Work

I’ve been a remote worker for 24 years. While I have an office in Boulder, I’m physically in my office for a small amount of time. For many years, this was a function of travel. My investments have always been geographically distributed across the US and I spent the majority of my time between Monday and Friday on the road. I learned how to work in hotel rooms, in other people’s offices, in conference rooms, at coffee shops, and in houses (mine and friends.) In 1995, at the dawn of the age of the commercial Internet, this involved landlines, answering machines, pagers, and fax machines. Today, my bet is that most 25-year-olds have never used one of these things. ...

My dad’s posts over the past two days put me in a reflective mood about work. I’ve been working hard around computers and entrepreneurship since the summer between my senior year in high school and my freshman year at MIT. That first real job was as the first employee of Petcom, a company started by a husband and wife team that grew to about 20 people before the oil and gas market for software evaporated in 1985. ...

Tami Forman, the Executive Director of Path Forward (a new non-profit that I recently joined the board of ) just did a powerful five minute presentation on making space for moms in the workforce. I knew that Tami was a great speaker because of my interactions with her at Return Path, but she just totally blew me away with this talk. Making Space For Moms | Tami Forman | DisruptHR Talks from DisruptHR on Vimeo . ...

I love summer – it’s by far my favorite season of the year. While the summer solstice (6/21) is the official beginning of summer, I always view summer as being bookended by Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend. So – for me, summer has begun. As I was walking Brooks this morning for his early morning poop, I pondered the dynamic of “abstainer” vs. “moderator” which Amy pointed out to me comes from Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project . I’ve never known how to moderate particularly well, in any aspect of my life, so I’ve always been an abstainer. For example, I’m afraid of drugs, so I simply don’t do them – I abstain, since I’m concerned that if I started I wouldn’t know how to moderate. ...

I had a great breakfast meeting at the Cambridge Marriott with Michael Schrage , a research fellow at MIT yesterday morning. We had never met before and I loved the conversation – his brain was bubbling with ideas that are relevant to many of the things I’m interested in, he challenged some of my thinking, and we had a deep and awesome conversation about open source hardware, makers, and MakerBot . ...