Archive for the 'personal' Category

Princeton University – 2010 Baccalaureate remarks

Published on July 7, 2010 in personal. Closed

My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

via princeton.edu

From Jeff Bezos speech at Princeton…

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The Monster In Your Head » Don’t be a But Head

Published on May 26, 2010 in personal. Closed
Recognizing and accepting things as they are now doesn’t have to limit the way you believe things can be later.  For individuals as well as organizations, if properly integrated into the envisioning process, that recognition can ground the planning, the dreaming, and allow the envisioning to stay connected with the core of who and what we really are.

via themonsterinyourhead.com

Great post and quote from Jerry. Recognizing now and thinking about opportunity for later can and should work together.

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Perspective

Published on May 24, 2010 in personal. View Comments Tags: , , .
New York City Serenade
Image by joiseyshowaa via Flickr

I had a nice reminder yesterday of the power of perspective, following a horrible travel experience.  My sister, niece, and I were returning to NYC from  a nice and busy trip back to Cincy.  The flight from Cincy to NYC is really only about an hour and twenty minutes or so.  It’s a quick and painless trip if just count the flying time.  But there’s more to it than that.  Long story short, we landed at 5pm (20 minutes earlier) but had to wait on the ground, in the plane another hour or so until there was gate open for us (as if our arrival was a complete surprise at JFK).  Then, with an antsy two year old, the luggage took another 45 minutes or so to come out.  I know this is really not that bad of an experience.   I know this is really not that bad, but I just was not in the mood to deal with it yesterday.  I felt very annoyed, and there was a bit more…

I usually take the train back from JFK.  It’s pretty easy and it is a predictable 1 hour whereas a cab can take much longer than that in the right (wrong) conditions.  My sister and niece were taking a cab, so I walked all their stuff out with them, and then turned to come back to take the train.  On a lark I decided to hop on one of the many shuttles that run between JFK and Grand Central (only $15).  I figured I could just take a cab from there and still come out way ahead of taking a cab all the way.  But then I got on the bus.  Literally only one seat.  And no room for my bag.  I had to sit all the way at the back, crammed in between three visiting Italian couples.  I was further annoyed.  It was f’ing hot, and I had no room.  And then we started driving, and got stopped in traffic almost immediately outside of JFK.  Really bad traffic, as in you could walk faster.  I felt as if I had enough.  I had all of these thoughts about how life would be so much easier living somewhere else, somewhere quieter and smaller, somewhere cheaper, somewhere not so crammed and expensive. That’s the first time I think I’ve ever really felt like I’d had enough NYC.

As we inched our way towards the city, and my frustration was building, I took a breath and a moment to notice those around me.  I stopped getting sucked into my own frustrations and tried for a moment to notice what the 3 Italian couples I was crammed between were doing.  They were VERY excited.  With each mile the city’s skyline came into view the more excited and loud they got.  I watched and enjoyed their excitement build as the city approached.  I really loved hearing them laugh with joy when we pulled out of the tunnel in Manhattan for the first time and they saw the big buildings above us. And I realized something.  This very same place I was just cursing in my mind was causing so much excitement and joy for this group.  They were admiring all sorts of things that I take for granted everyday.  They were so excited and grateful to be in a place for a short time that I get to be in daily.  And suddenly things looked differently to me.  I was grateful for where I was.  I was grateful I get to be in NYC.  It’s amazing how nothing changed in the bus ride except for my perspective, and it made all the difference in the world.  I guess it makes sense that life feels much better when you notice the good instead of cursing the bad.

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From Hopes and Dreams to The Real Thing

Published on May 13, 2010 in personal. Closed
Elie Seidman 1 day ago
53 people liked this.

I’ve lived the ups and downs and downs and ups of entrepreneurship and my experience has been that when you look back on those days when you were in the trenches fighting for survival, you’ll see them, through the lens of nostalgia, as the “good old days”. By contrast, scaling a fast growing startup that has found its market fit is stimulating and exciting but, at least for me, sits nowhere near as prominently in my minds list of proud moments.

