The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

Picture 839, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Hilarious sign on their front door.

I can't agree more with Andrew Kortina:

"I find my self asking many of my friends these days to start blogging or at least posting commentary on interesting web content. My motivations are partly selfish and partly altruistic.  The thought process:

I like to befriend smart people.  They have good ideas. Conversations about good ideas lead to better ideas. Geographic constraints should not prevent good ideation."

I do the same thing, with varying amounts of success.  Not every smart person in my life is going to agree to start and maintain a constant blog.  What I'd really like is a post by post blog invitation service.  If I could just ping people with questions by e-mail, and their responses could automatically wind up on a blog, that would be awesome. 

Sure I could do a lot of cutting and pasting, but it would be a lot more seemless just to have a page to send questions out to people, and have the responses automatically show up on the blog, like Disqus does with comment notifications.  Plus, you could even e-mail back the creator with a link for editing, ping them with comment notifications when people respond, etc.

The quality of such a blog would depend on the owner's ability to ask great questions to smart and interesting people.

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

So I was just thinking to myself that I'd love a way to make web pages available offline for airplane and other types of offline reading.

Then I remembered Universal Document Converter.  I'm sure there's some free, open source thing I missed, but a while back I had to convert something to a TIF file or something random like that, because it turns out the copy of Powerpoint I had wasn't exactly kosher.  So I wound up paying for the Universal Document Converter and it's been a really easy way to print documents automatically to PDF.  I don't own a printer and try not to keep any paper files, so this has been a great way for me to organize my digital documents storage.

So I just realized I can easily print web pages to PDF and keep them for later.  There's a bunch of stuff I'd like to read on my plane ride back to NYC and now I have a bunch of PDFs in a folder.  Nice!

Still, it would be cool if something could run in the background pulling in my del.icio.us links that are tagged PDF and automatically do this for me.

I blog and I twitter.  It might seem to some like I'm sharing everything and totally out there, but I'm not.  For example, you don't know who I'm dating.  That's mostly to protect the innocent, but also because it doesn't involve you.  Plus, I believe, unlike some people, that certain personal things don't need to be shared, lest we all appear like train wrecks to the world.  We all know that there are many moments in our private lives that are momentarily or multi-momentarily train-wrecky that don't impact our ability to just get stuff done.

However, everyone's line is different, and so is how we manage ourselves between those lines.  Take Facebook, for example.  I think it's bizarre that people I only know professionally want to be Facebook friends with me.  I deny them not for any other reason than it makes my own experience of Facebook noisy.  Just because we met at a business development meeting doesn't mean I need to see the photos you uploaded of your kids, or when you add a Little Green Patch. 

What this means is that I don't wield the same size sphere of influence as someone like Jason Calacanis, but you know what?  I don't want to.  To me, there's something to be said for authenticity.  I may have 950 LinkedIn contacts, but I actually know them.  And my Facebook friends?  They're actually friends, for the most part.  Yet, I'm still, in my opinion, able to maintain a very extensive and very fruitful online presence. 

Certainly people have different approaches and that's what I'd like to explore at my SXSW talk with Alana Taylor.  Alana is an NYU student who is a great social networker, but in my opinion, also stays on the right side of the authenticity balance.  I'm sure she'll have a lot to say as a college student about her professional world colliding with her personal digital spaces.

So if you'd like to join us in exploring "Blurry Networks: Friends, Contacts, Followers and Professional Me", please vote for our panel.  Thanks!

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

[SABYA] I WANT SOME WIDGET           2:09 PM
[SABYA] ARE YOU THERE

ceonyc                                                2:09 PM
What kind of widget?

myplugoo                                             2:09 PM
[SABYA] FLASH CONTET

ceonyc                                                 2:10 PM
Ok... I get you flash widget.   How much you pay?

myplugoo                                               2:10 PM
[INFO] Visitor [SABYA] has left the conversation.

Its been at least a week since I've taken the subway to work. I'm leaving for SF tonight and so I'm wheeling a small piece of luggage around with me. Tonight I'll be participating in the logistics olympics, trying to play a softball playoff game at 6:30, leave by 7:40 from 148th/Riverside and be at JFK for a 9:10 flight. As long as there are no major hiccups, I should be fine--especially for August. Hopefully we put enough runs up early that I can leave 10 minutes early.

Today will be research day at work... I need to put together a clear and consice picture of what's going on in the recruiting market, what's needed, and why we're it. The nice thing is that, because it's such a lucrative market, and that it cuts across enterprises as well as consumers, it's very well covered by some really smart folks.

I thought those two people, the dirty blonde and the tan guy with the goatee, were together when they walked into the car. I guess not. Still, they're standing next to each other, hands on the overhead bar, facing out towards the window. Maybe I should introduce them to each other.

People are so oddly shaped. I'm staring down at my phone typing this and I'm noticing what is obviously my grandfather's ribcage passed on through heredity. I'm sort of barrel chested. I don't know where to go with that. I'm just sayin'.

Glen Frey just randomly came up on my iPod. This always makes me think of the Mets '86 Championship video.

What company makes all these orange and red cellephane veggie bags that all the Asians who get off at Canal St carry? Whoever it is, they have a total monopoly.

The guy next to me is reading a comic book.

This seemed like a short ride.

The woman next to me is listening to a Podcast of WNYC "On the Media". I agree with @tismoi. Very few people look happy in this car.

Kilsy just came on....hard to miss. I knew it right away. They need to make more music or tour more or do anything... very good stuff.

Links I've recently tagged on del.icio.us:

A friend of mine's dad runs a large landscaping business with over one hundred employees.  While the business has been in the family since 1939, when he took it over in the early 70's, he really took it to the next level.  That often happens when the reigns of a business finally pass on to the next generation.

