On The Beach

I’m taking the weekend off to spend it with my entire family (parents, brothers, wives, children) on the beach.

Here are a couple podcasts that Harry Stebbings did with my partners Albert and Brad in case you want to spend some time going deep on USV this weekend

Podcast w/ Brad

Podcast w/ Albert:

#VC & Technology

Comments (Archived):

  1. pointsnfigures

    Have fun at the beach. I am up in northern MN at our family’s very rustic cabin. Fortunately, a buddy down the way has built an obsevatory with an extremely cool telescope. He has Internet. My only contact to the outside world since ATT and other forms of tech don’t work here. See my Instagram for the photo of his observatory. He’s having a little trouble with software issues on the telescope. Microsoft 10-and I haven’t fully engaged him on a conversation about it so I don’t know the actual issue.Lots of wild blueberries, bears and donuts. Well, not so many bears we hope.

    1. William Mougayar

      what was that piece of meat you had on the bbq- from a wild boar you caught?

      1. pointsnfigures

        Pork shoulder. Yum. Wild blueberry picking today. In 2007, the Ham Lake fire destroyed acres and acres of forest. Now, it’s full of wild blueberries. We always have a back up plan here in case the fish aren’t cooperating. So far, they aren’t cooperating. I don’t know if it’s the fish or operator error.

        1. William Mougayar

          Have you had black raspberries like these:

          1. Pointsandfigures

            No. But red raspberries

          2. sigmaalgebra

            Reds! WOW! Maybe it was about this time of year, and my wife and I were driving east on the Interstate, whatever number it was, from Ohio to NYS. Our kitty cat was with us. We were nicely in NYS when our kitty cat was making noises. So, I pulled off the road and onto the shoulder, put a harness and leash on the kitty cat, and walked her on the shoulder of the road. Well, the shoulder was a steep slope upward. The kitty cat insisted on going up. Maybe 10 yards up she found it!A nice plot, several bushes, of red raspberries all just at the perfect point of perfect flavor ready to pick, all for free!Back in the car, I found a plastic bowl of about a gallon and about half filled it with perfect, red raspberries!Then back on the road, we pulled off at the first McDonald’s. Maybe we got some water and rinsed the raspberries. But then we stood in front of the order counter and just kept ordering their soft serve ice cream, one order after another, and dumping it on top of the raspberries. We got two plastic spoons, paid, retired to the car, and feasted on the raspberries and soft serve! Nice introduction to NY!Ah, I doubt we offered any to our kitty cat. I doubt she would have liked it anyway?

          3. William Mougayar

            we discovered black ones recently. quite rare, but tastier than the red ones, almost a cross between blackberries and red raspberries.

          4. Lawrence Brass

            yum, those are blackberries or “moras” in spanish, here in Chile they are naturalised and grow like weeds if you let them.

  2. jason wright

    i think disqus needs a feature that allows posts to be written,saved, and then calendar scheduled for auto publication. the beach should be a place to escape the web.

    1. William Mougayar

      that’s what WordPress is for, no?

      1. jason wright

        Beachpress? i didn’t know that.

      2. LE

        Exactly. Besides the spontaneity is key. I don’t blog but I would imagine that the way creativity is driven by impulse, once you write, you want to post. You don’t want it to go to an evergreen article bank

    2. LE

      the beach should be a place to escape the webYeah I don’t get that type of thinking although I acknowledge that some people feel guilty about not getting away (for some reason maybe because of comments like yours!) [1]If you enjoy something and it’s not harmful just go with it. Past several years I haven’t spent much time on the beach (got tired of just sitting there and books are less interesting because of the web) but even when I did I would get off and pull a laptop out and check email or read something while sitting in a chair having coffee.[1] “There must be something wrong with me. I need a break. Everyone is telling me that it’s good to have a break. So even though I don’t need a break I will take a break and ‘unwind'”. [2][2] Meanwhile the guys in China (that I deal) with will literally stay up all night (time zone difference) to make sure they can reply promptly when I write to them. I’ve had them apologize and say ‘it’s 4am I will go sleep now but write to you when I wake up’.

