Over the summer, I’ve been exploring Buddhism. I’m focused on it as a philosophy, not as a religion, but decided that reading a broad survey book that covered the history of Buddhism from multiple angles – historical, philosophical, and religious, might be interesting.
I stumbled up Buddhism 101: From Karma to the Four Noble Truths, Your Guide to Understanding the Principles of Buddhism at Explore Booksellers in Aspen. I grabbed it along with a few other books (something I do every time I enter a bookstore) and observed it sitting on my living room book table over the summer.
When we came back to Boulder, I carried a few books back with me including Buddhism 101. I’d started it and read bits of it but took a few hours on the couch this afternoon after my run and polished it off.
It’s a great survey guide to Buddhism. The chapters are short, very accessible, and remarkably clear. I’m sure some of the historical stuff will drift away from my memory, but the broad arc of the evolution of Buddhism and a reinforcement of the principles against this historical backdrop is now a solid base that I can build on.
If you have a meditation practice, a friend who is a Buddhist, or are just interested in having more than a millimeter deep understanding of Buddhism, this book will get you to two millimeters. And you’ll understand, after reading it, why there’s no value in getting attached to the number of millimeters.
I got the following email from Reid Hoffman this morning.
Inspired by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, I produced a battle rap music video about centralized and decentralized currencies, pitting Alexander Hamilton against Satoshi Nakamoto. I hope the video gets more people talking about crypto and its evolving role in global commerce.
It seemed oddly coincidental with Fred Wilson’s post from yesterday titled Some Thoughts on Crypto.
I’m waiting patiently for someone to start talking about Crypto AI.
I’m a proud investor (and crowdfunding backer) in Misty Robotics. As of today, Misty Robotics has started shipping Misty II to its crowdfunding backers.
The team at Misty Robotics has been hard at working getting Misty in shape to ship. The backers now have a key role in the next step of Misty’s journey, as they get the first crack at Misty II and her SDK in advance of Misty’s general availability in the market later this year.
There have been numerous approaches to a personal robot in the past few years. Most have failed. The team at Misty has taken a different approach, emulating the one that the Apple ][ took around the launch of the personal computer, which is to build a platform that anyone can extend with hardware and software.
Misty has been purpose-built as a developer’s platform, with the tools and docs developers need to easily build robot applications which we refer to as “skills”. Misty is a bundle of serious tech that includes:
- Facial detection and recognition
- Expansive field of view
- Mobile sound localization
- Image and graphic display
- Audio playback
- Voice integration
- Capacitive touch
- Obstacle avoidance
- Photo capture
- Hardware extensibility including Arduino and Raspberry Pi
- Audio recording
- Wake word (hint: it’s “hey Misty”)
- Robust Locomotion
- Raw sensor access.
- Programmable personality
While all the hardware is done, some of the software is still in an alpha form, including spatial awareness, video capture, and 3D mapping/SLAM integration. The neat thing is that Misty is “software on treads” so all of this will rapidly iterate as well as be extended by the developer community.
Misty is still available at a pre-order discount, so if you are a developer who wants to explore robotics and become part of the Misty community, jump on board!
I’m an enormous Jim Collins fan. It’s a special bonus that he lives in Boulder.
He just came out with a short monograph called Turning the Flywheel. It’s only 40 pages but stunningly good. In it, he dissects the concept of the flywheel, which he first described in his seminal book Good to Great.
Every CEO in our portfolio will be receiving a copy in the next month as part of our “book of the almost every month club.”
If you are a CEO trying to build an enduring company, get Turning the Flywheel now and read it this upcoming weekend.
We had our share of wildlife in Aspen. By mid-summer, this sign was on the road near our house. And, below is the mama bear that came and visited me almost every day in August.
It took all of my self-discipline to stay inside the house as every instinct I had was to go outside and play with it. Bears are my friend.
Rhinos, on the other hand, scare the shit out of me.
if you mess with the thicc unicorn you get the horn.
— The Warax. 🦛💨 (@iAmTheWarax) August 30, 2019
that’s the law. pic.twitter.com/BjKZqS0jBy
I don’t know whether it was Jerry Colonna or my therapist who recommended this to me, but I listened to David Whyte’s Midlife and the Great Unknown yesterday on my evening run.
As part of my acceptance of midlife, which I define as the transition into the stage where you know you have fewer days to live than the number of days you have already lived, I’ve been exploring a bunch of different things. One of them is poetry, which has always been extremely difficult for me to read.
