Fred, Brad, and Jerry have done a bunch of postings recently, and threaten to do more, sharing the VC perspective on many aspects of startups and entrepreneurship. I thought it might be interesting to share the entrepreneur’s perspective on the same subjects. I’ll try to cross-post and keep pace, but I’m already a couple behind, and I can’t crank out postings as fast as these guys can! (For reference, Fred and Brad are on my board, and Jerry as Fred’s partner is an advisor to my company, Return Path.) Topic 1: Boards of Directors. All three have many good points. Brad says that boards come in three flavors (working, reporting, and lame duck), and that small companies need working boards…
Archives / July, 2004
The Rumors of Email’s Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
I’d like to think that Mark Twain would wholeheartedly approve of me paraphrasing his famous quote for this purpose, but I’m getting a little tired of all these reports about how email is dead. The latest one comes in the form of an op-ed in Computerworld this week. This will be a longer post than usual — my apologies in advance. The writer talks about how email will die soon because there are too many issues with viruses, spam, IT management costs, and employment practices. The writer says email is close to having a bigger downside than upside, and that email will go the way of the typewriter or the floppy disk drive. I say that this is a writer…
A New Blog About Wine
When a group of us had dinner back in May, Brad posted that it was remarkable that 4 of the 6 people had blogs. Then Amy started a blog, making it 5 of 6. Today, Mariquita and her friend Sharon launched their blog about wine, making it a clean sweep. There is almost a complete dearth of blog information and commentary about wine. You can tell — the URL she was able to get on Typepad was wine.blogs.com! When Mariquita and I went looking into other wine blogs a couple months ago, all we found were one or two somewhat lame ones, one not updated since February, one not updated since April, none with interesting information that helps average people…
Grandma Goes Broadband
I’ve always thought my grandmother was a remarkable person. At age 92 (sorry to publish it, Gma), she is pretty hip — drives a Lexus, plays a mean game of bridge, carries a cell phone, and until recently, used WebTV. She was getting tired of the slow connection via dial-up, so Mariquita and I gave her an old laptop we had and installed a cable modem (I have to commend Cablevision of Westchester/Optimum Online on a very smooth and easy installation process), so now she’s the world’s newest computer user. Those of us who work with computers every day take some of the basics for granted, but if you’ve never used Windows or a mouse before, this stuff is not…
Present AND Accounted For
There was a great essay in the New York Times yesterday about multitasking. The gist of the article is that multitasking, when taken to an extreme, is unproductive at best and in the case of driving, quite dangerous. I’ve long believed that in business, as in any activity relying in part on interpersonal relationships, it’s important to be fully present when talking to other people. This is especially true in one-on-one conversations, but true even in larger meetings. The article talks about the clicking you hear when you’re talking to someone on the phone and he or she is typing in the background. And we’ve all been in meetings where someone picks up a Blackberry to reply to a presumably…
Turning Lemons into Lemonade
I’ve always thought that the ability to stare down adversity in business — or turning lemons into lemonade, as a former boss of mine used to say — is a critical part of being a mature professional. We had a prime example of this a couple weeks ago at Return Path. We had scheduled a webinar on email deliverability, a critical topic for our market, and the moment of the webinar had come, with over 100 clients and prospects on the line for the audio and web conference. There was a major technical glitch with our provider, Webex (no link for you, Webex), and after 5 or 10 minutes, we had to cancel the webinar — telling all 100 members…
Taylor Made for this Blog
I haven’t done a book review yet on this blog because I haven’t found a very relevant one. I will do more as I go here — I’ve actually read a few pretty useful business books lately — but there’s no better book to kick off a new category of postings here than the one I just finished: The MouseDriver Chronicles: The True-Life Adventures of Two First-Time Entrepreneurs. The book details how two freshly-minted Wharton MBAs skipped the dot com and investment banking job offers to start a two-person company that produced the MouseDriver (a computer mouse shaped like a the head of a golf club) back in 1999-2000. It’s a great, quick read and really captures the spirit of…
Negative Role Models
Old news by now, but John Kerry has selected John Edwards as his running mate for this fall’s presidential election. What I found particularly interesting was a line buried in one of the various news reports I read on the web this morning, which said that Kerry, still stinging from the fact that he heard the bad news that he was not to be Al Gore’s running mate in 2000 from the media and not from Gore himself, had kept this decision-making process deliberately private up until the very last moment to avoid making that same mistake and to spare the feelings of those he passed over for the job. How many of us in business have learned things over…
American Entrepreneurs
Fred beat me to it. I wasn’t at a computer to post this yesterday on the actual 4th of July, so today will have to do. I’ve read lots of books on the American revolution and the founding fathers over the years. It’s absolutely my favorite historical period, probably because it appeals to the entrepreneur in me. Think about what our founding fathers accomplished: – Articulated a compelling vision for a better future with home democratic rule and capitalist principles. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is really the ultimate tag line when you think about it. – Raised strategic debt financing from, and built critical strategic alliances with France, the Netherlands, and Spain. – Assembled a team of…
Not Perfect, But A Better Device
I am now a big fan of my new Treo 600. It’s not so new, I’ve had it for a couple of months, but I figured out a couple of things on it today that really throw it over the top in my book. In general, it’s a very good convergence device. The combination of phone, Palm apps, and email is very well done. It needs a longer battery life, but it lasts for a full day with pretty heavy usage, which is acceptable. I love not carrying around both a phone and a blackberry any more. The first thing that took it from being a good device to being a great one was our installation of the GoodLink Exchange…