I’m not nearly as much of a basketball fan as I am a baseball fan, but the “Linsanity” that has arisen over the last few weeks is inspiring.

It’s not just because of Lin’s faith. Though it is humorous to think about how it must really piss off Bill Maher to have the “Tim Tebow of basketball” arise in the news so quickly.

Forbes has an awesome piece this morning (thanks for passing it on, Nick) about 10 lessons that Jeremy Lin can teach us about winning.

In a nutshell, they are:

1. Believe in yourself when no one else does
2. Seize the opportunity when it arises
3. Your family will always be there for you, so be there for them
4. Find the system that works for your style
5. Don’t overlook talent that might exist around you
6. People will love you for being original, not a copy of someone else
7. Stay humble
8. When you make others around you look good, they will love you forever
9. Never forget the importance of luck
10. Work your butt off

The piece ends with a reference to one of Lin’s favorite Bible verses from the book of Romans: “…suffering produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.”

Photo Credit: Getty

Stare at the colored dots on this girl’s nose for 30 seconds. Then quickly look at a white wall or ceiling and blink rapidly.

Congratulations, you just processed a negative with your brain!

(h/t Vic Gundotra on Google+)

If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing.

If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.

Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged.

It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out.

Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever!

Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! But when the time of perfection comes, these partial things will become useless.

When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.

Three things will last forever. Faith, hope, and love.

And the greatest of these is love.

I’m a very blessed man to know this kind of love. And that’s because I have Cacey Nichole Steward Klein as my best friend and Valentine.

I hope your Valentine’s Day is just as great as mine.

A photo of Etalamahu, who we just sponsored at Adami Tulu School, sitting on my lap.

Cacey was scanning the kids who needed sponsors on the web site. Etalamahu looked familiar, but frankly, we’ve spent a lot of time with those kids, so a lot of them looked familiar!

But we didn’t have photos of hanging out one-on-one with all of them.

Too cool.

Any chance you might want to help sponsor one of her classmates?

Forgot to hit send on this post I put in the can a few days ago. But it’s still three minutes to midnight, so here is Saturday’s blog post.

Listen as a five year old girl looks at logos and interprets what they represent.

The funny part is that it’s easy to tell that her parents drink Starbucks, drive Mercedes, gas up at BP and use Macs.

Enjoy. And a big hat tip to Zack Miller for the video.

I hear you. “What? A physical letter? Like in the mail?”

Yes, in the mail. All the way from “across the pond” in London, England.

This new friend and I met in the comments on Fred Wilson’s AVC blog a few months ago. He wrote some very kind words in his note. I can’t wait until our paths cross and we can meet in real life.

Handwritten notes are a lost art form, for the most part. This one has inspired me to start doing that again.

Thanks, Rohan.

When did you get your last handwritten note?

This is a combination of video and time-lapse photography…and it comes awfully close. Do yourself a favor: put it on full screen. Best 3 minutes of your morning.

Amazing! Thanks to my friend Casey for sending this my way.

We’ve been honored to be a part of the leadership team that has raised over $300,000 to build classrooms at these schools. We are true believers in the idea that delivering great education and two meals a day will help families to stay together, break the cycle of poverty and begin to put an end to the global orphan crisis.

Late afternoon on Friday, we launched the next phase of the project: child sponsorships.

Most child sponsorship programs are $30-$36 per month. We’re a volunteer-run program without any US administrative staff managing the program. So we’ve been able to keep the cost very low…just $19/month per child!

So Cacey and I decided we’d sponsor two of these kids…one for each of ours.

Spencer is sponsoring Minyahel…remember his story in “Just a Little Bit More“?

And Emma is sponsoring Etalamahu, a five year old in Lower Kindergarten…and did you notice, these photos were taken right in front of the new classroom building you all helped to build last year?

In a little more than two days, we’ve already had 26 kids sponsored and there are only 162 left before every single one can stay in school, learn the skills they need to break the cycle of poverty, and get the life-changing food to allow them to stay with their families or caregivers.

This isn’t the long term vision for funding these schools. Our next step is to raise up in-country business ventures to fund the school’s operations and make the entire project self-sustainable. We can’t wait to come back to you and say “mission accomplished.”

But in the mean time, we hope you’ll consider making your own dent in the universe by sponsoring one of these awesome kids.

So I cracked up when I ran across this send-up on Facebook…enjoy “If You Give a Mom a Muffin.”

If you give a mom a muffin, she’ll want a cup of coffee to go with it. She’ll pour herself some. Her three-year-old will spill the coffee. She’ll wipe it up. Wiping the floor, she will find dirty socks. She’ll remember she has to do laundry. When she puts the laundry in the washer, she’ll trip over boots and bump into the freezer. Bumping into the freezer will remind her she has to plan supper. She will get out a pound of hamburger. She’ll look for her cookbook.

The cookbook is sitting under a pile of mail. She will see the phone bill, which is due tomorrow. She will look for her checkbook. The checkbook is in her purse that is being dumped out by her two-year-old. She’ll smell something funny. She’ll change the two-year-old. While she is changing the two-year-old the phone will ring. Her five-year-old will answer and hang up. She’ll remember that she wants to phone a friend to come for coffee. Thinking of coffee will remind her that she was going to have a cup. She will pour herself some. And chances are, if she has a cup of coffee, her kids will have eaten the muffin that went with it.

My sweetie will vouch for the fact that this is 100% accurate. Have a great weekend!

Today, we remember a man who proved that you can change the world with simple courage, and the willingness to do the right thing.

If you haven’t listened to Dr. Martin Luther King’s entire speech overlooking the National Mall in Washington DC, today is the day to do it.