So, I decided to try a combination of poetry, memoir, and reflections by David Whyte on Audible. I usually run without headphones, but I’m trying to reacclimate to the roads around my house in Boulder after spending the summer on the trails in Aspen, so I thought I’d listen to a book on tape. I’d downloaded Midlife a few months ago and it was at the top of the Audible list on my phone, so I just rolled with it.
About two miles up St. Vrain, as I was approaching the left turn on 47th, I settled into a groove where everything fell away. Whyte has a beautiful voice and I realized that listening to poetry is a lot easier for me than reading poetry. And, as I transitioned into the flow state that is a good run after the first 20 or so minutes, a smile crossed my face.
When I finished my eight miles, I was almost done with the two-hour-long Audible recording that I listened to at 1.25x speed. Amy was downstairs watching the US Open so I made my recovery smoothie, got in the hot tub, and had a wonderful half-hour phone call with my dad where we just talked about life as the sun went behind the Flatirons.
As I get comfortable with midlife, I see more poetry in my future.
When we started Techstars in 2006 we had one core goal in mind – helping entrepreneurs succeed. While it started as an experiment with one accelerator in Boulder, we now have about 50 accelerators annually around the world funding 500 startups a year. We also run Startup Weekends and Startup Weeks in over 150 cities globally, have a venture capital fund that invests in companies after they go through the accelerator program, and have a set of corporate innovation and ecosystem development programs that help bridge the gap between large enterprises, cities, and startups.
A key part of the ethos of Techstars is to always look for more ways to help entrepreneurs succeed whether or not they are part of the Techstars network.
Recently, we decided to start publishing the best content we have in the Techstars network. David Cohen and I came out with the 2nd Edition of Do More Faster: Techstars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup. Jason Mendelson and I are releasing the 4th Edition of Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist next week.
A new book in the Techstars Series is Sell More Faster: The Ultimate Sales Playbook for Startups written by Amos Schwartzfarb, the Managing Director of Techstars Austin.
Amos has been the Managing Director of Techstars Austin for four years and was one of the top mentors in Austin for the three years prior to him taking over MD role from Jason Seats (who is now Techstars’ Chief Investment Officer.) Prior to Techstars, Amos spent almost 20 years working at or founding startups including HotJobs.com, Work.com, Business.com, and Blacklocus where his job was always to figure out product-market fit and then build and scale the sales and client service organizations. These companies grew collectively to well over $200 million in revenue and had nearly $1 billion in exit value combined.
When Amos started his work mentoring at Techstars, he became a high demand mentor because virtually every company going through the Techstars Austin program sought him out for advice on figuring out sales. When he took over the role of MD for Techstars Austin, he quickly became one of the go-to resources for other MD at Techstars for sales related advice.
Amos decided to write Sell More Faster because he realized building early-stage sales organizations had become intuitive to him based on a simple but effective process he created back at Business.com called W3. This process stood for WHO is your customer, WHAT are they buying, and WHY do they buy it. However, he realized that of all the thousands of founders he speaks with each year, almost no one has a grasp on what it means to do “sales” in a startup. While they might understand sales in a mature company, it’s very different in a startup. In addition, as he looked around for books on sales for the founders going through Techstars Austin, while he found plenty of sales in general, he couldn’t find a great one addressing the tactical and operational side of building your sales strategy and process from day zero.
So he wrote it.
Sell More Faster: The Ultimate Sales Playbook for Startups is an awesome and straightforward playbook that takes you step by step through what you need to do from before you even start developing product all the way through to where you have found repeatability in your sales organization and are scaling the business. It’s a recipe that you’ll be able to refer back to throughout the life of your company and is the only sales book I’ve encountered for startups that address the “how-to of selling” from an operational perspective.
If you are a founder or responsible for sales in an early-stage company, do yourself a favor and grab a copy of Sell More Faster: The Ultimate Sales Playbook for Startups right now. It officially hits the stores on September 4th and you can pre-order yours now on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Finally, Amos will be doing a 20 city book tour this fall including a workshop on selling that accompanies the book. Watch the Sell More Faster website to see the dates when Amos comes to a city near you.
Enjoy – and don’t forgot to Sell More Faster!
Recently, I read a well-written article in Fast Company by Jon Dishotsky titled We need to be more honest about what tech culture is doing to our mental health.
In it, he had a list of lessons he has learned over the years.
- Look out for your wake-up call
- Create routines that prioritize mental health
- Work in line with your body’s rhythm
- Make time for silence
- Find space to unplug
- Give your emotions credit
- Cultivate (and listen to) your inner circle
These mental health suggestions are all right on the money. I encourage you to go read the article if this is a topic that interests you.