Sunday morning I read The Power of Less by Leo Babauta. I’m a big fan of Leo’s Zen Habits blog (I was turned onto it a few months ago by Amy) and I had high hopes for the book. It delivered.
Several times a week I hear from a friend or colleague that he or she is overwhelmed with the amount of stuff going on in their world. Occasionally someone ends up in my office in tears as they struggle to make sense of the madness that has become their life. I continuously gets email responders from people I email that say some variant of “I’m way behind on email – be patient” which is often foreshadowing for their subsequent blog post or tweet that says “I’ve declared email bankruptcy – starting over.”
A decade ago I figured out a rhythm that works for me. I’ve always managed to get through an enormous amount of stuff, but I would periodically go off a cliff and just completely melt down from complete exhaustion. I’d either end up asleep for a week or in bed with a nasty cold (trying to sleep, but mostly just feeling shitty) until my body (and brain) recovered. My ultimately solution was a combination of some of the things I’ve talked about in my Work-Life Balance posts (and that I’m writing about now in my Work-Life Balance email newsletter).
Some of my tactics show up in Leo’s book. As I read through it, I thought to myself that “everyone I know that struggles with being overwhelmed” should read this book. As fits the title, it’s not a long book, but it’s well organized, has a clear philosophy throughout, and is easy to relate to and understand.
I was already a fan of Leo’s, but now I’m even a bigger one.
Now that Do More Faster is out and I appreciate how hard it is to write and publish a book, I read every book through a different (more appreciative) lens. This morning, I spent three hours on the coach and plowed through Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry. It was excellent.
Marc Benioff, the founder and CEO of Salesforce.com, tells the story of Salesforce.com in 111 short stories. He mixes each story with clear advice, from his perspective, about creating, building, and scaling a business. I loved the format that Benioff used to organize these stories into clear themes, while still marching linearly through the story of Salesforce.com.
This is a book aimed at entrepreneurial CEO’s but scales nicely to any founder of a company. It also reminds us of the actual evolution of Cloud Computing, which several very large technology companies continue to try to claim credit for. When reading this book, you realize how deep and clear Benioff’s vision was from the beginning.
It was well worth the time to read and gave me some structural ideas for some writing that I’m working on.
During the Tahoe Tech Talk three hour Q&A segment with the panelists, someone in the audience asked about how to create a stronger entrepreneurial community in their city so that it could be “more like Silicon Valley.” After a little banter, Chris Sacca and Dave Morin called me up onto stage to do a short riff on what we’ve done in Boulder and what makes it special. Damon Clinkscales recorded it on his iPhone – the three minute video is embedded below.
The key points are:
There’s a lot of stuff about this in our new book Do More Faster in case you want to go deeper on this topic.
About a year ago David Cohen and I were having a beer together talking about ways to capture all the different things we’d learned about early stage entrepreneurship from running the TechStars program. In a moment of insanity, we decided to write a book. The result is Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup.
Over the next six months, we worked with many of the mentors and entrepreneurs that have participated in TechStars. Our goal was to write a unique book full of useful information for any early stage entrepreneur. Rather than give advice or simply tell an entrepreneurial success story, we decided to blend the experience of the TechStars entrepreneurs and the TechStars mentors in an organized fashion. As a result, we ended up with seven themes (Idea and Vision, People, Working Effectively, Product, Fundraising, Legal and Structure, and Work / Life Balance) and about eighty separate lessons and stories.
We were on the verge of self-publishing it when we were introduced to a senior editor at Wiley who embraced the project and one other one that we proposed. As a result, we ended up with a two book deal with Wiley. When I reflect on things, getting Wiley in the mix has been awesome as they have helped us materially improve the quality of the book.
My professional career – since I was 19 – has been focused on entrepreneurship either as an entrepreneur, angel investor, or venture capitalist. I’ve spent a lot of time since 2005 thinking about the “science of entrepreneurship” as well as the “dynamics of entrepreneurial communities”, especially as I’ve helped bring Boulder to the forefront of entrepreneurial communities in the US. I’m extremely excited about Do More Faster and hope it lives up to my expectations. But most of all, I’m really grateful to everyone who has participated in TechStars and has contributed to the book.
The publication date is 10/4/10 and it should be in bookstores around the US by 10/20/10. David and I are doing a 12 city book tour starting in Palo Alto on 10/12/10 – all the info is up on the Do More Faster Plancast. And of course, you can follow Do More Faster on Twitter or join the Do More Faster Facebook Page.
Finally, Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup is available for pre-order on Amazon as of right now. If you are interested, go grab a copy.
Entrepreneurial communities grow up around smart people. Whenever someone in state or local government asks me what they can do to accelerate entrepreneurship, I always tell them to put as much money and energy as they can into education. If you build a broad base of smart, inquisitive, curious people that are long term members of your community (e.g. they don’t move somewhere else), you’ll be delighted with the results over a long period of time (think 20+ years).
Richard Florida, one of the most thoughtful writers and thinkers about entrepreneurial communities, recently identified Boulder as the “brainiest city in the US.” Richard Florida’s first book, The Rise of the Creative Class, is a must read for anyone that cares about entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial communities. It forms the basis for his body of work around the notion of a creative class and has influenced plenty of my thinking in this area.
