That's what we're doing isn't it? When we blog, we tweet, we take photos...the minute we set something to "public" (or don't change it) we secretly hope that someone gets our message... that one hundred million bottles wash up on our shore.

Do you know what your hundred million bottles look like? Is it a person? Is it a job? Is it money?

Is it anything as long as its different than what you have?

Think about what it is... Don't tell me. Just think about it, and pass this on...

I dusted off my analyst skills and crunched some data...

Since October 1, 1928, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has hit a 5 year low 28 times, including today.  Those days all clustered around three previous periods:

April 1942

May 1970

October of 1974

Even the crash of '87 didn't put us anywhere near historical 5 year lows for that period--investors were still way ahead.

If you went back put money into the market right at the close of any day that the market hit a 5 year low, here's what your returns would look like over the next year:

Average 1 year return: 36.1%

Average 3 year return: 13.3%

Even the worst cases didn't look so bad:

Minimum 1 year return: 16.5%

Minimum 3 year return: 9.1%

If I had any extra cash right now, I'd be a buyer.

I was talking to my entreprenuership class the other day and made an important discovery--a lot of them lacked for inspiration from the people around them.  A lot of us have great friends--mostly people that life just put in our laps by geography or by shared interest--and they wind up being people you share a lot of history with.

However, those aren't always the people that get your brain stirring the most.  You know what I'm talking about--when you can actually feel, even hear, that little hamster spinning away on the wheel.  Your mind races faster than you can speak, and you trip over your words as you try and get them out into a verbal blueprint of some big mental breakthrough.

Marc Andreessen once quoted Dr. James Austin on the topic of luck, and how just getting your mind going increases the chances that you stumble upon something big:

"A certain [basic] level of action "stirs up the pot", brings in random ideas that will collide and stick together in fresh combinations, lets chance operate.

Motion yields a network of new experiences which, like a sieve, filter best when in constant up-and-down, side-to-side movement..."

I have a friend that is always coming up with big and sometimes ridiculous new ideas.  Once, he was going to get an aquarium for his apartment and populate it with agressive fish--"fish that eat other fish".  He was so psyched about it.  I couldn't help but be equally excited, but also somewhat suspect about the feasability of this endeavor.  Either way, it got my mind going.

Nate has a similar effect on me, too.  He has an idea a minute.  Perhaps one day he'll settle on something, but for the moment, he remains the Wile E. Coyote of Silicon Alley--always working up blueprints for something big.  You can't help but get the wheels turning when you talk to Nate, even if you totally disagree with him, because you're going to wind up exploring the idea and learn something along the way--or take something away from it that could help you with something completely different. 

These are the kinds of people I go out of my way to spend time with.  I probably take about three meetings a week with people who have inspiring ideas completely unrelated to what I'm up to, because it's a mental workout for me.  It helps me think better and gain perspective about my own ideas--a rigorous cerebral exercise.  What I was trying to explain to my students is that, if you're going to make a living off of your creativity and innovation, you need to set your life up in such a way that you spend more time with people who inspire you to think, as opposed to just spending your time with whoever lives on your floor, or the people next to you in class.

Along the way, we've all met pretty interesting people in passing, but we don't always stop them and demand more of their time.  That's active management--making a point to be more deliberate in our scheduling, and its something we all should do more of.  When's the last time you had a really inspiring conversation with someone?  Who was it?  What did they make you think about?  How likely is it that you'll talk to them again soon?   Perhaps you should ensure that happens sooner rather than later by asking them to grab coffee or something.  My life is filled with what I call "onesies"--people not really connected to the rest of my world but that I've pulled in because my interaction with them really lights a fire for me.

Who does it for you?  Why don't you drop them a line...

Hi folks...    I'm competing in the Donors Choose Blogger Challenge.  Basically, each blogger selects a set of educational projects they'd like to encourage donations to.  These are individual teachers and the projects are usually just a couple hundred bucks--like buying supplies, visual aids, etc. 

Check out the projects I've selected.  If half my blog readers give ten bucks each, we could easily fulfill all of these projects!

But most of all, I want to raise more than TechCrunch does.  Why?  Because by reading this blog, you're just a better person.  :)

The more that I think about $700 billion, the more I think that kind of dependence on debt we can't handle is how we got into this mess in the first place.

