Nisan Gabbay – an analyst at Sierra Ventures – has started a neat new blog called Startup Review.  Unlike so many other VC bloggers that pontificate on generic issues around entrepreneurship and venture capital (egads – is that a mirror I see – Amy – please put that down) Nisan is taking a very different approach.  In his words:

Startup Review will be a blog that profiles successful Internet start-ups in a case study format. The case studies will be fairly detailed, analyzing the key factors that made the companies successful, with an emphasis on strategy and product decisions. Each case study will also have sections discussing launch strategy, exit analysis, and links to other good analysis on the company.

Rather than overwhelm us with posts, he’s going to focus his efforts on one substantive case study each week. 

My plan is to publish one case study per week, as I plan to devote
about 10 hours to creating each case study. I am committed to staying
the course, but nothing helps better with motivation than seeing my
Feedburner stats climb – so tell your friends about this blog!

His first case study is Craigslist.  I think this is a great idea for a VC / entrepreneurship oriented blog – hats off to Nisan for tackling this.  If you are interested, subscribe here to Startup Review.

Technorati Tags: vc, venturecapital, entrepreneurship, startups, blogs

In Europe, today is 2/8/6, tomorrow is 3/8/6, Friday is 4/8/6, and Saturday is Pentium.

Technorati Tags: numbers, numerology

About an hour into Superman Returns, Amy leaned over to me and whispered “The Matrix wrecked everything.”  I yawned about 20 times during this two hours and thirty four minutes of this movie – it’s was as boring an “action/adventure” movie as I’ve seen in a while.  We are in movie hell this summer up in Homer – we walked out of Nacho Libre after 20 minutes and stumbled through the disappointing Click.  So far, only Cars has been satisfying.  When is The Matrix IV coming out?

Technorati Tags: movies, superman

Niel Robertson has a hilarious post up of an article he wrote for the New Yorker Shouts and Murmurs section.  He got rejected by them, but not by me.  Awesome Niel.

My goal of running a marathon in every state by the time I turn 50 pales in comparison to the world’s longest foot race.  3,100 miles around a city block in Queens, NY (that would be over 5,000 laps) in approximately 51 days.

My friends at Slice of Lime just put up a website for the new Blink Gallery on 1011 Pearl Street in Boulder.  Clean, simple, and contemporary, just like the gallery.  We sure do miss Colorado art when we are up in Alaska.

Amy said a really nice thing to me the other day.  We were talking and she said “One of the things I really admire about you is that your work is play to you.” 

I’ve always loved what I do.  Yeah – I’ve had my share of really crappy days (and months, and even a crappy year or two – say around 2001) – but even when things are really rough, I treat the “work” part of it as indistinguishable from “play.”  As I’ve figured out more things about how I relate to the elusive notion of work life balance I’ve determined that “always being on” is not a requirement for effective work (nor is it sustainable.)  Once I’d finally decoupled the idea of work and play, it became easy to put them back together again since so much of what I work on is just a blast.

I was on a call earlier today and the person I was talking to said “sorry for interrupting your vacation in Alaska.”  I kindly responded that even though I was up in Alaska, this wasn’t vacation, this was life, and I just happened to be up here right now.  I’ve been in front of my computer or on the phone since early this morning (except for an hour when Amy and I wandered over to Cosmic Kitchen for lunch).  I’m jamming out to Cowboy Junkies, my favorite person in the world is at her computer five feet away, and it’s been a really fun day.  Even the garbage I had to deal with today was “fun” if you squint and look at it the right way.

Paul Kedrosky – the author of the excellent, informative, and often entertaining Infectious Greed blog – sent me a link to a fantastic post by Art De Vany on Elite Athletic Training and Disease.  It’s primarily a very thoughtful and insightful article by Mark Sisson on elite athletes, health, and overtraining.  It’s great stuff for anyone that is an endurance athlete.

EndurancePlanet put up an interview with me about running marathons.  If you are a runner, or just want to hear me talk about something different than entrepreneurship and venture capital, enjoy the roughly one mile (10:46) of interview.