Category: Places
Put this in the “every business traveller thinks this on a regular basis” rant category. Sure – I’m whining, but I imagine I’ll feel better after I get done. I doubt it has any impact on the universe, but hopefully it’ll be a story that rings true to some of you out there who travel as much as I do. And to my friends at Starwood and AT&T, you made my day yesterday, which was already intense, a lot harder than it needed to be.
I just woke up, made some coffee, turned on my computer, and noticed that my hotel bill was shoved under my door. Last night before I went to bed I tweeted “Dear AT&T and Westin Hotel Wifi: I give up. Good night.” I rarely look at my hotel bills but this time I was curious so I grabbed it. $323.10 for the room, $32.32 for State and County Tax, $9.95 for Internet Service, and $180.76 for 10 telephone calls.
Remember that I said I rarely look at my hotel bill. I travel constantly and I’m what I’d describe as a high end utilitarian traveler. When I travel alone I’m not terribly picky about the hotels I stay at, generally prefer modern to classic, just want a dark, clean room that I can make cold at night, and want to be left alone. I try to be super polite to the hotel staff while simultaneously very low maintenance.
I used to be annoyed that I’d pay $500 or more for a room and get hit with a $14.95 bill for Internet access. I stopped being annoyed by that a while ago and just view it as part of the cost of the room. I don’t watch television so my time in the room is spent working on my computer, talking on my cell phone (or my computer via Skype or Google Chat), sleeping, or being in the bathroom. That’s it. Oh – and I appreciate the free coffee service in the room since I get up at 5am and there’s rarely a coffee option anywhere until 5:30am.
Yesterday at about 2pm I arrived at the Westin Arlington Gateway. I’ve got a set of meetings tomorrow at the National Science Foundation so I’m staying down the block. My amazing assistant Kelly had scheduled a dozen phone calls between 2pm and dinner so I figured I’d just sit in my room and grind away on calls and email. A few of my calls where Skype calls and my phone number is a Google Voice number so I’d just sit in front of my computer and work in between the calls.
When I checked in at 2pm, the room they had assigned me to wasn’t ready. The guy checking me in was super nice, asked me a bunch of questions (do you want a high floor or a low floor, near the elevator or away from the elevator) to which I answered “I don’t care – whatever room you have will be fine, and found me a room. He informed me that my Starwood preferred number was on file (whatever that means) and was very polite.
I plopped down in my room, took out my laptop, went through the “connect to the Internet” process which appeared to cost $9.95 for the day, and got to work.
After 10 minutes I knew I was screwed. The Internet performance was painfully slow. Since I had back to back calls, I didn’t have a window to call “tech support” and have them take a look so I put up with it for a little while. I figured I’d use my iPhone as a hotspot as the backup and switched over to it. That was even worse. I tried to make a phone call with my iPhone instead of Google Voice. It took three tries for it to go through and then it dropped after 60 seconds.
I was officially in RidiculousTelecommunicationStan. I struggled through the first few calls (anyone on the other end, especially the poor souls on Skype, could probably sense my frustration and theirs was probably higher) before giving up and switching to the landline in my room. Yes – a landline. I had to think for a moment whether to dial 9 first or 8 first (remember that I’m in a hotel), got it right, and simply made all the calls from that phone. Internet performance was still miserable, but by using Sparrow I managed to work “semi-offline” and the emails went through what seemed to be simulating a 2400 baud modem.
Eventually I had 15 minutes between calls so I pressed the “Service Express” button on the phone to ask for Internet tech support. The nice person took down my info and said someone would call me back. They did 15 minutes later which overlapped with my next call. I eventually called them back just as I finished up but before I left for dinner. We did all the standard troubleshooting things which indicated that the Internet was slow and after an escalation, resulted in someone “resetting a router” remotely. I went to dinner, was about 15 minutes late, but was optimistic that when I got home I’d be able to jam through another hour or so of email.
No such luck. After calling Amy on the land line and saying goodnight, I struggled through 15 minutes of email before deciding to just screw it and go to bed. I tweeted out my frustration and quickly got a response from @StarwoodBuzz that said “Sorry about that. If you can DM us your stay details in full, we can do our best to help. We’ve followed you.” Nice, but I was done for the night, closed my laptop, and will DM them this blog post and see what happens.
