Moving Sucks
Its 1:13 AM.
I'm packing up all my stuff... well, throwing a lot of it out and packing the minimum amount of what's worth holding onto.
I haven't closed yet, but I'm allowed to move my stuff in. Just my stuff, not me. Hopefully, I'll close this week. I'm homeless as of Friday.
Should I throw out all my little league baseball trophies? Perhaps just keep the few most important ones?
What the hell is on all of these cassette tapes?
Why do I still have textbooks from high school?
What do I do with my laptop from freshman year of college with the busted touchpad? I think I'll throw that out.
Shit... all the framed pictures and prints I have on my walls... jeez, I have to take all those down.
Didn't I ever dust?
What is dust anyway? Is this my own skin I'm sweeping up? I'm sure some of this is from kayaking in the Hudson.
Moving sucks.
Fordham Tipped by ImClone 15-2
Just two weeks ago, Fordham played a perfect defensive game on the field.
On Wednesday night, they gave up 15 runs to a team that hit the ball out of the infield just a handful of times, dropping their record to 2-5. Clearly, this went awry in the field. After the game, Fordham fired fielding coach Bill Buckner.
"I taught them everything I knew, and apparently it just wasn't good enough," Buckner told the press.
The bad fielding crushed an otherwise solid effort on the mound by Patty Dickerson, who proved to be quite durable, throwing 243 pitches in the losing effort.
The team may have been feeling a bit pressured to turn in highlight film plays in the field, because the offence has been non existent. The team has only averaged 4.57 runs a game, second worst in their division.
Still, you have to give the team credit for having heart. After the game, most of the players stayed for an extra 45 minutes of practice, in addition to the extra inning they played after the mercy rule kicked in.
Also hurting the team were the departures of Alexis Kramer to Chicago and Kevin Rodricks to Boston. Both players were traded for future considerations in cost cutting moves forced by the movement of University funding to scholarship students.
"Apparently, academics, and not alumni softball, is the priority for this school," commented Manager Charlie O'Donnell after the game. "You have to wonder whether or not the University is really thinking about the future if they're going to have these kinds of lopsided priorities."
Introducing the AO/Technorati Open Media 100 :: AO
Vimeo / Jeremy Rolling at the Downtown Boathouse
This is the kind of cool stuff we do as volunteers at the Downtown Boathouse. Come hang out with us and volunteer!
Batman Begins
I went to go see Batman Begins last night and I absolutely loved it. I had high expectations going in, because I love the Batman character--he's my favorite superhero by far. I think its mostly because he has no special powers. It kind of gives me hope for my own future superhero potential. I don't need to concern myself with getting dropped in a vat of toxic waste or something to become a superhero. All I need is about $5 billion dollars. Perhaps I should leave a podcast pitch for Fred, although I think our fund is too small to make me Batman.
Well, the movie by far surpassed my expectations.
Batman Begins really rescues the franchise from the awful campiness that George Clooney, Chris O'Donnell, and the worst villians ever--the sexy but ridiculous Uma Thurman and played out Ahh-nold, left us off with. Liam Neeson, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Katie Holmes all represent serious upgrades over previous supporting casts, with the exception being Jack Nicolson's portrayal of the Joker. I loved the original Batman--the lone, mysterious Dark Knight. Michael Keaton was by far the best one and Tim Burton's original really captured the mood perfectly. The whole idea of Robin is just annoying and I never figured out why the story needed him, but whatever.
This movie is way different. Its not a "superhero" movie. Its an actual movie that explores real charactors. We don't even see Batman until the second half of the movie. The story has a lot of depth to it, and halfway through it, I thought to myself, "Wow, there really covering a lot of bases here, but it doesn't seem like its overly long or complicated." Chris Nolan has done this twice before--telling a complicated story where you sort of know where its going, while maintaining great pace and viewer interest--in Momento and Insomnia. To have these three movies under his belt at 35 its really impressive.
Definate candidate for my top 50 list... we'll see when we get closer to the end. I might have even liked it better than the original.
Journal Gazette | 06/06/2005 | Trading stocks for cookies
I went to junior high school with Cara... After reading the article below, I think I'm going to start sending cookies around instead of flowers, which are generally overpriced and pretty wilted most of the time. If you're sending something to anyone in Brooklyn, try her shop. The number is 718-680-6680.
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| Newsday photos |
Cara Macksoud left her job as a specialist on the New York Stock Exchange floor to run a franchise of Cookies In Bloom. |
Link: Journal Gazette | 06/06/2005 | Trading stocks for cookies.
