Category: Personal
A snarky person could call the title of this post “the tagline for Facebook and Twitter.” A bitter person could expand this to mean all of media.
I’ve got a cold (it’s a bummer to end the year with a cold, but if it runs its course by January 1st I’ll be happy) so it’s been hard to concentrate this morning. Instead of working on the final draft of the Second Edition of Startup Opportunities: Know When to Quit Your Day Job (being published by Wiley in Q117) I’ve been surfing the web, looking at Twitter and Facebook, responding to email, and drinking apple cider.
I came across three articles this morning that were prompted by an email exchange about truth / fake news / exaggeration, which was stimulated by Fred Wilson’s Headlines post today.
I figured I’d be done after reading Erin Griffith’s The Ugly Unethical Underside of Silicon Valley. There’s a lot of meat in the article but Erin’s writing deserves a better, less clickbait headline. But, we know that’s not going to happen.
I then bumped into ‘How Propaganda Works’ Is a Timely Reminder for a Post-Truth Age which resulted in a one-click Amazon purchase of the book How Propaganda Works.
I still felt sick, but for another reason.
I finished my random reading off with some Garrison Keillor who always makes me happier. Our country is bitterly divided. How ’bout a little small talk? ends with a great punch line.
“They say the country is bitterly divided. Maybe so, but that’s no reason to be rude. My mailman likes to banter, and so do the guys at Lloyd’s Automotive and the cabdrivers. So what’s going on with you? Cat got your tongue? Where’d you get that sweater? What’s that product you put on your hair?”
I’m going to quit stalling and go work on two more chapters of Startup Opportunities and then take an afternoon nap. And that’s the truth.
I turned 51 today. I’ve been telling people I’m 33 (since that’s my age in hex) and when I feel like having people say “whoa – you look a lot younger than that” I say I’m 63 (since that’s my age in octal). I like to look forward on my birthday instead of backwards, so when I woke up this morning I had a handful of things in my head for the next version of myself. So, here’s what I’m going to try to incorporate into v51.
No Booze: I’ve never been a big drinker (my parents don’t drink so other than awful Manischewitz wine on the jewish holidays I rarely saw booze as a kid. I don’t really like wine or beer that much so my go to drink is scotch. I have a moderator problem with all things in life – I’m either off (abstainer) or on (all in) so it’s a lot easier for me to abstain. I go through long no-drinking phases and I feel like v51 should be one of them.
Mission Sub-200: I weighed in this morning at 218. My weight fluctuates between 205 and 220 depending on how much I pay attention to it. My adult low weight is 192 and I feel really good around 200 so in v51 I’m going to figure out a combination of food and exercise that gets me permanently below 200. Fortunately, I have an awesome coach (Gary Ditsch) who can help me with that and I expect the no booze feature will help.
Religious Digital Sabbath: When I take Friday night through Saturday night off the grid (Digital Sabbath) I always feel a lot better on all dimensions. I’ve been inconsistent about this in v50. For v51 I’m going to be religious about it.
Focus On My 2%: I’ve written about this many times in different ways. On a daily basis, I pay almost no attention to the macro. When I was a kid, my dad once said to me “focus on the 2% you can impact and spend all your time there.” That’s generally how I live my life, although like many others I got swept up into the most recent election madness and found myself spending a non-trivial amount of time paying attention to the macro, even when I knew I couldn’t impact it. I’m recommitting my energy to my 2%, recognizing that my whole world is a network and my activity is almost entirely bottom up engagement rather than top down. v51 is recommitted to that.
Reset Social Media: While I’ve always been a broadcaster on social media (primarily Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn), my consumption and engagement patterns ebb and flow. For v51, I’m going to select ebb. So, while I’ll still be broadcasting, I won’t be engaging or reading the streams. Email remains the best way to get me, although I will continue 1:1 interaction via whatever channels find their way to me (SMS, txt, FBM, LI, DM).
More Maker Mode Expansion: v51 will include more travel and more maker mode. I’m writing daily again and working on several books (the 2nd Edition of Startup Opportunities and the 1st Edition of Give First.) I get so much emotional and intellectual joy out of the process that I’m just going to let it be a bigger part of v51.
Travel Mode Expansion: I’ve been traveling more and feel like I’ve figured out a comfortable way to do it. The biggest shift is that I spend my traveling time “in the moment”, I don’t over schedule when I’m somewhere and instead focus on longer time with less people. I also give myself plenty of me time on the road. I’ll take longer breaks from any travel or settle in one place for longer stretches with Amy. v51 will try this again, but will be careful not to over do it.
