I just read Howard Lindzon’s book The Wallstrip Edge: Using Trends to Make Money — Find Them, Ride Them, and Get Off. It’s a really fun book – 200 pages of the inside of Howard’s brain. There are so many things about Howard that I love including:
I could keep going but you get the point. If your path hasn’t intersected with Howard, you are missing out. Howard will engage in a conversation with pretty much anyone, including my dad, so go for it. And grab his book – it’ll give you a fresh perspective on public (and private) market investing.
Don’t take my word for it – take Fred Wilson’s. On the back cover he says “When I first came across Howard, he had a blog called PutzOrYutz.com. But he is anything but a putz. He’s among the smartest investors, both in the public and private markets, that I know.” Howard also wrote nice things about Fred in his book, but Fred (and I) both gave the publisher our back cover quotes before we read the book.
Yup – Fred and I are card carrying members of the Howard Lindzon Fan Club. Lindzonville is a terrific and endlessly hilarious place.
I view it as a good thing when people start writing about solutions rather than problems. Here are several good ones for you today.
Remain Aggressive: Will Herman is a long time friend (we’ve known each other since 1984), a fantastic CEO, and a dynamite board member. He’s also a huge Patriots fan so his Belichick quote: “If you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse” is expected. He also reminds us of the old Warren Buffet standard: “Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.” If you are a CEO, read carefully.
Focusing the Organization: I got to know Bill Flagg pretty well through the sale of RegOnline to Active. I wish I’d gotten to know him earlier – he’s got a great brain for business. He also makes a very strong case for “short, sweet, focused, and achievable” quarterly goals.
What is school for? I’m a daily reader of Seth Godin’s blog and a huge Seth fan, even since I met him at Yoyodyne in 1996. #15 is especially charming (“defang the proletariat”) as is #27 (“make sure the sports teams have enough players”). It’s vintage Seth in the path in which it takes your brain.
And – to end with some humor, here’s mega-endurance-man Dean Karnazes with When All Else Fails…
If you read one book in 2009, read Daemon.
It’s unusual for me to recommend a book so early in the year. Daemon is only my fourth book of 2009. It’s a first novel. And it’s mental floss. But it’s as close to flawless for a book of its genre.
I first heard about Daemon in December from Rick Klau. I got to know Rick at FeedBurner; he’s now at Google running Blogger. Rick told me that I had to read this book. He pointed me to a blog post he had written in 2007 about it.
“I can remember the feeling I had, sitting in the audience as the credits rolled after seeing The Matrix on opening day. I knew I’d seen something that was different, important, and something that I’d want to see again. And again. When I finished Daemon this afternoon, I had that same feeling. Daemon is to novels what The Matrix was to movies. It will be how other novels that rely on technology are judged.”
I immediately one-clicked it on Amazon. It wasn’t available for the Kindle so the hardcover showed up a week or so ago. I devoured it this weekend. Rick’s assessment was correct – this is by far the best techno-thriller I’ve ever read.
The author – Daniel Suarez (also known as Leinad Zeraus) describes himself as “an independent systems consultant to Fortune 1000 companies … An avid gamer and technologist, he lives in California.” He doesn’t mention that he is a magnificent writer and brilliant storyteller.
I won’t ruin any of it for you. It’s got everything you’d expect in a fast paced book that will appeal to anyone that likes Crichton, Brown, Clancy, or my newfound friend David Stone. The tech holds together well and is completely accessible to non-nerds and nerds alike. It’s a page turner with very little wasted plot or character development. And it sets up the sequel (Freedom) superbly.
Yum.
Amy is in Mexico on vacation with her sisters and I’ve been spending most of the weekend in bed. Sleeping. I twisted my ankle running on Tuesday and had an intense week so I think I’ve come down with a strange sleeping sickness that I’ll call “the ankle twist.”
I did manage to read through my RSS feeds this morning and found some good stuff for you.
Forecasting Sales in 2009: Will Herman is a semi-retired spectacular entrepreneur and CEO. He’s also an old friend who has put up with me since 1984. Whenever he writes something on sales (or selling) I read it carefully. So should you.
Creating Silos: Eric Norlin is blogging up a storm around his ideas for the Glue Conference. His latest post talks about the endless proliferation of application and data silos in the enterprise and on the web – and what can be done about it. Glue is happening on May 12-13 in Denver, Colorado – get sticky and register now – it’s only $395 (use the code “early1” and get $50 off.)
Some Company Rules: Walter Knapp, the COO of Lijit, espouses some rules for managers and non-managers. I particularly like #589: No one is ever too busy to return an email.
