Even though it’s been six years, it was strangely really cathartic and emotionally satisfying doing this for McKenzie. At this point, I needed it, but didn’t know that I needed it.

Cruising around Rome and Florence was fantastic. I’ve now been to Rome a few times and feel like I really know it pretty well. Nothing like McKenzie, of course, but I’ve been to the sites more than a few times, and they’re getting more and more familiar. This time it allowed me to go a little bit deeper. For instance, I actually learned and remember what the statues are on the Trevi Fountain and why they are there.

Florence is a really cool town. I was there ten years ago and don’t remember much. This time I really got a feel for it. It’s much smaller than I had remembered. You can walk from one end to the other in about fifteen minutes, and it was cool to get to know it and walk all over it.

The one day, Friday, that we set out to have as the memorial was really cool. We went to his dig site and we went to the museum associated with it and ate out there in Montelupo. Just having a McKenzie day was really great.

I was really grateful that some of the extended friends and family made the trip. Matt Lewis had a herculean task of getting there and back in a limited amount of time because he’s got two kids under the age of eighteen. Tildy brought her kids (Oliver and Malcolm) out. Paul and Dana made the effort. It was really wonderful of them.

This past morning, Diane and I woke up at 5am to a bang. We don’t have thunderstorms in the Bay Area (strange, right?) so we were shocked to get rocked by some good thunder. So was the rest of the house. The dogs started barking and then suddenly Hunter was in our room with a “did you guys see the lightning!?” and then a few minutes later Sasha jumped in our bed and asked, “Is this an earthquake?” The dogs then both jumped on the bed and all of the sudden we had 4 people and 2 massive dogs sharing our bed as we listened to the storm rage above us.

During the days, it’s often that both kids would rather escape to their room to call friends or watch their own movies on their iPads than hang out with Diane and I. So, it made my day to have a brief moment of snuggle time with the entire family. I know that lightning like this won’t strike that many times more as these kids get older and older.

Sasha had a soccer tournament all weekend. Two games on Saturday and a game on Sunday. I remember laying in bed before the weekend began, talking to God and saying, “Wouldn’t it be cool if she actually won this tournament?” I knew it was sort of impossible because the team hadn’t been doing that well as a team and the last tournament we went to they lost all three games. That said, they had been getting better.

Bright and early Saturday morning in Sunnyvale they played a team they’ve lost to twice already (the Mustangs). It was a well-fought game. Our team scored a goal to go up 1-0 in the first half, then the other team was charging and charging and charging the entire game, but they couldn’t score and the game ended. So we won 1-0.  Wow, that was nice.

The second game, the same thing happened. We scored a goal early and then we held on to the very end to win 1-0.

That was the end of Sasha’s first two games. Then I went to go coach Hunter’s game in the afternoon. Hunter’s team is the worst team in the league, and the team we’re playing is one of the best teams in the league. Last time we played them, they scored four goals in the first five minutes, and then they had to start taking players off and stop trying to keep from running up the score. So, I was not excited for a shellacking.

On the car ride to the game, I had a conversation with Hunter, and we agreed that as long as he tried hard and stayed positive, no matter what the score, we’d both have a good game. When I got to the field, I conveyed that to the rest of the team saying “Hey, this is a good team, but if we try hard and stay positive, we’ll have a good game.” And as luck would have it, the other team ended up scoring two goals in the first half, but we were battling and we were fighting and we weren’t getting our asses kicked like we had before. At the end of the game, it was 4-0, but our team was happy. We all left the field thinking “Wow, that was the best game we’ve ever played and we’re really getting better.”

Then Sunday came around (my birthday). I was distracted because we didn’t know what to do with Hunter and Diane for the day. We were up in Marin and Sasha’s game was down in Sunnyvale. We didn’t know whether we should drag them 2 hours down south to watch Sasha’s game, just to turn around and drive back. Seems like a waste of time for a 13-year-old who’d rather be doing anything else.  But ultimately I decided, “You know what, this is my birthday and I’ll be really bummed if I’m sitting in an office park in Sunnyvale talking to random parents for hours and not with my family on my birthday.” So I got the full team into the car. We’re all going. We may be in Sunnyvale but at least we’ll be together.

Sasha had her game at 1pm and we got off to a good start. In fact, Sasha scored the first goal to put us up 1-0. And we fought hard but the other team was a good team and really put the pressure on us. They scored another goal towards the end of the game and were about to score at least one more when the game thankfully ended and so we escaped with a tie, 1-1.

Because we had won two games and tied one, we made it to the finals to play the best team of the tournament, Marin FC, who are really good. We’ve played twice already this season and they’ve beaten us each time. So again, we had the attitude, “As long as Sasha plays hard and stays positive, we’ll have a good time.” Sasha had already anchored on how fun it would be to get a second-place medal. She’d never gotten a single medal before (in her life) and even getting the second-place one would be really fun. She was excited.

The game started and they were indeed really good but we were scrappy.  We were scrappy in a way we hadn’t been scrappy before and we battled as they were bigger and more physical. The other team was good and they scored a goal to have us down 1-0 at halftime. But we fought back in the second half. We had a chance here and there and we actually scored one goal towards the end of the half to make it tied 1-1.  CeCe scored the goal – it was kind of a long shot that dipped right inside the inside post.

And then with the game winding down, probably two minutes left, we got a corner kick. It came straight to Skoog who one-timed volleyed it right into the goal for us to go up 2-1. We were all sort of amazed at what happened and then before we knew it the game was over.

I had forgotten about my small request to the man above from the beginning of the weekend. But it’s amazing that we won the tournament. It seemed so impossible. The joy on Sasha’s face was really something.

It was a great experience for her and for us as a family. Hanging together rooting for each kid at each game and for each to compete hard and to emerge with big smiles on their faces.

Someone asked me what I got for my birthday, and I had to reply: I got everything I could ever wish for, and maybe a little bit more.

She made this video this summer and it cracks me up.  Anyone who’s seen The Croods should recognize it.

I got an MRI last week, and it confirmed a herniated disc at L4–L5, pressing on the L5 nerve root. I’m honestly just glad to know what it is. And if you’ve had nerve pain (which it turns out many people have), you know it’s intense and sucky.

The good news is I’m getting better — slowly, but noticeably, every day. My current plan:

• A short course of steroids to reduce inflammation

• Physical therapy (lots of core)

• Possibly adding an epidural injection if progress stalls — but for now, things are trending in the right direction

They say that this should take a good 6-8 months before I’m out of the woods.  My new motto is: Just abide in ’25 to get back in the mix in ’26.

This whole thing has taught me a few things:

• It sucks to be immobile — I have a lot more empathy for people who are injured or disabled. It’s easy to take movement for granted.

• My posture and office ergonomics are terrible. I never realized how bad my posture is or how much I sit during the day. I’m fixing both.

• I’m lucky. This isn’t a terminal disease or a catastrophic injury. I can still move. I can sit. I can function. I’ve had friends dealing with much worse.

Thanks to everyone who’s reached out and expressed care — I’ve appreciated it more than I can say. More updates to come.

]]> https://loo.me/2025/04/writing-about-coaching/ Wed, 02 Apr 2025 21:46:32 +0000 https://loo.me/?p=18740 I’ve been an advisor for startup CEO’s for almost 4 years now. I’m pretty good at it. But, also, I’ve also been training to be a coach.

Coaching vs. Advising
The difference between a coach and an advisor is simple but profound:
An advisor gives advice. They offer answers, frameworks, and examples. They’ve seen the movie before and can tell you what usually happens next.

A coach helps someone get where they want to go.
Coaches don’t hand you the answer. They help you find your own.
They unlock your creativity, sharpen your awareness, and help you change how you show up — so goals become more achievable, sometimes even inevitable.

Advising and coaching are adjacent. They overlap, but they require different muscles, different tools, and often, a different mindset.

Today, with most of my clients, I wear the advisor hat often. It’s familiar. It’s fast. And for many problems, I do have an answer. But I’m increasingly drawn to the deeper impact that coaching can have — not just on a founder’s company, but on their life.

More of a Coaching Focus
Coaching hasn’t been a secret — it’s just been… not the main thing. More like a passionate side relationship. Something I’ve been learning, practicing, and falling for slowly while spending most of my time advising startup CEOs.

But I’m changing that. I’m going to make coaching a bigger focus. I want to get better at it, talk about it more openly, and share what I’m learning as I go.

To go deep on it, I’ve started a substack. I’m thinking more about coaching, practicing it and getting better at it. And there, I’ll share what I’m learning.

This isn’t for my clients. It’s for me to capture what I’m learning about the craft of helping others grow, evolve, and achieve things they didn’t think were possible. I’ll share tips, tricks, tools, and reflections that are making me a better coach.

Let’s see how it goes

I put it on immediately and the next day I put it on again. My sister and I were sitting at lunch at this diner in Minneapolis, and she said, “You should wear that every day.” I said I should. She said “I’ll give you a dollar for every day that you wear it.” which sounded good to me.

But I said, “Well, actually I think I should get accelerators the longer I go to incentivize me to keep going.” She agreed, and we said every ten days the price doubles, and off we went!

Fast forward, I am now on day 13 of wearing this shirt every day.

Kudos to my sister for weaponizing my desire to keep streaks going. If you don’t know this, I love streaks and I have some crazy streaks going.

I’m 1600 days in my water drinking 80 oz every day  and thousands of days into using Readwise.

If you think about government, what is its job?  The most important thing government can do is ensure rights, defend our borders, and create a context for prosperity. That word “prosperity” really means a healthy economy. So, let’s look about our economy

1. Right now (Oct 2024), we are at full employment. We have the lowest unemployment since 1968.  Think about that. It’s awesome. If you listen to the mainstream media you’d think we’re living during the depression. Mississippi is America’s poorest state. That’s the worst in the US economically, but its residents earn on average more than Brits, Canadians, or Germans.
2. Our inflation is at 2.2 percent. So by the way, the lowest in the G7.
3. What about GDP? What about growth? It’s the strongest in the world. We are going to be responsible for 80 percent (according to the World Bank) of 2025 forecasts in World GDP.  In 1990, the US accounted for two-fifths of GDP of the G7. Today, it makes up half. Output per person is now 30 percent higher than in Western Europe and Canada, and 60 percent higher than in Japan. Gaps that have roughly doubled since 1990.
4. Lately, China has gone backwards, having closed in rapidly on America in the years before the pandemic. Its GDP has slipped from about three-quarters of America’s in 2021 to two-thirds today.
5. The US over the last 4 years has become the world’s largest energy producer. We produce a third more energy than the Saudis and Russia.  Over the past 4 years, Biden granted 50 percent more oil and gas drilling permits than under Trump.
6. The Biden deficit was cut by one-third. It tripled under Trump.
7. Immigration the last six months is far below what it was for the same period 4 years ago.
8. An unrivaled 76 record highs in the stock market in the last year.

We still have work to do, but there are 190 nations in the world. In terms of prosperity, your rights, your ability to express who you want to be, 189 would trade places with us. Let’s take some pause in just how ridiculously lucky we are for being born in the USA.

I’m parroting all of this from Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a world-class academic from Yale and the Pivot Podcast

I thought it might be fun to do the same thing for me. So, I dusted off a spreadsheet and came up with this (google doc here):

It was fun to see how my various stops around the country and different jobs look in relation to time, but there was one big surprise.  I was shocked to see how much room there is at the bottom.  Look at all this yellow!

I’ve been working for decades now. Many of the conversations I have are around retirement and when to hang it up. But, if I’m going to work to 65 or 70, there is SO much time left.

Try this thought experiment: Imagine all you’ve learned and accomplished in your career up till now.  That is 10-20 years. Think about how naive and dumb you were at the start and think about how much you’ve learned from then till now.  Now imagine that you can do all of that over again.  You could go get a PhD in a totally different area, get a job after it and work at that job for 5 years and then do that again in another different area.

For me, this surprise caused a pretty big shift, a reframe. It forced me to think of my new career as a coach and advisor as the beginning of a new journey rather that the end of my past accomplishments and new beginnings are fun and energizing. So, here we go…

Our trip to Ireland was great. I was surprised how small an dintimate the cities were. I found Dublin incredibly modern and the west coast the opposite. We explores a lot.  Some details….

Thursday

We flew to Dublin and then rented a car.  Learning how to drive on the left side was a challenge. It was harder than I had thought it would be but had no problems.