Roger says that this bailout is about keeping the credit windows open for small businesses to "support both business and personal economic growth," but at some point don't we ever have to pay the piper?  Shouldn't we at least have to feel a little hurt from all our excesses?

Sure, the markets tumbled 7% today, but you know they'll be up 4% tomorrow, and if not tomorrow then I'll bet you they'll be up for the week.  Either way, that's not my food money in there and for most of us, stock market jitters only effect our long term retirement plans.

Housing is a different issue, and we keep talking about people losing their houses like it's the end of the world.  Let's keep in mind that if someone has to bite the bullet on their house, they don't automatically become homeless--they just move into a smaller house or rent.  Not everyone needs a big McMansion they couldn't afford in the first place.  My brothers shared a bedroom growing up--a room that I thought was really small when it was just me.  Maybe some kids from the entitlement generation will have to bunk up, get a few less cable channels and send a few less texts.  Jeans from Walmart anyone?  I wore hand me downs...  how many kids today do that? 

I just don't feel like paying for everyone who made bad decisions.  I bought a place in Bay Ridge in 2005 because I couldn't afford to buy closer to or in the city--you know, because I didn't want to buy something I couldn't afford.  Silly me.  Had I known the government and other taxpayers would have bent over backwards to

My point is that, maybe in the long run, a bit of hurt isn't so bad and maybe we should just take our medicine now.  I don't want to crash the system, but it reminds me of why I don't like taking pain medications.  If my knees hurt after playing sports, I don't take anything, because I did something to my knee that is causing pain.  I don't want to just mask the pain, because then I might reinjure it worse.  I'd rather suck it up, so that I know when it stops hurting and I can get back on the field again.

Duh... of course they should.  It's about time!

Alana Taylor, who hopefully will be joining me on a panel at the next SXSW if it gets approved, recently blogged about a class she was taking at NYU with Prof. Mary Quigley as part of a project for the PBS MediaShift blog.  (The comments on that post are interesting...)  Her post wasn't exactly flattering to her professor, which prompted her to ban Alana from blogging or Twittering about the class again--and then backtrack on that, obviously realizing that she taught at NYU, which is supposed to be on the side of protecting, not snuffing out, freedom of speech.

The ironic part of this story was that the class was about Generation Y and new media.  While the professor taught about blogging, it seems she never actually expected the students in the class to go out and blog themselves.  The professor's reaction was remenicent of an old school mainstream media company--attack the consumer first, stand behind the letter of the law, and then back off to a more reasonable position.  This professor told Alana that she had violated privacy rights by blogging about the classroom activities.

Check out the full story here.

Personally, I can't even imagine telling a student they couldn't blog, tweet, or videotape any of my lectures.  Why?  If I feel confident in what I'm teaching, I should be excited about the idea of opening up my content to the world for feedback, idea generation, critique, etc.  I'd certainly be excited that my students would be using new media tools and working on PBS projects.

If I were Prof. Quigley, I'd work with Alana to figure out how to use all these social media tools to really make the most out of the class.  How about reaching out to other students outside of the classroom through blogs and video, or creating a class wiki and blog whereby lots of people could participate with their own knowledge and feedback.  Perhaps Prof. Quigley would get it if she started blogging and Twittering herself.

Thoughts?   Any teachers want to defend the idea of the closed classroom?

I've posted this before, but it's really all I want to say about this...

Empire State Building at dusk, originally uploaded by pinhole.

"I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body." - Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

I just bought a Vitamin Water in Grand Central. What are the chances that I'm ever going to need to return this, or prove that I was in Grand Central at 7:45AM today?

I also got one when I used my credit card to pay for my Metro North Ticket. Some people check their credit card receipts against their bill at the end of every month. I don't know a lot about ticket kiosks but I'm pretty sure that whatever transaction processing system they have, it's always going to print the same number it on the receipt that it charged on my card. Plus, if I ever really needed to prove a transaction, that record is on my card...in the cloud somewhere.

Either way, if your time is worth anything whatsover, I'm betting that extensive physical receipt tracking has a negative ROI attached to it.

