Random

I woke up to an email from a close friend of 25 years that his wife had passed away unexpectedly last night. She’d been fighting cancer for several years, had made progress, then had setbacks, and then made progress again. While I knew them both, I’d spent many hours over the years with my friend, so I immediately felt his sense of loss because I know how central his wife was to his life. I just hugged Amy and sent her out into the world for her day with tears in my eyes the phrase “In the end, entropy always wins.” ...

Ok – first nerd joke of 2017 for me. Yup. 2017 is a prime number. But 2017 is a pretty special prime . In fact 2017 is a sexy prime with 2011 – bet you didn’t know that! The Shrike né Predator and I wish you a Happy New Year. If you need a great blog to start 2017 with, give yourself the gift of following the Daily Overview. And, buy the book – it will blow your mind.

Jonathon Triest and Brett deMarrais of Ludlow Ventures are doing a fun video podcast series called Carpool.VC . As Jonathan and Brett drive to work, they do a podcast interview. It’s hilarious, fun, and informative. I did it early (6am California Time) on Tuesday. In it, you’ll learn my spirit animal, doppelganger, how Jonathon and I met (I’m now an investor in Ludlow Ventures), and a bunch of other random things. I also agreed to sponsor the episode for $1.70.

I’ve been heads down this week on a handful of transactions. As a result, I haven’t been paying much attention to the world around me, but it’s inevitable that some stuff leaks through in random conversations, emails that I get and skim to respond to later, or stuff I notice, even though I’m not looking. While I was just in the shower, I had a handful of random things roll through my head that I realized were creating intellectual dissonance for me. They are the kind of thing that I like to dissect and chew on, and expect I’ll blog deeper about some of them. Whenever I feel intellectual dissonance, it’s usually a leading indicator of something. It’s not necessarily “something bad”, but it’s almost always “something different.” ...

I’ve decided to try something new on this blog. Rather than using up full posts for short announcements, I’ve added a new block for announcements at the top of the home page. It’s in orange, will generally be only a few lines, and include a link. Since these are just blog posts being formatted differently, they will show up in the RSS feed and the daily email. In addition, there is a page in the Archives for the announcements. ...

My mom sent me this today. It’s still possibly one of the funniest comedy routines I’ve ever seen. I saw it for the first time as a little kid and I remember rolling on the floor laughing. A brilliant demonstration of how complicated the English language can be, even in its simplicity. By about minute six, my guess is Abbott is feeling like most entrepreneurs do when they are tangled up in something. ...

I’m gearing up for a long series of posts about the various books I read on my month off on Bora Bora. In the mean time, I read a bunch of stuff online this morning (from Friday through today) and thought I’d give you a taste of some of it in case you feel like digging in. I started with How Reading Transforms Us . It’s a good frame setting piece about some new research on the impact of reading – both fiction and non-fiction – on humans. There is a pleasant surprise in there about how non-fiction influences us. ...

I love today’s post from Nick Grossman at USV. It’s titled Everyone is broken and life is hard and he starts out with a clarifying statement. “That’s a pretty depressing and fatalistic post title, but I actually mean it in a positive and encouraging way. Let me explain. It’s easy to go about your life, every day, feeling like everyone else has their shit together and that the things you struggle with are unique to you. ...

A few years ago, David Cohen and I started a Colorado CEO Jobs list in response to the regular stream of inbound email we got from folks looking to move to Colorado and interested in tech-related jobs. We seeded this list with CEOs from companies Foundry Group and Techstars had invested in. As other CEOs requested access to the list, we added them. The list was managed in Yahoo Groups and had about 100 CEOs on it. It was simple – emails from people looking for jobs came to me or David and we forwarded them to the list. The hit rate was very high – I regularly get feedback from people that they’ve ended up with multiple interviews and a job from the introduction. ...

As we roll into the weekend, and I start another digital sabbath, I’ve got the question “what really matters about being human” rolling through my mind. I spent the afternoon at the Silicon Flatirons conference SciFi and Entrepreneurship – Is Resistance Futile? I thought it was phenomenal and remarkably thought provoking. I came back to my office to find Dane and Eugene playing TitanFall on my 75″ screen. In a few minutes I’m heading out to dinner with my parents, Amy, and John Underkoffler of Oblong who was in town for the conference. The juxtaposition of another intense week rolling into the weekend and a day off the grid intrigues me. ...