MaiTai is a gathering of entrepreneurs, innovators and athletes who contribute their energy to a shared experience centered around the kiting lifestyle. Friendships are formed in an informal setting as kiters learn from each other’s successes and failures in all endeavors as everyone attempts to master the sport of kiting. The event was started by Susi Mai (pro kiteboarder) and Bill Tai (venture capitalist from Charles River Ventures).

The attendee list was amazing – a veritable who’s who of entrepreneurs – I felt very lucky to be there. That being said, the first morning I spent on the kite I was miserable. Facedown in the snow over and over, I crashed my kite into a couple of other kiters and got pretty demoralized. By lunch I was convinced I would never figure out how to fly the kite, much less figure out how to do it on skis. But Philip wouldn’t let me quit. Instead he pushed me and somehow I managed to start flying the kite. It was soon after that I was able to do it on my skis and all at once it clicked (I have video to prove it). I’ll have to admit I am hooked.

If you haven’t read the Forbes article titled, Kiteboarding: The New Golf, you should give it a read. If you are interested in giving kiteboarding a try, a small group of Dallas entrepreneurs are going to be getting together each month to kite on one of the many lakes in the area – email me.

In a nutshell my health has made a 180 degree shift. When I began in July I weighed almost 260 pounds, had high blood pressure and I was generally depressed. Sure things like my business were going well, but I wasn’t really in a position to enjoy it because of how out of whack the rest of my life was. To date I have lost 82 pounds – I am now down to 188 (just four pounds from my February goal). I am running 4-6 miles on the weekends and 3 miles twice a week. I am also taking advantage of our wellness program at work – working out three or four times a week with our trainer. My blood pressure is ideal and I feel more alive than I have in a very long time.

Ironically, it isn’t just my health that has improved – but almost every aspect of my life. Our business is growing faster than ever and new opportunities keep presenting themselves because I am more open to them. My relationship with my children is better because I am more engaged. My relationships with others are better because I am more available and positive.  Finally, I am getting involved in activities that I would have NEVER considered like snowkiting – Bill Tie invited me to join his group in Park City, Utah this week and I will be strapping on a kite when I hit the slopes.

At the end of the day turning 40 was the kick in the pants I needed to get my life back on track. I started out thinking I needed to lose some weight, but I needed to change my life. My journey has just begun, but I wanted to give you an update.

Picture below – me in Marine Corps, me on FOX last year and me now.

http://www.meetup.com/Dallas-Startup-Happy-Hour/events/46716632/

It’s time to get the happy hour rolling again! We’re happy to announce that our guest speaker will be Preetish Nijhawan, Managing Director of Cervin Ventures, an early stage VC firm focused on B2B companies.

Preetish co-founded Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM) in 1998Most recently, Preetish was CFO for Neon Enterprise Software. Before that, Preetish was VP of Strategic Alliances at NeoEdge Networks, a video game advertising company. Preetish was also VP, Portfolio and Program Management for BMC Software. Prior to BMC, he was VP, Operations of iVita Corporation, an asset management software startup he helped found.

Preetish has advised senior executives in hardware, software and telecom industries for McKinsey and Company. He also worked for nearly six years in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) division at Intel in various engineering and program management roles. Preetish earned a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India, a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering from The University of Southern California, and an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management.

This morning a friend of mine asked me if I would be an adviser/investor in a startup he was working on. This friend is talented, intelligent and connected – he could do almost anything. The startup he was working on was in a very small market and was very niche – it will NEVER be a huge business. I gave the following advice:

Entrepreneurs only have a limited number of ‘at bats’. We hear about ‘overnight’ success all of the time, but almost all overnight successes take years to happen. How long does it take to figure out how your HUGE idea will turn out? From my experience it takes three to five years – an average of four years. Assuming you need a year between HUGE ideas this means you might have four ‘at bats’ during your career. Don’t waste 25% of your career on ‘known’ singles and doubles – homeruns change the world – change the world.

BTW: Side businesses are VERY distracting. If you aren’t interested enough in your ‘main’ business/job change your main business/job, don’t start a ‘side business’.

(FYI – the picture connected to this post is an inside joke with my friend)

There are scores of highly educated people who are ready and willing to bring their talents to the US to help create jobs. Why are we keeping them out? Just the other day I read about a startup that had to move to Hong Kong because their visas were expiring. We need to make it easy for entrepreneurs (i.e. job creators) to get to America – they shouldn’t have live on boats just outside international waters. Lets get these people in the country as fast as possible – lets unleash their creativity and let them create the next Google or Facebook.

Note to Peter Thiel and Blueseed: Thank you for doing more to resolve this issue than our leaders are willing to do. Kudos!

I decided to get involved with JA about the same time I saw the 1983 hit Risky Business. You might recall that Joel (played by Tom Cruise) got kicked out of Future Enterprisers (thinly veiled verion of JA), but by the end of the movie his little ‘business’ had actually done very well. The last scene in the move has Joel pretending to present his business to the judges at the Future Enterprisers club, “My name is Joel Goodson. I deal in human fulfillment. I grossed over $8000 in one night. The time of your life, huh, kid?” Of course, I immediately wanted to start my own business – I was hooked. In college I took a few business courses, but I never learned as much as I had in JA. The hands on experience I received in JA gave me the confidence I needed to start my first real business.