We checked into a swanky and hip hotel called The Dean. Interestingly it was our 2nd hotel that had a record player and records for us to play in the room.

After checking in, we got some drinks on the rooftop and then had dinner up there too and then went to bed early.

Friday

This was our day to explore Dublin.  We hit all the spots and ate some great food. We hit Temple Bar district, Dublin Castle, Trinity College, and (of course) The National leprechaun museum.

Dinner in Temple Bar district at Old Storehouse. Gave the chef a toy – Chef Paddington.

Saturday

We hit the road and drove from Dublin to Glassan Lakehouse and met Jen for lunch. The Lakehouse was super cool We swam at the Lakehouse.

Then we drove on to the west coast village of Galway. That town was really cool. It is small but has a ton of energy.  It was like Bourbon Street in New Orleans but except it being fulled of tourist it was filled with locals of all ages. It was just their lifestyle.

After walking the town for a bit, Diane and I had oysters and some drinks in our hotel (The Hardiman) which was super fun.  The drinks were delicious but we were tired and wanted to crash.  As much as we wanted to experience the town we just couldn’t handle it

Sunday

Checked out and drove to the Cliffs of Moher. Stopping first at a small diner on the outskirts of Galway called The Neighborhood which was really great.

On the way to the cliffs we passed so many small and quaint villages. The road down the entire coast was a 2-lane road that tested our driving skills and also gave a front row seat to these small towns and B & Bs. Super old school and cute.

The Cliffs of Moher were really impressive but I found that my hometown view of the Marin pacific coast has spoiled me a bit.

After cliffs we headed to Dromoland Castle which was way nicer than we expected. The gardens were awesome (no Skylands, but still beautiful). The castle itself is now a hotel and we had fun tooling around.

We stopped at the town Limrick for dinner at a great seafood spot called Cornerstone and filled up on calories. The town was cute and much bigger than I had thought. It felt like an Irish version of Denver.

We then drove 2 hours back to Dublin to crash for the night. We stayed the final night at Clontarf Castle which was super fun. Diane, Sash, and I had fun at the bar rehashing the trip.  Sasha had lots of questions about all the things she needs to learn before she goes to college. We wondered which city we had just visited (Rome, Milan, Dublin, Galway) we would choose to live in for a year if we had to choose one

Finally, we’re on our way home:

We would spend 4 nights and 3 days in Rome and it was a great time. We saw everything we wanted and more.

Sunday

We got to Rome about 9pm on Sunday.  After a debate, we decided to subway it to our Airbnb.  This involved a healthy walk from our subway stop (Spagna) to our place. It was both strange and awesome passing the Spanish Steps at 10pm when they’re empty and quiet.

We then finally got food around 11pm as we got a good recommendation from a guy Leo made friends with on the train.

Monday

Our Airbnb is great. Beds for everyone although for some reason the Italian air makes me snore. This pic is on the steps of our place in the lobby in front of an old birdcage elevator that definitely isn’t to code.

First stop is the Colosseum. Ali found a great guide Francesca who made the place come alive. She showed up the secret cat and cat doors as well as had some great explanations of all things.  Mckenzie and Mary would have approved.  Luca, Massi and Hunter were enthralled and explored the crap out of the place.

After exploring the Forum right next door, we got some gelato and walked to the Trevi fountain which is a healthy 30 minute walk. The Trevi is one of my favorite spots in Italy but this time seemed MUCH more crowded than last time (almost 20 years ago). I guess word has caught on.

The kids were fine walking everywhere. Because there were 4 of them, they mostly played as they walked.  Occasionally their energy sagged and we would stop for a meal or snack.  After the Trevi, we went home to relax a bit. We decided to grab food and dine in at our Airbnb.

Me, Ali and Diane did have a fun time at The Bulldog, a local bar/restaurant where we got a few drinks and chatted while we waited for food.

Tuesday

We hit St. Peter’s and the Sistine Chapel in the morning.  Our tour guide this time was the opposite of awesome. She mailed it in and we were all kind of bummed as there is SO much to see.  I was really taken by Raphael’s work this time and while the Sistine Chapel is always incredible and was my favorite the last time I visited, I enjoyed other parts more this time.  Other favorites were the tapestries and the greek/roman sculptures.

We were also unfortunate to have Luca lose his phone. We have been warned of pickpockets but we think one finally got us.

After the Vatican experience, we said goodbye to the Cedolin family and went back to our airbnb to rest and nap.

In the evening, we went to dinner at Piazza Navona and I remembered fondly my brother and all he loved about Rome.  At this plaza, I distinctly remember a hot day about 20 years earlier where I was driving him insane with my lack of respect and interest in anything he was saying.

Had a chill night in and relaxed. We’re pretty tired and we slept almost 10 hours each. We needed it.

Wednesday

We moved  to a new hotel which is right next to The Forum. It’s a small boutique place (The Nerva) but was really lovely.  The room was a loft which seemed to really impressed the kids. In fact, of the 5 hotels we stayed at our trip, this was their favorite (also the most expensive).

It was our last day in Rome and the only thing on the agenda was The Pantheon so we set out walking towards it.  On the way, we stumbled across a museum that was showing MC Escher works and as fans we popped in.  It was fantastic. I didn’t know that much about him and the exhibit showcased all his stuff from the early stuff to the later trippy stuff. Was really worth seeing and one of our favorite things we went to.

After Escher we hit there Pantheon and then walked the city for a few hours just basking in how great it is.

Thursday morning we woke up early and flew to Ireland to continue the fun.

Read about our Ireland trip here

Given that this was our first real trip as a family, my main goal was for everyone to just have a good time and want to travel more. On that front, it was a huge success. We had no arguments, meltdowns or even disagreements.  We had a blast.

It was also huge for the kids. They were able to experience being in another country where they saw new cultures, new languages and people who didn’t look or talk like them.  You could tell it was eye-opening.  Hunter especially loved it. He said that if there’s one place he wants to live in the world it’s Rome.

On to some day-to-day details. I’m doing this (below) mostly so I remember exactly what we did.

Thursday (24 hours before the trip)

We were supposed to leave Thursday morning but Diane and I went out of breakfast on Wednesday and we discovered that Italy won’t let us in with Diane’s passport as it expires in 74 days.  This is news to us. After initially panicking and thinking about cancelling the entire trip, Diane hustled her face off and got to the passport office and managed to get a passport turned around in 24 hours.  We pushed our flights back one day and were off on Friday.

Friday

We’re off.  It’s a long flight but everyone’s pumped.

We do one flight to JFK and then another red-eye flight to Milan.

Saturday

We land in Milan and take the train from the airport to downtown (almost an hour) and then try our luck at taking the subway to our hotel.

We succeed and get to our hotel (the awesome Max Brown) and sleep for a few hours.

At night, we meet up with the Cedolin’s.  They are some of our best Mill Valley friends who have moved to Milan for the year. They have a kid (Massi) who is Hunter’s age and his best friend at school. Leo (the dad) grew up in Milan and knows it well but the entire family (Ali, Luca and Massi) has been there for almost 9 months now so they have lots to show us.

Leo and Ali took us to a place to eat on a rooftop right next door to the Duomo. The Duomo is famous for its contrasting styles which display the work of various art legends from different generations. It started construction in 1386 and finally ended in 1775 (400 years later) when Napoleon came in and said the French would pay for it to be completed. It’s in the heart of the city and is a local hangout but also a tourist attraction because it has a collection of 4000 statues, gargoyles, and figures.

The view was amazing and it was great to finally be in Europe and connecting with some old friends.

Sunday

We woke up at noon and felt refreshed (well, except Hunter who woke up at 6am).  We then checked out of Max as the Cedolin’s took us off to explore Milan.

First stop was the center of downtown to get some pizza. It’s a bustling downtown that has thousands of people walking about. It’s a very young city with young 20-somethings all dressed up and eating and shopping everywhere.  See if you can spot Sasha below

After lunch we walked to visit the downtown castle called Sforzesco Castle. The castle is one of the more legit castles I’ve ever seen. Leo remarked that as a kid he would his friends either at the Duomo or the castle as the main places to “hang out.”  Definitely puts my local hangout (the McDonalds or Perkins) to shame.

As night approached, we caught a train from Milan to Rome. It’s a 3 hour ride where the adults were fully able to catch up on whats happened the past 8 months since we’ve seen each other.

Click here to read about our Rome experience

As the author James Clear says, there are really mainly 3 ways to change

1. Change your outcomes. Set new goals
2. Change your processes. Set new habits, new activities, new meetings
3. Change your identity or your beliefs.  Set new thoughts or perspectives

Outcomes are about what you get such as losing weight, running a marathon.  Processes is about what you do such as getting a new diet or  changing your bedtime. Identity is about what you believe – your worldview, your self-image, and your judgements about yourself and others.

As an advisor and coach, I’m regularly asking founders to set goals and think about how to accomplish them. We talk about new motions, new people, new processes. That’s level one and two listed above.  These are the most common ways I’ve seen people think about goals.

The big change for me is flipping the way you think about that circle. Instead of tackling change by going outside-in and thinking of goals first, I instead start with the center and think first about how I need to change yourself and your beliefs to accomplish my goals.

For example, if someone offers you a cigarette it’s much different saying “i’m trying to quit” than saying “No thank, I’m not a smoker.”

What’s even more interesting is to think more deeply about the goal. Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are. That’s the real goal.

• The goal is not to read a book, the goal is to become a reader.
• The goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner.
• The goal is not to learn an instrument, the goal is to become a musician.

Your behaviors are usually a reflection of your identity. What you do is an indication of the type of person you believe that you are either consciously or non-consciously

Another example from my own life is my weekly exercise routines. I’ve made more time and have better habits since I changed from just setting new goals to adjusting what I thought about myself.  I moved from someone who wanted to try to work out 3x a week to thinking of myself as “an athlete who has healthy cardio and is strong” and then behaving as if that was true.  I found that if I identify that way, I then behave that way.

I love this way of thinking as many people begin their goal-setting process of changing by focusing on WHAT they want to achieve. This process shifts that to focus on WHO we wish to become.

Imagine a river flowing.  This river is my energy as a person. Now imagine a rock in that river.  The water moves to go around the rock. It still flows and isn’t blocked much but the flow is somewhat disrupted.  Each one of these memories is one of those rocks. These are memories that get me charged up and that charge takes away from me doing other positive things and having positive thoughts.

This past weekend, I undertook an exercise to get rid of those rocks.

First, I went through my past and wrote down every single negatively charged memory that I still think about whether it was when I was age 8 or 40.  I was able to remember around 25 of them.

Then, I looked at each one a bit more deeply. What really happened?  What am I really upset about?  For many of them, when I looked, I was upset about something different than I previously thought.  For many of them, I realized that my deeper desire to please let me to bad behavior. I thought I was upset about the behavior but it’s really that desire that got me.

Then I spent all weekend ruminating on them. I shared the list with my wife and we talked about them.  These are my biggest embarrassments for the past 40 years and it was relieving to share them with Diane. Now all my secrets are out.  Just doing that removed the charge for some of them.

Next I made flashcards of each and then spent 4 hours going through each one (with Justin).  The goal is to forgive myself for judging myself in each action.  Give myself a pardon.  For each card, I looked at it and if was still charged I sat with it, closed my eyes and recognized the shame associated with it and found a way to separate the behavior from me and who I am today.  Doing that is key. If the behavior is not me, then I’m able to forgive it.

That process ended with me feeling much better about all of these areas.  I feel much freer and cleaner and streamlined.  Onward!

One story to share.  The weekend I spent ruminating on these items I went walking the dogs around the neighborhood in the rain (it poured a lot).  On Sunday night we (the dogs and I) were walking home and we came across as coyote standing in the middle of the road.  It’s common to see coyotes but they usually skirt past us and run into the brush as fast as they can. But not this time.  This time, he just stared at us. We were maybe 15 yards away and he stared for a long while – what seemed like minutes.  Eventually he turned but he didn’t escape to the brush but just walked down the middle of the road away from us.

To me, the coyote represents the pain and danger of the task at hand. Instead of running away from it, I was confronting it head on. Looking it in the eyes and realizing it isn’t that scary.  After a few moments, moving on to continue with my life.

