Most days I’m pretty excited. Some days I knock things over. You could say I’m quite like this goat:
Author: Mike Lewis
Ready for baby and the related highs and lows
As many of you probably know, there’s a new member to the Lewhouse family joining us in September. For the past 7 months, we’ve been getting ready in all the typical ways: buying a crib, reading about the development, deciding on birthing and breast feeding strategies. I’ve also been getting mentally prepared for a dramatic change in my lifestyle.
One recent TED video recently caught my eye. The video, which is great, is about all the myths around children. One chart in particular stood out. It charts marital satisfaction over the course of your life. One thing I immediately noticed is that the height of satisfaction – where you are most happy throughout your entire life – is right before you have your first child. Then things plummet:
Looking at Diane’s belly and then back at this chart as I watched this video on my iPad made immediately made me feel as if i was sprinting towards a cliff. Thankfully, the folks in the video dig into that chart a little more. There’s more to it than just that one line. The reality of the situation is that in our lives, we have control over our actions and what will make us happy. After adolescence, where we’re not really in control of our ourselves and surroundings, we grown in happiness because we are able to control what we do – and we do less of what we know we dislike and more of what we know we like. This is especially true for me these days I generally avoid anything where I know i’ll be uncomfortable or possibly have a good time, such as heavy metal concerts.
We become masters of doing what we like in our 30’s – especially if you don’t have kids. What the next chart shows are the emotional highs and lows one feels at various stages in their life. You can see that we have big highs and lows as teenagers and then they gradually shrink as we get a handle on the world. Then you have a kid. And the highs and lows become monstrous.
From what i’ve heard this is true. I hear stories of how amazing it is, and i also hear stories of how tiring and bad it gets. I’m expecting both are true I’m expecting to be shaken out of my lovely comfort tree into some madness. I’m expect to hate it at times, but i’m also expecting for some of the biggest highs i’ve ever felt. I’m ready for it. Just two more months to go.
The REAL tech meetups in Boulder
This morning I took a ride up Sunshine Canyon in Boulder. We stopped half way up and we looked around and took a little poll about who was on the trip. We had 4 Techstars companies represented (Orbotix, Kapost, Everlater, and PivotDesk), one VC (Hwy12), and one Techstars mentor (Jamie).
While biking 6 miles straight up, and in between deep breaths, we talked about building product faster to meet demand (Dave from PivotDesk), growing revenue (Mark from Hwy12), and how to correctly build a financial model for a an early stage company (Nate and Natty from Everlater). If you’re wondering how work in Boulder happens or how the tech community interacts, I’d say this was a pretty perfect example.
Oh, and the views aren’t bad either….
You can see the damage from the fire from 2 years ago still: 
Kapost Interview on KillerStartups
The other day, I gave an interview about Kapost to KillerStartups and i realized that i have a lot more to say than i thought i would. I’m going to republish some of it here.
First, I haven’t talked much about Kapost on this blog, so i’m going to republish those questions first. Here they are:
What’s kapost all about and what makes it stand out from the competition?
Kapost is a content marketing platform. Many businesses are spending less money on ads and more money on creating their own content. The idea behind that is that you can spend $5k a month in search ads and have a spot at the top of a search results page, or you can spend $5k a month creating content and have links in the search results page. These links are more authentic and over time much more effective. But, as a result, you have many businesses becoming publishers and creating a lot of content. What Kapost does is manage that content for them and provide insight into which content is working. Similar to how a CRM like Salesforce helps a sales team organize and evaluate performance from a formalized business process, Kapost helps a marketing or publishing team organize themselves and eventuate how they are doing from a content perspective.
Continue reading “Kapost Interview on KillerStartups”
We are So Lucky, Indeed
Just listened to a great commencement speech by Michael Lewis (aka: my google search nemesis). The end of the speech is great. He talks to the graduating Princeton class about luck and the role it plays in life. Here’s the transcript. I loved it:
I now live in Berkeley, California. A few years ago, just a few blocks from my home, a pair of researchers in the Cal psychology department staged an experiment. They began by grabbing students, as lab rats. Then they broke the students into teams, segregated by sex. Three men, or three women, per team. Then they put these teams of three into a room, and arbitrarily assigned one of the three to act as leader. Then they gave them some complicated moral problem to solve: say what should be done about academic cheating, or how to regulate drinking on campus.
Exactly 30 minutes into the problem-solving the researchers interrupted each group. They entered the room bearing a plate of cookies. Four cookies. The team consisted of three people, but there were these four cookies. Every team member obviously got one cookie, but that left a fourth cookie, just sitting there. It should have been awkward. But it wasn’t. With incredible consistency the person arbitrarily appointed leader of the group grabbed the fourth cookie, and ate it. Not only ate it, but ate it with gusto: lips smacking, mouth open, drool at the corners of their mouths. In the end all that was left of the extra cookie were crumbs on the leader’s shirt.
