Category: Things I Like
I was going to write something about a new book I’ve just published but I woke up this morning and that felt trivial so I’m going to save it for next week. Instead, I’m going to talk about my day yesterday.
My long time friend (dating back to the mid-1990’s) Andy Sack has testicular cancer. Before I get into things, he’s in the middle of chemo, has a 95%+ cure rate, is open and public about what he’s going through, and has an incredibly positive attitude.
I’ve tried to call or write Andy every day since his diagnosis. I’ve probably done it 80% of the time (I know I’ve missed a few days.) Every day at 5pm my iPhone gives me a reminder to “call Andy Sack.” Most of the time I get his voice mail and leave a message, other times we talk for a few minutes. While I was off the grid last week in Hawaii I sent him a postcard every day. Either way, I get a chance to tell him that I’m thinking of him and give him some additional energy from out in the universe, wherever I am. But this was the first time I’ve been able to get to Seattle to spend time with him.
I took the early flight from Denver to Seattle and we met up at the Kinect Accelerator where the program has just started. We found a room to just sit and talk for about 45 minutes. After a hug and a heart felt welcome, we started talking about how things were going. Our first 15 minutes were filled with lots of tears and emotion as I gave Andy a gift from a few of his friends including me and Amy and we connected physically for the first time since he was diagnosed.
I was curious about the experience he was having and he was very open about chemo, how it impacted him, and what the process was. We talked some about the dynamic of a loved one being sick or hurt since Amy’s had a broken arm for the past few weeks. While the broken arm isn’t in the same category as cancer, it has changed the way I’ve thought about caregiving as it’s the first time I’ve had to be – in Amy’s words “her man servant” – in our relationship. Amy called during this time and when the Imperial March (Amy’s personal ringtone) started playing on my iPhone Andy laughed a good belly laugh. I put Amy on speaker, the three of us had a nice talk, and then we wrapped up and had a TechStars related meeting.
We went to lunch with David Cohen, the CEO of TechStars. We talked about work, but we also talked about life. Andy was total present – he was having a good day physically and emotionally – and it was great to be around. After lunch David got in an Uber and headed to the airport to go back to Boulder; Andy and I walked around the corner to his office and BigDoor’s office (he’s on the board of BigDoor with me, their office is on the first floor, his is on the second.) I said hello to the BigDoor folks, hung out for a while and caught up on email while Andy had a meeting upstairs, and then he drove me to my hotel and we said goodbye for the day.
I had a few more meetings and then ended back up at the Kinect Accelerator for the Mentor Mixer. The program started on Monday and this was the first meeting of all the mentors. I gave a talk about how to be an effective mentor during the introduction to the program and afterward noticed Andy in the back of the room. This was a nice surprise as I didn’t expect to see him again on this trip. We hung out at the mixer a little and then took off to go have another meal together – this time alone. We talked about a few experiences in the distant past and I vividly remembered a dinner in Brookline in the 1990’s with Andy, Alexa (his wife), and Amy. I couldn’t remember the restaurant, but I had the visualization of the entire experience in my head and shared it with him (he remembered it also). We talked more about a wide range of things – some business, some personal – and just enjoyed being together.
I got more than my fair share of his time yesterday. And it was awesome. As I was laying bed at 11pm drifting off to sleep I thought of him some more, some of the ups and downs we’d had together, and how much I treasured him as a friend.
We’ve been through lots of things together. One of the first things he said to me when he saw me was “your support of me through this period eliminated any fears I had lingering about our relationship in the context of any money that I’ve lost for you.” I’ve invested in a number of things that Andy has done dating back to his first company (Abuzz, which was a success and acquired by the NY Times for about a 4.5x of my investment.) But we’ve also had lots of things not work (Bodyshop.com – 0.5x, Judy’s Book – 0.25x.) However, I never, ever have worried about it – my willingness to keep trying and working with great people trumps the specific returns of any individual transaction. And more importantly, my personal friendship and loyalty is built on trust and a long term arc of honesty, not transactional results. While we’ve both screwed up plenty of things along the way and had our share of disagreements, we always resolve them and move forward. I’ve told Andy this several times in the past, but when you face mortality you have a chance to really understand (and express) this.