Those are the big features I am modifying or expansion packs I’m adding. As today is day 0 of version 51, I expect I’ll iterate on plenty of these – and others – on my way to v51.365.
For those of you who have wished me happy birthday on Facebook and Twitter, thank you (per my reset social media, don’t expect a reply on my wall …) For my one friend who called me on the phone to wish me happy birthday, I treasure what is now a 34 year (in decimal) friendship. And, for everyone else, v51 looks forward to engaging with you.
Yesterday morning I woke up and said out loud “I accept whatever the outcome of this election is.”
I decided that whatever the outcome, I had spent all the emotional and functional energy I wanted to on the election. I was public about my point of view. I advocated for my perspective. And I voted.
In our democracy, I accept the outcome. I’m a long term optimist and hold that value front and center.
It’s now time for me to get back to work. And that starts with a run on the Embarcadero …
I love dreams. Mine are often very detailed, clear, extremely colorful, linger for a while (several hours) after I wake up, and full of strange and complex linkages between things that often cause me to make associations I wouldn’t have otherwise made. Ever since I learned about the concept of garbage collection in 6.001 at MIT in 1984 while using Scheme on HP Chipmunks, I’ve always thought of dreaming as the same as garbage collection for a computer. When I read Minsky’s The Society of the Mind I started referring to dreams as garbage collection for the mind.
I woke up this morning with a particularly vivid dream that has stuck with me for the past hour as I get ready to head to Seattle and Portland for a few days. After 30 days off the grid, I’ve had an expectedly intense full three days as I get back in the flow of things. I’m processing a lot and when I went to bed last night around 11:30 my brain was full. As I laid down next to Amy, she said “I can feel you thinking.” We murmured a few things to each other and then I promptly fell asleep.
I woke up in the midst of the dream to Amy saying “Did you set an alarm?” (Answer: “No, but I’m awake now!”) In my dream I was walking down the hall with the Chief Information Officer of a health care company I’d somehow ended up as a consultant for. The CIO was an older white guy – classic last generation CIO – who was totally panicked about a security breach but had no idea what to do about it. He and I had just walked out of a board meeting with about 30 people moments after they’d fired the CEO. The board was in an uproar, trying to figure out how the CEO had let the security breach happen and why there were all these Twitter accounts posting images of patients with posts in weird / poor English saying things about how great Trump is.
In the board meeting I had explained to the board that the Twitter accounts were geo-coded with locations in Russia, so it was likely a Russian hacker and a focused attack that had nothing to do with the company. One of the board members was emotional. “I don’t give a shit – just fix it!” Other board members were talking over each other about who the new CEO should be. The consensus was “We don’t care what it costs – just solve the problem.”
Immediately prior to walking into the board meeting, I had been in an underground office below a parking garage meeting with a small team of white hat hackers. They had previously gotten my attention by breaking into several highly secure systems unrelated to me, sending me evidence of their break ins, and suggesting that they were for hire. I had been going back and forth with Rob Hayes at First Round Capital about his experience with them, since he’d hired them in the past. The lead hacker showed me how he’d spoofed Rob’s response to me and replaced it with an image of a gigantic hairless cat.
As I go back further in the dream, it’s fading now so I’m losing the thread. But you get the idea.
And yes, Amy and I love the movie Inception. It’s on a semi-annual rotation in the Feld/Batchelor household. It is entirely possible that everything we are experiencing is just one of the levels.
Amy and I just got back from a month off the grid in Aspen. If you are an Atlas Shrugged fan, think of it like the annual trip to Galt’s Gulch.
Since 2000, Amy and I have been taking a week of the grid every quarter. I’ve never been a good moderator with anything, especially work, so it has been a way to get a cold reset every twelve weeks or so.
Three years ago my partners and I at Foundry Group decided to experiment with a month off the grid. Each of us goes away for a month and the other three (now four) cover for him. It’s been remarkably successful for us, both individually and as a partnership.
Let’s start with the individual stuff first. My brain is cleared of cruft, I’m extremely content, and my energy level is high. I’m in great physical shape, as I slept around 10 hours a night, ran about seven hours a week, and took almost daily naps. I’m in great emotional shape, as I meditated almost daily, spent lots of time with friends who came to visit, ignored almost everything going on in the world (although I got sucked into the election a few times), stayed completely off social media, and read a book a day. I’m in great relationship shape, as I got to spent 24 hours a day for a month with my beloved.
Professionally, having now been through this three times, I know that all my responsibilities were in good hands with my partners. As a bonus, they just spent a month taking care of the companies I’m primarily responsible for, so they know what is going on in my world – the good and the bad. Spending a month disconnected is, in some ways, the ultimate display of trust, and it powerfully reinforces the idea that we all work together on everything.
