Ah – it’s so nice to be home.
A run to town, lunch at The Rio, a massage, and maybe a movie in the late afternoon. What could be a better way to spend a Sunday?
A little more than a year ago, Amy and I had a legendary dinner at Le Cinq in the Four Seasons Hotel George V in Paris. Last night we had another amazing experience – this time at Restaurant Guy Savoy with our long time friends Warren and Ilana Katz. In fact, last night’s meal was so incredible that I’ve spent most of the day laying around the apartment recovering and keeping myself distracted from feeling full by doing email and phone calls.
We entered our own private food sanctuary and emerged five hours later. I don’t drink, so a five hour meal can be especially long, but in this case the food was so spectacular that the time passed fluidly. We had our own room – complete with a very disconcerting sculpture with Madonna “Blond Ambition Tour” breasts that had very little to do with the food.
The dinner (if you include the four dessert courses) was a 16 course meal. The main segments included:
Remarkably, the food just kept coming and coming and coming. Every plate was beautifully done. Amy and I are a pain in the ass at meals like this since neither of us drink wine (she’s allergic) and I’m a fishaterian. The folks at Guy Savoy performed marvelously. It’s 24 hours later and I’m still not hungry.
Amy and I had a great few days in Munich earlier this week. The highlight was teaching Joachim Henkel’s class at Technische Universitat Munchen on the topic of “Why Innovations Often Come From Startup Companies.” I met Joachim through Eric von Hippel – they’ve worked together on some Open Source research that’s part of Eric’s Democratizing Innovation theme.
The class was very engaged and humored me by speaking excellent English. Rather than stick to a tight topic, I did a lot of story telling and Q&A, which I always expect is a nice change of pace for a class like this from the more standard academic lecture (at least they seemed to have fun.)
Joachim and his delightful wife Kathrin were excellent hosts. We had an extraordinary meal at Schuhbeck and stayed at the beautiful Bayerischer Hof hotel. In addition to some sightseeing, I managed to squeeze in a meeting with the founders of eCircle – an impressive email marketing company in Munich that is a potential partner for several of my portfolio companies.
Mike Arrington just went to Spain and described virtually all my trips to countries where English isn’t the first language (ask me about my first non-trip to Versailles, trying to find a hotel in Paris by driving around the ring road around Paris – say – four or five times before realizing it was a circle, or getting mugged outside the Louvre.) I hope this isn’t foreshadowing for my trip to Munich on Monday.
I met Josh Spear for the first time a few weeks ago at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art Avant Garden fundraiser. I’ve been an avid reader of his blog for a year or so in my endless effort to “be more cool” (something that I regularly fail miserably at according to Amy, although my new pair of Vans are helping.)
I immediately liked Josh (how could you not – he was wearing very cool gold sneakers). We said our quick hellos, I clapped when he won one of the raffles, and I went back to reading his blog. Yesterday he discovered that I was in Paris and immediately began to help me be more cool. His suggestions (so far) which we’ll be sure to check out, include:
I’ve begun referring to Josh as Obi-Wan Spear. Thank you Obi-Wan.
Following is the final email from my friend who just spent a month in China with his wife and 11 year old daughter. If you missed the first two entries, the first one is here and the second one is here.
Well we are leaving China after almost a month. Off to Rome then LA and maybe to Paris to hook up with you guys.
Some amazing sites in China – out of all of the cities we visited Shanghai was by far the most interesting. On the surface it is as cosmopolitan as any major western city – skyscrapers as far as the eye can see and shopping that can make any girl happy. Since it is so modern, full of life and more diverse with a large western expat community – it didn’t feel like the rest of the country.
We visited 7 major cities (5 million people or more) and a few smaller ones. Outside of Shanghai and Beijing people stared and smiled at us – especially our daughter – several even asked to take pictures with her. We thought that maybe she looked like some kid star – but it was more simple than that – for many Chinese Marlo was the first blond haired westerner they ever saw. For the most part the Chinese were very welcoming and tried hard to please us tourists – which was different than our initial observation after visiting just Beijing.
The Three Gorges Project is amazing and cruising through down the Yangtze and through the dam locks was a worthwhile experience. It is so hard to imagine the scope of this project as an American – I can’t remember any public works project of this scale in my lifetime. Some basic stats as I remembered from our trip: 16 years to build, $25B in costs, 1.13 million people resettled due to the change in the river height, 99 new bridges and almost 10 times the power generating capacity of the largest dam in the US. When you see wonderful cities like Shanghai and mind blowing public work efforts as the TGP you get a sense of why many assume that China’s economy will surpass the US.
