I just got back from a friend’s wedding in Minsk. There were a bunch of awesome sounding weddings this season and I usually make a point of going to all the weddings I’m invited to, but given my new career situation (which I’ll be ready to talk about soon) I’ve unfortunately needed to conserve both the time and money. There’s always an exception to the rule though and my friends Paul and Jenia’s wedding in Minsk was somthing I just couldn’t miss. Highlights:
- Yes you really can consume an entire bottle of vodka on your own and not die. You just want to.
- There is a cured meat there that is basically just the fatty part of the bacon with all the meat part cut away. Amazing.
- Belarussian nightclubs. Wow. We went three nights in a row.
- The “purchase of the bride” – a Belarussian tradition where the groom and friends must convince the bride’s friends to let her go with bribes of chocolates, singing, champagne and cash. We had stacks of 10 ruble notes (worth about 1/3 of a penny.)
- Simultaneous English / Russian / Belarussian translation of the speeches at the wedding so everybody could understand. It certainly makes for short speeches.
- There were 17 nationalities represented at the wedding. (And that doesn’t include cheating ones like “Texas”) An amazing, awesome group of folks.
- The younger sister of the bride (who speaks both Belarussian and English) gave a very different speech in Belarussian that her family could understand than she gave to the invited English speaking guests. I won’t reproduce it here but it was classic.
- Belarussian singing / dancing / cover-band. You really haven’t heard Guns ‘ N ‘ Roses until you’ve heard the Belarussian cover.
- Being beaten by birch branches in the Sauna the day after the wedding. Really the whole sauna experience which involved ice cold water, scalding sauna, absolutely ridiculous hats and of course – more cured meats.
- Going to see Swan Lake the day after the wedding at the Belarussian Ballet. (Yes mom, I really went to the Ballet!)
- And of course – the absolutely amazing and cool friends I met there. The only thing I find sad about weddings is at the end knowing that this group of people will probably never assemble again. As I was leaving I had the urge to tell people, “See you at the Christening.”
Barry Ritholtz calculates the total taxpayer liability of all the accumulated bailout programs at $8.5 trillion dollars. (Not including the $5.2 trillion in Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac mortgages.) US GDP was estimated in 2006 to be $13.13 trillion dollars. Wow!
November 16th, 2008
oroup
Peter Barnes has written an excellent article for Reuters on a hypothetical scheme an Obama administration might develop to address carbon emissions and stimulate investment in clean energy in a way that is financially and politically viable over the long term. Exciting stuff.
Buried deep in Newsweek’s fascinating “Special Election Project” piece is the following nugget:
The Obama campaign’s New Media experts created a computer program that would allow a “flusher”—the term for a volunteer who rounds up nonvoters on Election Day—to know exactly who had, and had not, voted in real time. They dubbed it Project Houdini, because of the way names disappear off the list instantly once people are identified as they wait in line at their local polling station.
Wow!
That I’m a fan of Barack Obama is not a surprise to anyone who knows me. One of the things that appeals to me most about him is that he seems to be evidence based rather than ideology based. He is clearly very smart and secure enough in that intelligence that he can surround himself with other very smart people and actually listen to them. The thoughtful, nuanced positions he comes up with as a result may not play as well in a debate as pithy ideology, but they leave me with much more confidence that they are closer to “right” policy wise.
The outcome of the election is now looking likely enough that it’s not unreasonable to think about how the world might change under an Obama administration. NY Magazine just ran a lengthy, fascinating article on Obama’s transition planning process. Leading the process is John Podesta, former chief of staff to President Clinton and the guy who expected to be doing transition planning for Hillary Clinton. That Obama would tap a Clinton ally for the job (and that Podesta would take it) is refreshing compared to the political score-settling we have gotten used to over the last 8 years.
The article goes on at some length as to what the staffing and policy priorities of a hypothetical Obama administration might be and towards the end contains the following rather interesting quote:
Obama now informs Time’s Joe Klein that endeavoring to spark “a new energy economy [is] going to be my No. 1 priority when I get into office.”
Wondering what that may look like, I did a little Googling and came across the Center for American Progress, a think-tank helmed by the very same John Podesta. Front and center on the site is a link to “Green Recovery: A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy”. There, Podesta outlines a $100B stimulus package that would invest in the following six things:
- Retrofitting buildings to improve energy efficiency
- Expanding mass transit and freight rail
- Constructing “smart” electrical grid transmission systems
- Wind power
- Solar power
- Next-generation biofuels
As a second year business-school student with strong entrepreneurial leanings and about to graduate into a rather rough job and capital market, understanding ahead of time where $100B in new spending is about to occur is welcome information indeed. More thoughts on the opportunities this presents shortly.