      1. sigmaalgebra

        Naw, just go to the MIT ugrad physics course 8.04 on quantum mechanics athttps://www.youtube.com/wat…There I yell and scream at how they butcher the math, fumble with it, drop it, trip over it, fall on it, lose it, end up with their faces in the mud. Gee, when I was taking ugrad physics and saw such bad math, I thought that the problem was just my ugrad physics prof. Nope: The MIT 8.04 prof is nearly as bad!If I were a student in that class, I’d try to clean up their math, and for that would first have to clean up their physics, and in total that would be too much work.But, actually, except for trying to clean up their messes, the course is actually nicely easy and fun. They make quantum mechanics nice, easy, and fun — if put up with their sloppy stuff and don’t try to clean it up.And they have a second course 8.05 where they claim to clean up the math. They might do a little better. But the time I tried to watch a little of that course, the prof had a thick accent from maybe somewhere between the Persian Gulf and the South China Sea, and I couldn’t understand him.But 8.04 is easy and fun!

      2. jason wright

        guilt? health.

        1. LE

          Ok what is unhealthy about sitting on a beach and using the internet? Or answering emails? I think anxiety over anything (including feeling guilty because you aren’t conforming to what someone else (or the collective) thinks you should do is a definite problem.Otoh, sitting on a beach can be unhealthy in itself perhaps. Exposure to sun to much can cause problems as well as age you. Now in theory if you limit it and use the right sunscreen (have been stories about SPF mislabeling) you are ok? But it seems to me that the people that I see who spend a great deal of time on the beach later in life end up with skin issues (more wrinkles, blemishes, potential cancer etc.) But the point is to each his own, no pressure that anyone needs to feel that doing something they like isn’t right by another person.

          1. jason wright

            it’s not specifically about the beach. it’s about ring fencing downtime. (and we all need a brain break from the ‘religion’ of information from time to time). a beach could be a sanctuary from what can be a bombardment.

  3. JimHirshfield

    You can pick your friends, but not your family, if you nose what I mean. Enjoy.

    1. Mario Cantin

      Even if some of them make you scratch your knows

      1. Vasudev Ram

        the nose knows …

  4. Lawrence Brass

    Beach? Keep working and have fun!

    1. sigmaalgebra

      That’s a good image of what at one time I thought that a career based on pure math looked like. Since then, I’ve concluded that I was mostly right. So, a lot of applied math, a little pure math as foundations for the applied math and motivated by the applied math, and then a lot more applied math.That is, the sand castle is just waiting for high tide.

      1. Lawrence Brass

        That is the fate of sand castles, but the echoes of the quest will live forever in eternity.

    2. Vasudev Ram

      wow. good one. your kids?

      1. Lawrence Brass

        No Vasudev, that was googled. I have the best memories of building sand castles with my brother and sister and then with my son and daughter and look forward to build more with my granddaughters. The beach is magic time for me.

        1. Vasudev Ram

          Yes, beaches are great.

  5. Kirsten Lambertsen

    I think Albert does enough of these online interviews that it’s time we give him this for his birthday:http://en-us.sennheiser.com…The input quality is outstanding.

    1. Lawrence Brass

      Albert’s mic is registering a lot of echo, probably coming from the walls.It is incredible what a good mic can do for your communications.You are very diplomatic Kirsten 🙂

    2. fredwilson

      yeah, the audio is horrible on that one

  6. kenberger

    Love Harry. Class act.Hung with him at a BlueYard event recently, got a DriveNow SUV and shuttled guests around together 🙂

  7. William Mougayar

    Enjoyed Brad’s podcast. Albert’s was hard to follow…the sound quality was distracting 🙂

    1. Jason Harris

      I usually listen to these at 1.5x speed. Alberts I had to slow down and I kept hitting back 15 seconds.