Two followups

1. The book Living Untethered is a great companion for this process.
2. My daughter saw the flashcards on the table. She didn’t read them but wanted to make her own for me.  What she wrote melted my heart. I still not sure if it was her or God sending me a message

Some reflections on the past 2 years:

It’s so different than operating
When working inside a company, you have to hustle every minute of every day. You roll up your sleeves and make shit happen. When I started, I brought that same energy to my calls with founders and it wasn’t right. This job is not about doing, it’s about listening and asking questions. I still do a lot of work but it’s different, it’s about working to serve the CEO not on the business. Which brings me to my next point…

It’s all about listening
Not just listening but listening deeply. What is the real problem, and the problem behind the problem? Finding the right issue to talk about is often the most important thing. And it’s not just listening to the business problem but the tone and non-audio clues as well. This job is all about understanding and focusing on the right issue.

Being an advisor is not only about giving advice
As an advisor you need to have opinions and thoughts on how to help, but there’s more to it than that. When I first started, I had answers and was eager to give advice.  But that wasn’t the most effective. I was giving someone fish instead of teaching them how to fish.  I was being a consultant vs. being a teacher. It took a bit to change that behavior.

I’ve learned so much. Functional areas. Coaching.
I had learned a lot from time at Kapost, Airbnb and Onward so I have a good background to draw on.  What’s been fun about this role is getting the chance to read all the books that I never had the time to fully absorb.  I’ve made my way through most of the top business books now. I also have 11 other incredible partners who have amazing experiences that they’ve taught me about. What has surprised me is how fun it is to learn.

The drama triangle is everywhere
There’s a concept called The Drama Triangle where there are three roles that people assume when things aren’t going well. They are a villain, victim or a hero (or rescuer).  When people are stuck in one (or all) of these modes, often getting out of it is all they need.  And once you know the drama triangle, you can help but see it everywhere.

Earning the first call is how you measure success
I’ve always said that I thought advisors were kind of bullshit as you spend maybe once a month talking and half of the conversation getting them up to speed. Once reason I really like our engagements at ETW is that we engage deeply. We talked at a minimum weekly and sometimes daily. At ETW, we measure success when we have earned the first phone call from a CEO when something goes great or when something falls apart.

Coaching is a Cheat Code
I have loved my soccer coaches and think of them all the time. I don’t know why I have never thought of having a coach or personal advisor for work but the people who do are able to go faster and smarter. It’s a huge advantage and it amazes me that it’s not more common.  Having an hour a week dedicated to exploring your issues, problems and goals and working through how to be better and go faster is such a gift, I wish it for everyone.

My brother-in-law, The Boss (aka Mike Teubner), has been researching dog kennels and breeders.  He and Liz previously had a German Shepard and loved him. They loved the intelligence of Moose but didn’t like the killer instinct and protectiveness. Sometimes it was too much. There was a period where Moose wouldn’t let anyone, even Liz’s best friend, into the apartment.  So, Boss wanted to find a German Shepard type but a bit sweeter, a bit more like a Golden Retriever but still with high intellect. It turns out that he found a place that has dogs just like that. It’s on the border of Colorado and Kansas, a 2.5 hour drive from their home in Denver.

Over Christmas break I was talking with The Boss and he mentioned that he was headed out there just after New Years. I said it sounded interesting and decided to book a ticket to tag along with him.  Maybe we’d see a dog we like too as we’re in the market for a new dog. Worst case scenario is that I learn more about dogs and spend some good time with my family.

When we got to the location, we saw all sorts of dogs. Some are a bit older (1 and 2 years) and well trained. Mike was looking at those dogs and getting to know them. While that happened, I was introduced to a 6-month female puppy who I immediately fell in love with. She and I connected immediately (at the time I used the word “imprinted”) and it was game over. I had to take her home with me.  We’re calling her Leia.

At the same time, my niece had a dog who came up and adopted her. For the remainder of the trip, these two were inseparable.  It was clear to Liz and Boss that if they wanted to get a dog that they liked, it would be in addition to this dog as Reagan was never going to let this cute little puppy go (she also got the name Waffles).

We thought we were done and heading home.  But before we go we saw a cute little 4-month old puppy that was super friendly and well behaved. We asked about him and it turns out that it is Leia’s half-brother (same dad, different mom) who has a tail that was messed up at birth and had to be docked (cut off) as it was rat-like.  The kennel-owner said that nobody really wants him due to the tail issues.  All his siblings have been adopted and now with Leia, he’s out of siblings. Well that was enough for us to hear. Diane and I talked briefly and both immediately agreed, we’ll be taking him too!

We left with 3 adorable puppies.

The next challenge was figuring out how I get my two puppies home.

My Southwest flight wouldn’t allow me to take them with me via air and I had to get home. So, we decided to road trip.  Luckily my brother-in-law is awesome and without a second thought volunteered to join me on the trip.  I cancelled my flight, rented a car, bought two dog crates, purchased an extra pair of undies and socks and we hit the road on Sunday to drive from Denver to the Bay Area.

We made it in 1.5 days and had a great trip. We battled a monster storm that was dumping snow on Nevada and rain on California. We also got to catch up more and listen to a great book (I am Pilgrim).

I’m now home with two puppies. The kids are over the moon and getting up early to help us walk, feed and watch the dogs. We’ve had hours of discussion over what their names are. There are some interesting rejected names of Sprinkles, Nyk, Fury, and Bandit. We’ve settled on Leia and Emmett (full name Doctor Emmett Brown).  Emmett’s name is from (a) his docked tail, (b) he looks like a brownie, and (c) my brother loved the film Back to the Future and Dr. Brown was a favorite of ours growing up. The film was probably our most rewatched movie as kids.

Everyone told me that having a puppy is no joke and I can confirm that it’s very similar to having a toddler that doesn’t wear a diaper. Our lives have been thrown upside down but we’re excited to get used to our bigger and more chaotic family.

One recent study evaluated patients’ symptoms several weeks after they’d been discharged from the hospital and it found that only 12.6% of them were free of any coronavirus-related symptoms. This is just bonkers and mind-blowing.

Three-quarters of adults with COVID-19 have heart damage after recovery https://t.co/FD9avPlHPr

— Doctor Housecalls of Paradise Valley (@DrHousecallsPV) July 27, 2020

It seems like there’s a good group of folks who have fatigue, difficulty breathing, joint and chest pain, cough and headaches. A WSJ article also digs in and says that many of these patients are “younger and had previously been healthy, with Covid cases initially considered mild to moderate. But months later they are still sick, and some are getting worse.”

One physician thinks most patients with long-term symptoms are developing dysautonomia, a neurological condition that occurs when the autonomic nervous system is out of balance. It’s not clear whether the condition is a result of an overactive immune system or the virus itself.

This damn coronavirus is only 6 months old and we basically still know very little about it. There are so many unique things to it. Here’s a good Atlantic article about this if you want to read more.

The Long Haul

Although yesterday’s vaccine news got me excited, I still think we’re in this state for a while. Graphs to show that too:

Crazy to think that 42% of Germans once expected the effects of the pandemic to end this summer, and consider that even with that the Germans are in love with Merkel and how she handled this whole event.

Other Stuff

Sometimes in life, things don’t work out …
Take a break and try some humour
#WeekendWisdom pic.twitter.com/8Sup8cC6y0

— Geetima Das Krishna (@GeetimaK) July 25, 2020

This boat video is just crazy. It’s on the Ozarks and apparently they are going around 60 mph:

i think about this video so often and i still have so many questions about it like what even caused this in the first place pic.twitter.com/RhBSnm0sSu

— 𝗽𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝗳𝗮𝗶𝗿𝘆 (@jacobvan1ue) July 26, 2020

I think this accurately reflects how much I love ice cream as well:

Cat’s first taste of ice cream… pic.twitter.com/ekOWVMPgES

— Rex Chapman (@RexChapman) July 28, 2020

I WISH our raccoon would do this when we catch them in the act:

“We got caught Brian, just act normal” pic.twitter.com/eMyzE5PX2Z

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden_) July 27, 2020

Corona

The second-largest teachers’ union in the U.S. said it would support members who strike if schools don’t take steps to reopen safely.

The number of known infections among U.S. state prison inmates and officers has surged by 45 percent since July 1, to more than 80,000.

Since roughly July 16, the national daily case average has remained roughly the same. As you can see below, it appears we (the US) is plateauing.

So the country is coming back down. It seems cases are decreasing. We’re all doing a good job. Let’s not be like this:

The anticipation is killing me. pic.twitter.com/qevM9SmH73

— Fred Schultz (@fred035schultz) July 28, 2020

That is all. Have a great day.

Only 64 more days to go

Also, yesterday afternoon, Pfizer also announced that it will also begin a late-stage study of a vaccine, with the first shots to be given today (Tues). The trial will also include 30,000 people, from 39 states.

If all goes well and the vaccine is effective, Moderna said it should be able to deliver 500 million doses this year (2020), and up to a billion per year starting in 2021. I love the optimism. I had all but given up hope of anything happening in 2020.

An update about my Side-Effect statements: I talked with a pharma rep this weekend who stated that Stage 3 side effects in a drug trial is more akin to a bad headache than paralysis. Stage 4 means hospitalization, so it does encompass everything before before hospitalization but it usually means being under the weather. All that said, if there was a vaccine that knocked me out for a day – I’d be fine with that. I bet we all would.

Sports News

NBA Bubble

I’m super excited for NBA basketball to start back up. Right now, the NBA is in a bubble at Disney World and the players are tweeting up a storm. When they got there, they had to quarantine and just hang out, and so they started posting all day to social media.

Some filmed themselves training or shotgunning beers. Here’s a beer shotgun challenge. Miami’s Meyers Leonard shotgunned a Coors Light in record time, declaring himself “King of the Bubble.” Here’s JJ Reddick.

Sorry meant to post this earlier. Multitasking post practice. @budlight @NBABubbleLife pic.twitter.com/pBsau1SHoQ

— JJ Redick (@jj_redick) July 12, 2020

Giannis channeling his inner Eddie Murphy

You could say Giannis loves “Coming to America” *NSFW*

(via @Giannis_An34) pic.twitter.com/GYr4ZfGCfb

— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) July 4, 2020

Others got more serious and brought cameras and started official content platforms. A 76ers vlogged his trip from Philadelphia to the Orlando

Just launched a new @youtube! Episode 1 of my new #NBABubble series called #WelcomeToTheBubble just dropped. I shot and edited the entire thing. More episodes coming soon. https://t.co/RL6MI25HWo pic.twitter.com/uElXMh7rVI

— Matisse Thybulle (@MatisseThybulle) July 11, 2020

Over the weekend Lou Williams escaped from the bubble and then went to an Atlanta strip club. He’s being fined and suspended. I can’t imagine he’ll be the last to try to break the rules.

Clipper Lou Williams left the NBA bubble for a funeral. And went to Magic City strip club in Atlanta the night before the funeral with a rapper. Then lied about it and got caught by NBA security. This is amazing. https://t.co/oaFeC7LQve

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) July 25, 2020

Like I said, this stuff is just the kind of soap opera drama I’m looking for – and the games haven’t even started yet.

Random Sports

Poolball combines pool and soccer and looks awesome.

Objects are bigger than they may seem

Celebrate responsibly… pic.twitter.com/Q66R24It1o

— Rex Chapman (@RexChapman) July 27, 2020

Ballball Fiasco

In keeping with the sports theme of today’s newsletter, two Monday MLB games were postponed after 14 players on the Marlins tested positive for the virus. Apparently on Sunday their shortstop decided to keep playing after there was an outbreak. Good move, dude.

You gotta be fucking kidding me https://t.co/WWFofW4K8D

— Drew Magary (@drewmagary) July 27, 2020

Bringing back baseball not because we contained Coronavirus, but because we got tired of it — and then that decision immediately biting us in the ass — is a perfect encapsulation of this country.

Truly, America’s pastime.

— Matt Fuller (@MEPFuller) July 27, 2020

It’s a bad sign for baseball but also a bad sign for just about everything in our daily lives. It’s too bad things just can’t go back to normal. It’s also not a great omen for football as both the NFL and college football aren’t doing anything to protect against something like this happening.

Other Stuff

when you think about it, cars, planes, even trains, are just really fast chairs

— Indy (@IndecisiveJones) July 27, 2020

it’s so hot (how hot is it?) pic.twitter.com/bb2gQtvtRn

— 𝚍𝚘𝚍𝚊𝚒 𝚜𝚝𝚎𝚠𝚊𝚛𝚝 (@dodaistewart) July 27, 2020

Corona Stuff

Nationally, 80% of coronavirus deaths have been among adults 65 and older, and 33% among those age 85 or older but it varies from state to state. For instance, in Idaho, 94% of all deaths are adults over 65 whereas in Wash DC it’s only 70%.

