Recently, I was at lunch with some private equity folks and they asked me an interesting question... well, rather, they revealed that they couldn't quite get a handle on what it was that I wanted to do.  They saw and appreciated the myriad of activities I had gotten myself into and couldn't quite paint a picture of how this was all fitting together and leading somewhere.

Its a legitmate point.

I also think its kind of interesting.  You have some people out there with no goals and no requiste activities and obviously that's not too admirable.  You have others who have goals but really don't do too much to actually pursue them, and to me, that's even less admirable, because they've identified targets, but out of sheer laziness or fear, fail to motivate themselves to reach them.  Then, you've got other people who have goals, and, in fact, start out with those goals, based on little to no experience whatsoever, and then fully commit themselves to those goals.  That almost reminds me of the "strong and wrong" concept.  How many people go into investment banking or accounting, do all the things they need to do to get hired by Goldman Sachs or KPMG, and then soon realize that they had no idea what they were getting into, because it doesn't match the kind of lives they want to lead?  Yet, by all measures, these were admirable and respected pursuits. 

And then you've got where I am...   pursuing, yet seemingly without goals.  By my own admission, I do not have a singularity that I can neatly point to as my "goal."  I have potential points of arrival, and each passing day collapses another Schrodinger wave function, narrowing the possibilities through my choices, even if I have no particular inclination towards a particular result.  I become, therefore the end result of a series of choices based on particular inclinations, yet without an overall guiding inclination.  Therefore, I am not "aimless" but I might be accurately called "without aim." 

What of it?  Does it matter?  Wherein lies the potential problem?  Well, if you were completely without an overarching plan around your activities, you run the risk of overextending yourself... committing to so much unrelated nonsense, all without synergy, that you fail to accomplish anything.  Therefore, you need to draw the line between what fits and what doesn't.  How to do this...   Well, one could conceivably use this "goal" concept, but I'm not entirely sure that's the most effective.  Most people will admit that there are many roads to Mecca, and so using a goal as your hard and fast line to figure out what belongs in your life doesn't seem like it would be devisive enough.  Too many things could potentially lead you to your goals.  There's no "one way" to be a banker.  Some people major in History at Dartmouth and become bankers, while others are Finance majors at NYU Stern with a minor in math.  No, what is really a much better way to draw the line on what makes it into your Palm pilot or not is your own natural affection for an activity.  "Do what you love."  While it may sound wishy washy, the average person doesn't love much of anything, if we're all honest with ourselves... I mean, real love... true passion.  I have passion for new ideas.  I have passion for working with people who love to learn.  Sometimes, I find that in students.  Other times, entreprenuers or VCs.  The best VCs are undoubtedly lifelong students.  So, while I might not have a definate end result in mind, pursuit of my passions have consciously and deliberately singled out certain activities over others.  I could theorize where they might lead, given potential trajectory analysis, but to put forth those potentials as the overarching guiding principals in and of themselves would not only be inaccurate, it would also taint my natural ability to let my passions discern for themselves what I should be spending my time on.  They would be tainted by my alligence to a "goal" and hesitation to readjust goals once they are chosen... for what is a goal that changes everyday?  So, while my lack of a clear goal statement might confuse others and prevent them from catagorizing me, it also keeps my life as sincere as it has the potential to be.  As long as I do what I love, I will love what I am doing... and with true love for something comes sincere motivation and the desire to excel (a word which has no cap, I might add), greatly over and above the desire to reach a goal, and then... well... stop.

Carlos Beltran is now a Met.

Beltran is simply the most exciting addition this franchise has made... EVER.  That includes the trade for Mike Piazza. When Piazza joined the Mets, don't get me wrong, it was exciting, but he wasn't coming off the kind of postseason performance Beltran had. Carlos Beltran nearly carried the Astros on his shoulders into the World Series. Plus, unlike Piazza, he can field and he's much younger than Piazza.

You know what's even more exciting? Carlos Beltran was a Jesuit--he was on my fantasy team for the last two years. I got him last year for a paltry $23 bucks, which meant I got to keep him this year for $28, because I'm in a franchise league. Clearly one of the best fantasy signings ever. So, I've rooted for this guy... waiting for him to come up on SportsCenter every time I was out at a bar, checking the box scores on the net. When I watched the playoffs this year, I had a special kind of pride in Carlos Beltran... the kind of special pride that can only come from watching one of your fantasy guys succeed in the real world. Geeky? Perhaps, but hey, its 2005, and this is the bizarre state of the game for the internet generation.  I'm a rotohead loser, so shoot me.

