Its all over. The Red Sox have come back from the dead and have finally made it to the Series. As a Met fan, I was more than happy to watch Johnny Damon stick a fork in them with a slam in the second. It was a beautiful thing to watch. The best part about it was that it wasn't even close. It makes the book thing a little easier to swallow... at least my day ended on a high note.
In other news, I'm pretty excited about a meeting I have with someone from GM corporate this Monday. I think they're part of a research and development group, but GM is so large, its hard to get a handle on what anyone is doing. One of my goals over the next year is to streamline our process of leveraging our relationship with the IT guys in the company. Not only that, we should be better leveraging our relationship with the IT folks from other clients that we manage money for, like Delphi and Xerox, as well. Its the kind of think that just needs someone dedicated to it and willing to keep after these guys... the kind if relationship building we do with our own GPs. We have relationships and connections to such a huge group of IT consumers that its a waste of a resource not to know these guys better--especially since GM can be such a difficult organization to get inroads to. That's probably my number one goal over the next year.
That makes me think of a post that someone wrote about what to look for in a VC if you are an entreprenuer at a startup. In this case, I think connections to a large organization should be one of the things that VCs should look for in their LP base. That would make for an interesting post... what to look for in a good LP. I'm sure that VCs and GPs in private equity in general are looking for more than just dumb money. Over the weekend, I think I'm going to put some thoughts down about this, because its something we think about a lot here in terms of what makes us a more attractive LP.