Bruce Wyman, the Director of Technology at the Denver Art Museum, sent me a beautiful demo from TED2007 by Blaise Aguera y Arcas of Photosynth. In addition to being graphically brilliant, it’s a phenomenal example of how the computer infrastructure should be doing all the work (rather than the user.)
On the outside, he is a quiet calm of a man. Watching him sitting and contemplating the madness surrounding him, you sense a deep serenity. Inside, however, the fires burn with hot intensity. Sometimes they burst out to the surface – a head twitch here, a leg shake there – but it’s never more apparent then when you look in his eyes. At first glance, you see a deep peacefulness. At closer inspection, you see a fire burning bright, forged deep in his soul. Everything is lighthearted; nothing is casual. He considers the Barkley Marathon. What would Francisco d’Anconia do? (Thanks Herb.)
The number “2” (and in $250m and $280m.) Announcements at the WSJ D Conference? The checkbooks appear to be out in force again.
ABC interviews Ben Casnocha about entrepreneurship around Ben’s book tour for My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley. If you’ve never met Ben, I hope you’ve at least heard me raving about him. This interview will give you a sense for the brilliance that is Ben at 19.
I expect one of the big buzzes tomorrow will be Microsoft’s Surface Computing initiative. The first articles are appearing and on10 has a First Look: Microsoft Surfacing Computing! video up that shows off a great demonstration.
I’ve recently been exploring a theme I call “Human Computer Interaction.” A metaphor speaks volumes – if you remember John Anderton in the movie Minority Report, you can envision a much more interesting way to interact with a computer than using a mouse and keyboard.
Several experiences, including my investment in Harmonix Music Systems (the makers of Guitar Hero), finally coalesced in my mind about a year ago resulting in the idea that there was a real opportunity around creating platforms and applications to change the way that humans interact with computers. This isn’t a “consumer” problem or an “enterprise” problem – it spans the entire spectrum of computing applications.
I’ve made one new investment in this area and expect to make several others in the next few years. Of all the things I’ve played with and thought about in the past year, this area has the greatest opportunity to radically transform the way computers work. For a while, I’ve been suggesting to anyone that will listen (mostly my dog) that I’m ready for my implant that will jack me directly into the metaverse. As each day comes, I get a step closer.
My friend Shawn Broderick (currently CEO / founder of TrustPlus) just wrote a blog post wishing Chron X a happy 10th birthday. I was an investor in Genetic Anomalies – the company that Shawn started that created Chron X – and I remember being intrigued by the idea of “virtual property” in 1997. Amazingly – 10 years later – Chron X is still around and virtual property is now commonplace.
It’s been a little over 20 years since the first major production system that I wrote went live. It was creatively named “Bellflower Dental Group Patient Management System.” As of a few years ago it was still being used (yes – at Bellflower Dental Group) – I wonder if it’s still happily pumping out insurance bills for root canals.
While 10 years might seem like a long time in the software industry, as the industry ages, it’s not so long anymore.
40 years ago Logo was created. When I was at MIT in the 1980’s, I worked for a semester as a UROP (undergraduate research opportunities program) in Seymour Papert’s lab. The Coleco Adam had just come out and was going to revolutionize the world of home computing with a variety of features, including a version of Logo the lab I was in was porting to it. Anyone remember the Coleco Adam?
Recently, the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab released (or at least publicized) Scratch. After playing around with it for a little while this morning, it’s obvious to see Scratch’s roots in Logo. However, the creators of Scratch have also built an underlying social network for all Scratch programmers / programs / users. This is the hidden power – within five minutes of exploring I started to find all kinds of interesting programs that I could look at that helped me learn how Scratch worked. In addition, all the normal social network things applied (e.g. in “My Stuff” I have friends, requests, galleries, projects, and favorites.)
Learning how to program is hard. I learned on an Apple II in Basic and 6502 machine language. That impacted how my brain is wired since I was 13 at the time. Today, when I look at something like Scratch, I can see how the next generation of computer scientists (who are < 10 right now) are going to think about software completely differently than me. That’s good.
David has a summary of the great first week at TechStars. The Intense Debate guys weighed in with a post of their own and the energy in the room was huge on Thursday night when I was part of a panel with Greg Reinacker, Andrew Currie, and Jason Mendelson. It’s pretty awesome to hang out with 26 people that are at the very early stage of creating new companies, completely fearless, and focused on doing something great.
One lesson from their backyard came if any of them ran in the Bolder Boulder. If you don’t know about the Bolder Boulder, it’s a 10k race run in Boulder on Memorial Day that is now one of the largest 10k’s in the world. This year everyone had an RFID chip on their shoe and was tracked throughout the race. According to Steve Outing (I didn’t run it – I went and hid in Keystone for the weekend) there were a few problems – as Steve says, Version 1.0 seldom works well.
To bad there wasn’t Facebook integration also. That way you could check out how your friends were doing during the race on your cell phone while you were running. Or you could just follow Tim Wolters advice and be Mindfulness.
I’m amused by the endless awards that our industry bestows on people and companies, but I can’t avoid the seduction of asking you to vote. I promise you don’t have to make choices between Clinton and Obama – yet.
The Webware 100 are up for selection. Several of my friends are listed as candidates.
Please vote early and often (ok – you only get to vote once – so early will have to do) for them.
