Category: Things I Like
I’ve decided not to travel for the rest of 2013. There are a lot of inputs into this decision, including the fact that I’ve been travelling 50% – 75% of the time for the last 20 years and I’m just tired of it. I also have realized that my endless travel introduces a lot of friction into my world that I believe is both unnecessary, is shortening my life, and starting to have a material impact on my creativity.
It’s amazing to me that in 2013 – with all the choices we have – real video conferencing is still chaotic, messy, and underused across many organizations. Getting it set up within a single organization generally works ok, but across organizations continues to be painful.
There are lots of different cases to consider. The simple one, like a one to one video conference, works fine with Skype, Hangouts, or Facetime.. It’s trivial to initiate and I find video to be much more effective and powerful than a phone call. Eye contact matters.
As it gets more complicated, such as a multi-person video conference that is analogous to a typical audio conference call, there are more options. For example, you have two to ten locations connecting. Most are a single person but one is the center of gravity. There might be a presentation. I’ve found Hangouts to be the best and easiest to deal with for this, although there are lots of other options, such as GoToMeeting, Adobe Connect, WebEx, and Fuze.
But then you descend into the typical morass of a weak link somewhere. Someone connects with a low speed connection. Or is calling in without headphones from a crowded coffee shop. Or a group is in a big room with a laptop at the end of the room with an 11″ screen that no one really sees and eventually gets aimed at one particular person, rather than the whole room. Or the audio in the main room is weak, and it’s hard to hear the conversation unless the person is right in front of the speakerphone or computer mic.
I’ve recently done many presentations to large groups – 100 – 500 people – using video conferencing. This works well as long as there is good audio and video on the receiving end. Ironically, these are often easier to do and work better than the smaller video conferences, since someone is actually paying attention to it.
My current goal is to train “my world” to use video conferencing effectively. A small investment in the right hardware and configuration makes all the difference. While I have real preferences on software, I can live with different choices given our hardware setups.
For example, I used Fuze for the first time last week for my Yesware board meeting – it was flawless (easy setup, sharp video, great screen share. solid everything.) I’m on an UP Global board meeting right now using GoToMeeting – it’s working fine, although I’m staring at one person (instead of the room) since the video is on a laptop on the end of the table. But last week, my GoToMeeting experience with Moz was a disaster (in direct contrast to the actual meeting content, which was great), until we separated the audio stream to a separate dialin number.
At the high end, we use Oblong’s Mezzanine. It integrates directly with a Cisco system so you get the Mezzanine experience virtualizing the Cisco high end video conferencing. Plus we then have a very high def H323 system in our office.
Look for more on this from me over the rest of the summer as I work hard to master this stuff.
I’m interested in what you are using – toss it in the comments.
I closed a large transaction yesterday without signing a single piece of physical paper. It was painless. The entire negotiation was done using email and DocuSign.
I’m doing this at least once a week at this point. Either with DocuSign or EchoSign, the two services that seem to be most popular. I generally hate paper and have almost no paper in my world anymore so being able to eliminate the “print out the signature pages”, “sign the signature pages”, “scan the signed document”, and “email the signed document” step is a joy.
There are a few obvious other benefits. The first is workflow. Signing a doc is part of my workflow, no matter where I am. There is virtually no hassle – I just bring up the doc in the web, read whatever I need to, and sign where required. In addition, I see who else has signed, or hasn’t signed, which is helpful in the context of other investors and board members. When the sigs are completed, a PDF is emailed back to me and I can toss it in the company folder in Dropbox where we store all signed docs. Trivial workflow.
I also have an archive of everything I’ve signed. With the electronic signatures, there’s no more hunting down a doc. I just go to the doc stored in my account. I have another version in Dropbox, but I don’t even have to fight through finding the right one.
Now, every time I have to physically sign something I’m mildly annoyed. I’m going to push everyone I work with to go all electronic.
Unfortunately we aren’t investors in any of these companies. I remember being pitched several in the mid-2000s and just never engaged. That was a miss on my part. But at least I can benefit from them!
At 3:55pm yesterday I cried.
I was getting ready for a Google Hangout back to my office with my partners and I noticed something about an explosion at the Boston Marathon on twitter. I did a quick scan of Twitter, clicked through to a few links, and realized a bomb had gone off near the finish line.