And then I woke up this morning, started a cup of coffee, and noticed by $180.76 bill for 10 phone calls. Total stupidity on the part of Starwood where I’m apparently a “not very preferred guest.” It’s been a long time since I resorted to using the landline in my hotel room and it didn’t even occur to me that they’d rip me off like this. I remember staying in a Marriott near an airport recently and the cost for Internet and unlimited long distance phone calls was $9.95, so I’m doubly perplexed. And I don’t see any of those little plastic signs saying “if you use this phone to make a call we are going to charge you $2 per minute” (which is what it appears they were charging based on a few of the calls.)
I can’t remember the last time I made a fuss when I checked out over a hotel bill. I’m sure I eat some extra charges her and there, but whatever. This morning, when I head downstairs, I’ll ask to have all the phone calls taken off my bill. We will see what happens.
In the mean time, I’m going to keep reminding myself that this is 2012, not 1996, where we are just discovering the expensive magic of Internet in hotel rooms. I look forward to 2024 when I no longer have a landline in my room and the Internet works flawlessly for the $9.95 I pay a day to use it. Or maybe AT&T will work in the middle of Arlington, Virginia. Or maybe pigs will fly.
Update: The manager at the Starwood Arlington left a message for me that he had reversed all of the charges. So he did the right thing and I appreciate that. An AT&T customer service person also called and assured me he would talk to the hotel and explore if there is a dead spot in the area. I’m now on Acela to NY where their Wifi doesn’t work for shit but AT&T is tethering ok today. Now, if I could only get the soccer mom two rows up to stop telling stories about her 7th grade son’s soccer team I’d maybe be in a less grumpy place.
I’m a big fan of the CLEAR card and the CLEAR service. When it first launched, I got it immediately and used it wherever it was available. Fortunately this included Denver, New York, and San Francisco.
If you don’t know of CLEAR, it’s a biometric card that you use in the exclusive CLEARlane at airports to bypass the security line. It’s saved me from missing plenty of flights over the past few years.
In 2009 the company shut down suddenly. The new owners bought it a year ago, honored the old customers, and are gradually rolling it out across the country (currently Denver and Orlando and opening in San Francisco soon.)
I think CLEAR makes a great gift for any frequent traveller out of DIA. In addition, the folks from CLEAR are running is Community Charity program where they give $2,000 to favorite charities in these cities. We get to pick them, so go to the CLEAR Community Charity blog and vote now.
I’ve talked a lot on this blog about the great things about the Boulder entrepreneurial ecosystem. Over the past five years it’s been awesome to see things really blossom. But there are always problems of some sort. And we have a few here in Boulder which – in the spirit of helping understand how entrepreneur ecosystems work over time – are worth pointing out and talking about.
The most visible problem her is that Boulder’s booming businesses are running out of room. Downtown Boulder is not large – maybe 10 blocks by 5 blocks – and very few of the buildings are more than three stories tall. Once you get outside the downtown Boulder core, you get some larger buildings and some office parks, but you are no longer in the core of downtown. If you get in your car and drive to the next towns over, such as Broomfield and Westminster, there is plenty of office space and some larger buildings.
But many companies that start in downtown Boulder want to stay in downtown Boulder. The companies build their culture around being downtown, benefit from the extremely high entrepreneurial density of Boulder, and the dynamics of being in a downtown core rather than in a suburban office park.
Ironically, the Boulder politicians have always seemed to have a bias against “business in Boulder.” I’ve heard about it for the 16 years I’ve been here and experience it periodically. The zoning here is extremely restrictive and the decisions around zoning seem arbitrary. The division between retail, tourism, business, and residential seems in continual conflict. A few real estate developers own and control much of the existing office buildings in town and as a result end up having a zero sum approach to leasing space – specifically they jack rents up as high as possible when the market is tight, only to have them collapse when the market loosens up.
As I’ve watched local Boulder companies grow to be in the 100 to 300 employee range, I’ve watched them struggle with office space. If the trajectory of several of the local companies continues, this struggle will get more severe over the next 24 months. Inevitably, several of the larger companies will have to move outside of Boulder, even though they don’t want to. When this happens, our real estate owner friends will once again have a lot of empty space on their hands which will fill up more slowly with smaller firms as they grow into what’s available.
