My brother Daniel sent an email to the family last Wednesday with the subject line “Proud Dad alert!” His daughter Sabrina had just built and launched a portfolio website from scratch. She didn’t use Squarespace or Wix. She built a custom Next.js site with scroll-triggered animations, a frosted glass navigation header, a custom image carousel with lightbox, and six page templates – all self-hosted on Netlify . ...
Turning 60 in December marked an important moment for me. A key section from that blog post was: “I’ve definitely shifted into a new mode over the past year. I’m still on a bunch of boards for Foundry and deeply involved in several companies. But I’m much less focused on the broader technology industry, uninterested in many of the things that are going on, and tired+bored of the arc the narrative about technology and society has taken.” ...
My father Stan and I in our default states. lsof -ti:3000 | xargs kill -9 2>/dev/null; npm run dev I’ve been wandering up to 60 for a while. During my extreme-extroversion around Give First: The Power of Mentorship I described myself as “almost 60” a bunch of times just to try it on. ...
I’m 50% of the way through being out of hibernation and am very looking forward to turning back into a pumpkin at midnight on Halloween. I’m not traveling in August and have settled into being in one place (Aspen) after running around the United States for the past few months. In hindsight, it was too much. When I was younger, the travel I just did was “moderate.” But, between my actual work, age, post-exertional malaise , and the normal energy dynamics associated with shifting between Brad-introvert and Brad-extrovert mode, it has been physically (and psychologically) challenging. ...
As a proud early Gen Xer, I was in ninth grade when Back in Black came out. It was my favorite song for at least a week, and it’s still in my top 10 (something by Rush likely displaced it.) As a teenager, I knew everything about AC/DC (at least everything you could know before the Internet existed.) I wandered around that week proudly telling everyone who would listen that the song was a brilliant tribute to Bon Scott. ...
I’ve decided to come out of hibernation until at least Labor Day. While this coincides with the publication of my new book, Give First: The Power of Mentorship , I also have a few things on my mind that I feel like blogging about. If you know me, you probably know that I explore ideas by writing about them, and have always learned a lot when I think out loud by writing in public. ...
I got the following email from Barry Schuler this morning. We’ve known each other for many years, and he’s one of my favorite VCs to work with. He described exactly how I feel this morning. The fall is my favorite season of the year. By labor day, I’m ready for summer to end. The stretch until Thanksgiving is my most productive time of year. I finally feel like writing again after a summer off (most of my books come out in the late spring / early summer, so I’m fried and uninterested in writing during the summer.) ...
“Turn off the TV and go outside and play.” I expect these are words that have been said in almost every household in America. Amy and I hit the bottom of the TV barrel last week while watching Army of the Dead . It was so awful it was good. But it was awful. And … It’s June 1 and I’m done for the summer. No TV until Labor Day weekend. And then, maybe no TV after that. ...
It has been a long winter. Really long. From my perspective, winter has been about 17 months, going back to November 2019. The Covid crisis started just as spring 2020 was beginning. As a result, winter continued through the spring, summer, and fall. And then, well, winter … I took a half-week vacation last week. I planned for a Q1 vacation, but I had some stuff on Monday and some more stuff on Wednesday, so I just decided to start my vacation on Thursday. I went off the grid, had Amy drive me to Superior, and spent Thursday and Friday running in the mountains back to my house in Longmont. I did an easy run on Saturday and then drove to Waterton Canyon early Sunday and went for a long run there. Between runs, I read a bunch of books and napped. ...
I no longer subscribe to many daily email newsletters, but I’ve kept a few. My favorite to wake up to is Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic . Today’s headline was It’s Possible to Tune These Things Out but it linked to an older post titled The True Power Behind Stoic “Indifference” . At morning coffee a while ago, Amy and I had a long conversation about the phrase “I don’t care.” I struggled to explain what I was trying to say and how it was often misunderstood when I said it. Through her reaction and feedback, she helped me better understand what people heard when I said “I don’t care.” ...