I went blank – just stared at my computer screen – and then started crying. I called Amy – she hadn’t heard about it yet and told her what had happened. I collected myself and called in to my Hangout. My partners were all shaken also – Seth lived in Boston for many years, Ryan has done several marathons, and Jason just did his first marathon last year in Detroit.
During our Hangout I sent some emails out to friends in Boston. Four close friends were on the third floor of the building above the first explosion. They were ok – but shocked and very shaken up. Emails continued to flow with me checking in on people and people checking in on me since they knew I was a marathoner and on the east coast.
My emotion shifted from sadness, to a wave of being horrified, to temporary anger, back to a very deep sadness. At the NJ Tech Meetup, before I started talking I asked for a moment of silence to recognize the people who were at the Boston Marathon, especially those who were injured. I can’t remember exactly what I said – I just know that I teared up again before my talk.
On my way back to Manhattan, Amy and I talked. We were both incredibly sad. And lonely – she’s home and I’m in NY. She was supposed to go to Boston yesterday for a Wellesley board meeting – she decided not to go because of some stuff going on. She would have stayed at the Mandarin Oriental, just down the block from the explosion. It’s all too close for comfort.
Lying in bed, I couldn’t fall asleep. I tossed and turned until 1am. I kept thinking about being in NY on 9/11, about running the Boston Marathon, about the bike accident I had in September where a turn of the wheel a different direction would have meant lights out for me. It was some combination of PTSD, sadness, obsessions, and contemplation of mortality. I finally fell asleep.
This morning on my run with Reece Pacheco we talked about it a little more. I haven’t even begun to really process this. Brent Hill sent out a tweet to me and a bunch of friends to commit to running Boston in 2014. I’m in.
I just contributed to the Boston Tech Communities fundraiser for the Boston Marathon victims. All proceeds will be donated completely to programs working with victims of the attacks including Red Cross, Children’s Hospital, and others.
I’m at the The Athenaeum at Caltech which is the alumni club / hotel on Caltech’s campus. I’m on Caltech Guest WiFi and am getting speeds of between 2 and 10 Kbps (e.g. miserably slow). My Verizon phone has one bar and is flickering between 3G and LTE, but is mostly 3G.
I have no expectation that I get a certain level of infrastructure and connectivity in my life, so this isn’t a rant about that. In fact, I’m amazed on a regular basis that any of this shit actually works. Rather, I’m intrigued by the disparity between the top and bottom speed of connectivity I experience on a daily basis with my laptop and my iPhone.
Last week in Kansas City I experience the 1gig internet speed that is provided by Google Fiber. I was in a house next door to mine – my Google Fiber was being installed yesterday.
The gap isn’t a little – it’s orders of magnitude. And it’s fascinating to think about the impact of this unevenness. In my house slightly outside of Boulder we have an old T1 line that gets 1Mbps to it via a CenturyLink connection – this is the fastest connectivity I can get where I live. In my condo in Boulder, we are on 50Mbps Comcast connection (although I rarely see more than 20Mbps). I get no cell service at my house outside of Boulder; I get strong cell service and LTE in my condo in town.
I realize that the typical speed I first got when using a computer was 2400 baud (actually – my first modem was 110 baud) – that was only 35 years ago. It’s remarkable the difference between 110 baud and 811.02 Mbps over 35 years, but it’s even more dramatic that within a week I’ve used the same devices and applications at 1Mbps, 20Mbps, 800Mbps, and then get stuck in a place where you are happy when things spike to 20 Kbps.
Richard Florida talks about the power of the world being spiky. It’s interesting to ponder in the context of Internet connectivity.
Last October, when I put out a call for A Design HackStar for Startup Revolution I got about 50 responses. Around ten were great; one was awesome. That one was from Cole Morrison, who starting working part time as a Hackstar on all the Startup Revolution stuff at the end of last year.
If you haven’t been on the Startup Revolution web site in a while, go take a look and give me feedback on things you’d like me to change, or add to it. We are continuing to evolve it on a weekly basis – our most recent change was to incorporate the Ask the VC website into it as part of the release of the 2nd edition of Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist.