My last entrepreneurial run went from 2000 to mid 2006 with a true “go to the light” near death experience throughout most of 2002. The business ultimately found its market fit and had a high growth phase from 2003 to 2005 (from 7 people to more than 200 during that time). Through the miracle of memory, I now remember 2002 very fondly as a source of pride, learning, and character building. But at the time it was not fun – on the contrary, it was as scary as I would let it be.

I’ve been watching and reading about startups since I was in high school and knew it would be what I tried to do when I read Startup by Jerry Kaplan while in college (still a great book for entrepreneurs). I’ve observed again and again that for every rapid success like Facebook, there are 100s of overnight moderate successes that took 10+ years and will never make it to the business papers and blogs. It’s really a marathon, not a sprint and sometimes your worst enemy is your own psychology or the psychology of the naysayers who inevitably crawl out of the woodwork. After all, it’s easy to be a critic and when things don’t follow a perfectly straight curve to success, if you allow yourself to, you’ll hear plenty of them.

On the hard days, I sometimes look to Parson’s rules of life: http://www.bobparsons.me/19/robert-ca-not-eat-r… They are all great but number 2 and number 3 are, to me, the things that ring true on all too many days of the entrepreneurial endeavor.

2. Never give up. Almost nothing works the first time it’s attempted. Just because what you’re doing does not seem to be working, doesn’t mean it won’t work. It just means that it might not work the way you’re doing it. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, and you wouldn’t have an opportunity.

3. When you’re ready to quit, you’re closer than you think. There’s an old Chinese saying that I just love, and I believe it is so true. It goes like this: “The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed.”

And the last comment – startups are uncertain until they are not and when they stop being uncertain, they are no longer really startups. If you sign up for being an entrepreneur or working in startups, that’s what you are signing up for. On the particularly hard days I ask myself whether there is anywhere I’d rather work (or anything I’d rather be doing including sitting on a beach) even if it meant more money or less uncertainty. And on those days I realize that I really do have the best “job” in the world.

Two thoughts from my father to close the comment, the first of which he told me when I was a teen: “There will always be someone smarter, richer, more accomplished, or better looking so to find satisfaction and meaning, you’ll have to look within”. Nothing truer could be said about entrepreneurship. I’ve never had a huge homerun – the kind of thing that gets you into the business press. But I don’t value my contribution to innovation and creation any less than the names and stories I read about in the press. All entrepreneurs – large and small – push the ball that is society and humanity just a bit forward. Larry and Sergei are the ones we read about in the press but their insights – large as they were – were built on the shoulders of countless unnamed others who are mainly not rich and certainly not famous. Entrepreneurship and innovation is a “noble profession” (borrowed from Randy Komisar’s recent comments http://entrepreneur.venturebeat.com/2010/04/23/… ) for all of the people who are involved in it – those with their names in lights and those who grind away anonymously. Society and humanity benefits very little – or not at all – from the untold numbers of rich people who became truly rich by hacking the financial system (to quote Mark Cuban) – and benefits massively from the countless numbers who – despite stress and lack of financial reward – devoted their working lives to innovation. The failures matter by the way. The iPhone for which Steve Jobs gets credit was built on the backs of countless other handheld computers that were before their time and whose investors and employees “failed”.

And closing with a joke from my dad “what’s experience?” “It’s what you get when you don’t get anything else”

via avc.com

Reposting this brilliant comment by Elie Seidman on Fred Wilson’s blog. I can’t say I’ve really been able to cross the chasm so to speak yet. That’s a really hard thing to do, and I have increasingly more respect for those who have. The truth is more entrepreneurs don’t make the leap from hopes and dreams to the real thing. Entrepreneurship is difficult.

