David Farber Says I Should Quit My Job

The Washington Post ran a story about email bankruptcy yesterday and featured my post declaring bankruptcy at the top of the story. The writer Mike Musgrove ended the story by noting that I did not return calls or emails requesting a comment. That’s true, but it’s not because I didn’t see the emails and phone calls. Email and voice communications for me is a triage. For every call and email that I return/reply, there are probably two or three that I don’t. I had to make a decision about whether talking to Mike and his colleagues Sabrina Valle and Richard Drezen was more important than all the other incoming calls and emails. I didn’t particularly want to be associated with this story and so I decided not to get back to them. I got into the story anyway.

And as a result, I got to see a guy named David Farber, who runs an email list called Interesting People, say in the same piece that if I can’t manage my email load, I should "get out of the technology field."

That pisses me off. I am a hypercommunicator. I send and receive hundreds of emails a day, I blog incessantly, I instant message, text message, and twitter all the time, I do calls on my office phone, cell phone, and home phone all day and night. I bet I communicate at 10x the rate that David does. It’s exhausting frankly.

My problem isn’t that I don’t spend the time it takes to reply to every email. My problem is my incessant emailing, blogging, texting, twittering, etc allows me to touch thousands of people every day. And many/most of them write back. And I do my best. Which is not good enough. At least for David Farber.

Guess what. I am not quitting. My job. Or my hypercommunicating.

#VC & Technology