I wore my Fuck Cancer shirt all day. Several people gave me positive comments on it and one stood out. Near the end of the day, a woman who I didn’t know said “great shirt.” She looked at me with acknowledgement and a real spark of connection occurred. I realized, at that moment, that cancer is a disease that defines many people at a profoundly deep level, especially when they survive it.
On Saturday I’m running a 50 mile race in Sacramento. I’ve been thinking about this all week as I try to get my mind into it. It’s been hard to get real focus on it because I’ve had a busy week and I know that Friday will be my transition day. But as I sit here, the 50 mile run doesn’t seem that hard. Sure – it’ll be a physical and emotional challenge, but it’s not surgery, a 64 day chemo regimen, and the emotional challenge of “beating cancer.”
Life is short. And uncertain. Live it every moment. Andy – thanks for being you and letting me be part of your life.
My quest for naming bathrooms, er – outhouses, continues. This one was named by Steve Lipsher of the Denver Post, for me on a recent trip of his. As I haven’t inspected it, I can’t guarantee cleanliness, but hopefully my name will add a little bit of warmth to the experience.
Look for another big bathroom announcement tonight at the Boulder New Tech Meetup which I’ll be attending.
My dad is one of my best friends. His birthday is on Saint Patrick’s Day and it has been a bright green celebration for as long as I can remember. He turned 74 today and we had dinner tonight at Oak at Fourteenth with Amy, my mom Cecelia, my sister-in-law Laura, my brother Daniel, and their daughter Sabrina. We had a wonderful evening and it reminded me once again of the importance and delight of family.
I’ve learned many things from my dad during the 46 years I’ve been on this planet. Following are a few pivotal ones that have shaped my life.
Age 10: I told my dad I didn’t want to be a doctor like him. I didn’t like how hospitals smelled, I was bored when we did rounds together (I just wanted to sit in the corner and read), and I didn’t like being around sick people. He told me that I could do anything I wanted to do.
Age 12: I hated learning Hebrew and thought being Bar Mitzvah’ed was stupid. My dad didn’t fight me on how I felt, but he told me tradition was important and this was a seminal jewish tradition. I procrastinated as long as I could and then crammed over the last few weeks. He sat with me, coached me through it, and was patient with me when I continued to fight the process. My Bar Mitzvah was a powerful learning experience, and, while I eventually became an atheist, am glad that I participated in the key jewish tradition.
Age 17: After two months at MIT, I was ready to quit. All of my friends had gone to UT Austin, including my girlfriend, and I was homesick and lonely. As we wandered around Concord, MA on a beautiful October day, he told me to give it a year and if I still didn’t like it, I could go somewhere else. But he told me I’d be short changing myself if I didn’t give it a year. By spring time I had fully embraced MIT and never looked back.
Age 21: Dave Jilk (another Saint Patrick’s baby) and I started Feld Technologies. My dad was our third partner, sat on our board, and contributed continuously as a mentor to us as we figured out how to create and build a company. He personally guaranteed a $20,000 line of credit with his bank which was our beginning working capital (which we stupidly used up immediately, although that made us realize we had to be profitable and cash flow positive from the beginning because there was no more money to tap.) Almost every year Dave, my dad, and I would go away somewhere for an annual meeting. I remember these weekends fondly as they shaped the path of our business. My favorite line from this period that I remember from him was “if you aren’t on the edge you are taking up too much space.”
Age 24: My father resisted the easy temptation to say “I told you so” when I got divorced. When I dropped out of a PhD program, he told me he supported any decision I made. When I was feeling sorry for myself, he’d remind me cheerfully that “everyone pees in the shower.” His unambiguous support of me, at a period of darkness in my life, was priceless.
Age 29: When Amy and I decided to move to Boulder, the first words out of my dad’s mouth were “that’s a great idea.”
There are many more like this, but this should give you the sense for it. In addition to being one of my best friends, he’s been an incredible mentor, business partner, and supporter. I love his sense of humor, his joie de vivre, and his endless curiosity. He always lights up any room he’s in, is always learning, and keeps on trying new things.
Dad – happy birthday. You are awesome. Green suits you.
Some time last year Katherine McIntyre, my partner Ryan’s wife, asked me if I wanted to do a 50 mile race with her. I think she was expecting me to say no, in which case she could have decided it was a silly idea. But my reaction, without thinking about it, was “sure – that sounds cool.” So we both signed up for the American River 50 Mile Endurance Run on April 7th in Sacramento.