September 3rd, 2008
oroup
Some times are so great, you can tell that they are among the best times of your life even while you’re having them. For me, this summer was one of those times. I spent the summer living in San Francisco, doing exactly what I’d hoped: working in VC, reading business plans, meeting with entrepreneurs, doing due diligence and generally learning the business. I also managed to find quite a bit of time to reconnect with old friends, work out in the mornings, ride my motorcycle into the hills and do a little traveling.
I’m now back at school for one last stretch of classes, but like MacArthur in the Pacific, I shall return!
I’ve long been a fan of Google Spreadsheet. Like all disruptive technologies, it doesn’t meet the needs of most customers of the incumbent product, Excel. I’m no banker, but even my relatively neophyte hands keep trying to hit F4 to lock a cell reference or hit F2 to edit a cell. I miss being able to right click to format a cell, the lag time of javascript sometimes annoys the crap out of me, etc… I would not try to convince a Wall Street number jockey to switch from Excel just yet. No way.
BUT, also like all disruptive technologies Google Spreadsheet is quietly getting good at things that Excel can only dream of. Since it launched, Google Spreadsheet has had great sharing and concurrent editing capabilities. A team at school used a shared Google Spreadsheet as a “factory information system” in a simulated factory exercise and it was amazingly powerful.
More recently, Google has added amazing data extraction techniques. Put =GoogleFinance(”Oil”, “Price”) in a cell and you’ll get the price of oil updated in realtime. The following will pull all the headlines off Techmeme: =importxml(”http://www.techmeme.com”, “/html/body/div[2]/div/div[4]/div/div[2]/div/div/div/strong/a”)
There are also functions for trolling arbitrary HTML, for parsing RSS and Atom feeds and for importing CSS feeds.
Where the mind really starts to boggle is when you think about how every cell in every google spreadsheet effectively has an URL. So it should be almost as easy to publish from your sheet as it is to pull in from somebody else’s. Suddenly, there are network effects for spreadsheets, where your work can leverage off the work of others. This ability to ref a cell in someone else’s sheet doesn’t seem to be enabled just yet, but I can’t imagine Google isn’t working on it. I’m sure there are some issues around permissioning and detection of dependency loops.
Throw in a little work on keyboard shortcuts and a little Google Gears magic to make the app more responsive and workable offline and Excel will be starting to feel the heat…
It would seem I am now an “official” inventor. The USPTO has granted, ahem, Method and system for in-line secondary transactions, an element of the work I did on the system that ultimately became Microsoft Points.
For the record, I think the US Patent system is horribly, horribly broken, particularly when it comes to software patents. Does protection of this “invention” really foster innovation? I don’t think so.
Perhaps more poignantly, the incident reminds me of the fiasco of Microsoft Points, yet another project that could have, should have, would’ve been really cool, except that the drawn-out, risk-averse, by-committee, design process yielded a mushy product with deeply fatal flaws.
Ever wonder why Microsoft makes you do math to figure out how much something costs? It was based on the theory that pricing something in actual currency would bring unbearable regulatory scrutiny. An issue that Amazon, which also has a sizable market cap, brand and balance sheet to protect (not to mention Google, Apple and of course PayPal) seem to have circumvented nicely. That and a completely evidence-free conviction that users would spend more that way. (The so-called “casino effect”)
Of course, on the upside, participants in international, user-to-user transactions can quote each other prices over IM or email. So it’s got that going for it. How’s that scenario working out for you guys?
Today I’m heading out to San Francisco for the summer. I’m going to be working for a VC fund. I’ve already done some work with them and I’m super excited. They’re super smart, have a great track-record and seem like a ton of fun.
I’m also pretty excited to move back to San Francisco. I haven’t lived there since Dec. 2001, so this is kind of a homecoming for me. I think there’s a very good likelihood that I’ll be moving to SF permanently when school is finished in a year, so this is an auspicious start. I’ll be living in the apt. of an old friend from Echo Networks. I haven’t seen it yet, but it sounds awesome and the few photos I’ve seen look great as well. I’ve also shipped my motorcycle (an 1989 Honda Hawk GT 650 in case you’re wondering) down from storage in Seattle.
So if you’re in SF this summer or plan to be there or would like to plan to be there, please drop me a line. I’d love to catch up with old friends.
In the genuinely useful software dept., here is a little app written in C# (source included!) that will download an entire google web album. Great for grabbing copies of all of your friends photos.
