Dear Discord: Please go public and stay independent instead of being acquired. Love, Brad. I’ve become a huge Discord fan and user of the past year. I’ve got many daily reference points from products that I use for real-time communication channels: Slack, Telegram, Signal, iMessage, Zoom, Voxer, Mighty, and of course, email. An increasing number of my group communications is on Discord. There was a ramp-up on Slack several years ago across organizations, but I find it noisy, not terribly easy to navigate, and tiresome for various reasons.

The best businesses are data-driven and metrics-driven. Instead of simply tracking top-line metrics, every person in the organization understands their role, how they impact the business metrics, and how this impacts its larger goals. One of the biggest mistakes I see companies make is fooling themselves into thinking they are metrics-driven because they are good at reporting high-level and often lagging metrics. Companies that achieve breakout success and longevity have a much deeper and richer understanding of their business’s nuances.

On my run to Boulder on Saturday, I listened to The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. My run was about four hours long, which was roughly the time it took to listen to this spectacular book. The quick summary from Wikipedia follows: Kaku explores the history of unification theories of Physics starting with Newton’s law of universal gravitation which unified our experience of gravity on Earth and the motions of the celestial bodies to Einstein’s general relativity and quantum mechanics and the Standard Model. Kaku dubs the final Grand Unified Theory of relativity and quantum gravity The God Equation with an 11-dimensional String theory as the only self-consistent theory that seems to fit the bill.

I listened to Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times on Audible over the past week. It was spectacular. Danielle Morrill recommended it to me. We had an intense up and down journey together with Mattermark, which was doing great until we made a fundamentally bad decision around the company’s strategic direction. The ride down, especially against the backdrop of what I expect would have been a success if we hadn’t made that strategic decision, was extremely challenging. We both learned from it, and it’s been awesome to see the journey that Danielle has been on since.

Amy and I watched Bridge of Spies over the weekend. We enjoyed it, but particularly loved one interaction between the lawyer (James Donovan) and the accused Russian spy (Rudolf Abel). Donovan: You don’t seem alarmed? Abel: Would it help? At multiple climactic moments, the line “Would it help?’ got rolled out. It had the same kind of resonance with us to one of our favorite movie lines ever (from Argo).

My partner Chris Moody recently sent around a note on a concept he refers to as Leader Leverage. I encourage every CEO to read and consider it. His rant follows. Many of you are probably tired of hearing me rant about some form of what I often refer to as “leader leverage”. If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid these rants, the quick summary is that your biggest lever as a board member is the CEO and your biggest lever as CEO is your direct reports. I learned this lesson the hard way running a very decentralized business with 70 offices in 17 countries at Aquent.

Over the past year, we’ve seen an increase of people from across the business and political spectrum join the fight against climate change and pledge to support a greener, more sustainable future. Investors are seeking both financial returns and environmental impact and looking for opportunities to partner with ventures that are working to tackle our world’s biggest energy and environmental challenges. Enter Cleantech Open, the world’s largest and oldest cleantech accelerator for cleantech, climate tech, and sustainability startups. Through Cleantech Open, startups can build their entrepreneurship skills and professional networks, access expert mentorship, and connect with potential investors, partners, and customers. Cleantech Open is currently accepting applications for its 2021 cohort, and you can learn more and apply here by April 18.

My partner Chris Moody came up with a great idea he’s calling #BoulderStrongTableMesa. This is in response to the mass murder that happened at the King Soopers in Table Mesa on Monday, March 22nd. What if the Boulder community doubled down on #BoulderStrong to show support for the small businesses located in the Table Mesa Shopping Center directly impacted by this tragedy? After an extremely challenging year trying to keep their businesses running through a global pandemic, the small shops and restaurants of the Table Mesa Shopping Center are now facing the near impossible task of trying to return to business-as-usual. I visited a few of these shops this week and have heard stories of employees hearing gunshots and being forced to shelter-in-place. The parking lots adjacent to King Soopers are occupied by police vehicles and mourners visiting the site. “Trying to hang in there, was a response I heard from one store owner when I asked how things were going. He looked exhausted. 

I sort of took a Q1 Vacation last week. 2021 didn’t really feel like it started for me until January 21st. Yeah, I took a company public on January 4th, but then January 6th happened. It was a cold, dark, and anxious stretch where January felt like it had about 51 days in it. Then I was deep in SPACland and lots of deals and financings. I definitely had some “I just need to get to March 26th, and then I get a break” in my head.