Don’t hide behind your board: David Cohen talks why a CEO should never start any sentence with “The board said …” or “The board decided …”
WordCamp Denver (Feb 28th, 2009): WordCamp in coming to Denver for the first time, on February 28th. Matt Mullenweg will be keynoting. Alex King, one of Colorado’s WordPress developers extraordinaire, will be presenting on the Carrington Theme Framework.
What makes a great salesman? Pete Warden is most of his way on his migration from LA to Boulder. While he’s quick to state that he “really suck(s) at selling”, I think he’s protesting a little too much. He has a great expose on why Ron Popeil (the “I can sell you anything infomercial guy”) is so good at selling.
It Doesnt Take Much: Micah Baldwin explores whether or not the Boulder tech scene is like high school and – if it is – what you can do to break into the clique of your choice. One option – just email me. Remember Walter’s rule #589.
Now I’m heading back upstairs to try to finish reading Daemon before I fall asleep again.
It’s 2009, people are getting ready to get back in gear, and there’s a lot of good stuff floating around the blogosphere this morning. Here’s some of it.
Economic Recovery Plan: Philip Greenspun has some prescriptive ideas about what the US needs to do to dig itself out of the ditch. I agree with some of it and disagree with some of it, but it’s all stimulating.
Another Resume Tip: Whenever there is a downturn, the number of resumes that flow through my inbox increases dramatically. Many of the companies we’ve invested in, including most of the Foundry Group investments, are growing so I’m happy to get these. If you are a software developer, Joel Spolsky has a superb suggestion about how to shape your resume so I’ll pay attention.
Putting The Band Back Together: Fred Wilson has a nice post where he hypothesizes that when times are tougher, serial entrepreneurs tend to swarm together around the best opportunities. The music metaphor of “putting the band back together” applies nicely. Fred’s got some good hints about how to think about equity in these situations. We are seeing this regularly also – one of our recent seed investments and another that we are closing early in January are cases of “getting the band back together.”
Google, why are you tracking links in my Gmail message? I’m not sure I care about this, but Dave Taylor does and I know that a bunch of other people, especially those of you that haven’t given up on your privacy, probably do. It’s an interesting issue.
Why Government Investment in Broadband Is Justified Now: I hope one of the legacies of Obama is a real national broadband infrastructure in the US that is better than anywhere else in the world. So does Tom Evslin; he has some good suggestions around it.
The $100 Fund: The crazy cats at VC Wear are giving away $100 in t-shirts for the stupid Twitter apps you can come up with.
My Holiday Project: A Twitter Search Engine Built on Windows Azure: Dare Obasanjo isn’t going to win a t-shirt from VC Wear for this one. He explains his experience building a cloud based app for Twitter on Microsoft Windows Azure.
Burnout: Jon Fox of Automattic / Intense Debate realizes he was burned out and does something about it. Are you burned out? I hope you aren’t anymore and did something like what Jon did over the holiday break to recharge.
TechStars Meetups soon in NYC, Boston, Boulder, Paris, and more all the time: TechStars 2009 is starting to get rolling. There are lots of pre-application meetups happening – follow the TechStars Meetups page if you are interested.
It’s too windy and cold to run outside today so I think I’ll go do my 1:45 run on the treadmill while watching The Matrix. I always take the red pill.
I rang in the new year with some mental floss. I found David Stone’s The Echelon Vendetta on one of our bookshelves in Keystone as I was looking around for a palate cleanser after my run of serious books last week.
Last night I got about 80% of the way through it. At around 11:20, long after Amy had gone to bed, I actually got scared reading it. I hadn’t figured out the end game yet, so my brain was whirring around a lot. The book was taking place mostly in the Rocky Mountain West (Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado) and I suddenly had an image of the bad guy stalking me from the giant open space behind the two story picture window I was lying in front of.
I rarely get scared reading a book – the only thing that really gets me is when bad stuff is happening in a setting near me. For example, I had to stop reading Dry Ice by Stephen White because of the Boulder setting.
So, that was it. I closed the book, got a glass of water, went up stairs to sleep, and woke up around 10:30 am. Yum. Welcome to 2009.
I just finished off The Echelon Vendetta and it’s easily one of the best spy / CIA / conspiracy / thriller that I’ve read in a long time. Stone’s bio says it’s “is a cover name for a man born into a military family with a history of combat service going back to Waterloo. Stone, a military officer himself, has worked with federal intelligence agencies and state-level law enforcement units in North America, Central America, and South East Asia. Retired now, Stone lives in an undisclosed location with his wife, photographer and researcher Catherine Stone.”
It shows. I just bought Stone’s other book The Orpheus Deception on my Kindle – given my poor impulse control I expect I’ll read it next.
