When I think of geniuses who inspire me, Stephen Wolfram is near the top of the list. I’ve never met him but have followed him from a distance since I was introduced to Mathematica in grad school in the late 1980s. Backchannel just published a a long, detailed exploration of the life of Ada Lovelace and her work with Charles Babbage that Wolfram wrote a few weeks ago. It’s awesome. By going through a lot of original source material, Wolfram formed his own view and discovered a number of things, including that the common reference to Ada Lovelace as “Enchantress of Numbers” is incorrect – Babbage actually referred her as the “Enchantress of Number” (9/9/1843 – letter from Babbage to Lovelace.)

Two words: Mattermark Daily When I started blogging in 2004 I think I was the third VC blogger after David Hornik* and Fred Wilson (if you were, or know, of another pre-2004 VC blogger, please tell me so I can update my historical recollection.) I remember lots of people asking me why I was doing it. I heard plenty of trash talk from other VCs, especially second hand, such as “He doesn’t have enough to do”, “He’s not spending his time doing his job”, or “What a waste of time.” I didn’t care, as I was doing it – like Fred often said – to help me think out loud in public, learn about different things, and get a conversation going around topics I was interested in. In retrospect, it was also helping me “practice writing” and without all the practice, it’s unlikely I would have ever gotten in the rhythm of writing a book a year.

A few days ago, I noticed that my MacBook Air fully charged battery life had suddenly gone from around seven hours to under two hours and the fan was going full speed. This has happened in the past and I couldn’t remember what I did to fix it. I blew it off for a few days until I got tired of having to plug my computer in every few hours. A quick look at Mac Activity Monitor showed me that Google Chrome Helper was eating up all my CPU (often at 100%) and subsequently crushing the battery life.

There are two common ways to scale a system – horizontally or vertically. If you are a software engineer, you probably get this instinctively. If you don’t know what this is, let’s work with the simple Wikipedia definition which is pretty good. Scale Vertically (or “scale up”): Add resources to a single node in a system, typically involving the addition of CPUs or memory to a single computer. Scale Horizontally (or “scale out”): Add more nodes to a system, such as adding a new computer to a distributed software application. Think of vertical scaling as building a bigger monolithic machine and horizontal scaling as add more machines to the system. Or, if you want a business construct, vertically scaling would be adding more people in one location while horizontal scaling would be creating a bunch of new locations, optimally with a similar footprint to the previous locations.

When I sat down at breakfast, I told Amy that the title of today’s blog post would be “A Steaming Pile of Dog Poop.” She suggested I come up with a different title. That’s Brooks the Wonder Dog. For the past six weeks, I’ve been walking him at least once a day. Typically I take him for an afternoon walk and an evening walk and Amy usually takes him for a morning walk. Today I did the morning walk also.

The Force Awakens has been particularly exciting to me since we are investors in Sphero. If you haven’t seen BB-8 from Sphero yet, take a look. I watched Star Wars for the first time the week it came out in 1977. I was 11. I’ve been an unashamed Star Wars fan since then, loving almost every moment except for the ones I had to suffer through with Jar Jar Binks. It turns out that I’m about six months older than J.J. Abrams so I feel similar to him about Star Wars.

As I sit here watching Amy play tennis with her coach Mason (I hurt my shoulder serving so I’m taking a few days off), I’m reflecting on my first week back on the grid after a five week sabbatical. A few things come to mind. 1. Amy’s tennis game has improved dramatically over the past six weeks. She’s always had nice strokes, but she definitely has been playing beginner tennis. As I watch her play, everything has elevated at least a level for her including her confidence on the court. It’s beautiful and I expect her tennis girlfriends will have a big challenge on their hands when she returns. And, I’m ready to start (and look forward to) playing mixed doubles with her.

Over the years at Foundry Group we’ve built an extensive network of companies. While we’ve invested in some of these directly, this actually represents the smallest set of companies that we are involved with. We have also invested indirectly in many others through our investment in Techstars. Yet another, and much larger set of companies, come from our investments in other venture funds. In 2013, we started thinking hard about the future of Foundry Group. When we started Foundry in 2006 we were very clear that we were not going to build a legacy firm. There would be no generational planning, no transitions to younger partners, and no senior partner hold-outs who would hang onto economics well after they had stopped working. Simply put, when we are done investing, we will drop the mic and shut off the lights.

If you play tennis almost every day for five weeks you get a lot better. I’m back from what was an amazing sabbatical. Last year Amy and I went to Bora Bora. This year we went to Rancho Valencia – a tennis resort near San Diego. In addition to turning 50, I had an incredible mental, emotional, and physical reset. Two years ago, Seth, Jason, Ryan, and I decided that we would each take a month off the grid each year. We’d do this asynchronously so only one person would be on sabbatical at a time. We’ve now had two cycles of this.