Yeah, so we definitely had a blip on the grid just now. 91 degrees a few minutes before midnight and poof... my computer restarted and the streetlight went out.
Astoria II? Damn... I better start eating the cheese in my fridge now.
All in It's My Life
Yesterday's trip to Skirmish with ZogSports was a blast, and I have the markings to prove it:
One thing I've noticed about myself... within a given setting, whether it was school or a job or where I lived, I'm pretty resistant and uneffected by stress. Nothing really bothers me much.
But that's when I'm pretty anchored into my surroundings--where I know the avenues for dealing with stress causes and can manage, avoid, reschedule, etc. When I'm playing on my own mental turf, my batting average at home is very high.
Through me into a completely new surrounding and change the rules, and I have to say, I get a bit mentally unraveled. I'm still able to complete all my tasks, but adjustment gives me quite a bit to deal with. When I started working at my last two jobs, or when I moved, the same thing happened. For a couple of weeks, I just tried to keep the deck chairs from sliding off the ship.
So if I'm a little slow with e-mail or on the blog, bear with me here. I'm only on week two.
That being said, the people at Oddcast are great, and I can't wait for the momentum to build further on what we're working on, because then I'll be working directly with a lot more people within the organization. We had a fun company outing on Friday and everyone was very warm and welcoming.
Its very different working on independent projects when you're in a group of 10 or 4, but 38 people is the largest group I've worked with in quite a long time. GM was 150, but I didn't work directly with most of those people.
In any case, I'm learning a lot about my own style of project work... I really like the process of speccing something out. Taking something enormous and breaking it down to its composite parts is something I'm good at and enjoy. And, as it turns out, I'm not bad with designing screenshots either!
More details and observations to come...
After stopping at my parents on the way back from the Met game, I noticed the sky as I was parking, so I walked down to Shore Road today and snapped off a few pics...
Or something like that...
On October 14, 2004, I sat in DTUT working on my Stanford MBA application, trying to figure out where all this was going....
"In the last day or so, I've found clarity of vision. ...Its the best and biggest thing I have the potential to do right now, and I shouldn't be shooting for anything less than that. I don't want to look back on my life over the next few years and think I left anything on the table. Let's see how far this can go. I want to let it ride.
This is going to be big. I can feel it."
That's how my blog got named, and we've come a long way since my eventual rejection from Stanford. :) On July 17th, after seventeen of the most eye-opening months of my professional life, I will be leaving Union Square Ventures to join Oddcast in the newly created position of Director of Consumer Products.
I imagine, given my obsession with my avatar, that hardly comes as a surprise to most of you... but here's the extended version.
My time here at Union Square Ventures has been nothing short of amazing. In less than two years, I went from being an investment analyst at a pension fund to helping a venture-backed digital media company with their burgeoning consumer effort. That would not have been possible had it not been for the opportunity that everyone here at USV afforded me... from the front row seat that Brad and Fred made sure I had for all of our meetings, investment discussions, and interaction with entrepreneurs, to Kerri's patience for having to sit next to me day in and day out in "reception".
Brad and Fred have been great mentors. I knew this was going to be a great fund when I evaluated them for GM back in 2004, but I really didn't understand how far ahead of the pack they were until after I got here. Right around the time that I got here was when they were talking to Joshua from del.icio.us... I totally didn't get it. Bookmarks? Tagging? Not many VCs would have understood it at such an early stage either. I got it soon enough, though. These guys were ahead of the curve by a year and I definitely benefited from the insight the market gave them credit for. Union Square Ventures developed a great brand in a short period of time, and that granted me access to a deep and knowledgeable network of people.
Think of working at USV like MBA 2.0. Lots of networking. Lots of "case studies". We met a ton of companies and in each and every single one of those meetings, there was something to be learned... some new way of thinking... or an inspiration for a thought experiment of our own. It was the most educational birds eye view of Everything 2.0 that I could have had.... and so to all of the entrepreneurs I was lucky enough to meet with while I was here, thank you for your time, your passion, and your attempts to reshape and improve the world.
The only difficult thing was that, when you're an analyst, you don't really live and die by your own sword. You contribute to decisions, but it is difficult to have direct impact on your company. Plus, any company that interacts with us here can tell you that we're a passionate group of users that love to play product manager with a whiteboard once in a while to generate ideas. Sometimes, in that process, you meet a company whose product and its potential you can't shake out of your head--one where you feel like you have some unique insight or talent that could be the missing piece of a great puzzle. When we met with Adi, Oren, and Gil from Oddcast, I felt that from the start. I wrote about why we were excited about Oddcast as an investment on the USV blog. But here, on my blog, I'll tell you why I am personally excited about this opportunity... as a company and just in terms of my own personal opportunity.
If there's anything that we've learned over the past two years or so on the web, is that if you give people a fun and flexible way to express themselves and connect to other people, great things happen. The most interesting new voice in media is us, and we are a growing part of our own digital experience. In Oddcast, I see a company with a platform that enables self expression in a unique way and one that has some key components--mobile and voice--that have the potential to create an exponential amount of social interaction and value to the end user.
This is going to be a fun challenge and a tremendous opportunity for me. I get to work together with a great team to figure out how users want to express themselves digitally and what those expressions will look like. The Oddcast platform is a great base to build on and it is going to enable what is potentially a very creative and unique business model--one that I'm confident brands and advertisers are going to be very interested in.
So all I can say is stay tuned, because I'm jumping in the game here, coming a big step closer to fulfilling the nomenclature of this blog...
My best friend Brian and I have birthdays a month apart, and so instead of buying each other equally priced gifts and exchanging them, which to me seemed silly, we've gotten into the habit of hitting up top tier NYC steakhouses. We've done it for promotions as well, and so steak has become celebratory food for us.
Here's where we've been so far:
- Del Frisco's - Best seasoning... friendly waitresses
- Ben Benson's - Redefined our notion of what a crabcake could be... best appetizers.
- The Strip House - Very dark... great food, though... if you date a steak girl, this is the place
- Old Homestead - Unbelieveable cut of meat... melted in our mouths like butter
- Wolfgang's - Solid all around
- Angelo and Maxie's - I have a special place in my heart for their Teriyaki steak
Seperately, at least one of us has also been to the following places:
- Peter Lugar's - Steak for steak people
- Ruth's Chris - Excellent service
- Morton's - Overrated (me)
- Smith and Wollensky's - Overrated (according to Brian)
- Sparks - Sorely disappointed when I went there...
- Gallagher's - Good food but the place is sort of a dump
So we're going out tomorrow for Brian's birthday and we need to cross another off the list. Anyone have any suggestions?
Kaz Matsui gets traded to the Arena Baseball League... umm... I mean the Rockies, along with 4.5 million Pepsi points.
The Mets take four from the D'Backs as the Yanks lose four to the A's.
My fastpitch softball team mercies the other team twice, winning their seventh game in a row.
I got to hangout at the boathouse all day Saturday and yesterday afternoon.
And a bunch of my friends showed up to hangout at the rooftop of Bar 13 on Friday.
Not to mention getting to hangout with my favorite blogger through most of it.
Ahh... yes, it was a good weekend...