Plus, how many millions of pounds of paper and ink are we throwing away every year in receipts we don't need? That's what I always think about when I get receipts. I've never in my life used a receipt for anything. I charge most of what I buy on my credit card and pay it off right away (or at least used to before I started a company) and so I have a record in the cloud of my purchases. Could I have been mischarged here and there? Probably, but it might have also been in my favor, so I doubt it amounts to much. I've got better things to worry about.

With all the green things we're supposed to be worried about, who's solving this wasted receipt problem? How about a first step that says that no one gives you a receipt unless you specifically ask for it? Weren't they supposed to be doing that at restaurants with water to conserve? Let's conserve paper and ink and do away with this relic of our analog past.

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Zoe got cookied...  I welcome cookies and other forms of culinary schwag on this blog.  An entrepreneur's gotta eat...

"She connected to me through someone I know. Check.

She wrote an honest, friendly and personal email. Check.

She didnt pretend to be a long time reader of my blog. Check.

And there are no obligations as to what I have to write. Check.

Oh...and I get free cookies that are probably going to be delicious! Check!"

Free Cookies from New Moon Kitchen | medium & the message

What if I wrote a blog post... 

I've been reading all the right ones, following all the memes.  I've been thinking...about data portability, Facebook, the iPhone, monetization, being an entrepreneur, platforms, VCs, the Loch Ness monster and the theory of Atlantis. 

I have a good theory... err... Top 10 List... that ties them all together.  It's funny, too--even has some lolcats in it.  Yup...  Everyone will be talking about "meme platforms", because that's the new Web 2.0 catch phrase I created for this post.

I'll write it from my blog publishing software, and use Zemanta to suggest links, tags, metatags, keywords, related videos, suggested articles, other books you might want to buy, people you may know, lovers you have had before, fantasy baseball free agents on the upswing, and an appropriate chardonnay to go with this post.  I will not, however, check spelling.

I won't linkbait, but I can't help but quote smart folks like Robert Scoble, Fred Wilson, Om Malik, Henry Blodget, and MacRumors.

But first, I need to tell everyone I know about it--and right away.  This is too important to wait for them to read it in their Google Reader.  I'll post it to Twitter, and Hacker News, because... well..  I'm sure there are some people I know there, too.  I suppose while I'm at it, I'll tag it in del.icio.us, Digg it, StumbleUpon it, Sphere it, Reddit... it... (allow myself to introduce... myself), Newsvine it, Share it from Google Reader, since I of course read my own feed in my feedreader, you know... just to see what the feed looks like and that it's still working, Mixx it, Furl it, Ma.gnolia it, Slap it, Flip it, Rub it down, oh no!! 

And for a few close personal friends, I may IM it to them, too, just in case they didn't get my public DiggBeg.

And then...   I'll wait.

I'll wait for the inbound links and the traffic and all the blog love... and the haters, too.  That's ok.  I'm sure some troll will comment on my Friendfeed about how I have no idea what I'm talking about.  Flame war!  Everyone will start talking about it...  The Disqus comment notification e-mails start pouring in.  I respond and respond... and sometimes I respond to my own responses, creating a small tear in the space-time continuum.  I like words that have two u's in them in a row.  Am I talking in a vacuum? 

All of the sudden... BAM.  There it is... barely perceptible in small font all the way at the bottom, but it's definitely there. 

I'm on Techmeme.

Do I post a call for more links to push it up the list?  Naa... that would be pushing it.  I can't watch.  It's too much.   I need to go do something else.  I'll go monitor the del.cio.us/popular list.  OMG I'm already #3! 

Dammit...  

Stuck behind "100 CSS Hacks for people who still can't get shit to work in IE" and "50 incredible photos of children getting struck by lightning".

I'll never get past those.  Oh well...  3's pretty good I guess.

The real question is how many more RSS readers am I going to tack on?  I need to get to that next psychologically satisfying number...  the big 3000.   Of course, it's really just 1000 people who have inserted my feed into three different readers at one time or another but still... it's a nice looking number, no? 

Hmm... that gives me another idea.  Yes, that's it!  Tomorrow's post!

"Monetizing Meme Platforms...  ...in Second Life!"

Should this guy get run over by a Mustang, please forget you read this here...