In Marin, cases are on their way down, which is great. Let’s keep that trend going. Here’s new cases since the beginning:

That’s it. Have a great day everyone

Only 64 more days to go

Apparently Tesla stock is super popular among day-traders who don’t like to hold any kind of position overnight. Partly as a result, it opened higher than its previous close every day this month up to yesterday. Fun fact: If you bought one share of Tesla at the closing price each day in July and sold it immediately at the open the following morning, you would have made more than $450 between July 1 and July 15.

There’s something to be said about this time period where we’re in the middle of one of the worst periods of unemployment in history, nobody is driving, the roads are empty, yet a car company’s stock is bought and sold in volumes never seen before. The world is crazy.

Oh, I Do Like Tesla

I would to mention that I love Tesla’s position as a pro-environment company. Their mission of “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy“ is simple, to the point, and more pro-climate change than any other billion dollar business. This long article about how Tesla will change the world is a great read. One thing it shows is that the reason Elon Musk and Tesla are building cars is that’s where the climate damage is being done. It’s an ugly chart, but look at how much of US’s total energy use is for transportation:

27% of all energy is on transportation and that is major use of oil. That’s a big chunk.

Finally, I admire Tesla’s vertical-ness of their business. They have their cars running on their own operating system and dash software, built it its own factories (in US, Germany and China), sold in their own showrooms, getting recharged in their own charging stations around the country, and being powered by their own batteries who are built in their own battery factories. That is very different than any other car business and is head and shoulders ahead of other manufacturers.

All that said, I’m staying FAR away from that stock.

At My House

We went to the beach again this weekend. Fun times of playing in the sand.

Other Stuff

I have a How I Met Your Mother joke and the punchline is– actually, to really understand it we have to back up a bit. It was 2005 and I was out at the bar with my friends when all of a sudden (1/11029)

— Carter Bays (@CarterBays) July 26, 2020

Pretty cool story

Fun Fact: this episode helped to clear a Latino man wrongly charged with murder. He went to a Dodgers game that day and by a stroke of luck, he had accidentally walked in front of the CYE camera during a take. Juan Catalon. There’s a Netflix doc about it. https://t.co/vyfP9uPYJw

— Zoë West (@itsZoeWest) July 25, 2020

This guy is pretty damn impressive. With sandals!

Step aside, drive-ins: Now the world is all about boat-in movie theaters.

This is the new sports world we live in:

Anthony Rizzo just handed Orlando Arcia some hand sanatizer when he reached first base.

This is baseball in 2020. pic.twitter.com/KHzdHH6qi7

— Cubs Live (@Cubs_Live) July 24, 2020

Can you imagine having a rough weekend, maybe feeling a bit sluggish and rolling into this job on Monday morning? I have no idea what they are doing or why but it looks crazy and intense:

People have time on their hands. Everyone chooses to use it a bit differently:

Corona

As of Sunday night, both new cases and deaths are relatively flat over the past 7 days:

Here in San Francisco, we’re on the rise but not the worst in the country:

That’s it. Stay safe everyone.

Only 64 more days to go

It talks about how most of the clinical trials have PR teams feeding us all the positive information and hiding the negative. The spin is covering up that there are “mild side effects” that are anything but mild.

In the Moderna trial, 1 in 5 people in the trial ended up unable to complete their activities of daily living by having a “grade 3 systemic” reaction. If you search for grade 3 systemic in FDA’s guidelines here (page 4 and 5) it means: Prevents daily activity and requires medical intervention.

As Sidey wrote said,

In case it’s not clear, “prevents daily activity” means disabled. It’s a pretty high bar of messed up. 1 out of 5 people being unable to work/go-to-school would be a real problem. Also these were previously entirely healthy people with no pre-existing conditions of any sort.

A friend who is on permanent disability and is deeply knowledgeable of the FDA technical definitions described it this way “Grade 3 systemic is more like suddenly you have multiple sclerosis (all over body issues, multiple organs, “unexplained” and they don’t really know why or what to do to fix them other than to wait)“

I can’t wait for the vaccine. I think about it every day.

I’m being led to believe the vaccine is just around the corner but it seems like these companies have some serious roadblocks ahead of them. I hope they find a way through them.

Other

Only 100 years apart but looking so similar…

The Dr. Fauci Of The 1918 Spanish Flu —- More than a century ago, epidemiologist Dr. Thomas Tuttle prescribed face masks and social distancing to slow the influenza pandemic. He made a lot of enemies—but it worked. @forbes https://t.co/qKv4T6nT3e

— Vivian Salama (@vmsalama) July 21, 2020

What kind of fucking Doritos do they have in Japan. pic.twitter.com/GK27ccrEM6

— Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) July 23, 2020

Reminder pic.twitter.com/y37NII7Iht

— Elad Gil (@eladgil) July 24, 2020

The force is absolutely adorable with this little one… pic.twitter.com/0fL1EHFDgw

— Rex Chapman (@RexChapman) July 24, 2020

I could have used this dog when I was a kid:

Check out this good boy rebounding for his hooman.

Dogs, bruh… pic.twitter.com/4PeJBZ0zlq

— Rex Chapman (@RexChapman) July 23, 2020

Saving donuts is pretty a great service

I’ve watched this about nine times since I first saw it yesterday. Her last line takes me out and lifts me up. Trying to be like her today. pic.twitter.com/WEtTGw4EJz

— Ava DuVernay (@ava) July 23, 2020

Corona

The number of new coronavirus cases in the U.S. shot up by over 20% per week for the past month. Things are slowing down as this week, it rose by a more modest 7%. We’re leveling off, but we’re still at a super high rate of infection.

OK, well, now our daily update is published. States reported more than 70k cases for the 4th time ever. Hospitalizations are near their all-time high (with the previously noted caveats). More than 1,000 deaths were reported for the third day in a row, after 55 days sub-1,000. pic.twitter.com/5kAX6zv9nl

— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) July 23, 2020

That being said, the hot spots aren’t so hot and things are no longer on the rise. Texas rose 3% this week in Texas, 9% in California. Florida’s was flat and Arizona saw its second straight week of improvement.

All that being said, we (the U.S.) went over 4 million cases yesterday. That’s 4 million out of 15 million in the whole world (27%).

So, let’s chill out for a while longer and bring the cases down so we can get back to some kind of normal.

It’s Friday

Folks, last day before the weekend. Leave it on the field. Sprint through the finish line

Only 64 more days to go

How we’re doing it:

• We found a former teacher who doesn‘t want to go back to work at an in-person school. We’ll pay her monthly.
• We have a family we’re close with who has similar social-distancing values as we do who wants to join. They’ll bring their kids over to our house every day.
• We set up a dedicated space as a schoolhouse – our garage – and we will have the kids and teacher use it to teach the Zoom classes or whatever the curriculum is.

This “pod” system seems to be catching on. If you go to NextDoor you can see teachers looking for pods and parents looking for teachers. Others:

• Myra Margolin, who created a Facebook page to help connect families in the D.C. region interested in “microschooling,” found more than 1,000 people join the group.
• Andrea MacRae is trying to organize “bubbles” for children and families in the East Bay area. She has interested families fill out detailed surveys about their values and risk comfort, and then matches those families with other like-minded families — including those who won’t be able to pay and those that include essential workers.

If we get this working it seems like a great way to get everyone through this pandemic safely. While this is working for us, I could see how it could be tough for kids of essential workers, those who can’t find teachers, or families who afford it. I feel very fortunate we can do it.

Other Stuff

I’ll never get enough of Eminiem’s sign language interpreter…https://t.co/gQZ2wachti

— Rex Chapman (@RexChapman) July 22, 2020

With apologies to @Lin_Manuel, Moms (We Get the Job Done). https://t.co/NRqlaR4BVW

— Randi Mayem Singer (@rmayemsinger) July 23, 2020

Here’s what happening on Facebook. Seems like Republicans are just much better at social sharing. Trump did kick ass on Facebook during the 2016 election.

Today, 7/22, the top-performing Facebook link posts by U.S. pages are from:

1. Franklin Graham
2. Fox News
3. David J. Harris Jr.
4. Fox News
5. Blue Lives Matter
6. Donald J. Trump
7. Blue Lives Matter
8. Sean Hannity
9. Blue Lives Matter
10. Judicial Watch

— Facebook’s Top 10 (@FacebooksTop10) July 22, 2020

Twitter in a nutshell pic.twitter.com/tihCxXHdAE

— Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) July 22, 2020

BREAKING VIDEO: WATCH: Massive lightning bolt strikes Statue of Liberty as storm passes over NYC https://t.co/CAiIVqqO9o pic.twitter.com/5hacFiswg1

— 1010 WINS (@1010WINS) July 23, 2020

American in UK soccer watch. Pulisic is on fire this season. Check out him absolutely destroying yesterday. Oh, and he got a goal right after this video.

153 seconds after entering game against Champion Liverpool. Christian Pulisic eviscerates 4 opponents with his first touch, balance, searing confidence and an impudent nutmeg to end a man. Jawdropping to watch an American make Premier League look this easy pic.twitter.com/nMn7KVAcxk

— roger bennett (@rogbennett) July 22, 2020

Just a harmless dog and cat video to end it out:

Corona

The Trump administration announced a plan of $2 billion for 600 million doses of a vaccine, with the first 100 million promised before the end of the year.

The good news: In just over two months, the East Coast states — Delaware to Maine — have gone from the country’s worst hot spot to something like Europe where the virus is under control.

The bad: The U.S. recorded 1,127 deaths on Tuesday, the highest daily total since late May

One interesting graph I saw (below) that shows that (a) more tests are happening and (b) more are coming back positive – pushing our cases higher.

That’s it. Have a great Thursday

Only 64 more days to go

It seems like the best answer is we want, at a minimum, a massive reduction in police violence. After all in 2019 and 2020 in the US, a third of all people killed by strangers were killed by police officers. That’s crazy.

So, there’s a good answer for how we could reduce the violence and killings. In fact, there are 8 specific policies that could be implemented at each police department. There’s even a website called 8CantWait.org which highlights these policies.

If a department implements all 8 of these policies, there’s lots of data that shows police violence will go down 72%. Seventy-two percent. That’s a pretty good start.

The policies are fairly simple things:

Some thoughts:

• Requiring techniques for de-escalation and banning chokeholds and strangleholds. This seems obvious but only 28 of the largest 100 police departments in the US have done this. These are pretty much allowed everywhere. Minneapolis currently doesn’t ban them.
• A duty to intervene? If officers see other officers going against policy, they have a duty to intervene. This is why Minneapolis officers who were just watching Floyd get murdered were able to be arrested, because they had a duty to intervene.
• Shooting into moving vehicles. You shouldn’t do it because if you kill the person driving, they simply run into others and kill innocent people. 62 people this year died because of this.

Basically, citizens should know the ways that police are legally allowed to kill you and we should know what we, as protesters, want to change of our current police force.

This seems like a great start.

Meanwhile, in Minneapolis

Minnesota is doing more than just 8 new policies, the Minneapolis City Council just voted to completely disband the entire police department and radically change how crimes are approached in the city. Wow.

BREAKING AND HISTORIC: A veto-proof majority of Minneapolis City Council members will announce today their commitment to disbanding the awful Minneapolis Police Department, following the police killing of George Floyd https://t.co/HjwCR49f7Z

— Matt Ferner (@matthewferner) June 7, 2020

Apparently, this happened before in Camden, NJ:

Minneapolis isn’t the first city to disband its PD. “In 2013, the Camden Police Department was disbanded, reimagined, and born again as the Camden County Police Department, with fewer officers, lower pay—and a strategic shift toward “community policing.” https://t.co/wYwNf0xB0j

— Grace Panetta (@grace_panetta) June 7, 2020

Other Stuff

Skateboard protest is rad:

philly skate protest for BLM pic.twitter.com/ntpFXG8si4

— courtney (@tennisC0URTney) June 7, 2020

Funny, In all fairness, they had been in trouble with the law since the day they was born.

The craziest thing about Dukes of Hazzard is being asked to believe cops would bother two white dudes in a car with a Confederate flag on it.

— James Fritz (@fritzisdead) June 7, 2020

I hope so, Dan:

I’ve seen and reported on many “this time”s. But this time really does feel different.