Thank you, Dr. King, for upholding the self-evident truth that everyone is created equal.

Your dream is well on its way to becoming reality.

Lots of people have written lots of things about Tim Tebow.

He’s not the first athlete to express his faith on the field. He’s not even the first one to do it in a noticeable way.

But what I love about Tebow is how he’s consistently ignored the critics, put his head down and played his heart out. You can feel his passion to win.

And simply because of that, whether he wins or loses today, he’s a winner in my book.

So whatever you do, don’t forget that you can’t believe everything you read. (Hat tip to my friend George for this piece of morning humor.)

“We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight on Facebook, we shall fight on Twitter and the blogs, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength, we shall defend our old-fashioned way of reading, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight in the libraries, we shall fight in the bookstores and in the streets if we must; we shall never surrender our books.”

I’m a huge fan of my Kindle, for a variety of reasons. I love having my entire library come with me across countries, across continents, in my pocket, and in long lines. I read far more because of it.

At the same time, I still buy certain kinds of books in their paper form, particularly presidential biographies, which I love to collect.

What do you think? Do the benefits of e-books outweigh the drawbacks? Or do you love e-books so much that you can’t imagine buying dead trees any more?

That post exploded on Hacker News and on Twitter with hundreds of comments, tweets and posts.

A good number of those comments were focused on the fact that Wikipedia would “lose its objectivity” and be “subject to bias” if it used ads or affiliate links to raise its annual budget.

• Never mind that Wikipedia could use an ad network to avoid a direct relationship with any advertiser.
• Never mind that Wikipedia already accepts donations from the corporate interests that so many of the commenters decry as evil.
• Never mind that Wikipedia keeps the identities of more than 200 of their major donors a secret, not allowing us to know who has influence over them. (How is THAT more transparent than an ad?)

The commenters from this point of view betray a distinct lack of understanding of how the indirect model works, whether we’re talking business or non-profit.

In the direct model, your incentives are focused on who gives you money. Your customers.

In the indirect model, users are the stakeholders who drive the real value. Without users, you have very little. So your incentives change and the person writing you the check is no longer the most important stakeholder in your mission. The user is.

My company, Riskalyze, is a great example. We’re building an incredible free product to help self-directed investors search the world’s investments to find a portfolio that fits them.

And that is spawning a marketplace for investing ideas and execution, which will involve connecting a small percentage of our users with partners, in a way that indirectly makes us money.

95% of our users might never do anything that makes us money, but the indirect model allows us to sustainably empower 100% of the world with an incredible investing tool they would never have had access to otherwise.

Our user community has to be first and foremost in our minds when we make product decisions. We know that maximizing user delight and satisfaction is what will actually drive our growth and maximize our revenue from partners.

Sustainable capitalism, especially as implemented in the indirect business model, is a huge force for good in the world. Wikipedia should give it a try.

Dear Wikipedia, stop begging for handouts. A single ad + Amazon affiliate links = swimming in money. Capitalism won, try it.

— Aaron Klein (@AaronKlein) December 27, 2011

Some friends re-tweeted it or gave it a like. Others probably silently disagreed. One wrote that he had to laugh at my critique after all of my tweets and posts about raising money for the Adami Tulu Project.

I thought that was a great point and it gave me the chance to be clear about how I think about non-profit fundraising.

We’re raising money at Adami Tulu and Ziway to build something that changes the world. That takes upfront capital, and it’s not a project that can attract investment dollars (yet). So we’re using fundraising to do the initial construction and operate the schools.

But that’s only the first part of the vision. We’re also working to lay the groundwork for in-country business ventures (mostly focused on food production) that will be able to sustainably support the operating costs of these schools.

Capitalism will be the force that sustains our work in Adami Tulu and Ziway. Otherwise, what we’ve built won’t last, and it will be gone as soon as we are.

On the other hand, Wikipedia is already built.

It’s one of the most powerful media properties on the web today. They could generate every penny they need for their annual budget (and more) with the simple tools they have at their disposal.

I love supporting creative projects. I’ve donated to a few of them on Kickstarter. I’d have donated a few bucks to help build Wikipedia in the first place.

But I’m not going to waste my money supporting something that could easily be supporting itself.

It’s a great piece that he wrote, and I hope you enjoy it.

For Sierra College trustee Aaron Klein global adoption issues are personal

Colfax resident, wife work to aid, educate orphans in Ethiopia

By Gus Thomson, Journal Staff Writer

AUBURN CA – Through the eyes of Emma Klein, the youngest child there, Thursday’s citizenship ceremony at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services building in Sacramento was no big deal.

Plenty of talk by grownups, lots of smiles and people raising their right hands at some point.

For the adults and older children assembled – 138 in total, representing 19 different nationalities – the ceremony was the landmark moment in their lives where they received the official piece of paper showing that they are U.S. citizens.

Emma’s ceremony was the latest chapter in the personal mission Emma’s parents, Colfax couple Aaron and Cacey Klein, have taken on to help in small and large ways to ease the plight of orphans.

Aaron, well-known as a Sierra College board president, and Cacey, a blogger and decorator, have adopted two children over the past four years – a son, Spencer, now 4, in 2007, and Emma, now 2, early last year.

Both U.S. citizens by right of their adoptions, Spencer and Emma now have the official papers the government is increasingly requiring for future international travel. Both children became naturalized citizens the minute they stepped on U.S. soil but the citizenship certificate is an important piece of paper to have, said Sharon Rummery, of the Immigration Department.

“They’re citizens but they don’t have anything to show they are until they receive their certificate,” Rummery said.

