On today, the first day of the new year, I give to my wife Amy Batchelor the gift of a lifetime of uncomplaining tech support. While in Bora Bora, one of the books I read was Stewart Friedman’s Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life . It was “ok” so I ended up skimming a lot of it. But I picked up one great thing from it which made the entire book worthwhile. ...
Foundry Group has now been around for over seven years and I’ve been working with my partners for 14 years. We’ve started to develop some traditions. One of my favorites is exit gifts. When a company has an exit that generates a return for us, we give a gift to the partner who served on the board. These gifts are generally tuned to what the partner loves such as musical stuff for Ryan and Jason, bike stuff for Seth, and art for me. They are modest, but very thoughtful and something the partner wouldn’t have just gone out and done for himself. They are often self referential, such as the Makerbot sculpture of me created by an artist and printed on a Makerbot after Stratasys acquired MakerBot. ...
A week ago, Fred Wilson wrote a post titled Etsy Gift Finder . In it he described a new Etsy feature that uses your Facebook friends info to suggest gifts for your friends. He picked out what he called “a clay Farmville sheep thingy” and bought it for me. As you can see it has already made friends with Yoda but appears a little scared of my ray gun. ...