Yesterday, I told Amy that this is the only 50 miler I’m going to do again for a while. It’s simply too much training while I work and travel the way I am. I’ve had several 50+ mile weeks in the last month and my weekends are consumed with running. For example, last weekend I had four separate runs totaling seven hours and this weekend I’m doing a double 18 – an 18 mile run on Saturday and an 18 mile run on Sunday.
I love the running. And the double 18s are fun. But for my current 46 year old body, there’s a two day recovery time. During this two day recovery time, I’d love to get 12 hours of sleep a night. That doesn’t work when you get on a plane Monday at 8:15pm to go to Chicago to have a 9am board meeting the next day.
This week I’ve been exhausted every morning when I wake up. My normal wake up time is 5am – I’ve been finding myself getting up at 5, wandering around for a few minutes disoriented, and then going back to bed until 8am. Even then, I’m still tired. I’m not staying up late (I’ve been getting to bed by 10:30pm) and I’m sleeping well, so it’s clearly just the cumulative effect of the training.
I’m easily in the best running shape I’ve been in a decade. I’ve dropped 20 pounds and weighed in at 195 this morning, partly due to the help from my friends at Retrofit. Regular massage has kept me feeling fine, and I’ve even tossed some light swimming and biking into the mix.
Suddenly, a marathon seems really trivial. Katherine and I will put this 50 miler behind us and I’ll be back to my friend, a well understood distance of 26.2 miles. In the mean time, I’ve learned a lot about my physical limits and – with the life and pace I live – feel like I’ve started to bump up against them.
My mom (Cecelia Feld) just put up a new website (Studio 7310) showcasing her art. In addition to being a really beautiful new site, she’s also started blogging at Art Everyday and tweeting at @ceceliafeld. I’m awesomely proud of my mom for embracing the web and social media – gigantic smiles from the son.
Rather than talk about it, I’ll let a few pictures tell the story. If you are into art, know my mom, or are just curious, venture over to Studio 7310 and take a look. And, if you fall in love with something, don’t be bashful – even though she’s modest about it, she loves it when people buy or exhibit her art (ok – that’s the son doing his shameless promotion thing.)
Amy and I have a bunch of my mom’s art. If you’ve been in my office or to my house, you’ve seen some of it. She works in a bunch of different mediums – the one above is a collage, the one below is a solar plate print.
Following are some of my favorite paintings that my mom has ever done. They are huge (think 20′ x 20′) and bring any wall to life.
I’ll end with a great Texas Hill Country photograph. Don’t forget to subscribe to Cecelia’s (she’ll probably be ok with you calling her “Brad’s mom” – at the minimum that will bring a smile to her face) blog and twitter feed now that I’ve managed to convert her to a blogger in addition to being an artist.
I’ve tried to aggressively shift to video conferencing instead of audio conferencing for anything longer than a 15 minute call. I’m also giving a lot of talks around the world, especially on Startup Communities, so rather than travel and burn a day (or more), I’m doing 30 minute videoconferencing things remotely. And, as anyone who has ever asked me to speak to a class of students knows, I have a huge weakness for always saying yes to this so I’ve been doing this via videoconferencing as well.
After exploring a bunch of different options last year, I decided to use Skype everywhere since it was “good enough”, simpler, and portable. I equipped my desktops with HD cameras, took my MacBook Air on the road, and didn’t look back, until recently.
I noticed that twice last week I had horrible Skype connections. One was a US call and one was for a 30 minute presentation to a group of about 200 people in Barcelona at the Silicon Valley Comes to Barcelona event. In the US case I was using my Verizon 4G MiFi, in the Barcelona case I was tethered to my AT&T iPhone.
Skype completely failed in each case. Audio worked but we couldn’t get a sustained video connection. Each time we tried Google Hangouts as a backup. It worked flawlessly on exactly the same connection.
This was a classic A/B test. Yesterday, when I was on a Skype three way call, where one of the callers kept freezing and the other kept getting higher resolution focus, all I could think was “I wish we were on Google Hangouts.” After talking to a friend at Google who said that Hangouts is now pervasive at Google, I’m going to try it more frequently.
Any feedback from any of you about performance / quality of Skype vs. Google Hangouts?
