July 2010
4 posts
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“My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly...”
– Commencement speeches can be amazing; people’s stories are always worthwhile. This one is worth reading in its entirety (it’s very brief).
Jeff Bezos Princeton Commencement
(via soxiam)
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The Spy Who Loved Me
I was approached on LinkedIn by Anna Chapman, one of the alleged Russian spies described by the New York Post as a “flame-haired 007-worthy beauty” on LinkedIn last November. Of course, I didn’t know she was “007-worthy” and, as a professional social network, LinkedIn excludes photo-sharing features. Ms. Chapman and I had never met nor had any other contact when she...
April 2010
1 post
1 tag
“Crash Years” - latest release from...
February 2010
4 posts
Bought a CD at a Record Store
…possibly for the last time ever. I spent about 20 minutes in J&R “Music World” this afternoon listening to Santana, browsing CDs (even a few LPs), and checking out what other people were buying. It reminded me what a great hangout well-curated record stores are. In general, I believe that information technology and the internet have added to the experience and enjoyment...
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Silly Love Songs
Thought I would post a song for Valentine’s Day and before I do, will indulge myself for a moment. Probably three-quarters of rock/pop/country consists of love songs: so there are a lot of great ones out there. When I woke up this morning, one of my favorite DJs was playing a cover of “Ring of Fire.” That song probably captures being “head over heels” better than...
Sam Cooke, “Cupid” (1961)
Turn,Turn,Turn (to everything there is a season)
Couple of big tech news items last week. Most prominently (absurdly prominent given other major world events) was Apple’s introduction of the iPAD.
I like it. It’s effectively an oversized iPhone/Touch and, in this case, size does matter. As some of my Silicon Valley tech friends observed, developers will be able to do new kinds of things with all that touchscreen space. As an...
January 2010
1 post
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Running On
Today was the first day since New Year the daytime temperature got above freezing in WB. Was able to leave work a little early, during daylight, and after a quick errand, I decided to stop by Kirby Park to see if the paths were runnable. The park paths were clear, so I decided to climb up onto the levee to see if the riverside path was ok. It looked pretty dry, but on my way downhill to the car I...
December 2009
3 posts
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Ten Years
Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of our family’s move to Brooklyn. We moved into a rented apartment and the kids started at PS 29. Economically, NYC was enjoying a bull market and the dot.com boom. I had just started a position at a dot.com myself. The IT world was concerned about overcoming the “Y2K problem.”
People didn’t know it yet, but all of these things were...
Brooklyn Mohawks →
Excellent post on neighborhood history from the premier Brooklyn history blog, Brooklynology published by the BPL.
September 2009
1 post
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August 2009
1 post
4 tags
How We Work Now: Input Requested!
Globalization has garnered particular attention in the high-tech fields for a number of valid reasons. First of all, the high-tech workforce in the US is particularly diverse in its international origins and has been since the 1960s. Second, the nature of the work, particularly in software development, lends itself more easily to remote or distributed work, than many other kinds of work ranging...
July 2009
1 post
June 2009
3 posts
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Tina Seelig, Stanford - Fail Quickly and Often →
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Failing Quickly
I recently lucked into a fabulous consulting engagement with an entrepreneurial start-up company which is launching a transformative IT product. It’s just the sort of company that I despaired of finding in New York City (such companies are much easier to find in California or in other pockets of the US). Though it’s a product I believe in and with people I can trust, I am avoiding...
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May 2009
3 posts
Best Baseball Songs →
Inspired by a post on Nationals Journal, one of my favorite baseball blogs, I have started putting together a list of favorite baseball-related songs. The list is work in progress, so if anyone suggests others in the comments, I will modify the list.
Trendspotting: Writing on Subways
I have been doing much of my writing lately on my smartphone while riding the NYC subway and other public conveyances. And I am not alone; my neighbor on this transatlantic flight, a scientist, just whipped out several long emails to colleagues. A few months ago, The New Yorker magazine described a whole sub-genre of Japanese literature written by young women on mobile phones. And, my final...
