You know the phrase – it’s said with some disdain, frustration, disappointment, or dejection.
Well – it happens. My partner Heidi Roizen’s assistant (Mary Bush’s) father-in-law Chuck Bush just won the $44m California Saturday jackpot ($17m lump sump payment after taxes.) I’ve never met Chuck, but Mary is awesome and my understanding is that Chuck is too. So – good people do win these things.
The next time someone groans out this phrase, tell them to be optimistic – it could happen (of course, you have to “suit up, show up, and play the game” also, but that’s a different metaphor.)
I mentioned recently that we have a place in Homer, Alaska. A common refrain that we hear from our friends is “where is Homer?”
Well, believe it or not, the New York Times wrote an article on Homer in today’s NY Times (Friday, 7/23) titled 36 Hours In Homer, Alaska. It’s a cute story that hits some of the highlights of this place that we find amazing, fun, therapeutic, and wacky.
In case you were concerned that there’s no actual “culture” up here, we saw Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale tonight. It was performed at the Pier One Theater by the Fairbanks Shakespeare Theater. Like all Shakespeare, it took me about twenty minutes to get the rhythm (and a clue about what was going on) but once I did, it was hilarious and extremely well done. The theater was packed (which means about 50 people). The play was set in late 19th century Alaska (surprise). The cast was outstanding.
Now, if we only had a symphony up here…
Yesterday, IAC/InterActiveCorp announced that it acquired ServiceMagic.
ServiceMagic connects homeowners with prescreened and customer-rated residential contractors, real estate professionals and lenders. They are the market leader in this category of local services with over 50,000 active service professionals using their services, having facilitated more than 2.4 million customer request for home services, and generating an estimated $8.4 billion in consumer spending.
We invested in ServiceMagic in the fall of 1999. The co-founders – Michael Beaudoin and Rodney Rice – did an extraordinary job of creating a real company that survived the dotcom implosion, came out the other end with a strong business, did $20m of revenue in 2003, and was profitable and cash flow positive. IAC/InterActiveCorp has assembled a powerhouse e-commerce business through their acquisitions of companies such as Expedia, Hotels.com, Hotwire, Ticketmaster, Match.com, Citysearch, Evite, and LendingTree. ServiceMagic is another great addition to their Local & Media Services segment.
We’re all extremely excited about the transaction. Congrats Mike and Rodney!
I’m an email junkie. As a user, I not-so-fondly remember Compuserve, Novell MHS, and Pine. As an investor, I’ve been involved in Email Publishing (first email service bureau), MessageMedia, Infobeat/Exactis, Critical Path, Postini, and Return Path. Recently there’s been a lot of noise about how email is on the decline. I don’t understand this as I use it more than ever and see its adoption continuing unabated.
Matt Blumberg has a great, thoughtful post on email that’s worth reading if you have anything to do with the email business. Matt’s the CEO of Return Path and he acknowledges that his post is self-serving, but it’s content rich and right on the money.
I live in Boulder, Colorado. However, my wife Amy and I spend as much time as we can in Alaska. She was born in Anchorage, lived in Anchor Point (near Homer) until she was eight, and then lived in Fairbanks until she graduated from high school and moved to Boston to go to college. We’ve been coming up to Alaska together for the last decade and it has become a huge passion of mine. While Colorado is amazing, Alaska is Amazing^10.
We’re spending a good chunk of the summer at our place in Homer, Alaska. I’ve been bumping into some Alaska-centric posts in the blogosphere and smiled when I ran a link that sent me to a story titled Great White North by Ron Sanders. If you like travel or adventure stories, ride a motorcycle, know anything about the Alcan highway, or just want to read a fun story by a software nerd about his motorcycle trip to Alaska, check it out.
I went to the gym today (we have one in Homer – it’s small, but it works) to do my semiweekly (or is it biweekly – twice a week) weight workout that my running coach makes (ok – begs) me to do. I hate weights (my standard reaction to anyone that suggests we go lift weights is that jews don’t do weights), but I capitulate to my coach.