Spencer was born South Korea and Emma was an orphan living in Ethiopia. While Spencer was receiving his citizenship certificate, the Kleins were in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, preparing to bring Emma back.

Aaron Klein said that the ceremony is a special one for his family.

“I think adoption has been a huge blessing for us,” Klein said.

Klein’s sister, Dora, is an adopted member of his family, having been born in Rumania. The Kleins decided to start their own adoption process in June 2006 and worked with Sacramento’s Holt International Office.

Holt social worker Lusandra Vincent said that since Emma was adopted, politics have closed adoptions in Ethiopia.

“There are a lot of politics in international adoptions but I think the nation will open again,” Vincent said. “But many other nations are looking for good families for their children.”

While adoptions are now closed in Ethiopia, the Kleins have continued to help that country by assisting the village of Adami Tulu to fund and build new classrooms. The doors opened on one school in January 2010 serving 80 children.

Fund-raising to construct another school should be completed in the coming year, Klein said.

“There will be about 800 kids there in the fall,” Klein said. “They’ll get an education and be fed two meals a day – breakfast and lunch.”

The Kleins visited the south of Ethiopia when they adopted Emma and seeing the poverty and the needs of the people was a life-changing experience, Aaron said.

“There are 163 million orphans in the world,” Klein said. “It’s a huge problem and it’s growing.”

Merry Christmas!

My daughter Emma officially became a United States citizen yesterday, just about two years to the day since my son Spencer did the same.

That means only 16 more years until she starts voting and taking over the world.

Here is Whitney Mountain’s great article in the Sacramento Bee, and I’ll post the equally great piece from Gus Thomson at the Auburn Journal tomorrow.

138 children get citizenship certificates in Sacramento ceremony

By Whitney Mountain

Many signed their names with ease. Some scribbled their names on the line with illegible penmanship, too young to sign in cursive. Others were so young they couldn’t use a pen, needing their parents to sign for them.

But the hands of every child at the immigration services ceremony Thursday afternoon held tight to the symbol of their new nationality: an American flag.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service presented 138 children and young adults with citizenship certificates in a ceremony held at the USCIS Sacramento Field Office, providing children of immigrant citizens and American adoptive parents a milestone and a document proving their citizenship.

“These children’s parents were kind enough to apply for the certificates for them so they will always be able to prove that they are U.S. citizens,” said USCIS spokeswoman Sharon Rummery. “It’s basically the birth certificate of their nationality.”

Rummery said that many of these children may have watched their parents apply and study to become American citizens. So having a ceremony to celebrate their own citizenship is meaningful for them, she said.

“The kids are all freshly scrubbed and the parents are all happy because they’re at the end of the process,” said Rummery. “We try to make it special for the kids, and the moms and dads as well.”

Aaron and Cacey Klein of Colfax celebrated their 2-year-old daughter Emma’s citizenship certification Thursday after adopting her from Ethiopia in 2009.

Their son Spencer, 4, whom the Kleins adopted from South Korea in 2007, received his certificate two years ago.

“It’s a very special thing to be an adoptive parent in a multicultural family; we are first and foremost Americans,” said Aaron Klein, “but as we adopted both of our kids, their cultures meshed together with ours, and that really is the wonder that is America.”

The Kleins missed Spencer’s certification ceremony two years ago because they were called to Ethiopia to get Emma and bring her home. But Klein said that when Spencer received his ornate certificate in the mail, they told him: ” ‘This means that when you grow up, you get to vote and help decide who the president is going to be.’ He thought that was really cool.”

After Thursday’s ceremony, Emma, along with 137 other young people, will be able to do things like vote, apply for Social Security cards, and get their driver’s licenses with ease.

“This is proof of citizenship that they can use their entire lives,” Rummery said.

Klein said the U.S. government is not only allowing these children to prove their citizenship, but also helping these children feel like members of society and part of American culture.

“They often say you can go to China and it doesn’t make you Chinese; you can go to Russia, but it doesn’t make you Russian,” he said. “But when you come to the United States, you really become an American.”

Photo Credit: Hector Amezcua, Sacramento Bee

It’s been an amazing year. We did our best to document it in our annual Christmas letter. This is the third year we’ve done this letter on the web, instead of mailing it out on dead trees.

» Read our 2011 Christmas Letter

To all of our family and friends out in Twitter, Facebook and blog land, we hope you have a wonderful holiday season and a Merry Christmas!

Here are just a few of the amazing details of what happened.

In mid-October, just 61 days ago, the Adami Tulu team was getting started on its $65K project for 2012. The Ziway team had raised $50K but still had another $105K to go.

When we met in Chicago in early November and merged the leadership teams for the two projects (33 people strong!), the mountain looked pretty darned high to us all. The combined construction budget was $220K, and we still needed about $170K of that.

Then a simple phone call changed everything…a matching donation of up to $65K for each project’s fundraising by December 31.

It was like we had a little grass fire going, and then it started raining gasoline.

In the last 61 days, hundreds of amazingly generous people have given $85,000. An unbelievable $65,000 of that came in just the last 29 days. That’s $2,246 a day, for crying out loud!

You double $85K to $170K, combine it with the $50K already raised, and the 2012 construction budget of $220K is fully funded.

So the kids of Adami Tulu and Ziway just got the greatest Christmas gift ever. Because of you, 735 kids will have the classrooms to get a great education and two square meals every school day. Preventing these kids from becoming orphans, breaking the cycle of poverty and building self-sufficiency.

We’ve still got a lot of work to do to raise the operating funding for the schools. There’s still more time to double your donation with the match before the end of the year. And we’ll be rolling out some exciting opportunities to get involved with these projects in 2012.

What an incredible Christmas gift for us all!