— Dan Rather (@DanRather) June 7, 2020

Cases

It does seem like the U.S. looking at around 5000 coronavirus deaths a week for the foreseeable future, and most Americans are apparently OK with that.

— James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) June 7, 2020

New York is doing better:

US cases are flat but deaths are down. We’ll see if there’s a rise in the next week or two.

Happy Monday everyone

Only 64 more days to go

In North Carolina and Arizona, increased testing suggests that infections are still climbing quickly and may spike further as more people venture out.

In New York, a ‘big sigh of relief’ as the daily death toll falls to 35, but you can see from the graphs below that cases spiked yesterday. We’ll see what that means in the future.

That’s it. Hope you have a great Sunday!

But then the world matured. By now we’ve all gotten used to it. The novelty has worn off. We take that online social connection for granted.

In today’s world, it’s not just enough to connect people and share the information, you need to provide context around that connection and that information. This is how people get news and information.

I’m not the only one who thinks so. When Trump posted last week “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” the employees at Facebook wanted to label that post as offensive, but Zuckerberg was adamant that all posts go up without being altered. Hundreds of employees are pissed after the company took no action.

Mark also went on Fox News and criticized Twitter for fact-checking Trump’s posts on mail-in ballots. He said he didn’t want his company to be an “arbiter of truth” on political issues. I think he’s the only one who feels that way.

Come on Mark. Let’s be honest, the reason you care so much is because (a) you don’t want to sign up to do the work. It’s a lot to label posts as incorrect or violent and once you set the precedent that you can’t go back, (b) the alt-right and other groups (Russia) are paying customers and it hurts the business to take sides, and finally (c) when your core product is harmful, you wants few warning labels as possible.

For all of these reasons, my views are switching. I’ve always viewed Facebook and its ability to connect others as a net positive in the world, even with all its flaws. But considering the recent actions and lack of conscience I hear from Mark, I’ve come to think of them as a net negative.

With over a billion monthly users, I only hope it turns around and gets better as they have enormous influence and power in the world.

The Trolling of Trump

It seems like the Mayor DC is fed up and is going to work. Check this out. First, the street leading up to the White House has been ordered to be painted:

#BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/OQg6977n5r

— Muriel Bowser (@MurielBowser) June 5, 2020

Second, the street directly in front of the White House is now officially “Black Lives Matter Plaza.”

The section of 16th street in front of the White House is now officially “Black Lives Matter Plaza”. pic.twitter.com/bbJgAYE35b

— Mayor Muriel Bowser (@MayorBowser) June 5, 2020

The “Not Cool” Section

He couldn’t stay away from it. Jeez.

The president just retweeted a post attacking the character of George Floyd pic.twitter.com/Bj0Xuly1jk

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 6, 2020

It’s the kids of these folks that I’m worried about:

There’s a town called Vidor, Texas where no Black person has lived in for 75 years.

Back in 1987 Oprah and her crew visited the town and here’s what happened. pic.twitter.com/KWlz7KNEBM

— Titty 2 Virgils (@BkJay_Early) June 4, 2020

Putting up a graphic that shows how you’re not only not losing money but making money after black people get murdered is probably one of the more unbelievable things I saw yesterday

This is a horrific graphic to have put up on air.

My god. pic.twitter.com/HoDof1AN9l

— Yashar Ali (@yashar) June 5, 2020

Other Stuff

The N.B.A. team owners approved a proposal to restart July 31 in DisneyWorld. I’m excited for this.

Michael Jordan is ponying up $100 million over 10 years. Wow.

I agree Santa

Cases

We are all opening up. Even though the COVID threat remains, we’re just realizing that we’re going to have to find a way to live with it, somehow:

Cases and deaths are flat in both US and the World. I’ll keep you posted. Have a great weekend everyone.

The thing I like most is the personal tracking. I track my daily water intake (upper left), my exercise (30 minutes a day – the green circle), and my sleep every night. The gamification of my water intake – showing my progress all day, every time I look at my watch – has resulted in my consumption of at least 66 ounces a day for the past year.

The watch tracks my movement and heart rate as I sleep. Tracking my sleep has shown me how much alcohol impacts my nightly rest and how my mood correlates very closely with my 3-day average number of hours of sleep. Here’s are some other things my sleep app shows:

I bring this up because I recently read that wearable devices like the Apple Watch and the Oura Ring are being used to predict when COVID-19 cases might occur. From the article:

Data from a wearable device can reveal coronavirus symptoms days before you even realize you’re sick. That means fitness trackers could be on their way to becoming sickness trackers.

The Oura Ring can predict up to three days in advance when people will get a fever, coughing or shortness of breath. If these devices can signal when someone is getting sick before they know it, then we can detect sooner and keep the population healthier.

There’s obviously a long way to go and privacy concerns, but I’m a sucker for new technology especially if it will allow us to live more socially but still be safe.

Making a Difference

I’ve been wondering what changes can be made that will make a difference, specifically with police departments. I found this podcast very illuminating as it has the stats, figures and examples of what police departments have done things well and which ones haven’t and what the immediate actions that can be taken by cities and departments to make real change.

Other Stuff

Oh man:

Las Vegas has been open for 45 minutes. pic.twitter.com/v3wcjYBcKe

— Ed Komenda (@ejkomenda) June 4, 2020

Need a smile today. Here you go.

Wait for it… pic.twitter.com/qM0Zr24pnH

— Rex Chapman (@RexChapman) June 3, 2020

Here’s soon-to-be my weekend setup in my living room. Just need an iron and bubble gun:

Cases

USA

Oregon, Arizona and Texas are on the ride and Florida has to be close behind because Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Wednesday that bars and clubs will be allowed to reopen on Friday.

Hot spots in the USA:

Happy Friday everyone. Sprint through the finish line!

Only 64 more days to go

My friends in other parts of the country are living differently. I heard someone yesterday make a reservation at a restaurant for “a table for 3.” Another friend who is operating a taxi company in Georgia remarked that there are plenty of rides happening. So, America is definitely reopening.

Trivia question: There are 3500 deaths from COVID in California. How many of them are under the age of 45? Answer: 68. Most people my age haven’t seen anyone die or get seriously ill from this disease. I can understand that. If people don’t perceive the threat, there’s no fear, and they’ll continue to push the line.

So, we’ll see what happens. I’m guessing there’s be more waves of cases, but, hey, maybe not. We will see.

I keep thinking about this read: Sure, The Velociraptors Are Still On The Loose But That’s No Reason Not To Reopen Jurassic Park

Other Stuff

Jane, here, comes in hot and just destroys this interview:

“Why do we hate?”

Racism destroyed in 1min by the brilliant Dr Jane Elliot.#BlackLivesMattter pic.twitter.com/6sHFvKd2GE

— Ashley Davis (@AshleyD48604018) June 2, 2020

This is the point we’re at:

Among the many things 2020 is, it’s clearly hard for PR people trying to figure out opening sentences for promotional emails.

— Linda Holmes Thinks You’re Doing Great (@lindaholmes) June 3, 2020

As if things aren’t worse enough, then this happens:

Just now in Alta, Norway: Huge mudslide dragging several houses into the sea. pic.twitter.com/xR4t5zLI7m

— Jan Fredrik Drabløs (@JanFredrikD) June 3, 2020

This is really beautiful:

Surreal, beautiful, peaceful scene outside the White House as a man sings “Lean On Me” and thousands and thousands of protesters raise lighted cellphones and join their voices with his. pic.twitter.com/iAr0WWYc3u

— Hannah Natanson (@hannah_natanson) June 4, 2020

Cases

In good news, The White House selected 5 companies as finalists to develop the vaccine. Keep in mind that the current record for developing a vaccine is 4 years.

There’s a general decline of hospitalizations for COVID around the country

That’s it everyone. Have a great Thursday

Only 64 more days to go

When I look at just the famine piece and put the systematic deep racism aside for a moment. That seems to be all about income inequality. That’s hardly a hot take. It still baffles me that no Democratic platform has an answer for how to fix it. Better taxes helps a little bit as does universal healthcare but that still doesn’t make it possible for an Amazon delivery driver to buy a home and join the middle class.

When I look at why we are where we are, the inequality has been drastically escalated over the past 60 days. All the businesses that have failed are local and retail, and all the ones that are succeeding are upper class tech jobs. Shit, Amazon went from 18% of the retail market to 28% in 60 days. It was previously growing 1% a year. That can’t be good for the middle and lower class.

America doesn’t work for half the country and we need to figure out a ways for it to do so. I‘m open to ideas but think a good start would be a $20 minimum wage. That seems logical. Can someone tell me why we shouldn’t do that?

It’s Not All Bad

There were some really great protests and moments around the world. New York, Amsterdam and Paris are doing it right…

Hospital staff battling #COVID19 comes out to applaud protestors in New York – demonstrators shout back ‘Thank You’. #ICantBreathe #GeorgeFloyd #BlackLivesMattter ( @SarahWaltonNews) pic.twitter.com/2LQGiwaSQz

— Anonymous (@YourAnonCentral) June 3, 2020

Inspirational: THOUSANDS of people showed up today in Amsterdam to show their solidarity for #GeorgeFloyd #BlackLivesMattterpic.twitter.com/yuK7Bs8zbI

— Peter Morley (@morethanmySLE) June 3, 2020

All around the world from #Minneapolis to #Oakland to #Paris we stand united.

This is the solidarity protest in Paris, #France. #BlackLivesMattter #NoJusticNoPeace pic.twitter.com/MPjJCJHOqG

— Mike Hudema (@MikeHudema) June 3, 2020

Other Stuff

From NY Times Reporter who did some deep research:

Unlike previous SARS viruses, which tended to settle deeper in the respiratory system, this one tends to settle in the upper respiratory system — in your nose and throat. That means that it tends to spread with your voice, in addition to coughs and sneezes. And when you look at where a lot of the major super-spreader events have occurred, it’s places like churches where folks are singing. It’s meatpacking plants where people have to talk really loud. It’s sports arenas. It’s call centers. And I realized, holy cow, this is a virus that is ideally adapted to human conversation.

This photo looks more like its from a bad dream or a sci-fi movie than real life.

Remarkable photo via @MarthaRaddatz, where protestors are being blocked from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial pic.twitter.com/d7givADFQH

— Vera Bergengruen (@VeraMBergen) June 2, 2020

All 50 states. pic.twitter.com/PzLQ7y969g

— Des. (@insanely_made) June 2, 2020

I also have to say the space suits were a nice upgrade from the old ones. I mean even the suits in Armageddon were better than what NASA has been wearing. Here are the 1962 suits and 2011 suits (the last time they went up):

And here are today’s

The spacesuits Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will wear for today’s Crew Dragon launch look different from the ones you’re used to. We explore the sleek SpaceX launch and entry suits in a new blog: https://t.co/tjSaGyA6Is #LaunchAmerica pic.twitter.com/IcbGhG2S62

— National Air and Space Museum (@airandspace) May 27, 2020

The prototype for the suits was created by Jose Fernandez, a costume designer who worked on “Batman v Superman,” “The Fantastic Four,” “The Avengers,” and “X-Men II.” He created a helmet in two weeks as a test, got the job, and then worked directly with Elon Musk for six months to design the suit. The finished prototype was later reverse engineered to meet space travel requirements – a process that took over 3 years. The tuxedo associations are not an accident as Musk believes everyone always looks better in a tux.

Some details about them:

• They’re designed to be a single piece, with specialized parts.
• The helmet is custom manufactured using 3D printing technology and includes integrated valves, mechanisms for visor retraction and locking, and microphones within the helmet’s structure.
• The suits have touchscreen-compatible gloves that enable the astronauts to pilot the Crew Dragon, whose control panel is touchscreen-only.
• The suits had been in space before — but not on people. They had gone up once on the dummy at the wheel of the Tesla that SpaceX launched into space in 2018, and then on the dummy called Ripley that flew during in a test flight last year.

As someone who wore a Star Trek uniform for a week straight in college as a prank, I definitely appreciate the pros and cons of futuristic attire and being “space ready.” I have to say that I like the direction we’re going and could actually see these outfits being worn at halloween and others with pride and without irony. That’s a good step for the US. Lord knows we need a win these days.