And yet, the press says that the Mets aren’t even done yet. There’s apparently an outstanding offer to Carlos Delgado on the table. Pedro, Beltran AND Delgado? That’s just nuts. Imagine this opening day lineup…

SS Reyes

3B Wright

CF Beltran

1B Delgado

C Piazza

LF Floyd

RF Cameron

2B Matsui

P Martinez

Now that’s potent with a capital M. :)

I feel behind in my posting over the weekend because of the "Spite Monkey."   

The Spite Monkey is a irratating little critter who messes up your life in little annoying ways for his own personal amusement.  Over the weekend, the Spite Monkey once again knocked out the cable internet connection to my whole building, and also delayed the installation of an amp to fix the problem.  I can't even threaten Time Warner to jump for DSL b/c I don't have a land line and having one just for DSL is more expensive, PLUS I left DSL because the service was even worse.

After that, he crashed the hard drive on my work laptop, leaving it in FUBAR status.  Unfortunately, my San Fran pics were on there (which was stupid on my part), but FORTUNATELY, I had uploaded my San Fran pics to Snapfish.  You know, it kind of bugs me that I have to pay to get the hi-res images back, but, to be honest, I think this episode really underscores the need for some kind of online storage for photos.  Snapfish will charge me 10 bucks to get a photo CD of 50 pics if I really want it and, to be honest, that's a better deal than paying for some kind of monthly file storage.  I just like the option value of keeping all my stuff on my own drives.  I thought maybe I would burn them to CDs, but then what if my apartment goes up in flames.  (Perish the thought, but stuff like that happens, you know.) 

I'm also thinking of scanning up a whole bunch of old letters, etc and uploading those to Snapfish.  I have a love letter that my girlfriend from 8th grade wrote to me.  You can't replace that kind of sappiness.  Yes, truly, some document/photo archiving is in order.   

The good thing is that GM was able to get me back up in running in a short amount of time.  They had an image of my disk from September, so I have all my progams.  It also has all of the spyware that I got rid of since Ad-aware came to the rescue, so I need to do that again.  More posts to follow...

Bob Lutz is now a blogger, and to celebrate my GM design pride, I'm posting my wheels proudly on my blog.  :)   

Now if I could only afford to keep the car AND buy a one bedroom apartment in the city.  The car was well priced... the apartments... not so much.  :(

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In my experience, I think I've gained at least a rudimentary conception of value creation in acquisitions, and how to evaluation acquisition targets.  Sometimes, you get a good financial buy, where you are able to pickup an accretive stream of operating income for a good price.  On top of that, operating synergies may exist that allow you cut some overhead and, again, improve your bottom line given your purchase price.  Other times, you have strategic synergies that allow you to distribute your product in other markets or up/cross sell products.

Today's announcement of Six Apart's Acquisition of LiveJournal, to me, anyway, fits a different catagory.  I don't necessarily believe that it gives its users a more fullsome offering, because I think that the user bases are dramatically different and I don't think you have people.  However, where it does make sense is that the offering seems more "whole" as a company now.  The two companies are amazingly complimentary, with LiveJournal really fitting nicely as a free offering to go with the paid Typepad service and liscenced Moveable Type software.  Perhaps that might make it more attractive to a strategic, but I'm not entirely sure that makes the most business sense.  To what end do you create a company that touches all the bases when all of the bases might not be independently viable?   Fred argues that there exists a great opportunity to "monitize" the LJ content with ad placement, but I don't think the average LJ user would be too happy having ads on "their" space.  I think Danah would probably cringe at the mere mention of the word "monitize."  I wrote on Fred's blog that I think you'd see the kind of outrage that baseball fans had when Selig tried to put Spiderman ads on the bases. 

So, yes, now Six Apart is "more complete."  I can see that and perhaps that makes them more formidable, but better?  Not sure.  It kind of makes me think of the General Motors strategy of putting a car in every single damn segment they could find.  At one point, the company had close to 100 different models.  Some were profitable, some not as much, but you always knew that somewhere, GM had a car for you, no matter who you were.  I guess I'm not sure where "complete" gets you. 

I don't think you can upsell the LJers into Typepad, and even if you could, you didn't need to buy them to do it... I'm sure they are aware of the service regardless.  In any case I never liked the idea of buying customers you couldn't win on your own. 

So everyone keeps saying that Six Apart is now better because its bigger, more diversified, has a complete set of offerings... and while those sound better, I guess I haven't heard anyone really come up with a believable business case on how this will translate into better earnings and value.   