NYC Entrepreneur Week
A couple weeks ago NYC Entrepreneur Week took place, inspired by Mayor Bloomberg and run by the NYC Economic Development Council. The Mayor is encouraging entrepreneurship in all its forms as a way for the city to replace some of the jobs lost in last autumn’s economic meltdown. The week consisted of what you would expect: a business plan competition and panels on topics relevant to...
April 2009
4 posts
Sun-Oracle
Sun Microsystems, my former employer, announced yesterday that it would be acquired by the Oracle Corporation. Like many of other one-time giants of high-tech, Sun and the Sun brand will soon begin to disappear. The list of once-prominent, now defunct IT companies really is long: Digital Equipment, Apollo, Compaq, Silicon Graphics, Cray, Siebel, BEA, PeopleSoft, NeXT, just to mention a few . ...
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Fathers & Sons
Working with a family-run business is different. All organizations have their own cultures and personalities: family businesses have an additional overlay of kinship and shared history complicating matters.
I was recently advising the founder’s son in a small light manufacturing enterprise in Brooklyn. This firm was under tremendous financial pressure due to misjudgments made over several...
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Shangri-La
One of the great things about meeting with a lot of different businesses is the insight you get into management styles and business culture. A few weeks ago I met with a fantastic company. Extremely well-funded, its mission is as much humanitarian as it is profit-making. Highly technological, the people who work there all graduated with sciences degrees from top universities and are extremely...
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Postcard from the Edge (3)
Our friend has left the small company where he started working just over a month ago. He explains -
“Certainly, the adjustment from large IT products corporation to a small light manufacturing group was a big one. There were lots of positives in the lack of red tape, the ability to work across functional lines and learn new skills. However, in small business even more than in a...
March 2009
3 posts
1 tag
“U.S. government cybersecurity is an insecure mess, and fixing it is going to...”
– Bruce Schneier, respected cybersecurity expert, Chief Security Technology Officer at BT writing in the WSJ - Who Should Be in Charge of Cybersecurity? - WSJ.com
Cybersecurity could be the fulcrum of our next great national crisis. A number of people are making noise about it, but the experts have...
End of Unintended Blogging Hiatus
Last few weeks have been quite busy with one interim work assignment, a couple of interesting interviews, and a few great discussions about possible start-ups. All of this activity has yielded insights into what is working in this business cycle, NYC-based business and what I like doing. The next few original entries here will discuss this in greater detail.
Startups in 13 Sentences →
Most people don’t think of themselves as startups, but aside from people who work in actual start-up companies, those of us who lost our corporate jobs, those whose industries are precarious, recent grads, and those looking to change careers: actually we’re all startups. This blog, written by one of the partners of the Y-Combinator venture incubator, is quite insightful. Lots of...
February 2009
5 posts
1 tag
Postcard from the Edge (2)
Our friend has written again with more information about his new situation:
“The company is located in an industrial area in northeastern Brooklyn near the border with Queens. It is far not only from Manhattan, but also from the hip and stylish quarters of Brooklyn. There are only a couple subway lines in this part of the city and while trains that go to Wall Street and midtown are...
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Postcard from the Edge
A friend who just started a new work assignment writes:
“Just started with a small (fewer than 20 employees) company this past week. The contrast with the Fortune 500 company where I spent the previous 11 years couldn’t be greater. I started working on President’s Day, which is a difference right there. At my old company, not only is President’s Day observed as a holiday,...
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Field Notes on the Economy
What I am seeing in the field now:
Consensus that this is not a regular recession, but a fundamental economic reset. This is not clear from the “noise” in the US media, but a number of commentators including Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer have hit the nail on the head. According to Ballmer, the three important milestones that need to be passed to get to the reset point are...
Where Real Innovation Happens - Tim O'Reilly →
Super insight for entrepreneurs! Short, to the point and well worth the few minutes it takes to read.
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"How Can We Help?"
Last week, this exchange at Davos between Michael Dell and Vladimir Putin captured world media attention for a couple of news cycles. According to CNN, Putin “slapped down” Dell. The discussion illustrated how Russians and Americans continue to talk past each other and miss opportunities to form mutually beneficial science and technology partnerships.
Dell starts the clip by...
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I plan to return to more earnest writing tomorrow,...
