I’m working on a new book with Dave Jilk, my first business partner. It is titled The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors. We are in the home stretch (it’ll be published sometime in the second quarter), and I’m adding a little connecting tissue to the major sections this morning. The third major section (of five) is called Free Spirits. Dave had already written the section introduction, which meant that I had 20% less writing to do this morning than I expected.

Poetry is complex, beautiful, and mysterious. My wife Amy writes poetry. So does my first business partner Dave Jilk (Rejuvenilia, Distilled Moments). There is a lot of poetry in my house. Both Amy and I had tears in our eyes after listening to Amanda Gorman yesterday. I knew America had a national poet laureate, but I didn’t know we had a national youth poet laureate. We’ve now had four; Amanda was the first.

In the US, we are currently getting a master class in “how not to lose.” When I was young, my parents regularly said to me, “Don’t be a sore loser.” I was a serious tennis player between the age of 10 and 14. John McEnroe was my hero, so, not surprisingly, I had a temper on the court. I threw my racket, screamed a lot (mostly at myself), and moped around when I lost.

At lunch today, Amy said “Welcome to January 112th.” I just got an email from a friend that included the line, “I’m writing off the first 20 days of the year, so here’s to a much different 2021 starting next week!” I didn’t really mark the end of the year as the “end of this phase.” The Covid crisis continues. The economic crisis continues. The mental health crisis continues. The racial equity crisis continues. Economic inequity is accelerating at a crazy pace. We just had an armed insurrection in the United States. 4,406 people died of Covid in the US in the last 24 hours.

Today, Techstars announced that Maëlle Gavet has joined as CEO. When David Cohen, David Brown, Jared Polis, and I started Techstars in 2006, we could have never envisioned what it has become. Today, Techstars is a global organization with around 300 employees, invests in over 400 new companies each year, and has invested in more than 2,300 companies worldwide. In 2006, an accelerator was a new idea; today, it is an integral part of the global entrepreneurial ecosystem. Entrepreneurship, which in 2006 was just starting to become talked about again after the collapse of the Internet bubble, is a global phenomenon. 

Gramercy Park in June 2015 After 89 years on this planet, Len Fassler passed away on Friday. Len was my Yoda. As a paternal figure, he was a close second to my father. I loved him deeply. And I will miss him every day. We were introduced in the spring of 1993 by Jim Galvin, CEO of Allcom, which had just been acquired by Len’s company Sage Alerting Systems. Feld Technologies worked with Allcom whenever we needed a network installed for a client. At the time, the state-of-the-art was a wired 10BaseT ethernet network, so Allcom did the wiring, and we did everything else. After Jim’s company was acquired, Len asked him who else he should talk to in the Boston area. Jim introduced us, and that led to lunch near our office in downtown Boston.

For a long time, I collected computers (hardware, software, manuals, and magazines.) About five years ago, I donated my collection to the Media Archaeology Lab, located at CU Boulder. Also, Amy and I have made substantial gifts to MAL from the Anchor Point Foundation. And, last year, our gift enabled them to buy a vast collection from Benj Edwards. On Thursday 1/21/21, at 5 pm, there will be a virtual tour of the Media Archaeology Lab collection. I need different things to do at the end of each day, so I’ll attend as a way to immerse myself in nerd history.

For the past nine months, Amy and I have started our morning together. I get up, pee, weigh myself, brush my teeth, meditate for 20 to 30 minutes, and then we have “morning coffee” together. Morning coffee lasts for two cups of coffee (one regular, one decaf). This ends up being between 15 and 30 minutes, depending on what we are talking about. After spending the vast majority of our 30 years together on the road until a few years ago, this has been an incredible joy for me. Regardless of the previous day, it gives me a clear way to Simply Being Again, each morning with my beloved.

I love Neal Stephenson. I’ve read all of his books, some of them multiple times. Well, except the Baroque Cycle trilogy, which I’m saving for a special period of time to get lost in them, and from everything. Last week I read In the Beginning…Was the Command Line. For the second time. This time I read it on my Kindle, which was fitting. Stephenson wrote it in 1999. As we exit 2020, it’s a great reminder of the place technology was around 20 years ago. It shows how much has changed and how little has changed.