Perhaps they just didn't spend that much on it?  That might be the key.  If the stats are right, and LJ has about 90,000 users paying $25 a year, they're bringing in about $2.25 million.  Now, let's say that the acquisition went at a very healthy 4x multiple of sales, making the purchase price about $9 million.  They've raised a little more than that, but not much more, so this would represent a big chunk of the venture money they raised.  Let's say its in the $7-9 million range, so we don't assume they went and spent all their money in one place.  I have no idea what it really was... I'm just pulling numbers out of my butt.  (Well, the multiple isn't out of my butt... you usually see private venture companies go at about 3x forward sales, plus or minus a turn.)  At $7-9 million, with estimates of about 2.5 million *active* LJ accounts, you basically paid $3-4 a viable customer.  Now, the question is, is that expensive or no?  I have NO IDEA.  I mean, can those blogs generate that kind of dough each?  What if only 25% of LJ users (which would be some pretty good penetration) sign on for whatever advertising or business proposition you send their way... now you've got the number up closer to $16 a viable customer and that seems like it would be tough to make back.  Remember, while bloggers can make a lot more than this with contextual advertising, the blog service doesn't get a piece of that.  If the service got a cut, that would be different, but bloggers *own* all the equity in their blogs the way its set up now.

If anyone else has any shorthand models they want to throw around here, I certainly welcome them.  This is about as halfassed as you can get, but its a start.

Link: Mena's Corner: Current Mood: Optimistic.

So its true...  Six Apart bought LiveJournal.  I think the funniest thing was that, by the time they announced it, it was old news... a whole day old.  We all posted and commented the thing to death before we knew anything about it including myself (you thought CNN was bad about making 24 hours of news out of nothing.)  The truth is, we don't know what this means until at least a year from now, if not longer, and I don't think either of the companies knows either...  well, not exactly anyway, which, to me, is what a marriage is supposed to be about.

I've always said that, if you're truly in it for the long haul, you're in a marriage for like 50 or 60 years.  What could you possibly discover about each other in even a year or two that would somehow prepare you for 60... its insane.  You need to just find someone who compliments you as a team and decide that, no matter what, this is the person I'd like to face the unknown with.  I knocked this thing at first because I couldn't figure out why and I couldn't point to tangiable reasons that would create value.  But, that doesn't matter.  Inevitably, the landscape changes and all of the "best laid plans" go awry.  I think marriages and mergers fail when people are too locked into a plan and what the future will bring, instead of just saying, "we have great resources, they have complimentary resources, we think we're better together."  You can't predict the future and things won't always go your way...  so just pick someone you love and hold on tight... seems that's what is happening here.  I may not get it, but I can respect it.

Its too bad this didn't happen earlier, because had Howard Dean's blog had a little Current Mood: "So excited I might scream uncontrolably" smiley, we might have seen that coming and taken it better.

Link: ESPN.com - MLB - Beltran offers under wraps.

Make that $100,000,100.   I will personally contribute $100 to the get Carlos Beltran fund if the Mets need help.  This guy would be the best outfielder this franchise has EVER had....  I'm ALL for it.

Link: apophenia: The Cultural Divide Between LiveJournal and Six Apart.

Danah has more cultural insight into the blogworld in her pinky than I have altogether and assesses this deal from an interesting perspective.  And yes, I'm one of those people that thought LJ was just for teens...  obviously its a lot more than that.  In fact, now that I think of it, I think of it like Diaryland and I've definately witnessed firsthand how close those communities are and how far away from the new blog wave that hit in '04. 

This is almost as bad as when AMF bought Harley Davidson.

Link: Om Malik on Broadband ? Six Apart to buy Live Journal.

This is interesting, but I'm not sure I agree with OM's comment that Six Apart is somehow a natural fit.  Certainly the LiveJournal audience is a drastically different crowd than the paying Typepad crowd or the Moveable Type users, but diversifying your audience by buying a group that is unlikely to ever pay for your product, well, I'm just not convinced that's a good way to go.  I mean, how many fifteen year old girls are going to fork over a dime to get their site hosted, even if you do give them all of the fantastic features of Typepad/MT which I have come to know and love.  Where's the payoff here?  Perhaps it makes Six Apart more attractive as an acquisition candidate itself?  It seemed like their growth would certainly make it attractive enough, and I can't honestly believe that LiveJournal's growth is any better. 

Om writes "It also gives the company a very fighting chance against Google’s Blogger and Microsoft’s MSN Spaces."  Fighting chance against MSN Spaces?  I'm sorry, but I don't see the droves of people flocking to Spaces, and I can't really see any blue blooded blogger letting Bill and Steve host their little baby.  I haven't seen numbers, but I never got the impression that MSN Spaces had any initial success.  And as for Blogger, which is currently the biggest site, well, I never really thought of it as a "winner" takes all scenario.  I always thought of Typepad/MT as a place for more sophisticated and professional bloggers that need more features and Blogger as the place to go for a simple, free service.  There should be more than enough of the prior space to go around, if you include all of the corporate blogs, to build a viable business.  That segment of the market, currently the only paying segment, is prime real estate and will be huge at some point. 

