Category: Things I Like
I noticed something when I tried out two apps (Mingly and Cobook) this morning – they each immediately asked to connect me to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter during their onboarding process. And, by using my Gmail as the starting point / authentication, they connected me to G+.
Microsoft is conspicuously absent from this. I’ve noticed this many times in the past but when you onboard yourself in two contact-related apps in the same morning and there is no Microsoft anywhere, there’s something going on that’s important. I wonder if this will change with Office 365 – I hope Microsoft is building a trivial to use oauth to O365 so it’s easy to connect to, along with a good sync API.
I was trying to think of other authentication that would be helpful to me in the context of my contacts. Almost everything else I use is based on either my email address or auth with one of these four services. Hmmm.
So far Mingly feels basically the same as Gist but Cobook seems different than anything I’ve used. I have no idea if I’ll keep using either of these, but like many things in the themes we invest in, I love to play around with new apps for a while and see if it sticks.
Following is something that happens to me on a regular basis, with a new and exciting twist. I’m telling this story both to vent (maybe I’m grumpy today – I don’t know) as well as for an object lesson on how not to interact with a VC, or at least with me.
First – the normal part. I’ve had an email exchange with an entrepreneur over the past week. We’ve never met, but he started the email thread by asking if I’d be interested in getting together about his company because he’s looking for financing and he’s sure I’ll be interested. I asked for a short description of what he’s doing. He sent me another email telling me all the friends we have in common who will vouch for him. I responded by asking what he was working on. He gave me a vague description and told me I’d love it. I didn’t really understand it, but it didn’t fit in any of our themes and I told him so. He said he’d looked at the themes and thought I’d be really excited about what his doing. I again asked him to be more specific in case I was missing something.
Now – the new and exciting part. I didn’t hear back from him for a few days and then got an email asking me to respond to his previous message. I looked through my email archive and didn’t have a previous message from him. He responded a little later with the following:
“Kindly, thoughts below…pls recognize that this is intellectual property and disclosure of this information in any manner is agreed to be upon mutual consent prohibited.”
I sent him a simple reply. “I haven’t read past the first sentence of this email and I’ve deleted the original from my email archive. I don’t sign NDAs and have no interest in having you unilaterally commit me to a confidentially agreement of any sort.”
Stuff like this just baffles me. I get some version of a strange interaction like this every few days. Last week it was the guy who had “flown to Denver just to meet me because I said that I’d meet with anyone.” After a dozen emails where I kept asking him to tell me what he was working on, he basically told me to go fuck off and I’d regret not meeting with him because he was going to create a great company and I was going to miss out.”
It’s weird. Advice to all of you out there – don’t be that guy. If I tell you I’m not interested, try to respect that. I’m trying to be respectful of you by passing quickly and not wasting your time. It has nothing to do with you – and I’m often wrong. But thrashing around with weirdness to try to get face to face isn’t helpful.
And yes – I’m having a much better day today now that I’m hiding in my room behind my computer.
I’ve been obsessively tracking data about myself since 2009. The most visible data I track is on Daytum which includes Miles Run (by location), Books Read (by type), Airplane Flights (by carrier), and Nights In Town (by city). I also track all of my running data (most recently on RunKeeper and SmashRun) and all of my health data (including what I eat) on Fitbit. I track plenty of other stuff, but those are the public / systematic things.
I started doing this in 2009 – see My 2009 By The Numbers for how I was thinking about things then. This year I’m thinking about things more categorically, based on a set of activities I do that drive what I spend my time on. Here’s where the year ended up.
Running: I had a great running year – probably the best in a long time. I ran six marathons, including four in eight weeks, and the last one of the year was the fastest since 2003 in 4:28:46. Overall, I covered 1,125.91 miles (not including the 6.5 miles I’m going to run today). 339 were in Boulder; next best was a monster month in Tuscany of 156.97 miles. I crossed 100 in Keystone and had another strong month in Paris at 94.65 miles. You can tell that I had two weeks of vacation in Tucson this year, plenty of short runs in cities I traveled to for work (SF, NY, Seattle), and then a bunch of marathons.
