. But we’d never done it for longer than a week.
I’ve also had a fantasy about going to Bora Bora, staying in a hut over the water, and reading a book a day. I don’t know where Bora Bora came from, but the book a day was an easy one for me since I usually read about a half-dozen books on our week of the grid vacations.
I read 45 books since we left on November 7th. Our typical day looked like:
- wake up
- run (maybe)
- eat breakfast
- read
- eat lunch
- read
- nap
- lift weights (maybe) or get a massage (maybe)
- eat dinner
- read or watch TV
We did 30 days of this. We sprinkled plenty of adult entertainment into the mix, along with lots of long discussions about all kinds of things.
After a week, we were each a little restless. I ate something weird around day five and didn’t feel good for three days. But once we got into the middle of the second week we forgot that the world existed. We woke up each day, did our thing by the turquoise blue ocean, and went to bed at the end of the day.
We headed into week four feeling completely transformed.
I’ve never taken a month off before. During school, I always worked in the summer time. After I sold my first company (on a Friday), I went back to work first thing Monday morning. I’ve been investing ever since and when I stopped working at AmeriData full time, I already had more than a full time job worth of consulting to the startups I’d funded via Intensity Ventures lined up. While doing that, I started working at Softbank/Mobius, and while doing that co-founded Foundry Group.
I find it incomprehensible that I’ve never taken a break like this before. Given my comfort with one week off-the-grid vacations, it was easy to just disconnect and leave everything in my partners’ hands. I trust them completely and having already been through the one month off cycle with each of them earlier in the year, I knew that whenever something came up, good decisions would be made and things would be handled.
As a result, I feel like I’ve completely reset my brain. I read what I wanted – I had over 200 books on my Kindle – so I just picked randomly when I didn’t have “next book” in mind. Some of the business books were skimmers and I only dropped out of one fiction book a quarter way through because I lost interest. The rest was like being transported to the magical reading planet.
Amy and I never grew tired of being together. I could spend all day, every day, with her, all the time. I feel like we’ve mastered being together, but letting there be enough space when one of us needs it that we never get frustrated with each other. Sure, there are moments, but they are very short ones, and usually solved by laughter by one of us.
After 30 days, we are ready to be back. We miss our friends. I miss my partners. We both miss our work, which is something that neither of us has said out loud for a while. And most of all, we miss Brooks the wonder dog!