Boat remains in the yard having its innards scrubbed (fuel tanks opened and cleaned – engine pulled – new prop shaft, stuffing box, engine teardown/service).
Hopefully I’ll get her back by the weekend just in time for the next set of rain storms.
Archive for May, 2006
Don’t pull that thread
Wednesday, May 31st, 2006LinkedIn is best lead source
Wednesday, May 31st, 2006My networking meet with the “Queen of VCs” yielded a bunch of email addresses to people who don’t respond to email. I’ve had much better luck digging through LinkedIn’s listings and have a couple meetings with founders this week to discuss their ideas.
More after the meets.
BadPage.info has a new purpose?
Wednesday, May 17th, 2006Scoble claims that the MS Word team finally generates clean html. I’ll believe it when it passes checks at http://badpage.info with no warnings or errors.
It will be nice for people to actually care about web standards. The web 2.0 people have to because bad dom’s leads to broken javascript. But so many large websites are still awful.
So I’ve met the queen of the VC’s
Wednesday, May 10th, 2006of Seattle and she was very helpful and a lot of fun to talk with. Wish we had more time.
Now I’ve got a huge list of names to follow up with.
How to pick a startup idea
Thursday, May 4th, 2006Something that was clear from Startup School was what kinds of ideas seem to take off. A few things I’m looking for:
- It should change basic user behavior – like Flickr has become the way to share photos on the web.
- It must be “head slapping easy” to use.
- It must encourage formation of a community.
- It must provide embeddable content and thus be viral- like Flickr photos on a blog.
- It should be hackable/employ web services, like google maps.
Thinking, thinking, thinking. I’ll be talking to lots of people in the next couple weeks. Keeping those things in mind.
Great Book on Managing People
Monday, May 1st, 2006I picked up the book Harvard Business Review on Managing People in the Seattle airport on Friday and read most of it over the weekend. It backed up a lot of things I knew intuitively about managing people from experience. Only it provides data and case studies to explain why. Lots of light bulbs going on for me.
Perhaps the most gratifiying thing for me was its vindication of my management approach and condemnation of my manager’s approach. Since we are diametrically opposed, this book makes me the right one. Its a shallow victory given that, while I have the satisfaction of being right, he still wins and will keep on winning because bad employees are completely unassailable from below at work. I’ll probably post more articles on the specific revelations I’m having.
If you manage people, you really ought to buy this book.
Startup School was good
Monday, May 1st, 2006And I’m kind of fired up to do something. Especially given the recent unpleasantness at work.
The best speakers were Joe Krauss of Excite/JotSpot fame, who gave a really snappy and fun “lessons learned” kind of thing, Tim O’Reilly on trend spotting, Paul Graham – who isn’t the best presenter but has great pithy bits of wisdom, and Joshua Schachter – the accidental entrepreneur.
I wanted to like Caterina Fake (Flickr) but she lacked focus and rambled way too much. Om Malik was entertaining but I didn’t find a lot of useful advice there. The VC’s Ann Winblad and Page Mailliard were good in demystifying what they do. I met a few people but wish I had found a good post conf mixer/networking op.
Now I’m wanting to do something – the catch being that the VC’s were clear that they fund two or more people ventures only. So I need a partner – interested it pursuing something? email me.