Weight: I started the year at 208, hit a high point of 219.4 at the end of October, and weighed in at 202.8 this morning. My goal is to be 190 on 12/31/12.
Sleep: I clearly missed a few days since I only have 354 days reported for this year. I often get asked how often I travel vs. sleep at home. Eldorado Springs is where I call home so I was there 99 nights. Boulder, which is a condo I have down the block from my office logged 40 nights. So – for the year, I was in Boulder for 139 of 354 nights, or 39% of the time. Keystone was very light this year – we were only there 25 nights (and 14 of them were the past two weeks). You can see my month in Tuscany in August and month in Paris in July, two weeks of vacation plus a little in Tucson (I guess I like Tucson), 16 nights in New York, 10 nights in San Francisco, and 10 nights in Seattle. I was only in Boston five nights this year – that will change in 2012 as I’m spending the second half of January there. While I swore off red eyes several years ago, I still ended up doing three of them this year. And if you are curious about the other 16 places, they are Los Angeles, Newport, San Antonio, Napa, Boise, Ann Arbor, Bismarck, San Diego, Orlando, Kansas City, New Orleans, Washington DC, Montreal, Portland, and Colorado Springs.
Reading: I didn’t read that much this year – only 41 books. In contrast in 2010 I read 52 books and in 2009 I read 78. Business, Biography, and Mental Floss were all even at 7 and then Philosophy, Fiction, and Sports at 4 each. I’ll definitely read more in 2012 and as you’ve probably noticed I’ll continuing blogging my reviews.
As a special bonus, I’m about to cross 6,000,000 steps logged on my Fitbit. That’ll happen today on my run. I wonder if I’ll get a badge for that.
When I reflect on 2011, I had a great year on many fronts, both personal and professional. I’m looking forward to 2012 and am doubling down on my personal commitment to myself to focus on things that matter and ignore the noise.
It’s that time of year again. Everyone that publishes content and is looking for link bait is publishing a top 10 list of 2011. I’m getting asked daily to contribute – I finally decided to create a blog post so I could simply refer to it instead of saying “sorry – I hate top 10 lists, count me out.”
10. They are boring as shit.
9. Extraordinary selection bias prevails.
8. Clever superlatives like splendiferous are often missing.
7. They always have 10 items. Why not squares like 9 or primes like 11?
6. Google has better things to do than index top 10 lists.
5. Time wasted reading top 10 lists takes time away from playing CastleVille.
4. Ever try to read a top 10 list on an iPhone? There needs to be an app for that.
3. If SOPA/PIPA passes, some of the sites republishing the lists might be shut down.
2. Listmakers, like @abatchelor, are food for the matrix.
1. Very few lists of 10 things fit in 140 characters.
So there.
I don’t celebrate Christmas. So my Christmas eve’s are chinese food and a movie (also known as “Jewish Christmas”) and Christmas day is usually spent in front of my computer writing after sleeping late, followed by a run, a nap, and another movie.
This morning I slept until around 10am. Amy and I watched Hanna last night and I had a bunch of bizarre dreams as a result. The combination of being tired from an intense year, six marathons including four in the fall, a steady training schedule the last few weeks, and being 46 has resulted in a bunch of 10 to 12 hour nights. Yawn.
Amy and I got into our pajamas and drove 10 miles to the nearest Starbucks to get a physical New York Times (my gift to her for putting up with me not wanting to do Christmas.) When we got home, we settled in upstairs with our coffees, the dogs, some music, and the Internets (well – she’s over there reading the New York Times – very old school.)
I started my daily information routine around 11am and immediately thought to myself “boy things are slow today.” I’ve had a stupid problem upstairs in my office (my Wifi router was on top of subwoofer – intermittent performance issues which ended immediately when I finally noticed it and moved it away) so I’m extra tuned into performance right now.
