Soaring on Ridgelift

It’s been a while…

Sorry, for the zero volume of posts over the last couple of months.

I've spent a lot of this time trying to understand the impact of the financial mess on companies I work with and help them sort through strategy and action plans. This has been a rewarding process – adversity has a way of amplifying people's characteristics and I've been positively blown away by the creativity and determination I've seen flourish. As the saying goes, we may be down but we're not out!

A note on my posts… I try to keep the content on Soaring on Ridgelift "on topic" and maintain a high signal to noise ratio. As a result, I stay away from posting articles about my outside interests – feedback I get via email or in person about my blog supports this approach so far.

I've starting a parallel blog where I will post on topics that don't fit here – it's called EtherGeist and the URL is linked here. I'll add cross links between the two so you can easily find it and follow if you are so minded.

In the meantime, look for the next few posts to offer some ideas about life in Financial Mess 3.0 and opportunities to take some proactive steps forward.

As a reminder, I am happy to have a 30 minute "No-harm, no foul" meeting or phone call to go over business ideas. If you're interested, drop me an email.

A long week’s travel…

Just back from a 10 day business trip that included Sydney, Australia. I lugged all my camera gear with me on the trip – glad I did as I was able to get this night shot of the Opera House from my hotel room. The browser rendering of this picture doesn't do it justice – it looks great full size!

Sydney is a beautiful city – sort of like San Francisco without the fog!

Normal service will resume shortly…

Back in the days when the BBC didn't have quite the same level of reliability in its TV broadcasts, it wasn't unusual to see the BBC test card displayed with a voice over saying in a very BBC voice…

"We apologize for this interruption. Normal service will resume shortly.

Of course, "shortly" was a misnomer for "we aren't telling you because we don't know!"

I thought about the old BBC test card over the weekend when one of my friends asked me why my frequency of blog posting had fallen off of late. So, just like the BBC, I thought some explanation was appropriate.

One of the advantages of being a venture advisor is that I can spend more focused time working with companies – not just a few hours a month but often a day or two each week. Of late I've been working very closely with a particular stealth mode company and spending a lot of time helping on business strategy and product development. This has included a lot of late night phone calls with the development team.

It's an opportunity to work with smart people and it's a lot of fun – unfortunately, writing articles for my blog has been the casualty.

Time to get back to blog writing!

A VERY wet day!

The newspapers are full of reports today about the heavy winter storm that hit Northern California yesterday – January 4^th. I think it was one of the wettest days I've seen in the 20+ years I've lived in the Bay Area.

As I've written before, I'm somewhat of a weather geek – so it probably won't come as a surprise that I have my own weather station. We had a lot of rain yesterday – 3.69" in 24 hours.

As I looked at the reports from the weather station software this morning I realized that the standard reports didn't do justice in displaying just how heavy the rain fell – so I extracted the data into Excel and produced the following chart:

This shows the cumulative rain fall for the 24 hours of January 4^th – 00:00 to 23:59 PST. As you can see, the bulk of the rain fell from about 7am through 2pm.

The road outside the house was flooded in several places and the small creek that runs alongside the road nearly overflowed its banks. Fortunately our numerous drainage projects over the last few years proved their worth – we stayed dry and fortunately with power all day.

As I write this article, it's raining again…

I'm really curious how this translated into snow in the Sierras – this could be an awesome ski season!

Blogging on Christmas Day

Sitting back and relaxing before heading out for Christmas Day dinner at a local restaurant. For once, just kicking back and savoring the day – no pressure of emails, no meetings, no crisis and above all, great company with the family also kicking back.

From looking at my blog statistics, seems like there's a few of you just surfing and catching up – maybe doing the same as me, waiting for dinner!

So, no predictions for 2008 from me; just best wishes for the Holiday season – enjoy the day!

4 weeks, 4 countries, 3 continents

Back in my Cisco days travel was a constant fact – as a VP of Engineering, I always spent a lot of time with customers; what better way to get a handle on the problems of the real world? Learn how customers really used your products and find ways of giving better service to the people paying the bills. I averaged one week a month on the road – all International travel (US customers I met aplenty in San Jose!) with a mixture of trips to Asia and Europe.