More recently I decided to volunteer for the JA program here in Dallas. The first step was to sign up for a training program. The program was excruciatingly boring – I was learning about interviewing skills, checking accounts and mortgages – what did that have to do with starting a business? I soon learned that JA had shifted its focus away from teaching entrepreneurship and free enterprise. The new JA was focused on two primary goals: workforce readiness and financial literacy. No longer does JA help students learn by doing – i.e. creating their own companies. The instructor explained to me that the organization felt that suggesting kids start businesses would be a disservice as very few students in DISD would have the skills to build businesses once they graduated. Instead their hope was to help students become good WORKERS with an understanding of the proper use of checking accounts and credit cards. They even explained the value of labor unions and how collective bargaining was key their financial security. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The program SPECIFICALLY designed to help demystify starting a business had given up on its core mission and had been co-opted by big labor.

Horace Moses and Theodore Vail, the co-founders of JA, would turn over in their graves if they new what JA has become. Moses was an entrepreneur who started a paper company in Western Massachusetts – he gave a considerable amount of his life (27 years) and his fortune to help Vail (the founder of AT&T) start Junior Achievement. Moses and Vail were real American entrepreneurs and they were convinced that anyone, with the right tools, could build a business. JA was designed to give kids the tools and inspiration necessary to build their own companies.

Today JA is run by Sean Rush and Jack Kosakowski. Sean Rush is an academic who has spent his entire career focused on education and non-profit work. Little is known about Jack Kosakowski prior to his involvement with JA and there is no evidence that he has any business experience. Given Rush and Kosakowski’s non-business background I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by the direction they have taken the organization.

If you haven’t guessed I am 100% opposed to JAs current mission (i.e. workforce readiness and financial literacy). I think Rush and Kosakowski’s decision to abandon the goal of making entrepreneurship attainable for all is symptomatic of what is wrong with America. Remember the Occupy Wall Street movement? The protesters spent all summer complaining about corporations. These kids grew up without the slightest idea that they could start their own corporations. Why are we surprised they feel left out? They believe corporations are something that OTHER people build – not normal people – i.e. the 99%. But almost 100 years ago Moses and Vail sought to bring the concept of the corporation to the 99%. Rush and Kosakowski gave up on that vision. Shame on them.

“deep down you know that you’re part of history, that the things you are building will be written about and thought about forever, then maybe after that good cry after a short sleep under your desk you’ll pull yourself together and remember. That you are a person in the Arena. A Pirate. That you are here to make a dent in the universe.”

If you are like me you read the post and thought, ‘meh…no shit‘, and moved on to the next post on Techmeme. Turns out that Netscape engineer that Mike quoted didn’t appreciate the attribution. He responded with a post titled, “Watch a VC use my name to sell a con.” Jeremy suggests that the entire venture capital system is corrupt – they make money off of your hard work and provide no value whatsoever. Mike responds point by point here. I won’t bother to rehash the points here, but I did want to point out that a LOT of people are starting to get the idea that capital formation is bad – that perhaps capitalism is dead.

I think it all began with the bailout of the investment banks (and mainly AIG). The outrage against the bankers and the insurance companies was well earned and appropriate. More recently that outrage has taken shape as the Occupy Wall Street movement. The general feeling seems to be that capital formation is bad – i.e. accumulating wealth is bad as it allows the rich to get richer. The undertone is that our economic system has failed – that capitalism is somehow dead. Jeremy’s post suggests that VCs don’t actually write any code and as a result any money they make from investing in your startup is somehow ill gotten or as he suggests a ‘con’.

The Left is against capitalism because it’s outcome is by definition unequal. The framers of our Constitution sought to provide a nation of equal opportunity – a nation where a child born of an unwed mother, given up for adoption to a working class family could one day build the most valuable corporation on the planet (his name was Steve Jobs). In America anyone can succeed (and fail) regardless of who their parents were. On the other hand the Left seeks equality of outcome – everyone should be rich or no one should be rich. The Left believes, like Jeremy, that anyone with money must have had some sort of unfair advantage. The formation of capital – i.e. in this case by venture capitalists – is vital to create this equality of opportunity. Without capital how could Steve have built Apple?

First, you have to be VERY arrogant to think you are the only person in the world who has thought of your idea. EVERY time I have ever had a ‘unique’ idea I have ultimately found at least ten other people working on something very similar. Additionally, hundreds, if not thousands, of other folks have likely ‘thought’ about my idea, but failed to act on it. For example, at ShopSavvy we struggle to keep our focus narrow, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have ideas for other potentially very cool apps that leverage our technology. Lots of people outside of ShopSavvy contact us all of the time with their ‘unique’ ideas. They almost always want us to sign an NDA so they can reveal their idea to us – an idea that has likely occurred to us previously given our focus on the space. We began licensing our technology (barcode scanning SDK and product API) so that we could help these people develop their ideas. Nine out of ten people who bring their ideas to us never take us up on our offer to license our technology, but hundreds of companies have – building all sorts of applications.

Second, suing someone for ‘stealing’ your idea is plain silly. All of the time, energy and capital that you will spend suing the ‘idea thief’ would be better spent actually turning your idea into a business. The sad sad truth is that your idea wasn’t all that great to begin with and the person or company that stole your idea will fail. Most entrepreneurs must ‘pivot’ multiple times before their company turns into an instant success. Stay out of the court room – get back in the board room.

Finally, Sand Hill Road is an amazing resource for entrepreneurs. Billions of dollars to be had by entrepreneurs all on a single road in a single town. At no other point in history has been easier to raise as much money as quickly – don’t burn your bridge. Raj may be right or wrong. Nirav Tolia might have ‘stolen’ Raj’s idea, but the solution is not to sue Benchmark. We have all heard the stories about bad actors in the Valley, but the vast majority of VCs are professionals who are great to work with. Find a bad actor? The solution is to NOT work with them again. By suing a VC, Raj is forever burning his bridge to Sand Hill Road. Do you think he will ever be able to get a meeting to pitch an idea again? I doubt it. Don’t commit suicide to get even…