A Coney Island businessman is suing the city for damaging the Bentley he was driving when he killed a Brooklyn dad in a hit-and-run accident. Harry Shasho, who pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, says the NYPD failed to safeguard the battered black 2005 Bentley GT luxury sedan that was impounded as evidence of the fatal crash. He's asking for at least $190,000

Hit-and-run driver claims city didn't take care of his Bentley after crash

Fred posted about age today.  For a guy who's pretty cool about most things, he does have this bizarre  obsession with age--and he's worried that 47 is too close to the age where VC's start to fade.  Frankly, I think that VC's fade more because of money than because of age.  Why put in the same effort when you've got 20 million in the bank?

But Fred put this trend to bed years ago, because he made a ton of cash in the late 90's at a very early age.  By all accounts, he could have retired seven years ago--instead he's working harder than ever.  If you're not convinced, try getting on his calendar.

There are a lot of examples in my life where people don't act their age:

• My grandmother is 90.  She learned to drive in her 50's and still takes the car out all over Staten Island to go shopping and take car of errands.  She lives on her own, reads the paper everyday, and regularly cooks up a storm.
• My friend Darren has started something like 8 companies and is now the Head of Digital Media for Media Kitchen.  He's married, lives in Westchester and is now expecting his first child.  Did I mention he's only 26? 
• When I started the Fordham young alumni softball team, we had a guy sign up who listed his grad school graduation year as 1980.  I figured it was a typo, but the person who works in the alumni office handling signups said the guy was so enthusiastic that she felt too bad not to let him on.  Since then, this 52 year old guy shows up and plays harder than just about all of the 20-somethings on the field, diving for balls and steamrolling around the bases.  He calls me on the phone the day of every game to excitedly check on who's coming, what the standings are, etc.
• I originally got invited to teach about blogging at Fordham by a management professor who is nearly 70 as far as I can tell from her resume.  She had an engineering degree and worked for Lockheed as an engineer from 1960-1966.  Not only did she not fit gender stereotypes back than, but by reaching out to me to teach about social media's impact in business back in '04, she stood out from her peers on the cutting edge.

How old you are is a function of your willingness to learn new things, your ability not to let your experience close you off to new thinking, and your passion for what you do...    which pretty much makes Fred one of the youngest people I know.

Equity Private is the most amazing woman that I don't know...      She's incredibly savvy, and a total finance junkie.  She's also got a helluva sense of humor. 

She's been dubbing that "Der Untergang" Hitler mini-series (you know the one... it's been done on the Super Bowl, the Cowboys, Twitter failing, etc) with a financial crisis epic. 

Three of the episodes are up, and she tells me she's got seven more in the complete set.

Here's the first one:

If you're into finance, Equity Private is a must-read....  and now, a must-watch!

Back when I was at GM, working on investing in private equity funds, there were two funds I really liked that the team eventually turned down:

Union Square Ventures, which saw exits in Tacoda, Feedburner, and del.icio.us, and is nearly guaranteed (because of significant revenue traction) $200mil+ exits in Etsy and Indeed.  That's not counting the potential value of Twitter, either. 

The other one was a consumer focused buyout fund called Catterton Partners, which PEHub just announced had a 7x return on Wellness Pet Food.

"Wellness represents the second big exit for Catterton in four months. In April it earned more than 4x its money when it sold luxury hair product company Frederick Fekkai & Co. for more than $400 million..."

I'm not going to say I told you so, but...

Back in February of 2006, when nextNY started, there weren't a lot of social events going on in the NY Tech scene.  Now, it seems like there's a party going on every other day--and not parties for specific user groups or industries, where the chances of you making a connection to someone relevant are pretty good--just these big generalized "tech community" parties with sponsors no one really cares about. 

It's fun if most of your friends are tech and digital media folks, but mine aren't.  I grew up here in NYC and was a finance guy long before I was a tech guy--not that all my friends are finance people either.  My best friends work in publishing, law, and television production.

That's not to say I haven't made really good friends in the tech community.  I have, but I don't only see them at "industry" events.  I try to see the people in the tech community that I'm actually friends with in smaller settings like at the Shake Shack or for 1:1 lunches.  I play on sports teams with them and invite them to go out with me and my non-tech friends. 

So when I bounce from these bigger, generalized, noisy parties early, it's often because there's someone I know for years, maybe since junior high, waiting somewhere for coffee--or I just have a ton of work to do and can't go out every night if I ever expect to see my parents and other family. 

