As you know, I’m a big fan of Twitter. I’ve even gone so far as to call it the new IM. My wife Greeley has watched on with some amusement as I’ve twittered my life away over the last year or so. She finally sat down this weekend and read a few months of my tweets. What follows is a note she sent to me – an "if I’d been twittering too" list of tweets (to be read with heavy sarcasm; I was laughing out loud, but maybe it’s just me…). Woke up in a shitty mood, PMS? Contact lenses dry and itchy, off to buy SALINE! Sale at Safeway on seedless grapes. Nectarines look good, too. Made peanut…
Posts By / seth levine
Track your favorite Olympic sports with Filtrbox
Information tracking company Filtrbox has put out a handy little widget for tracking TeamUSA at the Olympics. By choosing both sports (for example: "USA Cycling – Men’s Road") or an individual athletes ("USA Cycling – Men’s Road: Levi Leipheimer") you can keep up to date on your favorite Olympic stories.
hello? …. echo …. echo …. echo
Apologies for falling out of the blogging habit over the last month. A nice, mostly off-line vacation was followed by a few weeks of slowly catching back up. Blogging (and keeping up on my blog reading as well) fell to the bottom of the list. Or maybe I was just being lazy. Either way, I was off the blogging circuit for a while and I apologies for any of you who may have been waiting with breath held for the next post (hopefully you didn’t delete me from your feed reader). I’m back. With plenty to write about. More soon.
Leave your ego at the door
My wife took me to kick-boxing class yesterday and if I was to be honest with you, I’d have to admit that I pretty much got my ass handed to me. Kickboxing is HARD. This isn’t athletic club kick-boxing. This is Muay Thai kick-boxing at the local Thai dojo. My wife’s been going for months and is really good (and before you ask – yes, she can clearly kick my ass any time she feels like it). She’s been asking me to go for a while but I’ve resisted. Not because I didn’t think it would be fun (and as it turned out it was even more fun than I thought it would be), but because I didn’t know how…
Any search groupies out there?
I’ve been mulling over a few ideas in search advertising. Curious if anyone out there has come across any companies innovating in the search value chain (I’m thinking about things like Yield and Clickable).
Just the beginning
In case there was any doubt how far advertising on the Internet has to go, consider that The University of Phoenix is the single largest brand advertiser on the Internet (with some $20m in monthly spend, which is pretty minimal in the context of brand ad spending) and that Internet advertising per household (dollars spend on online advertising divided by total US households) was $288. Compare that with $818 on newspapers (or just over $1k on "direct telephone") (sourced from Mary Meeker’s TechTrends June 2008). We’ve got a long way to go, baby!
Inside the Foundry psyche
There are a couple of posts up this morning that I’d like to point you towards. The first is over at Mendelson’s Musings (written by my partner Jason Mendelson) that talks about our work with Nancy Raulston, our team’s executive coach (direct post link here). I’m fortunate to work with a group of partners that believe (as I do) that part of building a great firm is building a strong foundation for communication and feedback. We take this work very seriously (starting with the 360 degree review that Jason describes and continuing twice a year at team off-sites where we Nancy facilitates a group review) and even base a portion of our compensation on this work (literally putting our money…
After the no
Last month I wrote a post that tried to share the venture perspective of turning down a deal (see "Saying ‘no’ can be hear to do"). In that case I was referring to a specific deal that was particularly hard for me to turn down, although in the post I was trying to generalize to the many potential investments that we take a serious look at but don’t end up closing. While there’s typically less anguish around it, saying "no" to deals is something that occurs with frequency inside any venture firm. The comments to this post got me thinking about the other side of the equation – specifically what should entrepreneurs who have built up a relationship with a…
My new Netflix Roku rocks
Pardon me for believing that Netflix introduced their new movie streaming box just for me, but with my DVD player recently dying and my Netflix account basically wasting away how could I think otherwise when Netflix rolled out the ability to stream movies directly to my living room. The fact that it had an HDMI output (which happens to be the only spare cable I have running from my TV at the moment) was just gravy. Seriously though, I was pretty stoked to add this to my account (and for only the cost of a $100 piece of equipment). I know the hard core Apple users out there are going to tell me I should have bought the AppleTV thing,…
Don’t be afraid of maps
I’ve spent a bunch of time with a handful of the TechStars teams in the last few weeks. The first week of TechStars was a complete whirlwind (lots of new people to meet, presentations from a bunch of big tech vendors, learning the lay of the land in Boulder, etc). Now the teams have caught their collective breath and are starting to realize just how quickly the summer rolls by when you’re creating and building a business. While it’s fun to run and gun during the early stages of business formation, I’ve always been insistent that the teams that I work closely with map out their work for the summer early on. It’s not something that’s set in stone but…