My sweetheart turns 29 again today. For the second time.

I am a very blessed man to have met her, somehow convinced her to team up on this great adventure called life, and spent the last 11 years side by side.

Don’t tell her I told you this, but she is an amazing friend. She is smart and insightful, and I love to sit and talk to her over a cup of good coffee. (Or bad coffee, for that matter.)

She’s a patient mom to our two kids, who, contrary to the hilarity of our tweets, are still very much kids when they get tired.

And she’s a compassionate advocate for the cause of the fatherless that we both care so much about. She’s even turned her last two birthdays in a row into fundraisers!

I love you, Cacey Nichole Steward Klein. You’re the best. Here’s to another great year in your wonderful life.

A little overwhelmed by all there is to do this holiday season? Here’s a quick way to send a Christmas gift of meaning to your family and friends.

Now just in case you’re new to this blog, we’re big supporters of the Adami Tulu Project to build self-sufficiency, break the cycle of poverty, and prevent kids from becoming orphans in Africa. You can read more about the project here.

My mom, Bonnie Klein, ordered 50 of the beautiful Adami Tulu Project greeting cards that you see above, and for the first 50 people who donate, she’ll inscribe a card from you, to your family and friends.

Those folks will love getting this card as a gift. Inside, they’ll read more about the project, learn that you made a donation in their honor, and be wished a “very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.”

So no need to brave the crush of people or lack of parking at the shopping mall. You can give a gift that changes the world, right from the comfort of your own home – and have it delivered before Christmas. Oh, and did I remember to mention that your donation gets DOUBLED?

Here’s how it works:

1. Please donate by this Saturday, December 17 to ensure delivery before Christmas.
2. Minimum donation of $10 per card that you want mailed, please.
3. When making your donation via PayPal, write “Christmas Gift Card” and your email address in the notes.
4. Send an email to bonnie.klein@gmail.com with your name, return address, and the recipient’s name and address.

I’ll update this post and remove the donation link as soon as all 50 cards are gone…so if the button is still here, there’s a card left for you!

Click Here to Donate

When I wrote the post detailing what our immediate plans were for Adami Tulu, we had raised $1,357 of the $65,000 construction budget.

Just six weeks later, thanks to your incredible generosity, we’re at an unbelievable $53,000.

Over on the Ziway Project side, a bunch of team leaders had already raised $49,000 of their $155,000 construction budget, and today, Ziway Project is at $120,000.

With the construction budget for both projects close to 80% complete, Lifesong has launched Hope Ethiopia:100…a weeklong effort to ask 100 people to invest $100 in the project.

(Remember, because of a very generous donor, every dollar raised between now and December 31 is matched 100%, up to a total of $130,000.)

Already, we have 44 people who have stepped up and joined the ranks. We’ve got three days left to find the other 56!

So when you’re pondering the true meaning of Christmas during the next few days, I hope you’ll consider becoming one of the Hope Ethiopia:100.

In fact, I’m putting out a challenge right now. The first person who pledges that $100 donation in the comments on this post…Cacey and I will match that $100. (Which then turns into $400. Double match!)

And whether you can give or not, do the next best thing: tweet, share or email this blog post to at least three other people who might be able to.

It’s amazing to think that you can give a Christmas gift of education, a few square meals a day, and the chance for a family to break the cycle of poverty…all for just $100. But that’s exactly what your generosity can do.

Will you be that 1 in 100?

Click Here to Donate

Update: As of Friday morning, we’re at 76 people and need just 24 more! Are you number 77?

This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for a family that loves me.

I’m thankful for a job that I love to do.

I’m thankful to work with a team of people I admire and appreciate so much.

I’m thankful to advocate for a cause I care so much about.

I’m thankful to be a part of making our community, our region, our state and our country more prosperous through education.

I’m thankful for each of you who I get to talk with every day through this blog, Twitter and Facebook. (Yes, even the trolls. It’s Thanksgiving.)

I have so much to be thankful for. And despite all of our problems and our challenges, we have so much to be thankful for as a country. Let’s not forget that.

So like the pilgrims of old who sought out freedom and found it here, let’s raise our glasses in thanks for all that we’ve been given.

Happy Thanksgiving!

“The one thing that we absolutely know for sure is that if we don’t work even harder than we did in 2008, then we’re going to have a government that tells the American people, you are on your own. If you get sick, you’re on your own. If you can’t afford college, you’re on your own…that’s not the America I believe in. It’s not the America you believe in.” -President Obama

Ever since the story of Cain killing Abel and then flippantly asking “am I my brother’s keeper?”, the appeal of community has been strong for us as humans.

But notwithstanding the demagoguery and partisan nature of his comments, there are two missing elements in the President’s call for a deeper sense of community: effectiveness and sustainability.

First, helping our community is most effective from the bottom-up, not the top-down. The successful businessman who funds five scholarships at the local community college is much more invested in the outcome for those five students than the one who writes a check to Washington DC to have his money forcibly redistributed to solve the same problem.

Second, you can’t build a community without sustainability at its core. We’ve proven that if we turn the safety net into a hammock, we never actually get the community we were promised. If it’s anywhere in the stratosphere of being equally rewarding to receive as it is to produce, we will inevitably bankrupt ourselves and never achieve that sense of community we seek.

So yes, it takes more work and thought to build an effective and sustainable sense of community. Yes, having such a community requires that we interweave the principles of individualism and responsibility throughout it. President Clinton actually understood this.

I’ve come to believe that President Obama simply doesn’t have the life experience to grasp it, because his policies don’t actually achieve his stated goal. In fact, they’ve achieved exactly the opposite in spades. They’ve dug the hole deeper for us all.

