Productivity

At 7:52, I was upstairs having coffee with Amy. It’s a new routine that we started at the beginning of Covid. Every morning we have coffee together. Long-time readers of this blog or our book Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur will recognize this as the evolution of our daily “Four Minutes in the Morning” ritual. “Morning coffee” lasts about 30 minutes. We each make a cup of coffee in our magical Nespresso machine. Mine is simple – put a random capsule in and press the button. Amy’s is more elaborate since it involves milk, a microwave, sugar, and the Nespresso machine. We then sit together in the living room and talk about how we slept, our Whoop recovery scores, and what is to come for the day ahead. That’s the four-minute part. We then let the conversation take us wherever it goes. The last few days, we’ve talked about octopuses, the Nature Conservancy, a Zen garden we are designing, tents, the dog next door who barks hello to us, winter turning into spring, summer adventures, estate planning, friends who just had a great exit for their business, and knitting. ...

Today, I’m helping amplify a $50,000 fundraiser for Sophie’s Neighborhood as part of World Pediatric Bone & Joint Day . Amy and I just contributed $25,000 so we are effectively matching any contributions dollar for dollar up to $50,000. Whenever I feel exogenous stress from the world, it helps me lower it by doing something to support someone in need. The #Calwood fires just outside of Boulder that broke out on Saturday added to a pile from 2020 that is beyond anything I’ve experienced in my life. ...

Multiple times a day, someone in my network asks if I’ll make an intro to someone else. I’m almost always happy to do this and, if not, I will explain why. I like to do opt-in intros, where I ask the person on the potential receiving end of the intro if they are open to the intro. Most of the time people say yes. Sometimes they say no. Very occasionally they don’t respond to me. ...

I was going to take a week off the grid next week, but I’ve got a bunch of podcasts and media recordings to do for my upcoming book The Startup Community Way . I also want to continue spending time in the new Startup Community community , which now has over 2,000 people in it and is growing and self-organizing at a rapid clip. And I have a few Foundry things to do. ...

I got the following note from a friend this morning. Hey. Over the past 6 to 12 months, I seem to be getting more requests from individuals in the City-1, City-2, and City-3 asking for introductions to you. Curious as to your preference in how to handle some of these. Many words on the web have been written about double opt-in email intros . This is the best and simplest way when you know the person asking for the intro and think the intro would be a good one. ...

My dad’s posts over the past two days put me in a reflective mood about work. I’ve been working hard around computers and entrepreneurship since the summer between my senior year in high school and my freshman year at MIT. That first real job was as the first employee of Petcom, a company started by a husband and wife team that grew to about 20 people before the oil and gas market for software evaporated in 1985. ...

A few weeks ago I read Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now . It helped consolidate some thinking on my part and I sent a few copies out to friends who I knew would have thoughtful and interesting responses. One that came back is very worth reading as it has a healthy critique as well as some personal reflections. The note from my friend after reading Lanier’s book follows. ...

I’ve got a lot on my plate. I always do. Presumably, I like it this way because I’d change things if I didn’t. And yes, that’s continuous fodder for conversations with my therapist and with Amy. I have always tried to ignore the macro, especially short-term dynamics, in the context of my work. I collect a lot of data and like to be well informed. I get this data from lots of different inputs. I regularly play around with the volume on the inputs as well as try different inputs. ...

Given my role in the world, I say no a lot. I get hundreds of unsolicited emails a day, often asking me to get together, invest, or look at something. Lots of VCs and execs who I know simply ignore and don’t respond to these emails. I’ve always tried to at least respond to them unless they are clearly a mass email. A long time ago I learned how to quickly identify what I don’t want to spend time on, which I wrote about in 2009 in my post titled Saying No In Less Than 60 Seconds . As time has passed, I’ve tuned this filter more, as the volume of requests has gone up. ...

It’s summertime and Snoopy is happy. I’m happy also. Summer is my favorite season. I’ve always been at my most creative in the summer and some of the profound life experiences that influenced me happened during the summer. When I was a pre-teen, summer meant tennis. Endless tennis. Eight+ hours a day in the Texas heat except for the three weeks I went to Camp Champions . It was awesome. I remember one summer with over 30 days of temperatures over 100 degrees. A break for lunch inside at the North Dallas Racquet Club felt really decadent. It was always a challenge to get back outside at 1pm, but we did it. And kept playing tennis. ...