I think because I don't necessarily take part in the "scene" as much as others, I get a little bit of a reputation of being standoffish, or not sociable.  In actuality, I'm very social--just not necessarily with 300 random strangers who also have websites. 

Sometimes, I think that people think this is what is meant by "participation" when entrepreneurs out looking for money or deals for their startups attend these parties.  I don't know about you, but I never quite feel like these big things are my community and I always wind up hanging out with the same people anyway.

I think entrepreneurs are better off spending as much 1:1 time with people who's opinions they respect and admire, who actually know their space a bit, and also creating communities around them.  No matter what the industry or interest, there's a smaller community of people that you should be gathering together to leverage and exchange ideas.

Hey, if you wanna drink on someone else's tab, these big parties are great... but don't mistake them for or let them replace the more authentic, true relationship (and dare I say friendship) building that needs to be part of your networking.

[SABYA] I WANT SOME WIDGET           2:09 PM
[SABYA] ARE YOU THERE

ceonyc                                                2:09 PM
What kind of widget?

myplugoo                                             2:09 PM
[SABYA] FLASH CONTET

ceonyc                                                 2:10 PM
Ok... I get you flash widget.   How much you pay?

myplugoo                                               2:10 PM
[INFO] Visitor [SABYA] has left the conversation.

A friend of mine's dad runs a large landscaping business with over one hundred employees.  While the business has been in the family since 1939, when he took it over in the early 70's, he really took it to the next level.  That often happens when the reigns of a business finally pass on to the next generation.

Anyway, what we're doing at Path 101 doesn't even hold a tea candle (yet!) to what he's accomplished.  This is a real business that sells real stuff with revenues, EBITDA, 100+ employees, trucks, etc!  It would be easy for someone with so much success to dismiss a small angel funded web startup in Alpha, but instead, he took a lot of interest  in what we were up to.  He even brought me up to a neighbor as another guy running a business who knows what it's like to work hardest for yourself.  I really appreciated getting that kind of respect towards our humble beginnings--especially from a friend's parent who might naturally be prone to a more unbalanced power dynamic.  Instead, it felt like two entrepreneurs shooting the breeze and it was pretty cool.

And yesterday, I got a nice note from Marc Cenedella checking in to see how things were going with Path 101 and an invite to come chat about the recruiting market and startup stuff.  I'm sure I'll learn a lot more than I can contribute to the conversation, but similar to my friend's dad, he asked some questions in our exchange about what the sweet spot is for when in a person's life Path 101 is useful. 

I really appreciate when successful folks like this can take a second to think about somebody else's business--but more so than that to take it seriously despite the vast distance between our respective progress.  It's a stark contrast to a recent situation where someone told me how they'd do things completely differently and never really acknowledged the progress we had made or my vision for the company.

At the end of the day, I just don't sweat situations like that.  You can't impress everyone and not everyone is going to care what you're up to.  You've got limited time and resources in a startup, and you just need to work with the people who believe in you and not worry about everyone else.  I guess relationships are kind of like that, too.  Some people are going to accept you and be excited to be with you.  If you spend more time building strong relationships with these people, and less with those who aren't interested, your life will turn out just fine.

I wish I knew who all these people were.

I wish I knew whether the girl standing in front of me reading Marie Claire with the trail of stars tattooed on her ankle was with anyone when she got it.

What about the tall geeky couple to my right? Are they actually a couple? Where did they meet?

The guy with the Handsome Boy Clothing Co tshirt...is that a bible pamphlet he's holding? Where'd he get it? Does he have one for each day?

The woman conked out with her mouth open... Does she fall asleep everyday? Did she go out late last night? Maybe yesterday was her birthday.

Lots of tats around... All are little stories.

How about nametags with links to our web profiles?

I'm sorry, but even besides obvious reasons I just find women so much more interesting to look at. I find guys to be pretty boring.

Ruoska sings Narua in my ear, in Finnish. No silver bullet for mortgages, UK warned says the peach flavored Financial Times. I can see my feet. The FT has spit out an insert. A guy in a Decepticons tshirt swoops in quickly to pick it up. His hipster bag says Black Paw.