I'll stop, because I definately don't have enough info to work with here so I'm not going to go guessing as to why they did it.  But, let me tell you, if they try to generate revenues directly from LiveJournal members (I won't make that statement more explicit for fear of starting up the rumor mill), hell hath no fury like a fifteen year old LiveJournaler.  Forget the backlash when they changed the MT pricing scheme...that would be nothing.

I'll think more about this on my way to work, but I can't really think of a good reason to spend your venture money on LiveJournal.  If I'm missing something, I'd love to hear it.

So I checked my e-mail this morning and I had nine notices of trackbacks.  "Ooh... my site is catching on, look at this."  Nope...  TRACKBACK SPAM.   The trackbacks were total gibberish.  So I added them to my blocked list and then deleted them.

Here's a question.  I labeled them all "trackback spam" and then put them on my blocked list, but does any other user of Typepad benefit from that?  I'm sure I wasn't the only one trackback spammed last night from those addresses and I'm sure most users will block the address after they clean their site.  Why shouldn't we collectively benefit from all that labeling?  SixApart should partner with Cloudmark, which has this "community" concept to help block e-mail spam, to offer some kind of trackback screen.  If enough Typepad/MT users block an IP address and call it spam for trackbacks, every other user who signs up would get the benefit of that block.  I'd pay for that in a second, because if this trackback spam gets as bad as e-mail spam got at its peak, I'd probably quit blogging.

Martin at Ignition had a similar problem on MT, but admittedly, the volumes of spam he got were much worse.  His comments were on point, though.  Even though I only had nine, it was way too cumbersome to delete, label, and block these goofballs.  I'm surprised he didn't mention a possible Cloudmark solution, since Cloudmark is Ignition's company. 

Ok, so anyone who has ever been to DTUT and tried to connect to their free wireless has probably undergone the same issues, especially if you are set to automatically obtain an IP address when you connect. 

However, this random guy clued me in to how to fix it and I've been connect all night, busy working hard on my new Success Blogging site.  You have to set your network connection to connect to a specific IP address...   

Go to your Internet Protocal (TCP/IP) properties...

Instead of "Obtain an IP address automatically" click both options to use specific addresses. 

Type in the following:

IP Address:  198_168_1_xxx     Instead of xxx, I used 156, but you can't all use the same one, so try 155, 157, 158 or something.

Subnet mask:   255_255 _255_0     Why do they call this a mask?  No idea, but this pops up automatically for me.

Default gateway: 192_168_1_254

DNS info:

Preferred DNS server:  151_202_0_84    

Alternate DNS server:    151_203_0_84

Hopefully, this works for you.  Now you don't have to bother the cool counter people, like the kid with "C A $ H" tattooed on his fist.  I'm sure they could use one or two less moochers asking them to reset the connection.  Leave them alone and buy a brownie.

As I prepare for my upcoming Learning Annex gig on March 16th and I start working with NYSSA on an finance/investment related blogging seminar, on top of the new book idea, I'm realizing that I need a better vehicle to organize my thoughts (and promote them) in regards to blogging as a career tool.  Therefore, I've decided to spin off my existing posts on blogging as a career tool into a blog called Success Blogging.  I already got the domain name and I'm working on connecting it to my existing TypePad account.  On this new blog, I'll be posting about my thoughts related to the book, as well as all of the information and content that gets produced related to events that I am working on.  I'm excited to start a new blog with a definite theme and purpose, and I'm also happy that the complete randomness of my personal blog, "This is Going to Be Big..." can now be legitimately excused.  I haven't decided whether or not I'll be parallel posting across both blogs, but rest assured, when the new site is up and running and has new posts, I'll let you know on here. 

When I was a sophomore, I lived in Hughes Hall.  It was the worst dorm you could get... a former classroom/office building, they stuffed four of us in two bunks in each room.  The walls and rugs were all various shades of brown.  Its only redeeming quality was that it was right smack in the middle of campus.  I had a dry erase board that a hung on the hallway door.  Everyday, I would put up a quote of the day, because we were close by the elevator in the first floor and we got tons of walkby traffic.  That is, until someone wrote "fuck you" on it.  I ignored it and kept posting...  until they took the dry erase board and threw it in the trash.  I retrieved it and continued to post, until they tore the board into pieces, even mangling the metal frame.  I pieced it back together, though, and hung it up again.  Then, finally it disappeared altogether. 