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Corner Office – At AdMob, a C.E.O. With a Portable Desk – Interview – NYTimes.com

Published on May 5, 2010 in personal. Closed

Q. What’s your best career advice?

A. Don’t be afraid. What I mean by that is lots and lots of decisions are made by fear and they’re made by people who think they have more to lose than they actually have to lose.

When you’re just graduating from college, there are so many people who want to start something. They’re worried if I do this I can’t get a job, how will I live, this and that. They have very little at that point that is really going to be risked for them to sort of make a bold try.

I mean, ultimately, if it doesn’t work out, if they were employable in the first place, they’ll still be employable afterward, and they’ll be able to do something. They aren’t going to live in a cardboard box in the street.

I think business school students are comical in this area. If you go to business school or probably law school or any professional school with these highly motivated people, they are stressed out of their minds. Like, they’re going to be homeless if they don’t get an internship in the summer.

You’re going to be O.K. But everybody just has a very hard time calculating the actual risk. People just greatly miscalculate risk, in my opinion. They are too afraid of things.

Or even when they’re at a job, they might have a controversial point of view or a controversial decision, and they’re so scared of getting fired that they don’t actually try and act on that.

I think that’s harder to say in this environment, given the economy and where unemployment is. Perhaps that needs to factor into people’s risk assessment. But on the whole, many professional people are more worried and more afraid than they should be.

via nytimes.com

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Organic Startup Ideas (via Paul Graham)

Published on April 15, 2010 in personal. Closed
The reason you’re overlooking them is the same reason you’d have overlooked the idea of building Facebook in 2004: organic startup ideas usually don’t seem like startup ideas at first. We know now that Facebook was very successful, but put yourself back in 2004. Putting undergraduates’ profiles online wouldn’t have seemed like much of a startup idea. And in fact, it wasn’t initially a startup idea. When Mark spoke at a YC dinner this winter he said he wasn’t trying to start a company when he wrote the first version of Facebook. It was just a project. So was the Apple I when Woz first started working on it. He didn’t think he was starting a company. If these guys had thought they were starting companies, they might have been tempted to do something more “serious,” and that would have been a mistake.

via paulgraham.com

This really nails it for me. I used to come up with ideas all the time. I had a few notebooks where I would scribble things down as potential ideas to play with. The ideas have slowed as I was quick to dismiss them. The problem is, and looking back this seems even more true for those ideas that were special to me, I was quick to shoot them down as not having “business potential.” I keep coming up with similar ideas because I’m looking to fix something I want fixed for me, but always brush them aside as ideas that don’t have hope of ever becoming real businesses. Maybe I need to re-examine those. Or maybe I just need to be willing to play more.

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What’s the problem?

Published on March 30, 2010 in personal. View Comments Tags: , , , , .
Television aerial on a rooftop
Image via Wikipedia

Ok this post could get very technical and nerdy, but I promise to do my best to prevent that, and I hope I’m able to get the message across. First a little setup.

Julie and I moved into a new apartment this past summer, a new place that we really love.  When we moved in we knew that due to a good amount of travel between June and September it didn’t really make sense to bother turning on internet and cable.  It helped that one of our close neighbors had a very strong, open, wireless network.   I had a nice, dell desktop that I had used before as a media center computer so I just hooked that up to our TV which we used to watch internet content.  As I played with it more I started to think I could legitimately do without cable in a girlfriend friendly way.  That is, I could set things up in a way that Julie could easily still view all of her favorite shows without cable.   It seemed easy enough, and then I tried it.

I could probably write a book about the process of creating a girlfriend friendly media center cable free tv experience, but that’s not the point of this post.  I’m getting to the point, I promise.  Basically all local tv channels, which if you think about it have about 70% of programming people watch, are available for free in HD (actually higher quality than you get on cable) over antennas.  With the new windows 7 media center, which allows you to access a guide, record shows, and a decent hidden antenna I thought we could get all the local channels in HD for free with ease and then with boxee, netflix, hulu, and ESPN 360 we could make up for the rest.  I was wrong.  It was a nightmare.