I did all my normal Speedtest things and realized that it was actually the “performance of the Internet”. Sites loaded fine. My local performance was fine. Comcast was vibrating all over the place – sometimes fine, sometimes not, and highly dependent on (a) a point in time and (b) which web site I was going to. There was absolutely no consistency.
I’d never noticed this before on Christmas day. I get very little email (I’ve only gotten one message since I woke up two hours ago) and Twitter is almost silent (@dickc is one of the few people tweeting – he must be doing it just to generate some traffic, although I did notice that @sether got a new @eastoncycling tubular wheelset from @greeleys – I hope he got her something sparkly and shiny.)
I tweeted out “boy the internets are slow today. or maybe it’s just comcast” and my ever present buddy @jbminn responded immediately with “anecdotal, but *lots* of devices online today that were still in boxes yesterday”.
I think John might be right. I’m curious if the rest of you are seeing slow / random / weird Internet performance? Is this the first year that Christmas morning overwhelmed the Internet? Or maybe @FAKEGRIMLOCK is just having fun with us humans today.
I hate Christmas music. Hate, hate, hate. Call me Grinch Feld. I don’t care. It just makes me want to poke knitting needles in my ears to stop it. Amy and I were in City Market grocery shopping the other day and at some point I had to go outside and scream. It felt good enough that I was able to go back in the store and finish buying greek yogurt and vegetables.
Yesterday I got a note from David Cohen with an attachment of a parody of The 12 Days of Christmas. At first I almost just archived it on general principle. And then I listened to it. And it was hilarious. I decided that since it was a parody, it got to go in a different category than “Christmas-Music” in my brain and I tagged it instead as “Hilarious-Parodies Humor TechStars.”
David asked me to send him a quick video of me lip syncing “Fiiiiiive sleepless weeeeks.” That was easy and I appear at 2:17 looking a little like Ted Kaczynski.
I thought the lyrics were priceless. I hope I don’t get blocked because of SOPA.
On the twelfth day of Techstars my startup gave to me
Twelve companies funded
Eleven piping pizzas
Ten pitch sessions
Nine servers crashing
Eight mentor meetings
Seven cups of coffee
Six geeks-a-coding
Fiiiiiive sleepless weeeeks
Four investors
Three sexless months
Two hackstars
And a space to work in rent freeeeeee
It’s Not About Having The Most Friends, It’s About Having The Best Friends
Over the past month I’ve been systematically cleaning up my social graph. It took me a while to figure out how I wanted to do this, as I’m a very active user of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and Google+ along with a bunch of applications that leverage these various social graphs. Historically, I’ve been a very promiscuous friender, accepting almost all friend requests.
While this strategy worked fine for me for Twitter (since I didn’t have to do anything, and could deliberately choose who I wanted to follow) this didn’t work for any of the other services. Specifically, Facebook had become basically useless to me, LinkedIn’s activity feed was pointless, Foursquare scared me a little, and Google+ was just a cluttered mess.
As I used each of these services daily, I thought hard about how I was using them and what I was doing. I realized that I was using Twitter ideally and no changes were needed. I broadcast regularly through Twitter, which connects to Facebook and broadcasts there as well. I consume content in a stream throughout the day from about 600 people who I follow. I unfollow someone periodically and add someone new periodically. The tempo works fine and I have my Twitter activity feed up on my Mac all day long.
Facebook was more perplexing to me. Ultimately I decided to orient around my activity feed and started unfriending anyone who I didn’t want to see in my activity feed. Given the current Facebook infrastructure, these folks will still “subscribe” to me (same as Twitter follow) and anyone who wants to subscribe to me can. Unfortunately, the UX for unfriending someone Facebook is horrible, so it’s a tedious and long process. I’ve decided to unfriend 10 people a day which means I’ll be done in about 200 days. I realize that once I’ve got this done I need to adjust my security settings to reflect what I actually want to share. That’ll happen at some point.
LinkedIn was easy – I just decided to ignore the activity stream. I’m remaining promiscuous at LinkedIn with two exceptions – no recruiters and no totally random people. LinkedIn continues to be the best way for me to discover professional connections to people I want to reach and the wider the network, the better.