To get a feel for the data and description that names Boulder as the Brainiest City in the US, there’s a quick slide show (that I can’t embed) that has the following data on it.
This reflects nicely on my post about Entrepreneurial Density from a week ago. 25% of the population in Boulder has a graduate or professional degree. Don’t forget that about 20% of the population of Boulder are undergraduate students. That’s a remarkable number.
I’m heading to Chicago early tomorrow morning to participate in a two day event around this years Excelerate program. Monday is Angel Excelerator 2010 and Tuesday is the Excelerate Demo / Investor Day. David Cohen and I are doing a talk together and we get to watch our friend Dave McClure juggle 500 hats. There are plenty of smart people in Chicago – I look forward to spending a couple of days hanging out with some of them.
Last week I co-hosted a lunch for Jared Polis with Kyle Lefkoff at Boulder Ventures which Jud Valeski covered nicely in his post titled Luncheon with Jared Polis. Jared was one of the first people I met when I moved to Boulder (thanks to an introduction from my long time friend Dave Jilk) and we’ve been great friends and partners on a number of fronts ever since.
The attendees at lunch were a bunch of Boulder entrepreneurs in three areas – software / Internet, biotech, and natural foods. While I spend almost all of my time focused on software / Internet, it’s always interesting to hang out with some of the Boulder entrepreneurs in other segments to hear what they are thinking and working on.
During lunch, I reflected some on the number of times I’ve heard in the past year from people outside of Boulder about how Boulder has become a nationally known entrepreneurial center. The comments come from all over and are often followed by the question “how can we do what you guys have accomplished in Boulder in our city?”
While I was listening to everyone and being proud of the little 100,000 person town I call home, I thought of a new phrase that I hadn’t used before: “entrepreneurial density.” I wondered out loud if Boulder was the “highest per capita collection of entrepreneurs in the US.” I have no idea if this is true but from my travels around the US it feels like something that might be true.
On Saturday morning as I was filling my car up with gas, I ran into someone I know that works at Rally Software. This kind of thing happens all the time – I’m constantly running into, sitting next to, or just saying hi as I wander down the street to people that work at startups in Boulder.
Entrepreneurial density isn’t just the “number of entrepreneurs per capita”, but it’s the “number of people that work at entrepreneurial companies per capita.” It gets even bigger when you include students and calculate the “(number of people that work at entrepreneurial companies + the number of students) per capita.
As ED = ((entrepreneurial_emps + students) / adults) approaches 1, you get complete entrepreneurial saturation. I’m going to guess that Boulder’s Entrepreneurial Density using this equation is somewhere between 0.50 and 0.75, but this is just a guess. I’m curious if anyone out there has a real way to calculate this.
On Wednesday I did two interviews with Mark Suster – one for This Week and Venture Capital and then one before the LaunchPad LA event. TechZulu recorded and broadcasted the second one. The first three minutes are kind of funny as we didn’t know they were recording so we were horsing around talking about funny drinks and the legalization of a particular type of medicine.
The actual investor that happens over the next 45 minutes is about TechStars, entrepreneurial communities, and some of the stuff I invest in. Mark does a good interview – he can have me back anytime.
As I watch Amy scurry around and put the final touches on our Homer house before we leave to go home to Boulder, I thought I’d stay out of the way and write a quick final book post on The House Advantage. I read a bunch more books the past two weeks but ran out of gas reviewing them all – see my Shelfari bookshelf if you are interested. But The House Advantage was worth mentioning.
My friend Niel Robertson – the CEO of Trada (which we are investors in) introduced me to Jeff Ma (the author) and then also sent me a book. It turns out that I know Jeff and lived next door to his sister when I was at MIT. You also may know Jeff – he’s the main character in Ben Mezrich’s excellent book Bringing Down the House and the inspiration for he main character in the movie 21. It also turns out that Jeff is an accomplished entrepreneur. He’s had several successful companies, the most recent being Citizen Sports which Yahoo recently acquired.
The subtitle of The House Advantage is “Playing the Odds to Win Big in Business”. In it, Jeff takes on a topic that most business people avoid – statistics. He uses his experience with both the MIT blackjack team, sports statistics, and his friends experiences in these areas to explain very important statistics concepts in very clear and straightforward ways. He’s a great writer – rather than resulting in a dull book about business stats, it’s a spicy read full of stories of Vegas, sports, high speed car chases, airplanes exploding, terrorist drug lords, extreme dance parties, and … well – ok – Vegas and sports.
As I was reading it, I kept thinking “every CEO I work with and every investor I’ve ever met should read this book.” After I finished, I thought “every academic researcher who has ever written a paper should read this.” None of the statistics concepts are complex, but they are regularly misused, abused, and confused. Or ignored.
As a bonus, the book includes the Basic Strategy Chart for Blackjack. How many business books can claim that? Seriously, this is an outstanding book – Jeff – well done!
It looks like I got 25 haiku’s in my haiku contest for a copy of The New Polymath. After consulting with Vinnie Mirchandani (the book’s author) we’ve chosen Rini Das as the winner for the following haiku:
Old Polymath all men
If New Polymath a woman
Then we call it “Progress”
Amy told me she approved of our choice. Rini – “the book is in the mail.”