Posts from February 2005

What A Season!

Hpim1792_1The Little Red 8th Grade Girls Basketball Team won the post season Town Tournament this week.  They beat a really tough Town team in the seminfinals and an even tougher Marymount team in the finals today by a 21-19 score.

Vio hit two free throws with less than a minute remaining to provide the winning margin.

These girls were amazing.  They didn’t play a team this year that they didn’t beat.  They won their league, their league tournament, and the Town tournament.

That has never been done in the history of the school.

The starters; Gloria, KK, Vio, Sarah, and Jessica were amazing.  The sixth and seventh players; Thea and Alex Eve were also incredible.  And the rest of the team played an imporant role as well.

I am incredibly proud of their accomplishment.  I hope they stay together in high school for the next four years.  Who knows what they might do?

#Random Posts

Ebay and PayPal (continued)

I just got an email from eBay asking me to click thru and verify some information.  It says that if I don’t do this my account will be deactiviated as of March 15th.

How do I know this is a legit email?

How do I know someone isn’t phishing eBay?

How do I know the link doesn’t take me to some site where I will be shot full of spyware?

I am not going to click on the link but I will go visit eBay and hopefully they’ll hit me with the same message when I get there (if in fact its legit).

This is a real problem and somebody needs to come up with a solution for it.

UPDATE: I went to eBay, checked out my account, looked at some auctions, etc and was never asked to verify my account.  I assume the email was phishing and I have deleted it.  This is nuts!

#VC & Technology

Analysis Paralysis

I was talking to an entrepreneur today and advised him not to surrender to "analysis paralysis".

It’s tempting to want to analyze every option and figure out exactly the best approach before jumping in.

But it’s the wrong way to go in most cases.

As a contrast, I attended a board meeting today where the CEO presented the board with a post-mortem on some decisions he made that turned out to be suboptimal. That was a stand up thing to do and the board appreciated it.  But I am not sure that the CEO in question did the wrong thing.

Because I believe that Teddy Roosevelt (one of my favorite Presidents) had it right when he said:

In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.

The CEO didn’t do nothing.  He did something.  Some of what he did was wrong. But he realized it, changed course, and he’s still a lot better off than if he did nothing.

Had he analyzed the situation for another 3 months, he wouldn’t be better off.  He’d be no better than where he is today and possibly a lot worse.

I think action and risk taking is what separates great entrepreneurs from the pack. I am not advocating blind risk taking, but I am advocating making a decision based on less than perfect information and going for it. More often than not, you will be rewarded for doing that.

#VC & Technology

Cuban Blasts The Broadcast Flag

You just gotta love a content owner like Mark Cuban who says the broadcast flag is idiotic and he won’t use it for any of his content. 

In this post, he calls for the FCC to call the broadcasters bluff and let them walk away from HD if they tie the HD rollout to the broadcast flag.

Cuban is a content owner who knows that content needs to be freed from its delivery system and that when given its freedom it can be monetized in many new and profitable ways.  We need more like him.

#VC & Technology

MP3 of the Week

Since I am laptop challenged right now and my music library is on my infected machine, I’ll just link to a free music download instead.

Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes has recorded a song called "When the President Talks to God" and its available for free on iTunes.

It’s very early Bob Dylan and a bit over the top, but the essential question has been rattling around my head too.

If you’ve ever wondered what transpires when the President talks to God, give this song a listen.

#My Music

Trojaned

Yesterday I was slashdotted.  That was pretty cool.

But I was also trojaned this week. And that was really uncool.

I was using Firefox, the apparently secure browser.  Jessica and I were googling for the video of Amare Stoudemire’s dunk off of Steve Nash’s header in the slam dunk contest on Saturday night.

We went to a site that supposedly had the video, but instead had viruses that penetrated Firefox and installed a trojan downloader on my windows laptop.  This nasty bugger sucks down spyware onto my computer every time I connect to the Internet.

Three virus removal programs and four spyware programs later my laptop is still messed up.

While I am sure I could fix it given enough time and energy, its time for a new laptop anyway and that’s what I am going to do.

In the meantine, I am using my Powerbook with Firefox and its pretty slick.  Maybe I’ll ditch the windows PC and go Mac all the way.

#VC & Technology

Slashdotted

I’ve been offline all day as I have been trying to fly back to NYC from Denver.

I am still stuck in DIA with crappy wifi that I can’t get to work on my laptop.

Hopefully my plane will fly at some point, but its going to be a redeye if it does.

I finally got online in the Presidents Club and checked out my blog to find that I had over 4500 visits today.

That’s three times my normal amount and by far the most I’ve ever had.

So I went to the referring page logs on typepad and found out that my Whither Tivo post was picked up by Slashdot.

I’ve always known that Slashdot had that kind of power, but to feel it first hand is an experience.

Very impressive.

#VC & Technology

Fixing Venture Capital (continued)

I am not sure I really like this title since I don’t think venture capital needs to be fixed, but it seems to get a lot of activity, so I think I’ll keep using it.

My basic thesis about venture capital is that its fine the way it is, but there are bad VCs and uninformed entrepreneurs and the result is things get messed up a lot more than they should.

This blog and others should help the entrepreneurs become more informed.  That’s a really good thing.

Outing the bad VCs is more complicated. I don’t intend to say anything negative about my colleagues in the venture capital business on this blog and my guess is very few others would either. In this regard, I think entpreneuers need to do a lot of checking around.

Entreprenuers themselves are blogging now and that should be a great source of information about the VC/entrepreneur relationship.

Tom Evslin is going to blog his Nine Lessons on Dealing with VCs over the next couple days.  I expect they’ll be very interesting.

#VC & Technology