Cole is a 25 year old entrepreneur, designer, and developer whose design services company, ijitsu Design, was recently acquired by TundraLogic, Inc. for which he now serves as the Chief Marketing Officer. He is also working on a new RPG called Project Recreate. I met him for the first time on my trip in November to Lexington and Louisville, KY and it’s an example of how random good things (in this case – Cole) come back to me from the effort I put out into the world.
I’m not at SXSW this year. I sort of miss it, but not really. Last year I cancelled at the last minute (the day before – I was already in San Antonio at TechStars Cloud) to come back to Boulder after Amy fell and broke her wrist. This year I just didn’t feel like I had enough extrovert reserves in my tank to deal with it. I stayed home and am hanging out at my house in Eldorado Canyon enjoying what looks like at least 12 inches of snow in the last 12 hours. And yes, I’m heading out later for a very quiet and transcendent run.
I got an email this morning from Ethan Duggan who is at SXSW in the #VegasTech booth with his dad Rick. I met Ethan when I was in Las Vegas in January for CES – he came up to me at the VegasTech event I did and showed me the beta of LazyHusband. It’s a cool app, but what’s even more awesome is that Ethan is 12. I met his dad Rick the previous year at CES at a breakfast we had talking about the Las Vegas tech community and how they could use some of the principals I was working on at the time around building Startup Communities that have since shown up in Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City.
I loved Ethan’s demo energy. He literally forced me to go through all the options while a crowd of people were waiting patiently, and respectfully, to talk to me. I think they were just as amazed as I was that a 12 year old was so enthusiastic about he app he’d created. And, out of the corner of my eye, I saw his proud dad smiling and thought of my dad. I started programming at the age of 12 (my first language was APL on an IBM mainframe in the basement of a Frito-Lay datacenter) and my dad – and my uncle Charlie (who was the VP MIS at Frito-Lay at the time) supported my enthusiasm for computers.
Ethan – I’m psyched for you. I just downloaded LazyHusband. Enjoy SXSW. And for all you out there at SXSW, go check out #VegasTech and see what Ethan is up to. If you are a husband (or a boyfriend) it’ll help you out!
PATANG (The Kite) – An Award Winning Film by Prashant Bhargava – Comes to Boulder
I don’t invest in movies. Unless a long time friend, like Rajat Bhargava, asks me to join him for fun in an investment. Several years ago Raj asked me to invest with him in a movie a cousin of his – Prashant Bhargava – was making called Patang. I wrote a modest check without thinking twice. The result of Prashant and the work of his team is a beautiful movie. And it will be in Boulder for a few days – 2/27 – 3/2 – at the The Dairy Center for the Arts.
Following is the story of the movie from the director, Prashant Bhargava.
The seeds for the movie Patang were based on the memories of my uncles dueling kites. In India kite flying transcends boundaries. Rich or poor, Hindu or Muslim, young or old – together they look towards the sky with wonder, thoughts and doubts forgotten. Kite flying is meditation in its simplest form.
In 2005, I visited Ahmedabad to experience their annual kite festival, the largest in India. When I first witnessed the entire city on their rooftops, staring up at the sky, their kites dueling ferociously, dancing without inhibition, I knew I had to make this film in Ahmedabad.
Inspired by the spiritual energy of the festival, I returned the next three years, slowly immersing myself in the ways of the old city. I became acquainted with its unwritten codes of conduct, its rhythms and secrets. I would sit on a street corner for hours at a stretch and just observe. Over time, I connected with shopkeepers and street kids, gangsters and grandmothers. This process formed the foundation for my characters, story and my approach to shooting the film.
I found myself discovering stories within Ahmedabad’s old city that intrigued me. Fractured relationships, property disputes, the meaning of home and the spirit of celebration were recurring themes that surfaced.
Patang’s joyful message and its cinematic magic developed organically. My desire was for the sense of poetry and aesthetics to be less of an imposed perspective and more of a view that emerged from the pride of the people and place.
Seven years in the making, Patang has been a journey which has inspired and brought together many.The key theme of resilience of family is reflected by the bonds between all of us who gave our hearts to make the film.
In general, I love Gmail. While Amy likes to complain to me about how ugly it is, I don’t even see the UI anymore as I just grind through the endless stream of email that I get each day. My biggest struggle is figuring out how to keep up, without the email ending up dominating everything I do. In the past year, this has gotten a lot harder, but I continue to try new things.