Disclosure: If you click though the link on this book, I get paid a small amount from Amazon (approx 6% of the purchase price) based on my affiliate code that I put in the link. Please read the post I wrote titled The Dynamics of Full Disclosure for more on this. I don’t plan to put this disclosure note on any more book posts this year – hopefully this will be satisfactory for anyone that cares.
I’m still roughly on my “book a day diet” through the end of the year. The last few were really good, with one exception. Here are my quick reviews in case you are looking for something to read soon.
Things I’ve Learned from Women Who’ve Dumped Me: This was hilarious. I’ve only been dumped a few times (since I’ve only had a few girlfriends) so I mostly got to live vicariously through the people telling these stories. There are some good life lessons, some excellent rants, some brilliant writing, and some really nasty breakups. I’m glad I hadn’t read this book when I was in junior high school or else I probably would have become a monk.
Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement: Bill Duggan was the keynote speaker at Defrag this year and was dynamite. Everyone got a copy of his book Strategic Intuition; I finally got around to reading it. The book was a good as his presentation as is one of the best “medium format” business books that I’ve read in the last few years. Duggan’s notion of Strategic Intuition is a fresh view on how strategy works for anyone that’s been living in the Porter five forces and value chain world for the past 20 years.
Imagining MIT: Designing a Campus for the Twenty-First Century: Whenever I think of the architecture of MIT, the things that come to mind are the Infinite Corridor, The Great Dome, The Green Building, Kresge, and Building 20. William Mitchell, who was the Dean of Architecture and the special adviser to MIT’s President Chuck Vest during the great MIT building boom of the 1990’s and early 2000’s, has written (and illustrated) a beautiful book describing the history of MIT’s architecture going back to the inception of the Institute. He then goes deep in his descriptions of the creation and the architecture of five new buildings: Zesiger Sport and Fitness Center (by Kevin Roche), Simmons Hall (by Steve Holl), Stata Center (by Frank Gehry), Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex (by Charles Correa), and the new Media Laboratory (Fumihiko Maki).
Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska: My wife Amy is from Alaska and we spend a lot of time there. I’ve only been north of the Arctic Circle once for a disastrous canoe trip on the John River in the Brooks Range, but I’m been north of Fairbanks a couple of times and get a sense of both the massive scale and the emptiness of Northern Alaska. Seth Kanter has written and illustrated one of my favorite books of 2008 about his life growing up and living as an adult in the far northern reaches of Alaska. All I can say is “wow.” If you think you know wilderness living, buy this book.
The World Without Us: I had forgotten how this book ended up in my infinite pile of books to read until Amy reminded me that she had bought it, along with several others, for one of our Life Dinner dates earlier this year. It has an interesting premise; what would happen to “the world” if all humans vanished overnight. I got about half way through it and got bored with the longwinded explanations. Another book that if was was half as long would be twice as good.
I’m definitely starting to feel the need for some mental floss between now and the end of the year.
Yup – that’s a Gandhi quote that came from Om Malik’s great post What I Learned This Year. I encourage you to read it slowly and ponder it. With it, I begin my suggested Daily Reading for you, as Om has kicked it off with a “what”.
Holiday’s and Communication: Jud Valeski, Gnip’s CTO, gives us a framework for “why” people twitter and blog.
What does the BoulderTwits graph mean: Pete Warden helps with a “who” as he does a neat visualization on Boulder Twitters based on data he’s putting together. Boulder is aggressively pulling Pete toward it – I predict he’ll be here full time soon.
Making an IRS Section 83B election: If you are an entrepreneur, Dave Naffzinger explains the importance and process of filing an 83b election. I was involved in an acquisition in 2008 where the founders did not file their 83b’s (even though the lawyers provided them to file – they just blew it off) and I expect they will never start anything else again, including a lemonade stand, without filing an 83b.
Florida, the Next Hotbed of Venture Capital: Ah those professional writers at the WSJ have such clever titles. This is an article about the Florida Opportunity Fund, a $29.5m “fund of funds” that will invest in VC funds that commit to investing in Florado-based business. I’ve learned a lot of this through my relationship with the Utah Fund of Funds (one of Foundry’s LPs) which has done the state-based fund of funds correctly (compared to a lot of other states which has done this incorrectly.) I’ve been working, as part of my role as co-chairman on the Colorado Governor’s Innovation Council on putting together a plan for a Colorado Fund of Funds (similar to the Utah one). It’ll be interesting to see if they get it right in Florida.
The Editor Dilemma: Fred Wilson has a good post up explaining two things. First, he talks about why he doesn’t spend time working on spellin, grammer, and verbige on his blog. He then goes on to describe a product (or maybe just a feature (limited wiki editing on blog posts) that he’d like to see. In doing this, he explains (by demonstrating) how he uses his blog as flypaper to attract interesting entrepreneurs and discuss new ideas. Gracefully done Fred. I’ll take that feature to also.