Other Stuff

Related to the Last Dance documentary. Isn’t Jerry Krauss, the GM from the Bulls, the perfect equivalent for show-runner David Benioff for Game of Thrones? Jerry Krauss orchestrated and built the personnel for a dominant Bulls team for six seasons but then botched the landing, pushing Michael Jordan out and destroying the Bulls for years. The Game of Thrones show-runners did the same they constructed the perfect cast and set up an incredible shows for six amazing seasons but then jammed all the loose ends into one final season and then finished it all the while the fans were screaming for 20 more seasons. (from this podcast)

Isn’t the mayor in the movie Jaws the perfect example of what’s happening today? He forced everyone back on the beaches and because he wanted to re-open the city and preserve against economic harm. Seems prophetic.

We’re now five days away from George Floyd’s death and we’re getting to a better place. On Saturday all I saw was police officers using batons, tear gas and rubber bullets. There was a lot of pain.

Yesterday, at first I saw something different. I saw people coming together and some police joining in with protesters to express their stance against police brutality, and to show solidarity with the anti-racism movement.

Here are a few:

In Flint Michigan the Sheriff took of his helmet, instructed all officers to lay down batons and to chants of “walk with us” joined the protesters in their march

Genesee County Sheriff (Flint, Michigan) Chris Swanson put down his helmet and baton and asked protesters how he could help.

The protesters chanted “walk with us” so the Sheriff joined — and walked alongside the protesters in solidarity.

Leadership. pic.twitter.com/Vs3941C2o8

— Rex Chapman (@RexChapman) May 31, 2020

At a protest in Camden, instead of throwing up their shields, police there marched alongside the demonstrators

In New Jersey the police officers are protesting WITH the people shouting no justice no peace. This is how it should be, every police station should be walking with their community there is no excuse! pic.twitter.com/8pwkCOA2fP

— ً (@AMPZ222) May 30, 2020

In Santa Cruz, California, the police chief took a knee with protesters with the department and tweeted out:

SCPD is fully supportive of peaceful protests @CityofSantaCruz and we always keep them safe.

Hundreds gathered on Pacific Ave in #SantaCruz, taking a knee together in memory of George Floyd & bringing attention to police violence against Black people. PhotoCredit @Shmuel_Thaler pic.twitter.com/EmfAfcIZaM

— Santa Cruz Police (@SantaCruzPolice) May 30, 2020

In Kansas City:

Apparently cops in Kansas City joined the local protest against police brutality. And my first reaction was to say something smart ass. But this is truly a start. pic.twitter.com/e3sUwaR16h

— Dylan (@dyllyp) May 30, 2020

In Fargo:

Pictured is @FargoPolice holding hands with protest organizers & a sign ‘We are one race… The HUMAN race.’ Truly powerful. pic.twitter.com/szkwRTmDAg

— Bailey Hurley (@BaileyHurleyVNL) May 30, 2020

In Ferguson, MO:

An HIP intern was filming a protest in Ferguson, MO at the police station when this happened…. As the protest leader called for a 9 1/2 minute knee in honor of George Floyd; Ferguson police of every color also took a knee in joint honor with protest. #WeStandTogether pic.twitter.com/6iN0dMroby

— Heroic Imagination (@HIPorg) May 31, 2020

But, wait…

as last night approached, the scene turned ugly. More riots occurred. They started happening all over the place:

In Santa Monica the police tear gassed everyone. In Minneapolis, a semi-truck driver ran his truck through a group of protesters.

Traffic cam of the semi truck coming towards the crowd. pic.twitter.com/va7bmccZYI

— Seth Kaplan (@Seth_Kaplan) May 31, 2020

It was bad, maybe the worst I’ve seen America in a long time. Trump remained silent.

Some photos from Minnesota and around the country:

The

From @brd_dispatch

In Kansas City:

In Utah at @DeseretNews

. @eldiariony, by @GettyImages 6/ pic.twitter.com/yO4UBbS09t

— Ann Marie Lipinski (@AMLwhere) May 31, 2020

From @mercnews

In Detroit

Other Stuff

Trump’s star in Hollywood is no more:

They destroyed Donald Trumps starrrrrrrrr #protests2020 #BLACK_LIVES_MATTERS pic.twitter.com/Fi8APDefBm

— Xochilt Gonzalez-Salinas (@XochiltGS) May 31, 2020

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about:

Reports of a Tiger on the loose near the Oakland Zoo. If you see it call 911. 98th Ave at Golf Links.

— Alameda County Sheriff (@ACSOSheriffs) June 1, 2020

Dogs are the best:

We don’t deserve ‘em.

Dogs, broheim… pic.twitter.com/N7JgIvFnSa

— Rex Chapman (@RexChapman) May 31, 2020

I’ll finish with this one:

Never forget! pic.twitter.com/IcGOtKqPgY

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden_) May 31, 2020

If you haven’t downloaded and used TikTok, you’re in the minority. The service has over 1 BILLION daily active users and is by far the best place to consume short videos. The company is likely worth $200 billion and is not only the most valuable startup but one of the most valuable companies in the world.

Some interesting facts about TikTok and ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok:

• The only real competitor to Google and Facebook is ByteDance. If anyone is taking down the big dogs, it’s them.
• The company’s roots are in a news aggregator in China (called Toutiao) that is a dominant source of news in China. The company did $20 billion in revenue in 2019. So, not small potatoes.
• TikTok’s success is due to many reasons but mainly its slick user experiences. There is no signin or account creation required, it’s mobile-first in a much better way than YouTube, and videos are super short – initially limited to 15 seconds which reduces the friction of both creation and consumption.

The speed of atomic content consumption on TikTok is unparalleled.

Average content units per session:

YouTube: 3-5
Twitter: 50-75
Instagram: >100
Tiktok: 200+

Twitter created bitesized content. It should have owned the entire stack of content types. They fucked it.

— Liad Shababo (@L1AD) January 19, 2020

• There’s lots of content. They claim 34% of US users shoot content daily.
• The cross-cultural nature of user-generated video has stronger network effects than traditional news. A silly video uploaded in Thailand is potentially interesting to someone in Romania and the US.
• It’s doesn’t rely at all on friends, following, or even having an account. Their algorithm recommends content based on an individual user’s view history, re-watches, likes, comments, shares, and even post-view activity. It’s all AI. The AI is the product really.
• It grew by spending TONS of money. It spend $3 million a day throughout 2019 to acquire users.

There’s lots more I could say about it but this is clearly the era of TikTok and if you think that you’ve heard the end of it, well just wait. It’s just now reaching more and more people and we’re probably 2 years away from mainstream media realizing it exists which means we’ll get a whole other round of “have you heard of TikTok?”

A few sample videos from yesterday that rolled up just so you can see range. It’s fishing, jokes, and lots and lots of dancing:

Other Stuff

Yep, totally unclear where she might have gotten that cheesecake

“Unclear where they may have gotten that cheesecake.” pic.twitter.com/mLfSJvMGvZ

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) May 31, 2020

A powerful video from Killer Mike in Atlanta

This is mandatory viewing. You won’t regret it. pic.twitter.com/OSf0HyOtHU

— Qasim Rashid for Congress (@QasimRashid) May 30, 2020

The is a great video of a man creating a grocery store in his house so he can take his grandmother shopping

COVID19 isn’t the flu.

But for under-45, COVID hospitalizes 1% & kills .014%.

All ages, flu hospitalizes 1.5% & kills 0.13%.

Restricting COVID to under-45s results in 6x flu hospitalizations & 1x flu deaths, & gets us to herd immunity.

Shelter the old, but release the young!

— Naval (@naval) April 16, 2020

This is the first time i’ve heard about letting the 45 year olds and younger out and back into society as a way to restart society and get to the general population to herd immunity. If you do it, it’s basically as dangerous as the flu. Interesting to think about.

It is basically the exact strategy used here in Sweden, not impossible.

— Erik Bjäreholt (@ErikBjare) April 16, 2020

Also: Online Education is New

Found the kid playing with her dog instead of Zooming with her teacher. She told me not to worry. She took a screenshot of herself “paying attention,” then cut her video & replaced it with the picture. “It’s a gallery view of 20 kids, mom. They can’t tell.” She is 10. #COVID19

— Angie Maxwell (@AngieMaxwell1) April 15, 2020

I remember passing notes in class and then storing stuff in my TI-82 calculator. This new batch of kids are going to have so much more room to play with. The teachers better catch up quick or they’re going to get steamrolled.

Other News

I have a wife and kid with asthma so I was really happy to see that it’s not appearing as one of the main risk factors:

Well… as a lifelong asthma sufferer, these findings may prove to be reassuring as the studies continue!

“Asthma Is Absent Among Top Covid-19 Risk Factors, Early Data Show.”#CovidRiskFactors #Asthma #COVID19 https://t.co/uN8etGpgs5

— Clare #StayHome #GoJoe Harris (fan) (@ClareWHarris) April 16, 2020

Ok, for the uninitiated, here is Frank Sinatra explaining to Johnny Carson in 44 brilliant seconds exactly why Don Rickles is a fucking legend. The payoff is worth your time: pic.twitter.com/w8rsOIbprJ

— Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) April 16, 2020

We also lost Brian Dennehy yesterday (not to COVID). For me, he’ll always be Tommy’s dad in Tommy Boy and the old guy boxer in Gladiator.

R.I.P. Brian Dennehy. A fine actor with such a range! The kind bartender in 10 (79), the pompous sheriff in First Blood (82), the sweet alien in Cocoon (85), the crafty cop in FX (86) and many more. Good journey, sir. #BrianDennehy pic.twitter.com/b3qkAmppzn

— paulspieceofmind (@barebones984) April 16, 2020

I’m really interested in the privacy implications and the technology behind how we track people who have recovered and keep track of those are infected as we will need to do to get back to our lives. Without doing this, this shelter-in-place will just continue until a vaccine arrives – which is just too damn long.

Google/Apple have formed an alliance that will help track people that are infected. The way it works is:

An app on your phone will pass a random and anonymous code to all other phones within a few yards of you, wherever you are (and vice versa). If you test positive, you tell the app, and every other phone in the region checks the codes they’ve seen in the last 14 days, and if there’s a match they can say ‘you’ve been exposed’. This is anonymous and automatic.

This is very cool, but am skeptical that it’ll ever happen because it really only works if governments mandate it and I just don’t see that happening.

On a related note, there’s a new San Francisco company called Onfido that is working with European governments to develop phone-based “immunity passports” for those who have already recovered from COVID-19. This is happening in Europe and is similar to what’s in China. Oh, and just yesterday they raised an additional $100 million.

At My House

We’re digging into the remote learning more deeply this week as our school is starting to get more involved and attentive to what’s happening at home.

That only takes half the day. The other part is spent enjoying the great weather we’ve been sent

Fitness

One of my friends sent me this today. I’ll be joining him:

I do one plank a day during the pandemic, holding it for as long as I can. Have made it to three minutes the last three days. Join me.

… and then I make myself a cocktail almost immediately afterward.

Other Stuff

Now this is a great use of modern technology. Here we have a Twitter account that is judging people’s video call background. Just what the world needed (thx Lizzie)

“I’m @clairecmc and this is my kitchen” 7/10. pic.twitter.com/DTedpSMCZA

— Room Rater (@ratemyskyperoom) April 14, 2020

ok, so one observation i had today: everyone is turning into hobbits during quar — we’re baking breads & listening to little melodies & getting hairier & our neighborhoods are the shire & we go on our little walks through the shire & head home to our breads & plumpen our bellies

— Megan Neuringer (@MeganNeuringer) April 14, 2020

Thanks Jackie!

"Thanks, Jackie. Great idea." @montypython #montypython #stayhome pic.twitter.com/jAORpbdCer

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) April 15, 2020

Check these out. Might as well keep safe in style:

We have reallocated our manufacturing capacity to produce masks for everyday wear

Atoms Masks are hand washable, and includes copper yarn, an antibacterial that reduces odor

We are donating 1 mask for every order, and selling them at cost. Pre-order: https://t.co/Fh4Q4WT2kd pic.twitter.com/BhoyjI2xNt

— Atoms (@WearAtoms) April 15, 2020

Cases

New York added two thousands deaths to their list who were people they hadn’t tested:

(spreadsheet)

Only 64 more days to go

Yesterday, Governor Newsom revealed a six-point plan to reopen California’s economy. Did he give a timeframe? Nope, but he did say what they are going to do to make it happen. They have 6 areas of focus:

1. Lots of testing so we can isolate people who test positive
2. Preventing high-risk groups (older people, those with asthma) from getting infected
3. Getting hospitals the resources they need to handle more cases
4. Getting drugs to help those who are sick
5. Ability for schools and child care facilities to open or operate remotely and equipment for workplaces so they could possibly open
6. Figure out when let people out of their homes

I’m pumped that they’re focused on this so that we can figure out what the next part of 2020 looks like.