Scott Yates won a copy of Ben Casnocha’s book My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley
startups, like parents,
get heaps of good, bad advice.
which bits to ignore?
Nicely done Scott.
It’s 2007. I was ready to go for my long run at 9am. It’s 9:27am. I’ve spent the last 27 minutes trying to get iTunes on my Vista-based laptop to sync my newly downloaded podcasts properly with my Nano.
10 minutes was spent fighting with iTunes before I gave up trying to get it to find my Nano (and then trying to close / restart iTunes.) 10 minutes was spent rebooting Vista (shut down / restart / reload everything.) It’s finally now syncing properly. Yes, I’m still living the iTurd life.
The age old solution of “turning it off and turning it back on” is the solution. Egads.
Now – before you just say “switch to a Mac” – I have a whole series of things I do on a Vista box that don’t work well on a Mac, so I’m basically out of luck there also. Maybe I should have been a luddite this morning and just gone run without my iPod and my Garmen Forerunner 305. Or maybe I should just quit whining and accept that as long as this stuff is completely messed up, there’s massive opportunities for all the companies I like to invest in. “Sucking less” continues to be an effective strategy.
Is it “whither” or “wither?” I guess you’ll have to read the Onion article titled Even CEO Can’t Figure Out How RadioShack Still In Business to determine which it is (hint – both?) I’m not a daily reader of The Onion – I rely on my friend Dave (who I think reads it cover to cover – or “every page” in webspeak) to send me the ones that will make me laugh. This article is a perfect description of the anacronism that is RadioShack. (Thanks Amy, Maureen, and Dave for the editorial, grammatical, and content help.) And thanks RadioShack for all of those gold tipped cables and wide array of battery choices.
On this delicious three day weekend (I love three day weekends), what would be more fun than a new version of FeedDemon. (Ok, I can think of a couple of things, but I’m the only one awake in my house at this point.)
I’ve been a rabid FeedDemon user for several years. I’ve tried every reader combination I could think of (web and desktop) and the FeedBurner / NewsGator Online combination is the way I deal with the 800+ feeds I read daily. Nick Bradbury is an artist when it comes to crafting Windows-based software. FeedDemon is his current work of art.
While FeedDemon has a pile of new features, Nick has his top five:
#2 – the offline support – is awesome. Given all my travel I often read my feeds offline on an airplane when my brain is tired – now I get the whole feed including links and images.
Great job Nick – again. Gotta go – Amy just woke up.
In my first business, we didn’t have a line for EBITDA on our financial statement. We went straight to Net Income. We knew our cash flow from our statement of cash flows (and our bank account which we checked regularly since we were self funded.) We never talked about EBITDA, nor did we ever feel the need to come up with things like “Adjusted EBITDA.”
Now – I went to business school so I knew what an EBITDA was – I just didn’t care much about it at Feld Technologies because it didn’t matter. Cash mattered the most. Cash Flow mattered next. Net Income mattered a distant third (as long as it was positive every month – it got more important if it was ever negative, but it was still third.) The list continued. EBITDA was not on it. This was 1987 – 1993.
Earlier this week I looked at financials for a company I’m not involved in. Cash has been vanishing at an uncomfortable rate so I was asked by a friend who is involved in the company to dig into the financials to try to understand what was going on.
The first financial presentation I saw focused only on adjusted EBITDA. It was sort of defined, but not really very clearly (I didn’t know the dynamics of the elements of the adjustment well enough to have a good understanding at first glance.) Cash flow was buried in one of the back pages of the financials (and not explained in the presentation.) EBITDA wasn’t really visible; Net Income wasn’t really visible – it was all revenue and adjusted EBITDA.
Revenue was strong (it’s a good sized company – not huge – but nice growth.) Adjusted EBITDA is positive. Balance sheet cash is declining rapidly month over month. Hmmm. That doesn’t work.
I punted on the financial presentation (e.g. please don’t send me your explanation – just send me your cash flow statement, balance sheet, and income statement – by month for the last twelve months – as it comes out of your accounting system.) Easy to do – I had it quickly.
EBITDA is very negative. However, it’s still not as negative as the cash flow. This is an equipment intensive business so about 50% of the delta was “adjustments associated with customer acquisition”, 25% of the delta was capital equipment (CapEx) investments, and 25% of the delta was “other things that got rationalized as adjustments to EBITDA.”
Not only was adjusted EBITDA pointless, it completely obfuscated what was going on. However, the CFO of the company was spending all his time focusing his CEO and investors on adjusted EBITDA to explain how the business – while losing piles of cash – was really doing just fine on an operating basis “if you just didn’t count these couple of things.”
Last week the WSJ Journal has an article titled Profit as We Know It Could Be Lost With New Accounting Standards. There is a potential massive overhaul in financial reporting coming (the accountants and the AICPA will need something to do in 2008 now that everyone is finally figuring out how to deal with SOX) – you can see some before and after examples here. They are actually pretty interesting (as interesting as accounting gets – not up there with Lost or 24). However, the first step is banishing all of the “adjusted stuff” in the financials. Not helpful.
The motto for my first company was “We Suck Less.” It’s one of my favorite lines and I think it’s a valid aspiration for many tech companies since so much that’s out there sucks.
Apparently today Mel Karmazin – the CEO of Sirius – told investors at his annual meeting in response to XM that “we suck less.” Brilliant. (Thanks Bill for the link.)
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