NEW YORK – Two years ago Cara Macksoud was trading Spiders, Diamonds and other sophisticated investments on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. She’s now taking orders for chocolate turtles and S’mores at her Cookies in Bloom franchise in New York.
My 50 Favorite Movies -- 25th Hour
So, I should be closing this week *hopefully* and moving to Brooklyn this weekend. It has me thinking a lot about neighborhoods and New York, and whenever I think about that, I always think of this scene in 25th Hour where Edward Norton is in the bathroom of his father's bar. He goes off into this rant, cursing out all the different New York neighborhoods and accompanying inhabitants. When he got to Bensonhurst, I was pretty sure I knew some of those guys and exactly where they were when they filmed it.
25th Hour is a really powerful movie, and the situation effectively packs a lifetime into a single day--Edward Norton's last day as a free man before he goes off to jain for a seven year sentence.
What would you do? How would you spend it? Who would you want to be with?
The supporting cast is great, too. Robert Scoble... eerrr.. Phillip Seymor Hoffman couldn't be more uncomfortable tagging along the last day of a ride that left without him some years ago. He and Barry Pepper play Norton's childhood friends whose paths all diverged pretty significantly, making the juxtaposition of their presence on this contrived last day all the more emotional and complicated. Anna Paquin, as Hoffman's underage and oversexed student, Brian Cox as Norton's Dad, and Rosario Dawson as the girlfriend that might have turned Norton in round out a really perfect cast. This film is a must see for Edward Nortan fans, New Yorkers, and just about anyone else.
Waiting at Gino's
They just doubled the size of the place, and we're still waiting at the bar. Its mobbed today. This place is too popular.
Starbucks Floor
Ever notice the mosaic tile floor in the Union Square Starbucks? It clearly predates the store... I wonder how old it is and what was here before it.
Dock Learning
Grahme giving Cory a lesson on the history of sign language... Seriously. The guy is like an encyclopedia.
Vimeo / Downtown NYC Skyline from the Staten Island Ferry
More fun with Vimeo... I made this little video on the ferry and added a little "You belong to the city" sax intro.
Link: Vimeo / Downtown NYC Skyline from the Staten Island Ferry.
Wikis, Weblogs and RSS: What Does the New Internet Mean for Business? - Knowledge@Wharton
Its always nice when other people support your investment thesis...
Link: Wikis, Weblogs and RSS: What Does the New Internet Mean for Business? - Knowledge@Wharton.
When you look at the trends in web development, you will see a shift from what I call host-provided value -- such as CitySearch (where publishers provide local events listings in different cities) -- to user-provided value in websites such as Upcoming.org (a global events calendar managed by users). There is a giving up of control. The new web applications are lightweight, single function and focused on a specific problem or interaction. When you combine that trend with creative developers who are beginning to have the energy and insight to recombine technologies in new ways, you get not the explosive growth of the 1990s, but you get something more relevant. I can't anticipate exactly what that will be, but I see the potential for businesses to change the way they think about developing and deploying technologies. - Janice Fraser, CEO _ Adaptive Path
"We spent a lot of time developing physical infrastructure, and now we have to develop the social infrastructure on top of it." Ross Mayfield, CEO - Social Text
Interesting thoughts of the defensibility of business models.
Brad and I had a really interesting conversation about our investment thesis, which we're constantly kicking the tires of and refining. We were talking about businesses whose value is driven by peer production, like eBay, Craigslist, and del.icio.us and we discussed the defensibility of businesses whose barriers to adoption are just as low as their barriers to exit. This also came up when we recently presented to our LPs a little progress chart on our investments for a number of criteria. For each of our investments, we had trouble filling in the little defensibility bubble and it made me think about the nature of defensibility in the first place.
What is a defensible business anyway? Last time I checked, we lived in a free country with a government that promotes competition and curbs monopolistic behavior. Any customer of a company can choose to stop being a customer at anytime, right? Now, perhaps switching costs are high, but I would argue that they are capped to the degree that customers would be unwilling to sign up for a product whose switching costs were so high that, in the event of poor performance, they could not afford to leave.
Plus, I always thought of defensibility, at least the way its been thought of, as a very selfish mindset. If your model is to be the only company who can do something, that's not nearly as effective as being the best company offering the product. Shouldn't your focus, when it comes to customers, be on providing the best service--one they want to choose--versus limiting their access to alternatives. I don't like the idea to build a business around keeping your customers locked up in a pen. Better to leave the barn door open and know they come back every night regardless because they like being fed.