Of course, Trump is pissed that someone else is calling the shots. His take:

For the purpose of creating conflict and confusion, some in the Fake News Media are saying that it is the Governors decision to open up the states, not that of the President of the United States & the Federal Government. Let it be fully understood that this is incorrect….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 13, 2020

What Else? Getting Groceries.

Seven in 10 people now consider going to the grocery store a risky act — and a majority of Americans say they’ve started wearing masks outside their homes at least sometimes

Not surprising as this is the one activity that we all must do and it’s the one time we’re getting out of the house. It is scary – especially when you see that old guy touching every single avocado to find the one that’s perfectly ripe. Come on dude.

Other Items

One interesting read in WSJ (paywall) is about how San Francisco was spared thousands of lives when the 49’ers lost the Super Bowl as it really eliminated a bunch of mass gatherings.

New Jersey knows their audience:

REMINDER: Keep AT LEAST 1.05 Bon Jovis of space between yourself and others pic.twitter.com/YinsvpH6U0

— New Jersey (@NJGov) April 14, 2020

After Bernie Sanders endorsed Joe Biden over live-streamed video, Jimmy Kimmel said: “That’s a very powerful message for the country — if two 80-year-old men can successfully log into a Zoom meeting, anything is possible.”

A recorded Easter call:

I had thought that everyone had Netflix already. Apparently there was room to grow. The crazy curve is Disney+ that went from 0 to 50million in no time. Today is the day that Comcast launches their Peacock service, only to Comcast subscribers though. Others get it in July.

As if our front-line workers weren’t badass enough, here’s a quick video of doctor’s holding a cello and piano recital at a New York hospital:

Comfort comes in many forms. Today our surgeons hosted a Healing Concert that will be shared virtually w/ patients all throughout the hospital.

Here is Dr. Liou (piano), gen surgery resident, & Dr. Dyrszka (cello), orthopedic surgeon.

video @MebrakKahsaiNY #SongsOfComfort pic.twitter.com/WkY2XsQJZq

— Columbia Surgery (@ColumbiaSurgery) April 6, 2020

Saw two little girls in facemasks playing hopscotch. It’s like someone Jumanji’d a Banksy painting.

— Jesse McLaren (@McJesse) April 13, 2020

Finally, in a move that surprises nobody:

Deleting this from last night because the current story also includes a Treasury statement saying there won’t be any delays (and an on-the-record quote from a quality control manager at IRS saying there will be). https://t.co/MASBPtGe73 pic.twitter.com/hoxBMA0lMX

— Mike Madden (@MikeMadden) April 15, 2020

Cases

(spreadsheet)

Only 64 more days to go

While this has been a nice little run we’ve had at home, I think you can tell from my email yesterday that I’d like to get back to normal life. Even if we have massive amount of testing, life as we knew it probably isn’t going to return until we have a vaccine. So, where are we on that? Here are the top four efforts towards a vaccine that I can tell:

• Moderna. A Boston-based biotech unicorn, they started on their vaccine back in Jan – way ahead of the game. Their vaccine slips RNA into human cells and tells them to produce the the needed defenses. Sounds sweet. Apparently, RNA technology can move faster into trials but then again there’s never been an approved RNA vaccine yet for any disease, so there’s that.
• Pfizer hopes to get an experimental RNA vaccine into humans later this month. Instead of testing the single vaccine, they are planning to move into human trials with four different options simultaneously, to see which one is the most successful before going to bigger populations.
• Sanofi hopes to begin human trials of its first vaccine, which uses the protein technology of its Flublok flu vaccine, by fall.
• Johnson & Johnson is working off a vaccine platform the company used for experimental vaccines for Ebola, Zika, and RSV. They’re a big dog, but seem the most out of it but, hey, who knows.

These are the top 4 but apparently 30 companies are in the race. (full list)

Even if one of these companies come up with it, there’s a need to get a TON of vaccines made. If you count doctors, nurses, and other first responders as well as infants, toddlers, and pregnant women, that’s 26 million people, you you’ll probably need at least 100 million out of the gates.

So, while there’s some good action happening, nothing seems like it’ll be ready for another year or so. Last Tuesday, Anthony Fauci told US senators, “It will take at least a year and a half to have a vaccine we can use.” That’s end of summer 2021. If true, it would actually set a record as most vaccines take between five and 15 years to come to market.

That means, between now and then, we’ll have some combination of social distancing, mass testing, and hoping for herd immunity.

So, we could be here a while.

World Health Organization: Don't expect to see vaccine for 12 months or longer https://t.co/Q08cClaLrX

— GMA News (@gmanews) April 14, 2020

Also, Flattening?

I’ve noticed that for the past three days the number of new cases has been decreasing – both the world counts and US. At first I thought it was just the weekend numbers which are typically lower but then Monday’s came in low too. Experts had said that the peak should be right around now, so maybe that is indeed happening.

Other Stuff

The French airforce gave a retiring contractor a joyride in a fighter. He accidentally ejected. That’s just the beginning.

Here’s a husband and wife team surviving the lockdown by crushing some lipsyncs. It’s These two comedians (Rachel Parris and Marcus Brigstocke) needed a challenge and it resulted in the trending hashtag #LockdownLipsync.

Ok we are upping our game for Round 3 of #lockdownlipsync ! Here we go; #Tightrope TRIBUTE to the queen @JanelleMonae ! Your move, @marcusbrig ! #LipSyncBattle pic.twitter.com/P46NsQINyx

— Rachel Parris (@rachelparris) April 6, 2020

old Hollywood bloopers stitched together while I slowly go mad pic.twitter.com/QwiMFRzwyM

— blu del barrio (@bludelb) April 11, 2020

pic.twitter.com/wC1BspoDoY

— Rob Sheridan, but from a safe distance (@rob_sheridan) April 13, 2020

Only 64 more days to go

I’m going a little crazy. It’s not from my family but more a lack of everything else. I miss my friends, my casual acquaintances, drop-off at my kids schools, the restaurants, the movies, the casual interactions, the hiking, the driving, the traveling. All of it. It was fun. I can’t wait wait for this madness to be over.

Just wrote a scathing Yelp review of my living room

— Solomon Georgio (@solomongeorgio) April 11, 2020

I miss the traveling (thx Kesner):

A whole mood pic.twitter.com/iMm4qbW5LS

— Janet D. (@TheRealPRLady) April 9, 2020

A good metaphor for this shelter-in-place experiment that’s happening (thx Hot & Streamy):

Other Stuff

Hope you had a good Easter yesterday. We had a productive Easter egg hunt:

This guy’s magic is something else:

Do you see the glass as half full or half empty?? #perspective #magic #illusion pic.twitter.com/c4N4ReA3st

— Zach King (@zachking) October 19, 2019

Over in Thailand, this is terrible and adorable at the same time: Newborn babies given mini face shields to protect against Covid-19 at Bangkok hospital

Meanwhile, in LA:

Meanwhile, in LA… pic.twitter.com/6ZTlyRqm8x

— Best of Nextdoor (@bestofnextdoor) April 12, 2020

Happy Easter Everyone

He is risen.

Please stay six feet away.

— God (@TheTweetOfGod) April 12, 2020

As we’re all still at home, not everyone can get out and celebrate in the typical way. I thought I’d post how it’s going with others around out there:

A chocolate factory in France:

The Pope is breaking with tradition and going online, so hopefully all of you will too

LOOK: Pope Francis leads the Easter Sunday vigil Mass at the St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican with no public participation due to the outbreak of #COVID19. Remo Casilli, Reuters #SemanaSanta2020 pic.twitter.com/ayh4PC2Oak

— ABS-CBN News (@ABSCBNNews) April 12, 2020

These deacons hold Easter service in front of portraits of believers who could not attend mass:

This Rabbi in Connecticut hosts a virtual Seder on Zoom:

For 50 years, Volker Kraft from Saalfeld Germany decorated his tree with 10,000 hand-painted Easter eggs (Michael Reichel/EPA) https://t.co/D8NOvZ9OHo pic.twitter.com/lmKiz3uRok

— Meredith Frost (@MeredithFrost) April 12, 2020

At My House

My kids:

Meanwhile, i’ve been thinking WAY too much about Trolls 2: World Tour. Some thoughts:

• Country Music Land could have been way cooler. Have one area that’s sad and drunk, another that’s party (Devil Goes Down to Georgia), another that’s all chicks (Dixie, Taylor Swift, Dolly Part), one that’s just Garth, and another that’s all ‘Merica with beers and trucks. That’s an awesome land and a place I could hang for a long time.

Other Stuff

BREAKING NEWS: I have been feeling unwell the last two days – tired, headache, foggy brain. I have been concerned about COVID infection, but it was hard to imagine how: we have been so careful.

I just discovered 5 minutes ago that I HAVE BEEN MAKING DECAF COFFEE FOR 2 DAYS.

— Claire Potter (@TenuredRadical) April 11, 2020

A sign of the times. Taxi’s vs. Delivery

Uber Eats just surpassed Uber, for the first time pic.twitter.com/gmrTOzPVac

— Teddy Citrin (@tcitrin) April 11, 2020

Not all fashion shows have been cancelled. pic.twitter.com/gaaCjn5e7e

— Back To Nature (@backt0nature) April 11, 2020

Cases

(spreadsheet data)

Only 64 more days to go

What I’m Thinking About: Zoom

This has been an incredible rise and a little bit of a fall for Zoom.

In the past month, they went from 10 million daily users to 200 million. Wowza. In the past week 90,000 schools across 20 countries have used it to conduct remote classes. Ninety thousand schools.

They also revealed that while they’ve been focused on keeping up with growth, they’ve done some not great things. Specifically, they were sending info to Facebook even if you didn’t log in or ever use Facebook. Second, the videos/calls aren’t really encrypted, which means others can see and hear what went on. Oh, and third, many of the videos and encryption keys were routed through China so they were available for the Chinese state to hear and view. Hmm.

Personally, I don’t care if my personal or work calls are viewed in China but I suspect a lot of more important people and companies do. This could be real bad for them and for Zoom. I’m curious to see what the fallout is.

I’m also curious to see how Zoom integrates itself more into my life. I’ve been doing double-dates with friends, group family chats, happy hours, school lessons and more. It’s a daily app now.

Finally, I usually really dislike recorded Zoom calls, but here’s one I couldn’t stop watching. It’s ESPN reporters inviting famous people to join them.

Katie Nolan challenged her ESPN friends to invite the most famous person they know to a Zoom call, and the results are spectacular.

This should be a weekly show but with even more famous people involved. I wanna see Denzel randomly pop into a Zoompic.twitter.com/vV4kGzgPDd

— Kendall Baker (@TheKendallBaker) April 10, 2020

What Else: The Flattening?

Nationally, the number of coronavirus deaths in the U.S. is projected to hit its peak within the next few days. Personally, I’ve been hoping that this is the worst as we had a few days of no growth, but yesterday we had peaks in new cases and deaths in the US and many others charts are saying that we still have some more time to go.

NEW: Fri 10 April update of coronavirus trajectories

Daily new deaths:
• US & UK still on clear trend of rising daily deaths. Reporting patterns may give occasional dips, but clearly trending up
• India daily death toll accelerating

Live charts: https://t.co/JxVd2cG7KI pic.twitter.com/5eEuSKc4az

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) April 10, 2020

Other Stuff

This is what you get if you cross @Simone_Biles and Indiana Jones. This is almost as impressive as that mane he has on his head. I wish we could see the first 1000 times he tried it though… pic.twitter.com/r6exf2vfbj

— Joe Buck (@Buck) March 30, 2020

Great ad:

Easily one of the best social distancing ads I’ve seen pic.twitter.com/9WhhTHmdPc

— 𝙹𝚘𝚜𝚑 𝙶𝚛𝚞𝚋𝚋𝚜 (@JoshuaGrubbsPhD) April 9, 2020

Murals

Murals are popping up all over the world to honor tireless health care workers, bring hope to those passing by, and to just vent. I loved seeing these. It was cool seeing how everywhere around the world we’re all dealing with the same thing, and it reminded me that this is the first time ever that the entire world has been focused on one thing.

In New Orleans, a graffiti artist called “Bandit” has painted murals in the city — one of nurses and one of children playing with toilet paper rolls.

