I spent last week at the Montgomery Conference in LA watching some of our companies present. For background, the Montgomery Conference is for later stage companies to pitch their business to growth investors – usually defined by having greater than $10m in revenue.
Since the majority of these companies were beyond where we’d play at True, it was a great opportunity to watch how others reacted to presentations and for patterns of success.
Over the weekend, I moved down the street to a new apartment in SOMA near the Ballpark.
While the apartment discovery process is still difficult (and really controlled by Craigslist), I found the actually moving process relatively easy – enabled by a group of new Bay Area startups disrupting the moving process.
You can now have your central home on the web directly on your blog with the new About.me Plug-in for WordPress.
You can check out mine live on this site’s sidebar and get your own from the WordPress widget directory. Enjoy!
Back when I was transitioning out of Perfect Wave Records, I bought a one way ticket to London with no plans and no final destination.
(Pro Tip: When showing up in the Heathrow Airport with long, shaggy hair after an overnight flight from NYC and no return ticket and no real purpose – you will have a hard time with immigration)
Once landed in a hostel, I sat down and made a list of anyone I had ever met who lived in Europe and started to make a plan on how to spend my time.
(It was a very short list.)
The most awesome thing that came out of those first meetings in London was my introduction to CouchSurfing.
Since joining True a few years ago, I’ve picked up a hobby of long distance running as a way to relax in the morning before work.
Talking to others who run – one of the most fascinating concepts that has come up – is the concept of the “Garbage Mile”
Loosely, a “Garbage Mile” is:
Miles run with no purpose, that often fall in the range of too slow for threshold work and too fast for endurance training.
Or more simply – miles run with no purpose – for the sake of hitting a milestone (be it days run per week or a mileage goal)
And while no mileage for training is bad – the debate is around whether or not the small marginal benefit of these miles outweighs the potential high cost of an injury (which is more likely in these scenarios.)
Viewed through the same lens – its interesting to think about day-to-day work – especially at startups where long hours and all-nighters are seen as a badge of honor.
Earlier this week, I hit a new milestone in life with my birthday and spent the week reflecting on life and what’s important to me.
Whenever I have this internal dialogue, I’m reminded of a great BusinessWeek OpEd from Marissa Mayer on “How To Avoid Burnout.”
The important passage:
Great new report digging into why users really like Zipcar – and the answer is not what you’d normally think.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/666376
Specifically, researcher’s wanted to better understand how users thought about Zipcar and spent in depth time interviewing and following their “sharing” behavior.
The paper goes on to argue that collaborative commerce products like Zipcar and Airbnb are missing the point as users don’t really care about community; but rather can’t afford or don’t need the full product now and sharing offers a cheaper and more efficient alternative. (In what they’re calling “Access-based Commerce”)
On the back of the Apple iPhone 5 Launch last week – both Google and Apple announced numbers about the growth of their platforms.
For Google’s Android Platform (September 2012):
September 4, 2012 in
Digital Market Commentary with
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