And now there’s another opportunity to get some great gifts while helping an amazing cause. Our friend Cassie Williams has an Etsy shop called Twinkle Stitch, and she’s donating all of her profits for November and December to the project!

So thank you Cassie! And all of you find some great gifts for your family and friends, and enjoy changing the world along the way.

Update: Don’t forget, we just got the news about the Matching Gift! So the profits from every item you buy from Twinkle Stitch or Tastefully Simple get DOUBLED for the school. Get shopping!

An incredibly generous donor has thrown down the gauntlet: they will match the next $130,000 given to build the schools at Adami Tulu and Ziway by December 31. That’s $65,000 each!

So for every $1,000 you give…it just magically turns into $2,000.

Now keep in mind, this is a real match, not a phony one. This is not a $130,000 gift. If we don’t raise that money by December 31, it evaporates into thin air.

I’m so incredibly thankful to these generous folks for their commitment to these kids in Ethiopia. For their belief in our shared vision of ending the global orphan crisis by keeping families together, breaking the cycle of poverty, and building self-sufficiency.

So I don’t know about you, but I’m incredibly enthused, excited and energized about this movement to change the world. I hope you’ll join us in acting today to maximize the impact of this generosity!

Make a Matched Donation Now

It’s hard to believe that it was only 14 months ago that I flew to Africa with a vision team from Lifesong for Orphans, trying to learn more about the global orphan crisis and how we could help end it.

The formula I saw was…great education, to break the cycle of poverty; combined with twice-a-day meals to keep families together; combined with a long-term effort to make all of this self-sustaining, to eliminate dependency and make Africa self-sufficient again.

We found a little school of 70 kids there, and with your generosity, a team of people raised over $40,000 and transformed it into a school of 210 kids. It was nothing short of amazing to go back there this past August, put the finishing touches on the new building, and start planning “what’s next.”

This past week, the Lifesong Ethiopia board gave a thumbs up to a three year plan that will expand Adami Tulu to about 500 students from nursery school through fourth grade.

There are three parts to the plan, so let me explain.

New Facilities. We’ll build another classroom building to handle first and second grade during this next year (budget of about $65,000), an expanded kitchen and feeding center in year two, and then a final classroom building for third and fourth grade. We’re already more than 10% of the way to goal!

Child Sponsors. Lifesong has a variety of fundraising efforts that pay the teacher salaries, buy the food and keep the school operating year-in and year-out, but to grow this school to have a village-changing impact in Adami Tulu, we need to find sponsors for these kids. Stay tuned…we’ll be launching a $19-per-month sponsorship program in January 2012.

Sustainable Ventures. Over time, we want to transition the ongoing costs of this school to be self-sustaining, by starting up in-country business ventures, owned by the school, that over time can pay for 100% of the school’s costs while also providing great jobs to local villagers. We’ve got a lot of work to do on this part of the plan, but it’s a critical part of building a self-sufficient Africa.

The other decision we made at this board meeting was to broaden our efforts to include the other Lifesong school about five minutes down the road in Ziway. So while Cacey and I will continue to focus our fundraising energies on the Adami Tulu Project for now, we’re going to play an active role on the Ziway Project as well.

So I hope you’ll help us get started with a donation to the facilities construction fund now. Time is short as they’ve got to start construction in late March or early April.

Time to saddle up for another year of changing the world!

On a whim, I submitted the link to Hacker News. I’ve done that before. The HN community is a pretty awesome group. They vote up the posts they like, and you get some nice readership there.

But apparently this one struck a chord. And then it hit #1 on Hacker News.

I don’t write this blog for the stats, but I do check them once in a while to see what’s been popular with readers. This is what my Google Analytics graph normally looks like:

This is what it looks like after a post goes to #1 on Hacker News:

So thanks to all you HN people who subscribed, or followed me on Twitter, or became a new Riskalyze user! Hopefully, this blog will live up to your standards with interesting posts, though I can’t guarantee they will all discuss beer.

If you’re reading this and feeling incredibly guilty about not getting me a birthday gift (ha!), that’s awesome.

Because here’s what I want for my birthday.

Let’s get a huge head start on the next phase of the Adami Tulu Project to build a school for 500 orphans and vulnerable kids in Africa.

You can give $33 in honor of my old age.

Or $29 to make me feel young.

Or $10 to remind me how lucky I’ve been to be married to my sweetheart for the last ten years.

Or $4 to remind me how long I’ve had the awesome privilege to be a dad.

No matter what amount you give, not a dime goes to administrative salaries here in the US. It all gets put to work where it belongs.

We’re on a mission to end the global orphan crisis by keeping families together and giving people the self-sufficiency to pull themselves out of poverty. And you’ll have made a difference.

So thanks in advance.

You’ve made my birthday great.

Click Here to Donate

It has been interesting to round the bend of 30 and see how things are different. I don’t know what’s magical about your age starting with a “3″ but people stop talking about what a wonder kid you are. You’re supposed to be doing important things. It feels different.

I never made a “30 under 30″ list in a magazine, and I have no idea if I’ll make one of the “40 under 40″ ones, but I do know this. No matter what happens to me from here…

• I have a wife who is my best friend, closest confidante and the most beautiful woman I know.
• I have a son who is smart, talented and growing up to be an incredible young man.
• I have a daughter who is beautiful, engaging and full of spark and energy.
• And I have an extended family that is second to none.

If no more “good” things came my way after today, I’d still be one of the most blessed people on the face of Planet Earth.

I’ve only had two people unsubscribe from the daily email so far…but this is just a reminder that I pay a few bucks every month to a company called Feedblitz to make a weekly email option possible.