I’m not sure if this is a solvable problem given all of the different constituents involved. The contraints on Boulder’s growth have many advantages and are part of what makes Boulder as great as it is. But it’s also a weakness – one that is front and center right now as a number of companies who look like they could be long term, self-sustaining anchors of the Boulder entrepreneurial community have to figure out where to house 300 people going on 1,000.
On a daily basis I get an email from someone, either in Boulder, or considering a move to Boulder, who asks how they can best get involved in the Boulder entrepreneurial community. My response is simple – get involved, show up, and participate. I then list a set of regular activities that exist, with my favorites being:
- Boulder Open Coffee Club
- Boulder New Tech Meetup
- Silicon Flatirons Events
- Boulder Beta
- Ignite Boulder
There are also a handful of sites that help you figure out how to plug in and list other events. The two I recommend are Boulder.me and Boulder Startup Digest.
One of the awesome things about the Boulder entrepreneurial community is that it operates on a “give before you get” approach – it’s super easy to engage as the existing entrepreneurs are happy to give help and support with no specific expectations. But you have to “give” to become involved – don’t just show up once and hope magic will happen. Keep coming back. Volunteer to help out, with no expectations of compensation. Build a reputation for what you can do. Then magic will happen.
For job seekers, I point them at the Foundry Group Jobs page and the TechStars Jobs page as well as encourage them to email me a resume that I’ll send to a CEO list I co-manage, which consists of about 100 local entrepreneurial CEOs (if you are a CEO and want to be on the list, just email me.)
It’s all remarkably low infrastructure and overhead, but very high velocity. When I reflect on what makes it work, its the “give before you get” mentality of the entrepreneurial community, which I’m proud to be a part of.
Oh – and if you run a Boulder entrepreneurial event that’s not included in the list, or have suggestions about what you’d like to see, feel free to leave info about it in the comments.
I travel a lot. I’m not a particularly high maintenance traveller as I can sleep from wheels up to wheels down on most flights. When I fly west to east I usually fly at night; east to west I usually fly early in the morning (much to the chagrin of my partners who don’t enjoy getting up at 4:15am to go to the airport quite as much as I do.)
I’m running a marathon on Sunday in Newport, Rhode Island and decided I didn’t want to take a redeye from San Francisco to Boston three days before the marathon. As a result, I’m flying “all day” – leaving SFO at 9am and getting in to Boston around 6pm.
I often fly Virgin America from SFO or LAX to BOS or NY. It’s unambiguously the most comfortable cross country flight and I always feel a little hipper when I’m chilling out in a plane in white seats with purple mood lights. But that’s just the feel good bonus. Here’s how this morning is playing out.
I show up at Virgin and notice that they have a Chromebook kiosk. Neat – there’s a bunch of computers that are connected that anyone can use while waiting for the flight. Then I realize they are giving away free Chromebooks to use on the flight. You only get to use them during the flight, but they are free and include a free WiFi connection. Double neat. Then I sit down, open up my MacBook, and immediately see my Skype WiFi app pop up and tell me I can connect to WiFi for $0.10 / minute. Since I don’t have a Boingo subscription, and there’s not any other obvious free WiFi right here, I just click yes. Oh – and there’s a nice desk area and power.
I have a five hour flight where I expect to get a solid four hours or so of online time. A decade ago, even though everyone was talking about “wireless networking on airplanes”, it didn’t really work. Today, I’m online without much effort for as much time as I want.
Virgin makes this experience seamless. When I think about my United trips, I just cringe. No WiFi on the plane, generally crummy gate setups with no power, and a very predictable “sorry – we have a maintenance problem that we are looking into.” It’s actually kind of enjoyable to be spending the day on Virgin America flying across the country.
Colette Ballou, the CEO of Ballou PR, is hosting a party in honor of me in Paris on Wednesday, July 27th, 2011 from 6pm to 8pm. I put this in the category of “go have a nice hang out on a bridge in Paris and drink wine with tech people” category, which sounds like a lot of fun to me.
The details, according to the invitation, follow.
- When: Wednesday, July 27th, 2011, 6pm to 8pm
- Where: Pont Solferino, otherwise known as Passerelle Léopold Sédhar Senghor — the pedestrian bridge between Musee d’Orsay and Tuileries. 4th & 5th bench on south side, facing west.
- Metro: Solferino,Tuileries, RER: Musée d’OrsayIf it rains, we will provide you with a new place/address.