I put myself out there... I always have.  Sometimes people agree with you, sometimes not, but I've never understood the hate and the meanness.  Don't like the quotes?  Ignore them... but tearing my message board to pieces?  I just couldn't grasp that and it always troubled me that there existed that kind of meanness.

Tonight, someone posted on my blog in a way that upset me over something really important to me.  People say everything is free game when you put yourself out there like this, and while I believe that, the meanness still troubles me.  There's a missing post now that won't return and it was a post that meant a lot to me.  Thanks...   and thanks for busting up my dry erase board.

I snapped this in the morning...

You know what's awesome about snow?

No alternate side.

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So I got an iPod for Christmas, along with everyone else in the free world.  I was impressed with how quickly my 1200 song library downloaded, especially considering it was only USB 1.1.   

Anyway, I've been thinking about something ever since Fred started posting his Top 50 Albums postings.  I didn't have a lot to add, not because I don't listen to a lot of music... I listen to a ton...  but because I never listen to albums.  Even when I was younger, I was listening to the radio and taping songs off the radio onto tapes.  Many of the albums I bought were just to get a song or two and perhaps I discovered a third or fourth, but that was about it and I'd skip through the junk.  Sure there were a handful of whole albums that I liked:  most of Pink Floyd's albums, Tommy, Led Zepplin, but very little of the other genres that I listened to were worth getting a whole album over.  Techno.... I dunno.. that always seemed like a song by song genre to me, getting played on the radio and in clubs.  I never saw anyone actually purchase a techno or electronica album.   Seems like most of those artists are happy to distribute that freely, because what they really want are club gigs and radio play.   

Anyway, point being, I wonder if this is a generational thing.  When the downloading wave hit colleges, right smack in the middle of my college years, the focus was on getting songs.   Middle aged iPodders today like Larry at GM are more focused on albums because most of their digital music comes from their own CD collection, uploaded album by album.  I don't know anyone plus or minus at least three years from me whose digital music collection was mostly downloaded as a whole album.  In fact, that was suppossed to be one of the reasons for the music stealing phenomenon... that it was a backlash against being forced to consume music in album sized bites when there were so few albums with more than just one or two good songs. 

It really hit me when I put all my music on iPod and I realized how much of a mess it was.  Songs and artists were poorly labeled and not grouped into albums.  Clearly, the iPod is designed with Uploader Larry Aged 37 in mind more so than College Napsterboy Charlie Aged 25.  I think I have about two weeks worth of relabeling and cleanup to do.   We need to throw some playlists on this mother, because 1200 individual songs with no rhyme or reason just isn't going to cut it.  This morning, I listened to a selection from the "A"s, for no other reason than they came first.  The selections?   Apple of Sodom by Marilyn Manson, As Far As Heaven is Wide by Garbage, Astrocreep by Rob Zombie...   clearly the "A"s are a sketchy bunch.   

So this is it...  I sent the first copy out to an agent that had asked for it, and obviously if he wants to do something with it, he has first dibs.  However, if anyone else wants to take a look or pass it to someone they know who might be interested, feel free.  Just make sure they're interested because they'd like to work with me and not steal the idea.  :)

Literary Proposal for "Success Blogging" by Charlie O'Donnell

Download blog_book_outline.doc

So I didn't take a lot of family pics, because, to be honest, they looked just like the Thanksgiving pics.  Same people, same venue....  the only thing different was when my brother Scott and his family joined is around 7:30PM.  They were supposed to be in earlier, but they got stuck in traffic on the Belt Parkway.

On my way into Brooklyn, I got caught in some traffic on the FDR, so I got bored and snapped off a few pics from the car...

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Once my brother's family got in, I took a few pictures...

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Exhausted from four hours of begging at the table...

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Perhaps I should start my Christmas shopping now.

Link: Six Log: Recognition for our founders.

Contratulations to the Six Apart team that runs Typepad, the service both my blogs run on.  They just got selected as PC Magazine's People of the Year along with the Blogger founders.   I can't wait to bid for their public shares Dutch auction style in 2006.  :)   Have a great holiday.... its been very exciting to watch this success story unfold.  2004: Year of the Blog.

The carnage begins Thursday, January 13th, when my charity dodgeball team, Dodge This!, plays its first ZogSports dodgeball scrimmage. 

Come see us play!

Thursday, January 13, 2005    9:30PM
PS 191 (West 61st Street bet West End/Amsterdam)

Be there, or we'll throw a wrench at you.