So if you don’t want to get an email from me six days a week, just click here to subscribe weekly.

I wouldn’t want to get an email from me six days a week either.

#1: I wanted to fully convey every part of my thoughts on a subject. Rather than writing a few paragraphs about something, I felt like I needed to write a masterful 1000-1200 word post talking about all the nuances of an issue. Which naturally takes more time. And as it turns out, those who bother to read my blog actually like the concise posts better (like this one, and this one).

#2: I worry about whether one of my circles will get bored. I have three distinct audiences for this blog: the tech startup and investor community who I love interacting with at Riskalyze; the supporters, colleagues and staff I work with at Sierra College; and the adoption and orphan care community who I advocate alongside of as an adoptive dad. Will I lose my adoption friends by blogging about technology too much?

#3: It took too long to find a great photo for each post. I love great photography and illustrating a post with a great photograph or visual seemed really important to me. And I still think posts will be more effective that way. But some concepts are hard to find illustrations for, and requiring myself to find a visual for each post ate up a lot of time I didn’t have.

The silly part of each of those mental blocks is that the alternative was not to blog at all. If I couldn’t convey every nuance of a subject, I’d convey none. If I might bore one of my circles with a post, I wouldn’t engage any of them at all. And since I didn’t have time to find a visual, I wouldn’t write the words at all.

So those excuses are gone.

I’m going to try to blog once every day, except when on vacation. They will often be short, concise posts. I’ll often post without any photo or visual, largely because I wrote the post on my Android while mobile. And if the topic is boring to you, use my multiple feeds to subscribe only to what interests you.

These posts will be on topics I’m thinking about or working on that day. I’m going to focus a little less on sharing my point of view and more on raising questions and talking ideas. I hope to learn from all of you in the comments.

I’m excited about this because writing on a more regular basis about technology, education policy and the global orphan crisis can really help me to “beta test” ideas, and increase the velocity of progress on all of these things that I work on.

So that starts tomorrow. And if I mess up, you have an open door to call me on it via the comments, Twitter or Facebook.

Update: I meant to write “weekday” when I wrote “every day” above. I’m not going to blog regularly on Sundays, but I will go ahead and do Saturday posts…because I really am having a blast with this new, easier approach. It’s made blogging fun again.

We all remember where we were on 9/11.

I woke up, thumbed through my BlackBerry and saw the awful news that a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers. I flipped on the TV and moments later, watched as a plane appeared on one side of the screen and seconds later flew into the second tower…where I had stood just five months earlier on my honeymoon.

The world changed that day.

I remember the news anchors commenting that the Secret Service didn’t want the President back in Washington.

I remember the President, right before ordering Air Force One to take him back to the capital, speaking with moral clarity that “freedom itself was attacked today by a faceless coward…and freedom will be defended.”

Thousands of men and women in our military and intelligence agencies, led by two commanders-in-chief, have done a remarkable job of keeping us safe in the ten years since.

We still live in a dangerous world. But right now, my two kids are growing up in a time when our worst terrorist attacks happened before they were born.

I pray that will always be the case.

We will never forget.

This past Friday, Dr. Martin Luther King entered his rightful place in American history beside many of our greatest American presidents with a memorial in Washington DC.

It took 87 years to end slavery. Another 100 or so years to end segregation. And about 40 years after that, this country elected its first African-American President – a proud moment for our country, whether you agree with his policy views or not.

Dr. King took an idea enshrined in our Declaration of Independence – that all people are created equal – and turned it into a movement that changed the world and transformed the future for my daughter and every other little girl like her.

I’m incredibly thankful for his work.

Today, we’ve still got some work to do to fully realize the dream articulated by Dr. King and shared by so many. But it’s a dream that is reality for most. And that’s worth celebrating.

I just can’t wait for my next visit to Washington and visiting the new memorial.

I’m going to find a way to put up with the view from my office for this week. We’re blessed to be spending the week with my inlaws in a sprawling beach house over on the California coast.

I didn’t really have time for a vacation, what with the Adami Tulu Project trip coming up in August. So I’m working from here Tuesday through Friday, and I’ll hang out with the family in the evenings.

I’m hoping to catch up on a lot of big projects and do some blogging. Somehow I’ll manage to deal with such a beautiful view.

You can go to Wordle.net and create a “word cloud” from your blog, so I thought I’d check it out. A word cloud will show the most common words in your posts as larger text.

I may have been writing a lot about Riskalyze recently, but it will take some time for that to get bigger, since I’ve written a lot more about our schools, apparently.

I did think it was too cool that the words “exceptional teachers” were smack in the middle. We do have a number of them at Sierra College.

I’ve had two “bad habits” with social media. I accept every Facebook friend request. I follow back everyone on Twitter.

This led to 3,200 friends on Facebook and 6,000 followers on Twitter.

The result is an overwhelming amount of spam from event invites, app requests, group additions, messages and Twitter DMs.

It’s made the signal-to-noise ratio on Facebook and Twitter really bad for me. Too much noise, not enough signal.

So I’ve come to a tough conclusion: I have to change how I use social media.

The interesting thing is that most of those 3,200 Facebook friends and 6,000 Twitter followers are real, awesome people who I enjoy interacting with. They follow my work in technology, or at Sierra College, or perhaps we know each other from advocating for adoption and orphan care.

But a bunch of them aren’t, and I’m making it worse because I’m doing it wrong.

I’m not going to give up all the wonderful things I get from social media. I’ve learned incredible things from people sending me @ replies on Twitter. I’ve gotten great input in my elected role at Sierra College from folks on Facebook. I’ve developed really important business relationships and deepened real-life friendships.

