The US personal savings rate fell to zero in June – its lowest level since the latest spending binge started (post 9/11) and the 2nd lowest since the Great Depression. You can read the full government report here (be sure to check out some of the tables – very interesting information). Yes, the economy grew at a healthy annualized rate and clearly the Fed is still worried about inflationary pressure (we still have 50-100 basis points left to move in the fed funds rate) . But still – personal savings rate of 0%? We already lag behind the rest of the world in our ability not to spend pretty much all of what we earn (see here for a chart…
Posts By / seth levine
We still have a long way to go
I’m leaving for a week’s vacation tomorrow (see my vacation curve post – I’m past the inflection point again) and I’m not planning on checking my e-mail regularly. To keep down on e-mail clutter, my secretary is going to monitor my mail and delete or move things out of my inbox that are not important or that don’t have immediacy. To make sure the right stuff stays and goes, I’m making a list of things that I would like her to keep and things that she can move or throw out. This process has highlighted for me how many things I get delivered to my inbox that should be sent via RSS – all the updates, tech dailies, vc weeklies,…
More thoughts on Occam’s Paradox
I’ve been re-reading my Occam’s Paradox post as well as the comments and trackbacks (which are excellent – please click through them if you have a minute). I fell a little short of really saying what I originally intended for the post, which was that I think that we have a tendency not only to make things more complicated than need be, but also to focus on too many things (and therefore the wrong ones). As a result we try to assimilate too much data to make decisions (not recognizing the massive diminishing returns on this effort) and try to pay attention to too many things. I wrote a post a while ago about trying to cram too much information…
Occam’s Paradox
Remember Occam’s Razor? It’s the principle (that you probably learned in high school physics) that states that the simplest solution to a given problem is probably the best. I’ve been thinking recently about complexity in business and in life and think there’s a corollary to Occam’sRazor that perhaps should be called Occam’s Paradox – the propensity of humans to make things more complicated than they need to be. I don’t pretend to know why this is, but I notice it all the time (both in my own life and with other people). I guess it’s just easy to start down the road of dependency mapping (i.e., making everything you do a part of a larger matrix that has many interdependencies). …
Cheese
Today is the 36th anniversary of the first moon landing (July 20, 1969). Moon’s almost full, so you’ll get a great look at it. Google put up a moon site recently – www.moon.google.com. Be sure to zoom all the way in <g>.
Who is your vc?
John H turned me on to a post from Investments and More titled VC’s – Top Brass Solid, Others Not (“wow – someone taking the glam out of the VC world,” he writes). I actually found his post pretty amusing. While I think a lot of people at venture firms are fantastic (law of natural selection, I guess) there are, of course, some that are better than others. What Steve’s post did bring to mind was how important it is to recognize that when you take on an investor you’re taking on an individual more than you are taking on a firm. Some firms have more cache than others, but at the end of the day as an entrepreneur you…
Changing styles . . .
Brent wrote in recently to remind me that I wrote in M&A Part I – Lines in the Sand that I’d talk a bit about changes in my negotiating style over time. I actually interested to hear if other people have had similar experiences, because what I’m about to describe both seems like a natural progression and might also be termed ‘growing up’. I had an odd introduction to more formalized negotiation a few months into my first corporate job after leaving Wall Street. The company I worked for decided to embark on a few acquisitions and I was assigned to work on these with my boss who was the head of the business development group. Eventually we settled on…
Some thoughts on better board meetings
I sit through a lot of board meetings and while they are a great time for a company to harness the expertise of the people sitting around the table, they need to be structured and managed in such a way to actually accomplish that (i.e., effective board meetings don’t just happen – they are the result of planning and careful management). I sometimes joke with my dad that it must be tuff to get a word in at his board meetings given the powerhouses around the table; he just laughs and tells me that they prepare for their board meetings carefully. In actuality, I think he get a huge benefit out of his board – as do many of the…
Toys
Here’s some stuff I’ve been playing with that I’ve been meaning to post about: First is MyBlogLog, which tracks links people follow from my blog site. It also tells me how many page views were served from my site. Since I serve full feeds this doesn’t capture all of my link traffic (I miss everything that isn’t clicked directly from the site itself), but I get enough direct site hits to extrapolate these data to my subscriber base. If you want you can also put up a chicklet on your site that shows your most popular links. It’s easy to set up (you have to embed a small amount of code on your site) and intuitive to use. Some more…
How cool is your ride?
Even though I’m getting older I still like to think of myself as at least a little bit cool (although I’m sure there are many people who would set me straight on that one). As a result I was a bit dismayed this weekend to read an amusing article in the Times that clued me in that – at least in my choice of cars – I was not as cool as I thought I was. In fact, the Land Rover that I drive is pretty close to the “Stodgy” end of the cool meeter and in the same category as Chrysler and (gasp!) Oldsmobile. As the kids would say these days: “Not so groovy!”