Plus, some companies become obsessed with defending, that they lose sight of their offense--their innovation and product quality. If your customers aren't being serviced, they'll leave, no matter what the business. We're thinking a lot about that with del.icio.us. Of course, you always have to keep an eye on competitors, but in the end, what can you really do besides try your hardest to be the number one destination for anyone who wants to remember anything on the web. I mean, if Google launched a tagging service, do you think Joshua would be like, "Well, screw this then, I'll just go back to trading"? No, he'd be up nights and weekends making sure that he and his team offered the best product possible--and that's what it would have to be, because it certainly wouldn't be worth the effort to attempt to "defend" and prevent Google from doing anything. Calcanis posted one before on this... about how businesses are built on 1) hustle, 2) passion and 3) resiliency, and I think in Web 2.0, where services are easy to sign on to and easier to stop using, that's even more the case.
When I was at GM Asset Management, we saw a lot of late stage VC deals whose "barrier to entry" was that they were the only ones who had a certain technology. However, we started to realize, and this is why the Union Square Ventures pitch rang true to me, that pure technology advantage was a fleeting notion. Maybe you were, in fact, the only ones with a technology, but that doesn't mean you were the only ones with the solution. In other words, there are always many ways to skin a cat.
In today's world where community creates value, I think that you will develop businesses that are actually more "defensible" than their command and control corporate hierarchical predecessors. Sure, a computer science major could duplicate the eBay website over a weekend, but he certainly couldn't stock it with a million items. The value of eBay, del.icio.us etc. is in all of these thousands, millions, etc. individual little agents all acting independently. Its very hard to get them all to act en masse, and there's definitely a power law going on here. As more people use these services, the stickier each incremental user will get. Why would that first guy ever use the eBay knockoff without a community of people buying and selling products? That's not to say people won't leave or new services won't get created, but it will take time... hopefully enough time for the company to improve themselves enough to make someone not want to leave.
This is Why Fordham is Special
A couple of months ago, my mom told me of a student asking for my help. She had made Fordham, but her boyfriend, who she said was a very good student, was waitlisted. Knowing that I, if nothing else, knew a lot of people to talk to at Fordham, mom passed this girl on to me. I know that this years admissions numbers were through the roof in both quantity and quality, so it had to be tough to get off that list. It didn't seem like the numbers would be in this student's favor, which is a shame, because its just a very difficult process altogether. The admissions group does a great job with selection, but its also a tough job, because you're dealing with the emotions and expectations of literally thousands of candidates. Its so hard to select one versus another and its, of course, not a perfect process.
The one thing that I told him was that, like in any other situation, like hiring, for example, its probably better when someone has a personal experience with you, and that he should make himself known to the right person. The Admissions Office can't possibily interview 15,000 people, but it would be great if someone at the University was able to talk to him. Showing up at Admissions and begging isn't quite what I had in mind, but I'm sure that's probably what a lot of people do. I don't envy the people that have to answer all of these really sincere and heartwrenching phonecalls from students and parents alike.
I asked what this student's major was and it turns out that he wanted to do journalism. Fordham has a great communications program and so I went straight to the top. I contacted Dr. Paul Levinson, the Chair of the department, and basically asked if he would be willing to take a meeting with the student. I said that if it turns out this student is really good, he could pass on a positive message to Admissions if he sees fit, and if not, no harm done and perhaps if nothing else this student would get some words of wisdom from an experienced professor.
Well, not only did Dr. Levinson meet with this student, but he asked the student for writing samples. I still didn't think there was much of a shot for this kid, though, just because of the numbers, until I got this e-mail today. It was actually the first time I had direct contact with the student...
Dear Mr. O'Donnell,
Although we have been in correspondance for quite some time now in one form or another we have never actually directly spoken. As I'm sure you know by now, my name is ..., and I'm writing to tell you how sincerely grateful I am for everything you did for me during the college acceptance process. Please don't think me rude for taking so long to respond, but I've been very overwhelmed as of late. One of the positive things that I got out of this whole application experience, is a genuine sense of gratefulness for my acceptance to Fordham. Unlike some others to whom admission came easy, I will not take one day of my career at Fordham for granted. I am thoroughly looking forward to the fall, and beam with pride whenever I get to tell someone about my college plans. Once again thank you so much for arranging my meeting with Dr. Levinson, who was invaluable to my quest for Fordham admission. At some point I hope I am able to thank you in person, but until that day you have my deepest gratitude.
Sincerely,
...
Fordham University Class of 2009
I forwarded this to Dr. Levinson, who responded:
Truly my pleasure. Fordham is a winner in the humanity it allows
into such tough processes like college acceptances.All best wishes,
Paul