And I’ve even made a few amazing friends that I haven’t even met in real life. (One of those friends in particular is one of my favorite people in New Hampshire…you know who you are!)

So here’s what I’ve changed.

• I’ve converted my old Facebook profile to a page using Facebook’s migration tool, so I haven’t lost all of my friends. All of my posts will go there so I can keep talking with you, interacting with you and commenting on your stuff too.
• I made a new Facebook for personal friends so they can invite me to events and such. If you know my e-mail address, you can probably find it. I won’t be posting much to that page, though…if I don’t want it public, I don’t put it online!
• If you know me personally (online or offline), please feel free to friend me on my personal page. Facebook wouldn’t let me friend everyone I knew on my old profile, so please don’t feel snubbed or anything. Just be patient while I try to get all 500 to 600 personal friends accepted.
• If you don’t know me personally yet, I hope I’ll get to know you soon.
• And finally, I’m not going to follow everyone back on Twitter. I’ll try to skim through and follow back the real people who look interesting, but I know I’m going to miss a bunch of great people. If I should be following you back, send me an @ mention and say hi! I try to read all of those.

I’m hoping these changes will make social media an even more powerful tool than it was before for talking, interacting and getting to know you.

Don’t be a stranger!

Update: Just to be clear, to “know me” isn’t necessarily to have met in real life! There are a number of people I’ve met in real life who I don’t know. There are a number of people I’ve only met online who I really know. If you feel like we know each other, please go ahead and friend my personal Facebook page (just be patient as I catch up). The goal here isn’t exclusivity, just the elimination of spam.

We got him.

Nearly ten years after a September morning we will never forget, Osama bin Laden is dead.

Revenge never feels good, but justice certainly does. And justice is now done for 3,000 men, women and children killed at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and aboard four airliners.

I could not be prouder or more thankful for the men and women of our Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines, CIA and others who we’ll never know had a hand in this.

Somewhere last night, a handful of Navy SEALs were clinking their beers in celebration of justice done.

We owe them a lot.

Viva USA!

Today is my last day.

My last day working with a team that I’ve had the privilege to lead for four years.

My last day working for a boss who has challenged, coached and supported me for four years.

My last report for the weekly management team e-mail we all read on Monday. (I won’t be reading this one next week.)

That’s a lot of "lasts" for one day.

At 5:00 today, I technically don’t have any job responsibilities until Tuesday. That feels just a little bit strange, to be honest.

Cacey, the kids and I are taking a long weekend on the coast…to rest up, recharge and get ready for the exciting challenges ahead of us.

No blogging, probably not much tweeting. A lot of reading.

We get back on Monday evening.

I predict that Tuesday will be a day of firsts.

Some of you are involved in education reform, are employees at Sierra College, or are supporters of the work I’ve done there since 2004.

Others of you are involved in the adoption and orphan care community, either as adoptive parents yourselves, as advocates for ending the global orphan crisis that touches 163 million children, or as supporters of the Adami Tulu project to build a school for orphans in Africa.

And while I’ve always written about business and technology here and there, I’m sure there will be a growing group of readers primarily interested in my new startup, Riskalyze. I’d love nothing more than to share some great ideas here and have some really smart people like you help make them better.

Despite the three distinct audiences, there’s no way I’ll ever be posting to this blog more than once a day on a regular basis. I just don’t have time.

But there are plenty of you who belong to just one of these groups, and you just don’t want to be bothered with my posts for the other two audiences.

So with the help of a cool tool called Yahoo Pipes, I created three new feeds so that you can have only the posts that you want delivered to your inbox by e-mail, or to whatever web site or software you use for reading blogs.

So you can subscribe to all of my posts, or just the posts about one of those three areas of interest. You’ll find these feeds in my sidebar to the right of this post, and it looks like the example at left.

All three of the new feeds will still include “general” posts and the odd post here or there about my family or things happening with me personally. In fact, if you want a sampling of what’s included with each one, just click the orange “RSS” button beside each of them to check out the prior posts included in that feed.

Some people have suggested you can’t have a blog about three distinct topics. But I really couldn’t stop blogging about any of this – they are all things I’m passionate about.

I hope you find this useful!

I hope you’ll indulge me for a minute so I can share some exciting personal news.

I’m joining a brand new startup company as CEO.

Here’s a little bit of the story about how it happened.

My 20-Year Career at Age 32

I’ve always had the good fortune to work with entrepreneurial companies – from my dad’s distribution business where I started packing boxes in the back room at age twelve, to a web consulting firm I sold, to a business ops software company that built a great team and a great product, but ultimately didn’t get funded.

All in all, the good has always outweighed the bad. There’s just nothing like being a part of limitless opportunity – and that’s what the American system of entrepreneurial capitalism is all about.

During the last four years, I’ve spent most of my time leading global product development for a financial services firm with operations in the San Francisco Bay Area and Chicago. That gave me the chance to broaden my experience with consumer marketing and international. It’s been a great privilege to work with an incredible team of people there.

And now, that chapter is coming to a close and a new chapter is opening.

For the last fifteen years, I’ve had a front row seat to watch technology – and the web – change the world and remake how we go about our daily lives.

When I started messing around with this stuff in the late 1980s, “twitter” was something that only birds did and “facebook” was what happened when you fell asleep while reading. We didn’t have Kindles or iPhones. (Heck, we didn’t even have cell phones – I remember when my dad had a pager so we could make him stop at a pay phone and call us!)

The New Opportunity

As I’ve spent the last four years building technology products and interacting with some of the world’s most brilliant market traders, it’s been fascinating to watch how they all deal with risk. Every economic decision we make is motivated by one of two things: seeking opportunity, or avoiding pain.