On day two of my 14 day visit to Miami Beach, I realized that the hotel WiFi at the W Hotel was not going to work for me. Once again I was at a Starwood Hotel, which I love, except for the abysmal WiFi and WiFi policies. In this case, performance of WiFi in my room sucked and the cost was $15 / device / day. Upon connecting my computer and Amy’s computer, I realized I was paying $30 / day for shitty WiFi. Nope – that doesn’t work for me.
I tried my iPhone 3G tethering. AT&T service was as bad as the WiFi – I literally couldn’t get a consistent signal in the room. I wasn’t desperate yet, but I was definitely uncomfortable. Amy was annoyed, as in “Brad, why doesn’t this shitty technology work?” and all the Skype calls I had set up looked like they might be a bust.
I had my IT guy Ross overnight me a Verizon 4G MiFi. It arrived the morning of day three and I never looked back. I plugged the MiFi into the wall, pressed the On button, connected each device, and never thought about Internet access again for the remaining twelve days. When I went down to the pool, where nothing worked at all, including the hotel WiFi, I sat for hours with my MiFi happily connected. Performance was great – I didn’t even notice that I wasn’t on a 50MB/sec connection.
I only ran into one edge case that was annoyingly bizarre. The MiFi allows five devices to connect simultaneously. But guess what – the two of us had six devices. Two Macs, two iPads, and two iPhones. The first time we realized this after getting weird “can’t connect” errors we each burst out laughing – c’mon, six WiFi devices in one room between two people? However, when you step back and think about it, the idea that there might be 10, or 20, or 50 in a few years is not beyond the realm of possibility.
So – instead of paying Starwood $180 / day for shitty WiFi, I ended up paying Verizon whatever my monthly fee is for excellent MiFi. Verizon wins this time. Starwood – you keep bumming me out with your WiFi policy. I’m already paying a ridiculous premium for your high end hotel – why not toss in the WiFi like the Marriott does. Or, at least get it to work.
I first heard the word “grinfucker” a decade or so ago from a close friend who was a former investment banker. He said, in response to a meeting we were in with a person who was very polite and charming “he’s such a grinfucker.” I loved the word and, as I found out later, it described the person perfectly.
I had an encounter with someone on Friday that made me think to myself “that person is a grinfucker” and I vaguely remembered a post on the web from someone about grinfuckers. A quick Google search generated a post from Mark Suster titled Don’t be a Grin Fucker. It’s excellent – go read it – this blog post will wait patiently for you to come back.
I was at dinner mid-week with another friend talking about a bunch of stuff. During that dinner we started talking about SOPA/PIPA. He has another friend who is one of the SOPA/PIPA advocates. He told me what the person said about it, which was basically “the tech industry misunderstands what we are trying to do – it’s only about foreign websites – there is nothing bad in the bills.” I responded to my friend that this person was lying. We talked about that for a while. As I reflect on the conversation, it wasn’t simply that the pro-SOPA/PIPA person was lying, he was actually grinfucking our mutual friend. Which, ironically given the specific context, might even be worse than lying.
I try to live my life where I always say 100% what is on my mind. I rarely hold back and, although I try to be polite about it, I’m sure I piss plenty of people off. But I’d rather annoy and piss them off than grinfuck them. And I’d much rather someone be brutally honest with me about whatever they think, especially if they disagree with me or think I’m doing something stupid, since that information is so much more valuable to me than a disingenuous good vibe.
I’ve started doing something new at the end of most of my public talks. I have always ended by giving out my email address and encouraging people to reach out directly if there is anything they want to discuss. But I’ve added on the following:
If I said anything you disagree with, think was confusing, stupid, or just plain wrong, please tell me. I won’t take offense – don’t sugar coat it – just tell me. That’s the best way for me to learn and get smarter.
I suppose I could add “please don’t grinfuck me by saying how wonderful the talk was as you think in the back of your mind ‘wow – Feld is a real moron – he totally missed the point on the blah thing.'”
I encourage everyone to chew on this. Honest, direct, and clear debate is so much more powerful than bullshit. We are living in a very complex era and the information we are trying to process is extremely confusing and contradictory. If you like or respect someone, don’t grinfuck them. And if you don’t like or respect them, don’t grinfuck them – tell them why.
It’s Monday and I’m back in Boulder after being on the east coast for three weeks. My partner Jason Mendelson got me possibly the best remote control toy ever.
Even though I’d love to stick around Boulder all week, I’m heading to DC tomorrow and then NY for a day. Oh well.