Then I became a VC – a long distance trip became "going to Fremont" for a board meeting and my International travel resorted to vacation trips. I can't say that I miss my 1K status on United and a long trip became the East Bay (Fremont) for a board meeting!

So the last 4 weeks have been an unusual amount of travel for me – Mexico, China, back to the US for Thanksgiving in the mid-West and then the UK. A few random observations from my travels:

• Cabo San Lucas is awesome!
• Beijing was less polluted than when I was last there (2004)
• Entrepreneurs in China are fantastic! Great energy, smart and with awesome market opportunity
• What I do with companies in the Bay Area, I couldn't do with companies in China – relationships are what make for great companies; language and proximity are critical to building a great relationship.
• American Airlines is more concerned about rules than service (more of this later)
• Arriving at Heathrow airport at 6am on a Sunday morning makes for a very quick transit from gate to rental car!
• We might be tempted to complain at gas prices of $3-4/gallon but UK prices are now closer to $9.
• Car rentals are expensive in the UK even without the current dollar to pound conversation rates.
• Heathrow airport has been under construction for as long as I can remember… and still is!
• I still like British beer – Real Ale please! Microbreweries at home are great too!
• After many years of flying over and back to Europe, I saw Greenland for the third time in my life – no cloud cover – very unusual but short lived!
• 99.999% of the people worldwide are awesome! I suspect the other 0.001% who are obnoxious, evil, rude, don't give a damn, are aliens!

Back to blogging!

I have to confess that the wheels fell off my blogging for the last couple of weeks – vacation followed by a hectic week as I got ready for an unusually intense period of travel.

Sitting here at 34,000 feet heading to China and thankful that the seat has AC power as my Lenovo laptop battery rolled over with an error message…

"Irreparable damage to the battery has been detected. Replace with a new one."

Great suggestion but utterly impractical at 3pm on a Friday afternoon and there's no local spare to be had – original or OEM. Never thought about battery failure – duh!... Better an error message than a frying Li-Ion battery any day!

Since I'm trying theory A of jet-lag management (when flying West, stay awake as long as you can), I have plenty of time to catch up on reading, email and blogging!

Nota bene; some airlines (including this one I'm on!) have timers in the outlets that shut off the power after about an hour… Crud! Remember to save frequently if your battery has gone to meet its maker!

Normal blogging will resume…

Out of the country on a trip this week – R&R and therefore not much time for blogging! As the BBC used to post during television outages (anyone else remember those???):

Normal service will be resumed shortly – we apologize for this interruption in service.

On our way out of San Francisco International, I did capture the following – a sign posted in one of the cafés in the gate area. Even MacDonald's doesn't do this!

Oh well… Welcome to San Francisco… now you are on your way home!

Thought round-up

Sorry for the late post today – got behind on some things yesterday and the ripples are just subsiding.

Request for help – I've only had a couple of suggestions for new companies on the Open Source Company List – if you have a suggestion, please send them to me via email – put "OSCL-XXX" in the subject line where XXX is the name of the company.

I'm pretty pleased with the iPhone – the UI is great and the utility is high especially being able to use an "almost real" browser on the phone via WiFi. I miss the ability to search emails and contacts, email a URL or cut and paste between functions. Hopefully Apple will add these… soon!?

Blogging everyday is getting easier – now I need to convert "every day" from working days to "every day of the FULL week!".

The No-Harm, No Foul meeting offer still stands – I get a couple of these in every week and they are great! Keep 'em coming!

 

The secret lives of Venture Capitalists

One of the interesting insights I've had since installing Xobni is how many of my VC friends are morning people. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, I'm one too!

My early morning isn't as structured as Brad Feld's but like Brad, I'm awake and out of bed early. When it's too dark to ride my road bike, I hit the stationary bike and read the morning newspapers (WSJ guaranteed but the NY Times often doesn't get delivered until after 7am) – then make a cup of coffee and start my work day with email.

When you select a message in Outlook, Xobni shows you details about the sender including a frequency graph that shows email arrival against time. The majority of my VC friend's show the bulk of email arriving early in the morning – mostly clustered between 5 and 8 am.

So, if you send a VC an email after 8am, don't be surprised if the reply doesn't arrive until the following morning – they aren't ignoring you, it's just the routine of the job!