And – no email. No Twitter. No Facebook. No calendar alerts. No Voxer. No Slack. No phone calls. No conference calls. No Google Hangouts. You get the picture.
We did watch Season 2 of Narcos (awesome). We watched a bunch of movies. We watched 24 Second Edition (also known as Designated Survivor.) Amy and I ate dinner together every night. We held hands a lot as we walked around and enjoyed a splendid fall in Aspen. We missed our dogs (they were staying with our Rover sitter who they love), but this let us stay up late and sleep until 11am some days.
I know it’s a huge privilege to be able to take a month of the grid every year. I’ve fantasized about this since I read Atlas Shrugged when I was 19. Thanks Jason, Seth, Ryan, and Lindel for helping this become a reality. Most of all, thanks Amy for sharing this time with me.
That said, it’s good to be back. I look forward to reconnecting with everyone – starting now.
Facebook can be a magical thing. I’m often frustrated about how to engage with it (I’m more of a Twitter person) but every now and then something happens that reminds me how awesome Facebook can be.
For a variety of silly reasons, I had lost touch with my best friend in high school (Kent Ellington) about 30 years ago. Last year, when I was in Austin with my college fraternity gang – about 20 of us that span three years who go someone every few years (whenever someone gets their shit together and organizes it) – Kent reached out to me and asked if I wanted to get together.
Kent and I had friended each other on Facebook a few years ago after another high school friend had died suddenly. I knew a little about what was going on in his life and expect he knew a little about what was going on in my life. But neither of us connected.
We squeezed in an hour of hanging out, which included meeting his pre-teen daughter after her ballet class. We caught up, in the way friends from long ago occasionally do, without a lot of ego and mostly just enthusiasm and empathy for the ups and downs of each others’ journey over 30 years. Not surprisingly, questions how parents and siblings were doing took up about half the discussion.
We’ve gone back and forth about a few things over the past year. I woke up this morning to a Facebook message from Kent that said “Brad – Got these photos from my endocrinologists office. His diploma is from when your Dad was President of the College of Endocrinology.” The photo follows.
I remember when my dad was president of the American College of Endocrinology. I remember the 1998 Orlando meeting and talking to him about it. I remember being extremely proud of him then. And, this morning, as I roll into my day, I’m going to carry around with me how proud I am of him for all the things he’s done, including for me, in his life.
I love you dad. Thanks Facebook. And – Kent – thank you!
It’s 1:34am in Boulder. I’m normally asleep by 10pm. However, since I returned from Australia, I’m up until – well – now.
For most of last week, I still felt shitty from the salmonella poisoning I got two weeks ago. I rationalized that it was ok to take an ambien every night since I was still sick. But, I’m not a fan of ambien or how it makes me feel, so I stopped on Friday. Since then, I’ve crawled into bed around 10pm with my beloved, tossed and turned for about an hour, and then gotten up and either read or typed on my computer.
I have several close friends who are insomniacs. Over the years I’ve heard their stories about being up in the middle of the night, completely awake. I see them yawn at 11am and know that regardless of what they are doing, they’d probably rather be in bed sleeping. I’ve always had sympathy for them, but I’ve never really understood it.
I have trouble sleeping maybe one night a year. On that special night, I get up and read on the couch until I fall asleep.
I’ve four nights into this no-sleep craziness on the heals of ten days of what is called gastroenteritis in polite society. It is exactly zero fun.
With that, my whining is over. I’m giving my insomniac friends virtual hugs wherever they are in the world. I’m going to crawl into bed and try again to go to sleep. Maybe I’ll feel like writing something actually useful to the universe tomorrow.
I’m going to play follow the leader this morning and blog my #firstsevenjobs on the back of Fred Wilson’s Fun Friday: First Seven Jobs post. I saw this meme go around last week while I was doubled up in the bathroom in Australia and thought it was cute but had no energy to participate. After telling my origin story during several interviews last week, I covered some new ground around first jobs so I thought it’d be fun to put it in one place.
#1: Curb Address Painter / Window Washer: I partnered with my tennis doubles partner Jon Zeitler and we painted street numbers on curbs for $2 / curb. There were lots of new houses being built in our neighborhood so we had plenty of leads, but we had to go door to door to sell, which was painful for two thirteen year olds. As a bonus, we occasionally washed windows. I remember procrastinating a lot. It was a hot and not very lucrative summer.
#2: Maintenance Worker: North Dallas Racquet Club: I cleaned the locker rooms, painted the building, picked up trash on the tennis courts, and knocked down wasp nests. My friend Jon (and others) got to work in the grill (which was probably 120 degrees, so I’m not sure that was a box of joy.) I got fired after two weeks for having a bad attitude.
