Posts from 2004

Brad Feld has a great post that is a reprint of an essay he did several years ago called Boards That Aren’t Bored. It’s a great rundown of the key issues in building and using a board.

It reminds me of the real problems of creating a great board. I’ve sat on over 30 boards in my years in the venture business and I can count on somewhere between one and two hands the number of boards that have been truly effective. Brad calls them working boards. That’s a good name. But I’ll call them engaged boards. Because boards that are truly exceptional are interactive, candid, engaged, involved, and passionate about the businesses they support.

I believe you can have a good company without an engaged board. You can even have a good company with a bored board, but its not that common.

But to have a great business, you must have an engaged board.

It takes a lot of work, but the payoff is always worth it.

The Galloping Goose was a hybrid bus/train combo that took people and packages from Durango into Telluride. The Gallping Goose has been preserved and is now on Main Street in Telluride next to the Town Hall.

The track that the Galloping Goose took was razor thin and traversed some sheer cliffs. This must have made for some pretty sweaty palms.

Anyway, the railway is gone but the track is now a hiking/biking trail.

We opted to bike the trail and the result was some great downhill runs among the rock gardens that line the trail.

The Gotham Gal tried to make it down a highly technical grade, over a tree stump, and across a creek. I chose to walk that part. She went for a tumble at the tree stump part but seems no worse for the wear and tear.

The picture on the right was taken after the fall and she’s still smiling.

This is a fun ride if you are out that way.

I’ve been a lot of places in the rockies but I’ve never seen anything quite like the Bridal Veil Falls at Telluride. The falls are pretty spectacular, but its the power station that sits at the top of them that is just way out crazy wild.

The power station was built around the end of the 19th century to provide power up to the mines above the falls. It was taken over more recently and turned into a single family home. The guy who owns it runs a little power station out of it. I can’t imagine a more wild place to live.

We started our hike up the Wasatch trail from the power station and got up to about 11,000 feet. We were almost up to the saddle where we were going to drop down into the Bear Creek trail and head back down to Telluride.

But then the weather came in so fast you can’t imagine. One minute, it was clear blue skies and the next minute we knew we were going to get wet.

We decided to head back down to make sure we didn’t get hit by lightning. We didn’t really get that wet heading back down because it was sleeting instead of raining. That’s how high we were.

It stopped sleeting about 1/3 of the way down. And sure enough, it got nice again pretty quick. I guess that’s the way it is in the Rockies in the summer.

Anyway, its a great hike and if you are in Telluride and in shape for some mountain hiking, I recommend the Bridal Veil Falls to Bear Creek Trail hike.

So the Gotham Gal and I left Aspen on Friday afternoon and headed to Telluride. My friend Mark offered to loan us his plane and more importantly his pilot, Capt Bob (that’s him on the right).

The clouds were coming in but we decided to get to Telluride anyway. Those who know me well know that I am not a huge fan of flying. Big planes are not a big deal, but the little ones give me some heartburn.

We flew up into a few big clouds. At one point we started to get bounced around pretty bad and then the hail and sleet started pounding into the side of the plane. Capt Bob and the Gotham Gal didn’t seem too fazed, but I was a mess.

We got through those clouds and then we had the southern rockies out to the left of the plane. It was an amazing site.

The landing at Telluride is pretty crazy. It’s the highest commercial airport in the country and its a mesa and you land right over the edge of the mesa. Capt Bob handled it beautifully and we were on the ground. And I was happy about that.

The last panel I attended at Brainstorm was about how technology is changing the modern corporation.

We are at the end of the command and control world. We are at the beginning of the coordinate and cultivate world.

Tom Malone from the Sloan School says we are seeing a movement toward human freedom in business that may be as fundamental as democracy was in government 200 years ago. We had kings running our corporations, but now we are headed to democracies. Information technology allows for information flows down the organization which enables this democratization of management.

Vivek Paul, CEO of Wipro, says that high transaction cost operations are getting automated or outsourced. Supply chain automation and customer relationship management are big examples. Lower transaction costs and globalization are creating enormous efficient and dynamic markets. Corporations can become highly reactive to market forces.

Jonathan Schwartz, President, Sun Microsystems, said that Sun has allowed blogging for 100% of the workforce. 32,000 sun employees can now “represent” Sun in the marketplace.

Mark Anderson of Strategic News Service says that if you take the globalization and technology trends to its logical conclusion, then eventually corporations will trump nations.

In the audience was Meg Whitman and the comment was made that eBay is a community of 40 million people and Meg Whitman is the Mayor.

Very interesting stuff to think about.

There was a great breakfast panel today talking about the future of advertising.

We’ve got the CEOs of WPP, Aegis Media, and DDB, the guy who runs marketing for Coke’s brand, the CEO of William Morris, a couple of great Internet entrepreneurs, and a even a dog sitting around a big round table talking about advertising and its future.

It’s clear that “image” ads are struggling to compete with “call to action” adds and its going to get even harder as digital media develops better tools to target these action oriented ads to the right audience at the right time.

It’s also clear that marketers (like Coke) are becoming media and media (like Fortune) are becoming marketers.

The most interesting part of the panel though was the heated debate that developed between the big agency guys and the Internet entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs were arguing that we are experiencing a major transition in the world away from big brands and big media. They argued that individuals no longer trust the establishment and that credibility, authority, and connections among individuals is what matters most.

It was fun to watch the fireworks.

Michael Eisner is here at Brainstorm. He said he liked “Fahrenheit 9/11”

Joi Ito blogged it so I’ll just link to him.

I got up early this morning and went on a hike up the Ute trail with a couple friends. We climbed about 1000-1500 feet in about 25 minutes. At the top we had a view that took what was left of my breath away.

Aspen is incredibly beautiful in the summer.

I’ve never been here in the summer before.

But I’ll be back for sure.

The highlight of Brainstorm so far was Charlie Rose’s interview of Ted Turner last night after dinner.

Charlie did his part perfectly and Ted was in rare form. In my opinion, Ted Turner is one of the greatest entrepreneurs around. He took big risks and got big rewards. He kept envisioning things and then making them happen.

There were enough one liners from Ted last night to fill a couple pages, but my favorite was “The US invasion of Iraq was as big a screwup as Time Warner’s sale to AOL”.

Last night we saw a humbler man. His fortune is 1/10th of what it was at its height, blown up by the decline in Time Warner stock. He admited that he “sold at the bottom because he was scared”. He was candid, funny, and full of the energy and enthusiam for life that has always characterized this man.

The interview was taped and will probably broadcast on TV at some point. I don’t see it on the schedule right now though.