Relationships

I love this time of year. I get up at 5am, catch up on email (holy shit – is it already 6:37?), write a blog post, go for a run, and then have a completely jam packed day full of working with amazing people. Some days are awesome, some days have crushing challenges, all of them are stimulating. For as long as I can remember, I’ve run incredibly hot from Labor Day through Thanksgiving. The boundaries seem to be the holidays and the bookends are Amy’s birthday (9/14) and my birthday (12/1). We often find ourselves in New York around Amy’s birthday and in some exotic warm beach place (like Mexico) on mine. Between the two is complete and total chaos, which is delicious when I give myself up to it rather than fight it. ...

I’ve had my share of vomit moments – both in business and in life. It’s that moment where a specific thing happens that causes you to want to run into the bathroom and vomit, which you sometimes actually do. Some of my memorable vomit moments including the night that I asked my first wife if she was having an affair and she nonchalantly said “yes.” Or when I woke up at 4am in the morning and realized Feld Technologies would be out of money in two days if I didn’t go collect some of our accounts receivable – primarily from customers who were clearly stalling to pay because of their financial issues. Or when I finally came to terms with the fact that the only real option for Interliant, a company I had founded and had gone public, was to file for Chapter 11 because we simply couldn’t service our debt. Or when I got sued for $150 million for fraud and read through the first filing which had my name on every page at least 10 times (after three years the suit was settled for for $625,000 and there was no finding of fraud – the other side spent $3m to get $625k – ultimately not a good plan for them.) Or when I got a call that a close friend, who was a CEO of a public company at the time, and his wife had been in a near fatal car accident and were both in surgery (they ended up surviving, recovering, and are doing great.) Or when I got a call that an acquisition of a company I was an investor in, which we had struggled through for months and was an outstanding outcome for everyone involved, had been called off because it wasn’t approved at the board level of the public acquirer. Or when I was on an airplane with my three Foundry Partners coming back from NY and we were diverted to Colorado Springs because of a massive storm in Denver and as we were landing I literally threw up – for the first time ever on a plane – because it was such an excruciating landing. ...

My partner Seth Levine turns 40 today. I’ve known and worked with him for 11 years. It’s been awesome. My first memory of Seth is him showing up in our office at 100 Superior Way with red velour platform shoes. There wasn’t much I could say since I was probably wandering around barefoot or in sandals at the time. But it made an impression – I knew he’d always be more stylish than me. ...

The title of this post “Work diligently, work intelligently, work patiently and persistently” is a powerful line from S.N. Goenka that is part of magnificent blog post by Ben Casnocha titled Reflections and Impressions from a 10-Day Meditation Course . On July 18th, Ben wrote a post titled Something I Think I Could Fail At: 10 Day Silent Meditation Program , promptly went to Northern California Vipassana Meditation Center , and went off the grid for ten days. He resurfaced today. His post about his experience is awesome – go read it now. ...

I’m not a huge sports fan – in my house I’m the sports widow during football season since Amy is a total football fanatic (although she’s pretty down on the new Broncos quarterback.) So – I sit downstairs with her while she watches sports and I bang away on my computer. We are watching the Olympics today. I always get sucked into the Olympics especially individual sports like swimming, tennis, and track and field. As I was watching the heats for the 400 IM and pondering Phelps and Lochte I suddenly realized how inspiring the Olympics are to me. ...

The phrase “it comes with the territory” is one my dad said to me when I was a kid. I can’t remember the context in which I heard it for the first time, but I internalized it to mean that whenever you are trying to do something interesting or amazing, there will always be people who try to tear you down, lob random insults at you, or just do and say things that make no sense to you. I’ve also observed many times (and experienced) the steep curve from obscurity to hero to goat to re-emergent hero that the media loves to play out over and over again. And my day is filled with random interactions – many of them interesting and stimulating – but plenty of them hostile, negative, and troll-like. ...

Last week my friends at FullContact announced a new paid vacation policy and wrote a post about it titled Paid Vacation? That’s Not Cool. You Know What’s Cool? Paid, PAID Vacation . FullContact will now pay an employee $7500 to go on vacation. The rules are simple: You have to go on vacation. You have to disconnect entirely (no phone, no email). You can’t work. If that whets your appetite, take a look at the presentation about the new policy. ...

Are you “too busy?” When someone asks you how you are doing do you immediately respond with something like “I”m incredibly busy?” If the answer is yes, go read the amazing opinion piece in the NY Times by Tim Kreider titled The ‘Busy’ Trap . I’ll wait. I’ve spent the last month at my house in Keystone in Maker Mode . I’m about to submit the final draft of “Startup Communities: Build An Entrepreneurial Ecosystem In Your City” to my publisher on Thursday. I’m closing two new investments in July. I’m running my 22nd marathon in Missoula in a week after raising $11,487 as a Random Act of Kindness for Justin Salcedo from Devine, TX who has testicular cancer. I’ve stayed on top of the 250 to 500 emails a day I get and have been responsive to all of the companies I’m an investor in. ...

Amy – we have been married for 19 years today. Some of our friends chose today to get married such as my partner Seth and his wife Greeley. Other close friends are celebrating anniversaries, including Fred and Joanne (25th yesterday) and my parents (49th a few days ago) . We are in good company even though we are still newlyweds compared to them. And, as a bonus, 19 is a prime number as is the sum of the digits of the date (06/21/2012). ...

An hour ago I received a phone call from one of my closest friends who has been a hugely influential mentor of mine that his wife had passed away. She was a close friend also and they’ve had an enormous impact on my life. She’s been ill for a while so this isn’t a surprise and when I saw her about a month ago I knew her time was coming. But it’s still incredibly hard to process, especially knowing how close they were as a couple. ...