Relationships

On Wednesday I did my final One-on-One with Phil Weiser on the topic of Work-Life Balance. Rocky Radar did a great job of summarizing it in the post Feld on Life Balance: “Accomplish What You Want, Not What You Think You Have to”**. w3w3.com recorded it – you can listen to it here . Since it was at 5:30 and on a beautiful evening, I figured there would probably only be 10 people in the audience. The room was packed and the questions were really fun. Hopefully everyone got something out of it.

Wow – that was a great and much needed week off the grid. Both Amy and I were exhausted. But, we are back (although she is about to decamp to Keystone for the summer to work on her book.) Before I checked out I spent 36 hours in Idaho with my friends at Highway 12 Ventures at the Idavation Conference . My keynote speech is up on their website along with me hosting the Idaho’s Top Geeks panel. Mark and Pam Solon were incredible hosts – I had a great first trip to Boise along with a superb run with Ryan Woodings of Metageek (really cool wi-spy product). This was my second trip to Idaho – Amy just tossed up pictures from last years Ashton Idaho Marathon with the Blumbergs. ...

On Wednesday, June 10th, 6:00-7:00pm in the Wittemyer Courtroom, Wolf Law Building at CU Boulder I’m doing an interview with Phil Weiser titled Feld on Work-Life Balance*.* I’ve written extensively about Work-Life Balance on this blog and have a wide range of opinions and perspectives on it. Phil’s intro the event sets it up nicely. For entrepreneurs, lawyers, and other professionals, work-life balance is often a topic that individuals plan on thinking about when they have time. For Brad Feld, this topic “took me 15 years, a failed first marriage, and my current wife (Amy Batchelor, Wellesley Graduate) almost calling it quits for me to realize that I had to figure out what ‘work life balance’ meant to me.” This recognition led to Brad’s commitment to a series of rules, which evolved into a set of habits that include: ...

If you watch Lost and are current, you know that the “Variable” is extremely important. As Daniel Faraday says, “we spend way too much time trying to figure out the constants – we need to pay more attention to the variables.” On Saturday I was at the Nantucket Conference (the 10th one.) I did not have a great time getting there (note to self – you get seasick even on the high speed boat thing) but I had a great time hanging out, participating (I was on the VC panel), seeing a bunch of people I hadn’t seen for a while, and meeting some new ones. ...

I love tennis. I don’t play nearly as much as I’d like to. About half of my Qx vacations with Amy include tennis; the first day is usually frustrating as I dust the rust off my strokes. By the third day I’m getting back into it and by day five I’m fantasizing about all the tennis I’m going to play when I get back home. I then don’t play much, except a little in the summer. I repeat this cycle on another Qx vacation. ...

Several months ago my friend Ben Casnocha sent me an article from Boston.com titled How the city hurts your brain… And what you can do about it . The article starts out strong and continues all the way through. “Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting — that’s why Picasso left Paris — this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.” ...

I was in a board meeting yesterday with a company planning a major commercial release of their product “at the end of summer”. We managed to turn this into 8/31/09 at 11:59:59pm pacific time (since I don’t believe you can release something unless there is a time/date stamp associated with it.) As part of this discussion, we spent some time discussing the notion of a daily / weekly / monthly rhythm for both the CEO/CTO as well as the product team. ...

I spent the past 10 days on the road in a bunch of different cities (New York, Bar Harbor, Boston, Westford, New York again, Tysons Corner, Alexandria, Owings Mills) doing a bunch of different things (stuff with MIT, our LPs, our companies, some friends, my partner Jason, Amy, and myself). As is my typical fashion, I didn’t pay much attention to the news while I was traveling – allowing myself one read through the headlines each day as part of my morning routine. This left my brain pretty clear to concentrate on the things I was doing and pick up the nuances of how people were thinking and feeling based on what they were saying and doing. ...

I’m baffled whenever I hear from a CEO that he’s having trouble getting a response from one of his VC investors. Unfortunately, this is a very common occurrence in VC-backed company land. After noticing this during the Internet bubble around the turn of the century (doesn’t that make it seem like so very long ago), I’m starting to notice this again more frequently. As I pondered this the other day, I tried to discern a pattern, but I just think it’s just the way the universe works for some people. ...

Tim O’Reilly tweeted a link to an article titled How To Concentrate which was originally published in 1930. It is excellent and worth reading slowly (presumably while you are concentrating.) Amy often tells me that I have “Amazing Powers of Concentration.” If you are a Pink Floyd fan, you will get the subtle reference to a line from Nobody Home. The line is actually “And Amazing Powers of Observation”, but Amy is generously applying it to my actual skill. Entertainingly (as in circus trick) I have a second amazing power – that of “total recall of the last thing someone said to me while I was concentrating on something else.” I use this very effectively in my marriage. ...