- Who: You, bring friends!What to bring: you know the drill, it has served us well over the years — each invitee brings a bottle of wine, Ballou PR provides the cups and bottle openers
Come join us!
We all love The Onion, right? It’s the best news right after Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert.
We also all love Boulder. Those of us that live here love making fun of ourselves and our town because, well, there’s a lot to make fun of.
The Prairie Dog is Boulder’s home grown version of The Onion. And it is hilarious. Some sample headlines follow:
- Oklahoma lashes out, accuses Colorado of being “anorexic”
- Republican spotted on Pearl street, children alerted
- Local venture capitalist raises alarm when magic 8 ball goes missing from desk
- After years of derision, gluten declares intolerance for Boulder
You get the idea. The posts are still short but artfully (and sharply) worded. I love it. Thanks @djilk for the tip.
And where’s my fucking magic 8 ball – who took it? Give it back please.
Amy and I have had a great first week in Paris. The weather has been amazing, the food has been incredible, and the cell phone experience has been abysmal. Here are a few things that I’ve learned.
- Running on the Champs-Elysees at 4pm sucks. Go to the Bois de Bologne instead – it’s great.
- I need a lot of sleep. Sleeping until 13:00 is fun.
- It’s not worth the effort to get a local SIM card.
- Being a vegetarian at lunchtime is tricky if you like hanging out at a brasserie.
- French women often forget to put pants on under their short frilly nightgown-like tops.
- Smart cars are everywhere which makes Amy laugh.
- Nespresso coffee is delicious. So delicious that you should have four each morning. Wheeeeeeeeee.
- Balconies rock. At least the one we have does.
- Amy rocks. But I knew that already.
- We need to work harder at picking sushi places. Conveyor belt sushi is mediocre.
- No one seems to be paying attention to the Tour de France here. At least we aren’t.
- Paris is more ethnically diverse than Boulder.
- French people are nice if you say “Boujour, je ne parle pas francias.” They smile and then speak in English.
- You can buy pajamas at the Monoprix.
- Lots of fun Americans came to Paris this week including @fredwilson, @kimbal, @jason, @johnmaloney, and Cliff Shaw.
- FNAC is not the train station (something I’ll be able to tease Amy about for a long time.)
- There are a lot of paid porn channels on the TV which I may have accidentally subscribed to while trying to get the Wimbledon final on TV.
- There is less dog poop on the street than a few years ago.
- Everyone here smokes at night and outside. They are about a decade behind the US on this front.
- 16 degrees C is the right temperature for me at night in the bedroom.
- I kind of like walking up six flights of stairs several times each day.
- Two glasses of wine at lunch is too much for me but a bottle at dinner is just right.
- Google Voice doesn’t work in France. But who needs a phone anyway.
- It’s smart to bring backup glasses with you if you can’t see very well for when your glasses break.
- French is a hard. I give you poison and poisson as an example.
- Lunch takes two hours here. That’s a good thing.
Overall we’ve spent of our time in the 8th and 17th – just hanging out, getting acclimated, writing, and living our life. I expect we’ll explore next week. And no, I am no longer carrying around my cell phone because who fucking a needs a cell phone that costs $17 a minute to use.
Trada is no longer doing Codespace – they’ve filled up the area with other companies. However, if you are looking for office space in Boulder for your startup, take a look at PivotDesk and give it a try.
When developers come through Boulder, I regularly get asked if I know a place for them to camp out and work for the day. There’s now a great solution – Codespace – hosted by Trada.
Boulderites know the local coffee shop / sushi scene where wifi is abundant. However, you now have a dedicated, free co-working space for developers on Walnut Street right in the middle of downtown (in the old Daily Camera building, now home to Trada). The Codespace philosophy is a simple one:
Code is free, so should be the space you create it in. If you’re in the neighborhood, come over and hang out – for an hour or the whole day. Enjoy some free wireless, scrawl on the whiteboards, rack up on endless caffeine, and enjoy hanging out and working with the smartest development talent in Boulder.
In addition to daily free options, there are a few dedicated spaces that you can apply for. Go check out the Codespace page or my partner Seth Levine’s longer description about Codespace. Most importantly, go check out Codespace. And please thank the gang at Trada for providing this for the Boulder entrepreneurial community.