This leader had performed no special task. He had no special virtue. He’d been chosen at random, 30 minutes earlier. His status was nothing but luck. But it still left him with the sense that the cookie should be his.
This experiment helps to explain Wall Street bonuses and CEO pay, and I’m sure lots of other human behavior. But it also is relevant to new graduates of Princeton University. In a general sort of way you have been appointed the leader of the group. Your appointment may not be entirely arbitrary. But you must sense its arbitrary aspect: you are the lucky few. Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interests to anything.
All of you have been faced with the extra cookie. All of you will be faced with many more of them. In time you will find it easy to assume that you deserve the extra cookie. For all I know, you may. But you’ll be happier, and the world will be better off, if you at least pretend that you don’t.
I couldn’t agree more. I feel completely lucky to be on the earth at this time, in this country, with my family and with all the other things that have fallen into place for me. It’s great to stop every now and then and acknowledge it.
You can watch the whole thing video:
Prometheus: Sci-Fi Done Right
I saw the film Prometheus this past weekend, which is a Ridley Scott-directed prequel to the film Alien and I really liked it.
Here’s what I liked specifically:
The Visuals
The film just looks amazing. Granted, I saw it in IMAX but it looked like it was made for the IMAX screen. Just the first couple of a scenes when they are going over the landscape of Iceland/Greenland was incredible. It was less of the tricks you see in big films and more of the awe you got from Avatar. No matter if you liked the film or not, it was just so *lush* in its appearance.
Continue reading “Prometheus: Sci-Fi Done Right”
5 Reasons Why I Loved the BoulderBoulder
I ran the Boulder 10k this weekend, called the BoulderBoulder, with my sister and Diane and it was just a fantastic time. I’ve run a few races in my day and they are all pretty similar, but some things that make the BoulderBoulder a unique running experience.
#5 The costumes. Lots of people dress up and they look fantastic. We’re talking tigers, bears, superheros and belly dancers. The spirit is infectious and i’m already thinking of my costume for next year.
Continue reading “5 Reasons Why I Loved the BoulderBoulder”
More Forward or Die
I was reading BusinessWeek and there was a good interview with Cisco’s John Chambers
Companies that don’t change get left behind. Since I became CEO [in 1995], 87 percent of the companies in the Fortune 500 are off the list. What that says is that companies that don’t reinvent themselves will be left behind.
Wow. I love that. You see this all over the place. The companies that will be killing it in 10 years probably don’t even exist yet. They say that each person today will have 8 careers by the time they are 65. The world changes pretty fast now. It’s exciting.
The Beats of Change – Electronic music is the new indie rock
I got to quite a bit of live music shows. I try to see my favorite acts whenever they roll through Colorado. I just went to Coachella and in the past year i’ve seen Mumford, The National, Wilco, Andrew Bird, Shins, Radiohead, Childish Gambino, Band of Horses and others. I like these shows but they are also frustrating. I increasingly find that rock bands do nothing more than just play the songs from their album, in a way that sounds just like the tracks on the album and i leave the venue wonder why I went.
I began to think back to why people used to go to shows. In the past, i could imagine that music represented more than it does today. It represented a movement. The Rolling Stones and Elvis were a powerhouse that were more than just great songs. Or, i could see how an artist’s lyrics (such as Bob Dylan’s) were so meaningful that their concert was more akin to a speech or a rally. None of these are happening in indie rock today.
However, i do see this stuff happening with the electronic music scene. Two things are different. First, now that music is digital, the instruments of today are the computer and that’s resulting in brand new music that is truly different than anything that’s come previously. Second, the concerts where this is played are extremely social. The DJ’s aren’t just playing music for an audience, the audience is involved. Very involved. As my friend JT said this weekend after hearing Swedish House Mafia, “it feels like the DJ’s are conductors.”
Also, these electronic artists don’t need major labels. They are proficient in interacting and promoting online. If fact, most of them don’t even release albums in the traditional sense.
It feels to me that this electronic music scene is the future. Bob Lefsetz agrees with me. I just hope i’m not too much of a dinosaur to enjoy it.
Marines vs. The Roman Army
This is a pretty great story. A worker in Iowa was checking Reddit and saw that someone posted a question,
Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if I traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion or MEU [Marine Expeditionary Unit]?
He immediately posted a response and began it with a narrative of what that actual experience must be like. His response got such a positive response that he wrote another, and then another. The story he concocted was so awesome that he got signed by an agent and got a deal to turn it all into a Hollywood film.
It’s a great story and even more interesting because it shows how modern-day publishing is changing. I think Reddit and Digg are much more similar to future newspapers than the Washington Post or New York Times. If we’re getting all our information on the internet, it makes sense for it to be an interactive medium we’re reading. It also proves that “the masses” (i.e. some guy in Iowa) is just as capable of generating quality content as a journalist.