That said the extremes still strike you everywhere you turn. Most business people are young and some are very rich – all the street sweepers are old and very poor. We had a full and tasty meal from a street vendor for 30 cents (10 dumplings a 3 loafs of bread) and the guy made a profit – this was 30 meters from the hotel front door where a meal inside for 3 would cost $60. It seems that the staff for any effort is 5 times what it needs to be – walk into a small shop selling cheap shirts and you’ll find 6 people working in 250 sq ft. On several occasions we just ask ourselves “How can these guys stay in business with so many employees?” On top of that most people we interacted with were under 35. Apparently the older generation did not have the same access to education as the 20 to 30 year olds. It’s no wonder everyone we talked to about life in China said generally the same thing – it can only get better.
There are lots of challenges that educated Chinese will freely talk about with you such as: the government may not be able to make the transition to a true market economy, widening economic gap may grow to the point of civil unrest, pollution, over crowding of the cities, inflation – just to name a few.
Overall it was a great trip – China seems more accessible to me for travel but I couldn’t tell you how to make a buck here if you weren’t Chinese. In that sense for the startup entrepreneur like me it’s closed for now.
Last week, I wrote post on A Different View of China from a close friend of mine who is spending the year traveling around the world with his family (wife and 11 year old daughter). I think he’s got a delightful rhythm to his thoughts and sent me another rant which I feel compelled to share with you. Remember – my friend has been on the road with his family since the beginning of the year so his thoughts are certain to be tinged with facing “the travel wall.” If you want yet another view, Rick Segal is also blogging about his trip.
I’m sick – lost my voice and I’m sitting in a room at the cheng do sheraton – they’re all the same to me now. (Wife) is surfing the bet and (daughter) is bathing. I ran out of books a few weeks ago – I’m now reading agatha christie that I borrowed from one sheraton – Ill leave it at this one when I’m done. Its not stealing if I move it one sheraton to the next is it? The foreign book stores don’t have the best selection.
It’s not that china is bad – there are just so many other places better to visit.
I love chinese food – but every restaurant is chinese food – and service is something they haven’t quite nailed yet. There are few if any other types of restaurants.
No nice cafes on the boulevards – no al fresco dining – just store after store selling the same stuff. How do they make money – there is zero difference between storefronts and product mix.
The streets are all clean – but traffic is crazy – traffic lights are more of colorful decoration than guiding signals.
The solution to every problem seems to be – more people. Want to seem like a swank hotel – put a dude in a basement mens room that no one goes to to turn on the water and push soap in your hands. No bulldozer to dig a ditch – 5 dudes with pick axes. We went in a private car to a restaurant and we parked in a new underground lot with about 60 parking spaces – there were eight people working there (one to push the button to hand you the ticket, another 2 to direct you where to park – another to collect the ticket and run it to the cashier, two cashiers, and 2 security guards – the rate was 30 cents an hour to park and it was 40% full. Crazy stuff wherever you look – on one area a million people jammed selling the same dried fruit for 80 cents a kilo and across the street a sleek high rise of condos is going up for millions of dollars a unit.
There is no middle ground – dinner tonight I’m sure will suck if we eat in the hotel and cost 80 bucks – 50 feet from the hotel door we bought the best food we’ve had in 9 days for 70 cents (3 loaves of bread and 8 dumplings! – 4 people were working at the stand – our hotel costs 350 US a night). The problem of eating on the street is you don’t know what you’re gonna get and you’re pretty sure it wasn’t prepared using the most hygienic techniques. So what’s a dude to do – pay up for crap or risk it.
The parts that are built up are very modern and seemingly well kept. People litter a lot but there are just as many working to pick it up.
English isn’t widely spoken outside of the hotels and tourist stops – and there is no way to fake your way into a word like in Spain or France. If you speak English you can earn 3 times more money giving tours.
I don’t fear china’s economic might – yet. They have to address a serious class gap, energy and pollution issues, and an infrastructure that can’t keep pace with demand.
(Daughter) just found the complementary condom in our room and was playing with it. It was red. She was telling me what it was for – she got it wrong – I’ll have (wife) handle that part of her education.
On that note – I’ll stop rambling.
And – a few minutes later…
The condom wasn’t complementary – it was 11 dollars! But we also got some tampons and disposable underware for (daughter) to play with:)
If you were interested in my post earlier this week about the closing of the Colorado Institute of Technology, you’ll find Al Lewis’s weekend column – which is a sharp commentary on the Colorado Institute of Technology – a useful compliment, both in terms of some of the details of the events around CIT as well as the spin from Mark Holtzman, current Republican gubernatorial candidate and the effective co-founder of CIT with Colorado Governor Bill Owens when he was Colorado Secretary of Technology.
I’ve got to know Ben Casnocha well over the past few years. He’s a remarkable kid – and I say “kid” respectfully even though he recently turned 18. Ben visited me and Amy a few weeks ago and we had a great time – one of the things we talked about were the colleges that Ben has been accepted to and his plan to take a “gap year” (a year between high school and college) to go travel around the world. He just launched a new blog called Ben’s Gap Year Travel Adventures – I expect this will be a fascinating and incredibly educational blog. Europe is up first in June and July.