If you think about it, how we see the world through that lens of risk is very personal to each of us – you might even say it’s like a fingerprint. And yet it also changes over time. Our own job, our finances, national security, world events and the financial markets cause us to constantly shift a little bit closer to seeking opportunity, or a little bit closer to avoiding pain.

Earlier this year, I was presented with a fascinating opportunity. There’s some incredible technology that can actually capture that “risk fingerprint” from each of us, and let us use it to make better risk/reward decisions. It’s groundbreaking stuff, and nobody has ever tried to do this quite the same way before.

The new company is called Riskalyze. I’m joining the company as CEO on March 1.

We’re going to take that raw technology and transform it into a set of products that will fundamentally change how the world makes risk/reward decisions.

I’m incredibly excited about the challenge that lies ahead. For one thing, you’ll be hearing more from me on business and technology topics I haven’t been able to write about before. (Financial Services is a highly regulated industry, so corporate policies prevented me from writing much about it.) I’ll be sharing a lot about what we’re doing as our story unfolds.

In fact, I’m hoping the “regulars” who follow this blog – everyone from friends and colleagues in business, to folks at Sierra College, to people in the orphan care and adoption community – will be intrigued enough to try this out when it’s ready. (If that’s you, go ahead and comment on this post, and I’ll make sure you get a “Backstage Pass” to check it out before it launches!)

I had to hold this post until I could meet with my incredible staff and share this news with them personally. It’s been a privilege to lead them for four years. It’s also tough to leave an incredible boss, who taught me a lot and gave me all the support that I needed to be successful. I trusted her with my career for those four years and she never let me down. I owe her a debt of gratitude.

So there you have it – one chapter closes, and another one begins.

I can’t wait to get started.

100 years ago this week, a child was born to middle class parents in Tampico, Illinois.

That little boy grew up to become the President of the United States.

And then in 1987, he stood in Berlin and said the words that his own State Department criticized as naïve and provocative, words they edited out of his speech twice (he just kept putting them back in).

“Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

And just two years later, that wall came down. Freedom and democracy took hold in Eastern Europe. And the world has never been the same – we saw the long-term effects in Cairo today.

Thank you, Mr. President. The world is safer and more secure, and America is a better place because of your selfless service to the American people.

We had a great Christmas and really enjoyed our two kids at such great ages (Spencer is three and a half, and Emma is one and a half). We had our traditional "three Christmases" this year – Christmas Eve with Nana and Papa (Cacey’s parents), Christmas morning at our place, and Christmas Day with Grammie and Pops (my folks).

New Year’s Day marked a year since we landed back on US soil with Emma. It’s just amazing to think she’s already been a part of our family for the majority of her short life. We just can’t imagine life without both of these two adorable kids.

I have some really exciting things to share with you about the Adami Tulu project, and next week’s Sierra College board meeting. I’ll try to write that over the weekend!

A little over a week ago was the 55 year anniversary of a moment.

The establishment said that the value of a human being depended on the color of their skin.

The establishment said that if a white person got on a bus, a black person should stand up and move to the back.

The establishment said that was the way things were, and compliance would promote peace and tolerance.

The establishment was wrong.

And a tired woman named Rosa Parks – who decided enough was enough – changed the world.

As the dad of an African-American daughter, I’m so grateful that she had the courage to do something radical for her time.

So now the question lies with the rest of us.

Will we comply with the way things are because it’s the “reasonable thing to do?”

Or will we see our own opportunities to change the world…and take action?

I love how Bing chose to remember our veterans today and had to share this powerful photo. We live in the land of the free, because of the brave.

Thank a soldier, sailor, marine or airman today for their service.

Photo Credit: Bing.com / James P. Blair / CORBIS

My VAIO is back. The pop, crackle, snap has been repaired. All of my draft blog posts have returned. So I should be back to posting on a regular basis, starting tomorrow morning.

First up: the next installment in the “It’s Time to Change the World” series.

I hope your enthusiasm for this series of posts hasn’t waned in the last few weeks! The need is even greater than it was before.

My grandfather served in the United States Air Force during World War II and Korea, and on Memorial Day, he is often in my thoughts. I hope you take a few moments on this important day to remember the men and women who have given all for our freedom.

I’ve been all but absent from blogging for the last ten days. Part of it was work responsibilities, with a big event coming up in Silicon Valley in a few weeks. Another part was that I’ve been working on a series of posts about a cause very near and dear to my heart, and that has taken up a lot of time. Getting closer to sharing those with you.

In any case, I think that I’m back in the saddle tomorrow. Hopefully those of you who are regular readers didn’t mind the absence too much.

Have a great Memorial Day and remember that freedom is never free!

(Mobile, feed and e-mail readers: embedded video above.)

As you may remember, before he was President, Ronald Reagan was an ambassador for General Electric, touring the country and making speeches at their plants, as well as the host of the company’s weekly television show on CBS.

Today, GE is remembering President Reagan’s leadership by sponsoring the Ronald Reagan Centennial Celebration. I love the quote from the ad: “Because long before he changed the world, or led a nation, or governed a state, he inspired our company.”

On days like these, I sure miss President Reagan.

(E-mail and RSS feed readers can click through for the video.)

Most of you know that I haven’t been the biggest fan of President Obama’s policies, but he absolutely nailed it today and deserves credit for the speech that he delivered in Oslo while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations could not convince Al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.

“…whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped to underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.”

Thank you, Mr. President, for recognizing our brave men and women in uniform for the tremendous sacrifices they have made to make our world a safer and more secure place. They deserved that speech, and you deserve our thanks for writing it.