It seemed like no matter what I did or what kind of antenna I used, I simply could not get a few channels (NBC and CBS) to work.  I bought amplifiers, I bought different kinds of cable, I tried hanging the antenna the window, and nothing worked.  No matter what I did the signal would come in jumbled.  I was losing my mind.  I was so sure that the problem was the signal, that I did everything in my power to fix it.  The problem was, the signal wasn’t the problem.

After about 3 weeks of pulling my hair out, I tried just plugging in my antenna directly into my HDTV.  You know what?  All the channels worked. Flawlessly. I couldn’t believe it.  I moved the antenna around, I stood in front of it, I hid it, and it didn’t have any effect on the signal.  The picture was perfect.  It turns out the signal wasn’t the problem.  The tv tuner in my computer was.  A New (dual), better tuner and it all came together as I had imagined.

We all have heard that there are more than one solution to a problem.  In this case I learned that there can be than one cause of a problem.  If I had continued to believe the signal was the problem, I would have probably spent lots of money on a fancy, ugly antenna, amplifiers, and ultimately just gone back to cable.  It wasn’t until I let go of my obsession of fixing the poor signal that I opened up to trying other things, and ultimately found the real issue and real solution.

Take a step back from whatever you are working and ask yourself, “what’s really the problem?”  You might find the problem you’re working so hard to solve, isn’t the problem at all.

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Tires off the road

Published on March 15, 2010 in personal. Closed Tags: , , .
Roadworks
Image via Wikipedia

“In a startup, you’re going to have moments when 2, sometimes 4 tires are off the road. It happens to everyone, expect it.”  Great advice from a friend and now advisor to my latest startup.  The way he said it, so matter of fact, really felt like he was giving us permission over the next few years to have crazy, shit hits the fan moments.  It felt good, but wow it’s hard to live by sometimes.  When the tires are off the road, it’s hard to not think the situation you are in is particularly bad, one that no one has ever dealt with before, and one that can’t be overcome.  Dramatic? yes. But it’s hard to get out of this train of thought sometimes.

This week we had a major hiccup on the development side.  Without rambling on or getting into specifics, I’ll just say this: shit hit the fan.  It sucked, it felt terrible.  It was definitely a 2 tires (although at the time it felt like 4) off the road situation.  It hit like a ton of bricks, and made me feel sick to my stomach.  All of the usual thoughts and fears coming rushing back, “what do I do next,” “What am I doing with my life.” “Is this another failure,” etc.  It’s actually amazing how quickly your balloon can be deflated.  There’s a sense of panic, a sense of desperation, a lot of frustration, a lot of fear.  It could consume you.  But then I thought back to the comment about tires coming off the road.  It happens.  It happens to everyone, in startups, in life.  Whew, deep breath, “sit, stay…” I stepped away and went for a walk, it was time for perspective.

First a reminder: There’s not a problem that can’t be dealt with.  And let’s be honest, this wasn’t really that big of a deal.  It can definitely be fixed, and fixed quickly.  Then I had to think, “this is it, this is one of those great entrepreneurial moments where your skills are tested, you gain experience and confidence, and you find solutions.”  Now here we are a few days later, and things have already been cleaned up a bit. Tires back on the road?  Not yet, but close.

So our advisor was right very quickly.  We had this moment about 6 days after he said this, and something tells me we’ll have plenty more moments like this.  I’d even say we’re lucky if we look back  and wish we had problems like this a year from now.  The problems should be much larger then. That’s a good thing.  Everyone has problems that sometimes seem insurmountable.  The goal isn’t to try and avoid them.  Instead the goal is to get more comfortable with each “uh oh” moment, to acknowledge your fears but not get overwhelmed by them,  seek solutions, solve problems, gain confidence and experience, and move on.