The gym was pretty full (by Homer standards – about ten people). While I was resting between sets, I stretched and looked at the other folks working out (something I never do in a large club – I end up in with my eyes in that “glazed over not looking at anyone or anything mode.”) I was stunned by what I saw. There was a guy on a stairmaster that was literally hunched over at a 90 degree angle to his legs reading a magazine while he lifted his legs straight up. Another guys was riding a bike, but had his chest lying on the bike readout / reading stand thing – again – almost bent over at 90 degrees. Both of these guys looked brutalized after about 10 minutes of jamming their legs up and down at a weird angle to the rest of their contorted body.
In contrast, there was a woman about my age that was doing a workout that was similar to mine. Her form was perfect and it showed – her muscles were well defined, she was calm during her workout, and was moving about twice the weight I was with what appeared to be moderate effort. She noticed the hunchbacks also at some point and nodded to me – pointing at them – as we passed during a break. She was extremely aware of her form – not because anyone was watching her (I don’t give myself that much credit), but because she knew the benefit of perfect form to what she was trying to accomplish.
As I settled into another set, I consciously thought about how I was sitting, what I was doing, and how the various parts of my body were moving to accomplish the task at hand. It’s a good metaphor for so much of life – if you pay attention to your form, you get better results.
I wrote about the merger of EYT and ePartners a few weeks ago.
Today, ePartners announced that Microsoft had named it Global Partner of the Year at Microsoft’s annual Worldwide Partner Conference. While not as exciting as the $32 billion Microsoft dividend announced yesterday, it’s great news for ePartners as the Global Partner award is Microsoft’s highest Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) award.
Congrats to the ePartners team!
That got your attention, huh? There it is – on page 233 – as our intrepid authors speculate on the title of their upcoming Inc. Magazine interview (which was – thankfully titled – An American Start-Up – subtitled “We’re motivated, passionate, excited, terrified, and, at many times, have absolutely no idea what we’re doing.”)
When I was starting my first company, I read all kinds of books from entrepreneurs and founders of companies that “seemed successful.” Many of these were autobiographical, self-promoting drivel. I eventually gave up and rarely read these today.
Matt Blumberg’s review turned me on to this one. The MouseDriver Chronicles is a great story, well written, fast paced, and has a very “blog-like we’ll share everything” feel. The authors – who co-founded a business to create a mouse that looks like a golf driver immediately upon graduating from Wharton Business School – tell all. They spare no one, least of all themselves.
Since the business was started in 1999, they spend a lot of time reflecting on how their buddies are doing in the dotcom explosion while they toil away in obscurity at a markedly low tech business. A chapter aptly titled Schadenfreude near the end of the book allows our fearless entrepreneurs a small measure of satisfaction to have created a successful, albeit modest, business in the midst of what became the dotcom implosion.
This is a must read for any entrepreneur – first time or otherwise. Their stories are great and their lessons are clear. For example, the chapter titled Darkness, Darkness, Darkness, Darkness is about – well – when everything completely goes to shit early in the life of the business. It’s an experience that any entrepreneur that has survived the creation of a company will recall clearly (possibly with glee that it’s in the rearview mirror, it’s happened a bunch of times since, and Mr. Entrepreneur has survived). Out of this, our fearless leaders realize that “Making and Selling – that’s all any business is, really, from Boeing to the corner lemonade stand. The rest is dreaming, description, and distraction.”
Great stuff. I wish there were more books in the world like this one.
Amy agreed to move to Stepford with me tonight.
We saw the priceless remake of the classic The Stepford Wives in our little town’s theater (the other movie was Spiderman 2).
“This place does something to people – all of the women are always smiling,” said Joanna (Nicole Kidman). “That’s a problem because?” queries her husband Walter (Matthew Broderick). “That’s not normal Walter!” exclaimes Joanna.
I finally lost it when Claire (Glenn Close) says “I wondered where we could put a town of robots and no one would notice and I thought – Connecticut!”
Heh heh.