Fortunately, spam is almost non-existent for me. We invested in Postini, which Google ended up buying, and it’s been a joy to have flipped a switch almost a decade ago and had spam go from “overwhelming” to “almost nothing.”
Every now and then, I get a flurry of spam from a new attack before Gmail figures it out. Today was one of those days – I had about a dozen things that looked sort of eBay notification like but with Arabic characters. So I hit ! and marked them each as spam as I was going through my inbox. Suddenly, my inbox reloaded and I got the following message.
I expect that by the time I finish writing this post I’ll have access to my inbox again. But stuff like this makes me physically uncomfortable – my morning routine was just interrupted and the machines decided I don’t get to access my email for a while.
While plenty of folks complain about the ambiguity and lack of precision around many of the issues surrounding Google apps, and more specifically the general lack of support, I usually don’t worry about this much. However, in the last month I’ve had two issues that caused me to remember that I’m increasingly less in control and the machines are increasingly more in control. This is one of them; the other was that I noticed an incredible slow down of performance of Gmail – just for me. After a week of pressing on it, the response from Google enterprise tech support was “you have too many things hitting IMAP – disable all of them.” A quick look at my Google Dashboard showed around 100 different apps that I’d authorized to access my account. I cut it down to about 30 – and got rid of several that I knew were high traffic that I liked, such as the awesome new Mailbox app – and things sped up again after 24 hours.
I recognize that if as we hand over control to the machines, they will make mistakes. That’s ok. But it’s jarring when one doesn’t have control over it, even for a little while. And yes, my Gmail is back up.
I participated in the lip dub of the song Lucky Ones, created by the gang at Undrip. They did this as a fundraiser for victims of Hurricane Sandy – I just contributed $900 to the effort ($300 each to Not Just Bagels, Jersey Shore Apparel, and Bungalow Bar & Restaurant). I think you’ll enjoy the song – it’s fun and, if you are so inspired, help out the fundraiser. We are – in fact – the lucky ones.
The lyrics, and the guest appearances, follow (including special guest dance that I do with my friend Pat Minotaur at 2:39).
Verse 1:
This is the one for the ninjas and rockstars (Mick Hagen)
Waiting for their chance to come up like a pop tart (Tim Draper)
People with the vision on their way to the top
Don’t let anybody tell you when to stop, start (Brian Wong)
Doin’ what you love because time is a wasting’ (Leah Busque)
You gotta get a beta from the nascent (Josh Felser)
Stay hungry on the way to your destination
It takes determination and patience (Justin Kan)
I don’t mean it as a diss, but wishing’s a waste of time
And you’ll never reach the front if you’re waiting in line (David Hornik)
So rise and grind, if you’re inclined (Jamie Wong)
Stay strapped on your deadline, never recline (Brad Feld)
Every time — they call you crazy, that’s gnar (Paul Davison)
No shame in the game this is who we are (Alexis Ohanian)
So flex your hustle get to running like a muscle car
And catch a long tail on your shooting star (Rick Marini)
Hook:
We are the lucky ones,
We are the dream,
And we’ll see it all come true, yah,
Cuz we work all day, and we play at night,
Nothing can stop, nothing can stop,
The dream of the lucky one
Verse 2:
So let me put it on the table like Paula Deen
You wanna get that butter, gotta churn that cream (Patrick Chung)
Got a scheme and a team, better hit it with steam
Or you’ll be singing it like biggie “It was all a dream” (Will Harbin)
And you don’t wanna see it get dusty
Trust me it’s ugly you better do something (Ted Rheingold)
Whether in your element enveloped in development (Christine Tsai)
Or busting your butt trying to get that funding (Josh Kopelman)
It’s a long road, no denyin (Micah Baldwin, Jessica Alter)
You gotta keep pitchin like Nolan Ryan (David Weekly)
There is a demand for what you can supply (Josh Elman)
And the bay runs deep so the well ain’t dryin (Alfred Lin)
We say it a lot and yo it might sound funny (Emily Olson)
You’ll never keep playing this game for the money (Rob Lafave)
It’s something inside that you can’t deny (Aston Motes)
You decide your life and that’s lucky (Robert Scoble)