Anyway, what we're doing at Path 101 doesn't even hold a tea candle (yet!) to what he's accomplished.  This is a real business that sells real stuff with revenues, EBITDA, 100+ employees, trucks, etc!  It would be easy for someone with so much success to dismiss a small angel funded web startup in Alpha, but instead, he took a lot of interest  in what we were up to.  He even brought me up to a neighbor as another guy running a business who knows what it's like to work hardest for yourself.  I really appreciated getting that kind of respect towards our humble beginnings--especially from a friend's parent who might naturally be prone to a more unbalanced power dynamic.  Instead, it felt like two entrepreneurs shooting the breeze and it was pretty cool.

And yesterday, I got a nice note from Marc Cenedella checking in to see how things were going with Path 101 and an invite to come chat about the recruiting market and startup stuff.  I'm sure I'll learn a lot more than I can contribute to the conversation, but similar to my friend's dad, he asked some questions in our exchange about what the sweet spot is for when in a person's life Path 101 is useful. 

I really appreciate when successful folks like this can take a second to think about somebody else's business--but more so than that to take it seriously despite the vast distance between our respective progress.  It's a stark contrast to a recent situation where someone told me how they'd do things completely differently and never really acknowledged the progress we had made or my vision for the company.

At the end of the day, I just don't sweat situations like that.  You can't impress everyone and not everyone is going to care what you're up to.  You've got limited time and resources in a startup, and you just need to work with the people who believe in you and not worry about everyone else.  I guess relationships are kind of like that, too.  Some people are going to accept you and be excited to be with you.  If you spend more time building strong relationships with these people, and less with those who aren't interested, your life will turn out just fine.

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

Yesterday, I had an amazing call with a guy with thirty years experience in the recruiting market.  For years, he had a vision of a service doing exactly the kind of things we plan to do with Path 101--not necessarily on the helping people figure out what they want to do side, but on the data-centric, getting to know candidates better side.  We saw completely eye to eye on how badly this market needs to do more than figure out eighty different ways to smash a resume and a job post together, or mindlessly connect people without adding intelligence to the process.  What he also believed in, which we do strongly, was that it needed to be a service people opt-in to--something that provides value to the user every step of the way, encouraging them to participate more and submit more information about themselves. 

What was amazing was that this guy went the distance in terms of describing the power of the vision--referring to it as "one of those four or five big stories..."--while at the same time, he realized that we needed to take small steps to get there, but that directionally we were in the right place.  At one point, the grokking was so intense, we had to pull back and say, "Hey, we need to pull back and let this sink in... let's talk next week." 

While I absolutely believe Path 101 can be one of those companies, there's never been a purpose to describe it as such to anyone like that, particularly investors.  In fact, going through the fundraising process actually forces you into quite the opposite mode of thinking.  Your grand vision starts slowly dying a death by a thousand cuts.  They start nitpicking on features they dislike, or question how long it will take before you drive revenues, or they want to know how are you going to get people to come to the site.  (Which is the most ridiculous question of all time, because every single company has the same answer--SEO, social media tools, PR, or some kind of partnership...and maybe some traffic purchasing... what other traffic is there?  Doesn't everyone say the same thing?)   

Eventually, you find yourself thinking smaller--that if you can't find anyone to believe your big world-changing vision, you try to convince people of small things--how you just want to get to the next product step, how you can pull down some low hanging fruit revenue, etc.  God forbid you should look out further than your next financing in your plan--well don't bother because who's going to believe you, right?

Meanwhile, I was at a panel discussion with four VC's and some of them were talking about "Web 2.0" deals and how they need to do extra diligence on the mindset of the entrepreneur because they need to make sure they're in it to build a big company and don't want the quick flip.  Well, how many game changing companies out there had a clear path to the world changing vision at the point of their angel round? 

Perhaps the reason why so many Web 2.0 companies are small ideas and quick flips is because we've never had so much transparency into the VC mindset as we have now, and what entrepreneurs are hearing isn't "Think big", but "What can you show me now?"  Well, big takes time, and small can be built on Ruby-on-Rails this weekend... and don't expect small to resist a $30 million sale to a media company.   Thus far, no new potential investor has flat out asked me how Path 101 changes the world, and only one has even come close to turning the conversation into how big this gets. 

del.icio.us, for example, was a company where lots of people scratched their heads and said, "Bookmarking?  I don't get it," while at the same time, others, like those of us at Union Square Ventures, thought that people-powered search and discovery was a potential game changer and maybe even a Google-killer.

The key is finding that one person who believes in that vision like you do--even if you haven't previously been #2 at Paypal or built Skype or whatever.  It's hard to do that as part of this process.  I told this guy yesterday that while I totally believed in this vision, as CEO, I also had to deal with the harsh reality that the well runs dry in January, and so no one's changing any worlds without some more cash.  Walking in the door and saying, "I know we're in Alpha and rolling out our product at the moment, but here's how this changes the world", unfortunately, isn't usually the path to solving that immediate need.

I wonder if your expected value increases if you grab your pick ax and go find that one person who believes in the big vision, versus thinking small and incremental and showing what you can do tomorrow so someone will fund you today.  Companies would certainly behave very differently depending on what kind of feedback they get from their supporters, and so I wonder how much the early exit/flip Web 2.0 small idea mentality is a product not of entrepreneurs but of the investment community itself.

UPDATE:

Of course, I really don't want to just come off like I'm complaining.  If you know me, you know I always look for actionable next steps anytime I see an issue.  For me, what this whole experience has me doing is thinking about ways I can better convey the vision and end goal to the folks who need to see what that first step on the path looks like.   Sometimes, though, its just nice to get unbridled support on the vision rather than just spend 99% of your time defending the product plan.