Foursquare was the hardest to figure out. I rebroadcast Foursquare to Facebook and had a very uncomfortable experience this summer with someone pretending to stalk me on Foursquare. While it was a prank, I never found out who did it which caused me to quit Foursquare for a few months. I get too much value out of Foursquare as a historical record (I love 4sqand7yearsago) so I’ve just decided to aggressively unfriend anyone who I’m not close to. Once I get this done, Facebook done, and my security settings right, I’ll be in a happy place.
Google+ is more dynamic right now as I figure out how I really want to use it. I’m finding the integration into Gmail to be very interesting and I expect my use case will change as they roll out more features, like they did today. For now, I’m using it much more like Twitter.
As I’ve been cleaning this up, I realized that I have a bunch of awesome friends. When I look at my friends lists in apps like RunKeeper and Fitbit, I smile a big smile about who I’m connected to. Most importantly, I realize that all of this technology is enhancing my relationships, and it reminds me to be deliberate about how I use it.
Let’s put this in the category of “pet peeves” around things that are obsolete.
One of my goals as a VC is to help create companies that cause obsolescence of existing products, companies, and industries. As a result I think about what’s becoming obsolete all the time. I don’t just think about this in the specific areas that we invest in, but in all aspects of my life. I find that this frame of reference – namely “will we be doing X in 20 years” is a fundamental part of my approach to what I do.
I’m at DIA this morning. I just spent $13.19 at the “Newsstand” on four Clif Bars, a bottle of water, and two packages of gum. I gave the guy at the register my credit card because I hate paying in cash, having to deal with change, and then submitting an expense report for a cash expense of $13.19. By putting it on my credit card, I don’t have to deal with any of this stuff.
A little piece of paper comes out of the register. Then another piece of paper comes out of the register. He gives me the second piece of paper and asks me to sign it. He hands me a grimy ballpoint pen that I don’t really want to tough and I scribble “pooh bear” on the slip. I hand it back to him. And leave.
Why the fuck does he ask me to sign a credit card slip for $13.19. This is so incredibly obsolete. While I don’t know his cash register system, it looked pretty modern (yes – it was a computer) so I doubt he does anything with the slips at the end of the day other than put a rubber band around them and send them to someone somewhere. And I’m quite sure no one will ever notice that I signed the credit card slip “pooh bear.”
Obsolete.
If you’re a regular reader, you know about my interest in the quantified self and exercise. You also know my struggle with losing that “last 20 pounds” which I’ve finally decided I am going to do once and for all. As part of this, I’m using a new program called Retrofit which was created by Jeff Hyman, a long time friend and entrepreneur, and some of the leading weight loss experts in the country .
Retrofit uses a Fitbit and a Withings scale to make tracking your sleep, activity and weighing yourself easy. Your data is shared with your personal weight loss team: a registered dietitian, exercise physiologist, and behavior coach. Your experts meet with you one on one via Skype videoconference. Not only do they help you lose weight, but also they help you establish the skills to keep weight off for life.
I’ve been doing the program for a month and my experience so far has been great. I’ve learned a lot about what I’m eating wrong and have started to reprogram my bad patterns. I’ve lost a few pounds already, but am taking a long term view toward losing the 20 pounds over the next 12 months and then maintaining my weight at 190 for the balance of my life.
Jeff has created this program for people like me – busy, on the road all the time, constant meals out, and the endless struggle with getting rid of a little extra weight. The goal is not a classical “lose weight right now and then gain it back” diet. Instead, it’s focused on gradual weight loss with long term behavior change.
While it’s not inexpensive, if you look at the overall cost and what you get for it, it’s a great deal. And, even though the program is never discounted through the website, Jeff was willing to give anyone reading this blog a 50% discount if you sign up before 12/31/11. If you are interested, just call 1-800-774-5962 and use the code word “Feld” to receive the special pricing.
If losing some weight is on your upcoming new years resolution list, take a look at Retrofit.