Similar:

My post on anxiety

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The magic wand – do overs

Published on March 6, 2010 in personal. View Comments

Several years ago I taught an undergraduate class in business leadership at Queens College. From the beginning I had, what to the students seemed a revolutionary policy: You always got a chance to re-write your essay. If you didn’t like the grade you got the first time, you could incorporate my suggested changes (or not) and re-submit your essay at least once.

The lesson I tried to teach was that doling out Do Overs was a powerful incentive. It mitigated the fear of failing and, more often than not, brought out the best in the kids.

Many walked away with the notion that they, too, when they ran their own companies (and they all thought they would one day), would hand out Do Overs. Fewer of them, though, walked away with the deepest lesson of all: you’ve got the magic wand in your hand right now. Give yourself a Do Over. Let go of the shame, guilt, anger, fear from eating too many Oreos and try again today.

via themonsterinyourhead.com

I really love this post by Jerry.

I was listening to the Philosophers note on Learned Optimism a few weeks ago and Brian / Martin Seligman talk about the difference in perspective between an optimist and a pessimist that is very much in line with what Jerry is saying here. Someone with a more pessimistic perspective tends to see things as permanent, especially their own mistakes, while a more optimistic person sees things as temporary. The optimist, they said, truly believes in the do over. It has taken me a long time to finally start believing this.

The reality is this: There are very few things in life where a do over is not possible. So why, sometimes, do we want to torment ourselves by thinking things are permanent? Do you really want to torturet yourself by believing the deal you failed to close was your last shot?

I guess without realizing when it happened, I started giving myself more do overs in the last year, and it’s amazing how different the world looks. It’s so much lighter, I sleep better, and life seems much more playful. When you know you have another chance at something, you’re willing to play. It’s no longer so serious. Why shouldn’t life be more playful?

Posted via web from Dan’s Random Stuff

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random thoughts on being an entrepreneur | gapingvoid

Published on March 1, 2010 in personal. Closed
22. One successful entrepreneur I know well has a wonderful quality, namely that he never, ever compares himself to other people. He just does his own thing, which actually serves him rather well. Just because his competitor has bought himself a bigger motor boat, doesn’t mean he feels the need have a bigger motor boat. This quality helps him to build his business the way he sees fit, not the way the motor boat people see fit.

23. Running a startup is full of extreme ups and downs. Which is why so many successful and happy entrepreneurs I know lead such normal, stable, unglamorous, “boring”, family-centered lives. Somehow they need the latter in order to balance out the former. Extra-curricular drama looks great in the tabloids, but that’s all it’s ultimately good for.

24. MBAs are conditioned to use their brains in much the same way as sex workers are conditioned to use their genitals. Nice work if you can get it.

25. Bill Gates may have a million times more money than me, but he isn’t going to live a million times longer than me, watch a million times more sunsets than me, make love to a million times more women than me, drink a million times more fine wines than me, listen to a million times more Beethoven String Quartets than me, nor sire a million times more children than me. Human beings don’t scale.

via gapingvoid.com

Really great post by Hugh over at gapingvoid.com. These are just a few of the good ones.

I particularly like 22 and 23. Both can be extremely difficult to pull off. It seems to be a human tendency to compare ourselves to others from time to time, some of us more often than others. What’s inevitable though the more you do it, the more likely you will feel like crap. There is always someone out there better than you at something, if you’re looking and comparing you’re going to find them a lot. Being comfortable and proud of you and your skills is empowering.

On 23. Entrepreneurship is a roller coaster of emotions, no doubt. I met with an entrepreneur last week who has done it many times, and he told me “You’re going to have several moments where you have 2 or all 4 tires off the road.” There’s no way to avoid those situations, they are part of the journey, but even more importantly don’t be so quick to get your emotions wrapped up in things. Good things happen and bad things happen, but they don’t change who you are. Hugh nails it, a key to being a successful entrepreneur is being reminded daily of who you are by those around you who love you.

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