#3: Fast Food: Potatoes, Etc.: The honors kids took over the Potatoes, Etc. in the Prestonwood Mall food court for a summer. I’d work for three hours and then go downstairs to the video game place and spend the $12 I made playing Tempest and Defender. I got fired for calling my manager a bitch in a moment of fury.
#4: Retail: Rave Electronics / Texas Instruments Retail Store: I spent 12 hours selling TVs one long summer day. I think I was on a combination of a very low salary and commission that theoretically would add up to something interesting. I quit after one day – I couldn’t stand it. I decided to try retail one more time with my best friend Kent and got a job at the Texas Instruments Retail Store (I think it was at Northpark Mall.) I thought I’d like selling computers more than TVs. Of course, I was selling TI 99/4A’s, which other than having sprites totally sucked, so that only lasted a day or two.
#5: Math SAT Tutoring: As a junior in high school I started tutoring for the Math SAT. I charged $30 / hour (instead of the $3 / hour my friends got working at retail stores) and had so much demand that I decided I would only tutor girls. Since I was a high school boy that seemed like a logical segmentation strategy. As a bonus, I was a junior and most of the girls I tutored were seniors. In addition to making a lot of money and only working a few hours a week, I ended up getting an 800 on the Math SAT.
#6: Programmer: Centronics (London): If you remember the parallel printer, you might remember the Centronics printer port (they invented the parallel printer port). My favorite dot matrix printer of all time was the P351 which I got as payment for spending the summer in London. living in Northfields and working in South Kensington, writing a character set generator for the P351 (and other Centronics printers) on an Apple II. It was a great job and the first work I ever did that I loved. I was lonely at times, being between my junior and senior year living far away from home, but it was an awesome adventure that shaped me in many ways.
#7: Programmer: PetCom Systems: I was the first employees of a husband and wife founded software company. At a time (1983) when almost all business software for the oil and gas industry was on minicomputers and mainframes (lots of IBM System/3xs), we wrote software for the Apple III and the IBM PC. I ended up writing two products over several years – PC Log and PC Economics – both of which I got paid $10 / hour + 5% of gross revenue. I learned about equity from this job, as I’d get monthly royalty checks in my first few years at MIT for amounts ranging from $1,000 to $10,000. It’s pretty awesome as a freshman, after getting the shit beat out of you in 8.02, to go to your mailbox and get a blue PetCom check for $5,000.
That was a fun walk for me down memory lane. I knew I sucked at working in stores but this reinforced it. To this day, I have trouble actually walking into a store to even shop. The web has been very good to me.
I had a two hour run scheduled today that’s not going to happen. I’m nauseous, tired, stuffy, and fuzzy feeling. It’s all because of something that happened on Friday.
I turned 50 in December. A right of passage in America when you turn 50 and have good health insurance is a colonoscopy. I wasn’t thinking very hard about this until a friend of mine had one a few months ago (at 51) and discovered she had colon cancer. A week later she had major surgery and today she’s doing fine as they “got it all out.” Another friend had one at age 42 since his family had a history of colon cancer and they discovered a major pre-cancerous tumor. His view is that he’d be dead if he hadn’t had the procedure.
So – in I went on Friday to have my colonoscopy. I have another friend who turned 50 within a month of me who was also having his first colonoscopy on Friday. As we drank our pre-colonoscopy “cocktail” which will be familiar to anyone who has had a colonoscopy, we joked about spending the evening on the toilet getting empty. Little did we understand the magnitude of what we were joking about – that only hits home around 4am on your 11th trip to the bathroom.
The procedure went well and I’m all clear (excuse the double entendre). Amy took a few pictures of me after the procedure. Here I am peacefully enjoying my fentanyl induced nap. I can’t tell whether I’m napping next to a machine running Windows Vista, XP, or 7, but given the various end of life for each it doesn’t give me a lot of comfort.
I’m always fascinated by the dedicated monitors in a hospital. Non-standard cables, funny button shapes, odd LED colors, and lots of extra controls. On the other hand, my 15 years of running is paying off, as demonstrated by a resting heart rate of 50 and a blood pressure of 105 over 67.
I slept all afternoon Friday and then went to bed early Friday night. I’d fasted all day on Thursday (part of the process) so my body was extremely uncalibrated. I have no idea what I ate on Friday or Saturday, but when I went to sleep yesterday my stomach was singing strange gurgling sounds. I slept in again today and am pondering taking another nap soon (it’s 10am).
I look forward to feeling normal again tomorrow.