January 2009
13 posts
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“Although spending at this level will reduce the assets more quickly, the goal of...”
– Bill Gates – 2009 Annual Letter: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Although his first annual letter was rambling and, in the way it was pimped up and prettified by a PR staff - self-indulgent, Bill Gates’ status report is a very useful review of the critically important work that the...
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Handling Rejection
Handling rejection constructively is one of the most important parts of prospecting for jobs or business. It is part of the job hunt exactly like it is part of any other activity with a long sales cycle. My reaction to rejection is a “work in progress” - it isn’t an aspect of business that comes very naturally for me. Yesterday, I received an email from a senior executive at...
In this economy, we're all entrepreneurs | from... →
“On the money” advice from a NYC VC about career building, entrepreneurship and the position of the job hunter in the current economy.
Career Change Then & Now (III)
Over the last five years, the change in how individuals use information technology has accelerated. This has made a huge impact in how one seeks jobs or business opportunities. During my last big search in the mid-90s, it was a big deal that I had email, the kind of PC on one’s desk was a constraint on what kind of tasks I could do, and communicating with large, widespread groups of...
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Career Change: Then and Now (II)
The business world and the labor force have changed very significantly since my last extended period looking for work or business opportunities in 1996-97.
Globalization of the world economy was underway, but the consequences were not yet as far reaching as now and the phenomenon was less-well understood. At that time, we were just a few years past the debate over NAFTA (actually, even now the...
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January 20, 2009
I began to be able to imagine this moment on Super Bowl Sunday, February 3, 2008. Barack Obama was already a sensation, having won the Iowa caucuses in January 2008. But Hillary Clinton had defied the polls and won the New Hampshire primaries. Obama won South Carolina, Clinton won Nevada (though, if memory serves, she got fewer delegates due to the Obama organization’s superior caucusing...
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Career Change: Then and Now
For the second time in my career, I find myself engaged in an extended career transition (first time was in 1996-7) and I will address a few posts about how the experience has changed over the past 12 years.
The circumstances are different now:
In 1996, I voluntarily left a secure government position because I wanted to work in a more dynamic field where my work would have more impact. Last...
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Man on Wire
This weekend our family watched the documentary film Man on Wire about the 1974 high-wire walk between the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York. You can search online reviews of the film to read about its innovative mixing of fiction with documentary styles (the director structured it like an Ocean’s Eleven-style heist film) and its results in the ongoing 2008 film awards...
My Trouble with AAPL
continuations:
A while ago I started buying some shares in GOOG, AMZN and EBAY as they declined heavily. Those trades have worked out well (so far) and I feel good about owning companies that I believe still have a lot to gain from the secular move online (in the case of EBAY not so much from the core business as from Skype and PayPal). I have not been buying AAPL, despite the fact that I am...
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Link to a great resume tip →
This one is not, as advertised, just for software engineers and it’s also not just for people applying to work in start-ups/small companies. The current economic climate has turned even the largest corporations into start-ups as far as hiring practices are concerned. Lines that “sound good,” but don’t directly translate into a concrete value-add for the employer are...
2009 - Very Simply and with Hope
January 1 dawned very cold here in Brooklyn and I had committed to run in the traditional New Year’s Day run of my new running club. It was 15 degrees as I drove over to Prospect Park. I spent part of every previous winter for the past ten years in Russia: it’s funny how quickly the human organism becomes unaccustomed to real cold. Stretched and warmed up indoors for about an hour,...
December 2008
1 post
WatchCatching Up on RSS Reading, I found a number of gems including a kinescope of the first Kennedy-Nixon debate from 1960. Kennedy’s victory was not as clear as I expected: in fact, not clear at all.
The other real standout was this simple, but arty video. Watch it and enjoy!
Fifty People, One Question: Brooklyn on Vimeo (via Vimeo)
November 2008
7 posts
Autumn Marathon - Part I
This blog was given its particular name for several reasons. I have promised that I would write about all those reasons over time, but I can now reveal that the common themes are as follows: 1) it takes time, effort, and dedication to accomplish big goals; and 2) with focused effort, great achievements are within reach, but success is never taken for granted and also requires humility, luck and...