Q4 vacation earlier this month was the site of my 43rd birthday (to those who wished me a happy birthday, thank you!) We spent the week in Cabo at the One&Only Palmilla my new favorite place to disappear from the world for a week. I hadn’t been reading much lately (no clue why – I just hadn’t been – maybe it’s due to the DDoS attack I have been under) so I reacquainted myself with one of my favorite things to do. As I’ve started my new daily book reading drill between now and the end of the year, I realized I hadn’t done short reviews of the books I read over Q4 vacation. Several were great; several weren’t. Here you go.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: Beautiful written and a great place to start. Haruki Murakami is a tremendous writer who has been running for the past 30 years of his life. He mixes personal philosophy, memoir, and treatise on running in a nice, appropriately size package. If you are a runner or triathlete, this is a must read.
Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race: This long history of the Cold War was really well done. For some reason I’ve become fascinated with the space race during the Cold War – maybe it’s a function of Sputnik’s 50th anniversary. Rhodes is a masterful story teller; this book was more like a novel than a history book. Coincidentally I saw an HBO Special on Sputnik and got to watch Ike and Khrushchev rail at each other, putting real faces to the whole thing.
Napoleon’s Privates: 2,500 Years of History Unzipped: Boring. I thought this was going to be interesting based on the teaser that it was a series of short vignettes on sex over history, pivoting around everyone’s favorite short French general. "Short" and "sex" are two words that should never go together in a teaser; this book lost my interest about half way through. A few of the stories were funny; most were just silly, stupid, vapid, or dull.
The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL: I’m the football widow in my family, but this book was dynamite. It was a combination an extended description of the highlights of the 1958 Giants vs. Colts championship game, biographic sketches of all the major players and coaches involved, and an extensive explanation of the evolution of football into the NFL. At some point I looked up and realized I’d been sitting in the same beach chair for three hours without moving. I guess some of y’all have this experience every Sunday in your living room – it appears to take a book about football to work for me.
Then We Came to the End: A Novel: Damnit, this should have been good. It’s a cynical novel about the contemporary workplace. I kept trying to get into it but couldn’t really care about any of the characters. I’d try again. Still no interest. I bailed at about the halfway point.
Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know: A fresh cut on the history of Google. Stross does a good job of organizing the story by chapter around specific Google products and their evolution. If you know a lot about Google, this book probably won’t be very interesting to you. If you think you know a lot about Google, but in you own personal quiet moment of honesty, you realize you probably don’t know as much as you do, this is a good book.
Rules of Deception: After that list of books, I definitely needed some mental floss. I was turned on to Christopher Reich in 2005 after writing a book review titled The Chairman (about one of Stephen Frey’s books). Reich is delicious – perfect mental floss.
Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World: Another awesome sports book. This one was about the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. Once again I get some geopolitics around the Cold War – this time with a direct intersection with a play by play history of the 1960 Olympic games. Russia vs. US Cold War stuff, Germany trying to decide if it is one country or two, Taiwan and China arguing over who is actually China, US athletes showing racial unification while the black / white split in America boils over, and a whole bunch of awesome and dramatic sports stories unfolding on a day by day basis, chapter by chapter.
Upbeat: I read a draft of Rajesh Setty ‘s newest book Upbeat. I met Rajesh at Gnomedex 5 and we’ve kept in touch since. He’s done a nice job writing a book that you can read in 45 minutes that has practical advice for entrepreneurs about how to deal with all the negative talk all around everyone right now.
Hot Mahogany: Stuart Woods is one of my favorite mental floss writers. Stone Barrington is a heroic character I can relate to. This was another fun one. Woods proudly says in his books that he’ll respond to all emails. I’ve sent him a few and never heard back. Nonetheless, I still enjoy his writing very much. Like a lot of mental floss, you’ll get a lot more out of it if you start at the very beginning, in this case New York Dead .
Divine Justice: David Baldacci is one notch above Stuart Woods. Divine Justice is another book in the Camel Club series and is the best one yet. Yummy.
Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride: A Psychological Study (Studies in Jungian Psychology, 12): I was at a board meeting last month where we were discussing different entrepreneurial personality types. One of the board members suggested that we all read Addition to Perfection by Marion Woodman. I hunted it down and started working my way through it. After three chapters of Jungian philosophy, I had very little idea why I was reading it and bailed. I wonder if he was simply suggesting that we ponder the title.
Letter to a Christian Nation: Sam Harris has written a short, blunt, and extraordinary well reasoned book. Based on his assertions, I’m going to guess that about 50% of American’s will be completely offended by this book. That alone makes it worth reading and contemplating. And since I like reading both sides of the argument, I just one-clicked Letter to a Christian Nation: Counter Point.