In Chicago, artists have also created outdoor art to capture the times and they’ve also started Quarantine Times, a website created to highlight the work of local artists during the pandemic.

This is happening all over the world. Literally every city is out painting their city to remind us that we’re all in this together, that this sucks, and to be safe.

In Berlin…

In Scotland,

In Milan,

In Sydney,

In the UK,

In Los Angeles,

In Moscow,

In Warsaw, Poland,

In Pontefract, U.K.

In Indonesia,

In Glasgow, Scotland

This is indeed a unique time in history

This is just so surreal. All important safety measures of course….but still so surreal pic.twitter.com/BlHCa04mOX

— Yashar Ali (@yashar) April 9, 2020

This synchronicity of the decline in restaurant bookings around the world—or, at least, among OECD nations with OpenTable—is remarkable.

Different distancing policies. Different outbreak rates. Different cultures. Different laws. And they all fell to zero in 15 days. pic.twitter.com/zPyIWAGv1y

— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) April 10, 2020

Other Stuff

Dad of the year and quite frankly it isn’t even close pic.twitter.com/o8o2tWBo6p

— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) April 10, 2020

“A famous win based on patience and pure belief” (thx Kesner)

Some sports are slower. More about the strategy. pic.twitter.com/JMBaGJ1tSd

— Andrew Cotter (@MrAndrewCotter) April 9, 2020

Cases

Showing just new cases and new number of deaths to see if we are flattening. You can click into the spreadsheet to see totals.

Only 64 more days left to go

What I’m thinking about: Working from Home

I’ve been working from home for the past year. One thing I noticed recently is that lots of other companies aren’t doing it very well. Over the past years, I’ve learned some modern work-from-home concepts. Specifically, there are 5 levels of remote work. The levels are:

1. Thinking this is temporary, and waiting to get back to the office to do your work.
2. Trying to recreate the office environment. This means trying to do things in-person, keeping all the interactions real-time, and making sure people are present and available during work hours. I saw a lot of companies here when coronavirus started. People were still expected to be online from 9 to 5, and in some cases employers installing screen-logging software on their employee machines so that they can play the role of Big Brother.
3. Acceptance and adaptation. Here, companies and employees invest in their home office with better videos and possibly noise cancellation machines. Meetings move to shared docs and people start working asynchronously.
4. Fully asynchronous. Getting to a place where you can actually get more done because you’re at home. This is where you want to be.
   

   Companies that truly practice asynchronous communication have stepped out of the industrial revolution, and no longer conflate presence with productivity, or hours with output, as one might on the factory floor.

5. Nirvana. This is where your distributed team works better than any in-person team ever could.

The analogy I loved is that the Japanese 4×100 track team in the 2016 Olympics. They were massive underdogs. In fact, nobody bet on them to medal. Not one runner could run under 10 seconds:

But because they mastered the baton handoff, they shaved seconds off their race and came in 2nd. That’s right, the Japanese got the silver medal because they were better and the handoff.

The idea here is that, as a company, you can master how work and ideas are handed off between employees your company can be much faster, more efficient, and a better place to work than others.

True asynchronous working is the place you need to get to. We’re working on it at Onward and so far it’s been great. Using the tool Notion is a big piece of it. I love Notion and the fact that it’s worth $2 Billion with only 40 employees should indicate this is a popular trend. I could talk about this for hours, but here’s a good place to start: a good post that goes into this.

Other Items

At my house it’s Spring Break which means there are no lesson plans coming from school. Instead, our current project is for Hunter and Sasha to make 7 really nice cards to send to their grandparents and cousins.

Speaking of Sports (from yesterday’s email), the Rakuten Monkeys of the Chinese Professional Baseball League (which is Taiwan) will play games in front of 500 robot mannequins dressed up as fans.

Also, the second episode of Some Good News by John Krasinski landed yesterday. Pretty funny and good:

Stats

The virus is starting to get out more and more in the US. I thought it was interesting to see that only 1 or 2 out of 10 know someone who has it. I know a few people.

New daily cases are shown below.

White is first of all respect.
White is rebirth, the light after darkness, the sum of all colours.
White is the colour of the uniforms worn by those who put their own lives on the line to save ours.
It represents space and time to think, as well as to stay silent.
White is for those who are filling this empty time and space with ideas, thoughts, stories, lines of verse, music and care for others.
White recalls when, after the crisis of 1929, this immaculate colour was adopted for clothes as an expression of purity in the present, and of hope in the future.

What I’m thinking about: Companies Getting Creative

I was talking with my friend Camilla yesterday and she had a great point:

Its pretty phenomenal how companies are adapting and adjusting and getting flat out creative… pie shops and bakeries hosting virtual baking clubs, wine shops and florists doing classes, tastings and deliveries, I saw Redfin is now doing virtual showings where an agent goes and essentially FaceTimes and answers chat questions.

I totally agree. One area I’m really impressed with is Masks. Now that we’re past the whole should I wear? debate, we can focus on what really matters – how they look. I’m starting to see some flair. You can get all different colors and styles now:

Also, Sports

With no march madness, the sports world is scrambling. I thought it was interesting to see that Major League Baseball is floating an idea of putting all the teams into a compound in Arizona, quarantining everyone together, and playing games with no fans.

Meanwhile I’m like the rest of the world in just rewatching old games, trying to decide if eSports are a thing (not yet), and looking at videos on Twitter to pass the time until sports can start up again.

A collection of Zinedine Zidane’s sublime first touches pic.twitter.com/zmk9zpGcPI

— James Dart (@James_Dart) April 7, 2020

This guy did a one-man March Madness show:

1918 – Toronto wins Stanley Cup
1919 – Stanley Cup canceled

1993 – Toronto wins World Series
1994 – World Series canceled

2019 – Toronto wins NBA Finals
2020 – …

— Sam Amico (@AmicoHoops) April 5, 2020

Other Stuff

This is good:

NIGHTLY QUESTION: what is the weirdest celebrity encounter you have ever had

— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) April 8, 2020

Stats

Pulling from this spreadsheet which tracks totals and new cases:

Only 64 more days to go

What I’m Thinking About: Changes in Ridesharing

At Onward, we’re diving into the food delivery world. We provide custom service where you can ask our drivers to shop in any store, go to multiple stores and do it all through the phone. This is new for us. We’re not the only one making changes in the ride-sharing world. Some changes that have stuck out for me:

• Ride-hailing in China: all riders are required to wear facemasks, there’s an apps that tells you if your driver has had a temperature check today, and an in-car sign that shows if the vehicle was disinfected or not.

Good morning, friends in Asia! — What are your ride-sharing companies doing to safely transport people and add revenue as your governments incrementally lighten restrictions? I read about the plastic screens, but what other innovations are you seeing for safety and revenue?

— Tim Ferriss (@tferriss) April 1, 2020

• There’s a company called Wheels that is deploying eBikes with self-cleaning handlebars and brake levers. “NanoSeptic’s handlebar technology, which is powered by light, uses mineral nano-crystals to create an oxidation reaction that is stronger than bleach“
• To save money, some smaller restaurants are training their own workers to deliver their food and giving the middle finger to the delivery app.
• Stay-at-home orders have reduced traffic accidents by half in Los Angeles. This is 15,000 fewer collisions per month and 6,000 fewer injury accidents per month. Man, you don’t realize how reckless our regular life is.

The Animal Game

Almost every night we play a game where a kid thinks of an animal and the other people have to ask questions and guess what they are. It usually involves the person acting out what that animal is.

Other Stuff

Matt McConaughey jumped on to a Zoom call to be the bingo reader for an assisted living facility.

ALRIGHT ALRIGHT ALRIGHT: Watch Matthew McConaughey host a virtual bingo game for residents at a senior living home in Texas pic.twitter.com/DINQ3peDHG

— CBS News (@CBSNews) April 6, 2020

This is a 392 years old Greenland Shark that was located in the Arctic Ocean. He’s been wandering the ocean since 1627.
Photo by Julius Nielsen.https://t.co/CMZtJWmnSq pic.twitter.com/6a4idxtIYY

— James ༀ Barrett (@JimBarrett) April 4, 2020

Choosing your quarantine character

pic.twitter.com/tgsQfH1ZIZ

— Danielle Baskin (@djbaskin) April 5, 2020

Cases

Tracking only new cases now to see when the “flattening” happens.

Only 64 more days to go

Government Loans. Today is the day that the government is accepting applications for small business loans. My business and millions of others are swarming to this. The current amount Uncle Sam is looking to loan out is 2.5 months of payroll. We’ll see how that goes.

Schools Staying Closed. As I mentioned last week, I’m not impressed with the current home schooling system that Mill Valley has. But, I can’t see us going back to school in the fall. Even if the curve flattens, there will be no vaccine, so I can’t imagine big groups being allowed. Nobody wants to the school that starts the next outbreak. That means we might be doing this home-schooling thing for a LOT longer than I had thought. Good thing Sasha and Diane put together two new desks for Hunter and S this weekend.

What else

Our Pets Too?! It was reported yesterday that cats can get COVID. Apparently a tiger in the NY Zoo tested positive. I never considered that my two cats could be my weakest link in my attempt to separate myself from the outside world. One of them is super skittish so she’s no issue, but the other, Lucious, is too damn friendly. As if we needed another thing to worry about.

Also, come on people, are you still not staying inside?

A picture paints a thousand words. #StayHome #SaveLives #Please pic.twitter.com/kfZ6xtgFGZ

— S/Sgt 6266 (@SI6266) April 4, 2020

Other Stuff

GOAL OF THE CENTURY. CHOOSE YOU’RE FAVOURITE GOAL! pic.twitter.com/wM2cvnrAgl

— Sean O'Hanlon (@sohanlon23) April 4, 2020

My wife and I play this fun game during quarantine, it's called "Why Are You Doing It That Way?" and there are no winners

— Eric Spiegelman (@ericspiegelman) April 4, 2020

This next one is a really great video. This is the kind of content I’m looking for people. Get creative:

Day 13 of #lockdownpic.twitter.com/MkEkspxaeS

— S&H illustrated reports / David Ziggy Greene (@SaHreports) April 4, 2020

Some next-level cat moves:

I swear I saw Walter Payton score about 20 touchdowns in his career with this exact same move … pic.twitter.com/aF6XKFb5gF

— Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) April 5, 2020

Cases

I’m switching up my case tracking. I’ve got a spreadsheet with the daily amounts and am going to just post the graph new cases/deaths. That seems to be the most interesting to me as I want to see when the World and US start plateauing and then going down. Let me know if you’d like to see something different:

That’s all. Have a great Monday everyone

*Only 64 more days to go

Yesterday was a rainy Saturday over here at the Lewhouses, so there were lots of in-home activities. Diane and Sasha built some desks to improve our home schooling setup.

While that was happening, Hunter and I watched the Han Solo movie. After completing his Millennium Falcon Lego set, he was curious about how Han got the ship and its origin story. That movie got a bad rap when it came out but it’s not terrible. Lord/Miller did get screwed though.

Later in the afternoon, I then HAD to get out of the house so I loaded up the kiddos and we went for a hike here in Mill Valley to a local waterfall:

Finally, we finished the Netflix docuseries, Tiger King. A good watch:

Getting to know our delivery guys. #TigerKing pic.twitter.com/yA20cjh7Ta

— Tim Scott (@hellotimscott) April 4, 2020

What Else?

There’s a good Op-Ed by Bill Gates in the Washington Post. He brings up a good point – the federal government could start NOW preparing for a vaccine and invest in the favorites to mass produce the ultimate vaccine that gets created. This whole madness doesn’t really stop until we get the vaccine, so why don’t we do all we can to get prepared for that. During this whole period Bill Gates has shown to be a total winner and a national treasure. History will look extremely favorably on him.

Bill Gates to build factories to manufacture the 7 most promising vaccines, so they can all be tested in parallel.

“A few billion in this situation, where there’s trillions of dollars being lost economically, it is worth it… we can save months, because every month counts.” pic.twitter.com/ZqhGRGMRAt

— Damon Evans (@damocrat) April 4, 2020

Also, the mask business is ridiculous. First we weren’t supposed to wear them, now we should wear anything we can come up with.

I read this great interview with the woman who blew the whole lid off the story and the ridiculousness of the CDC not recommending wearing masks. There’s a lot of good nuggets in here including (a) why no-one in the medical community could write the story and contradict the CDC, (b) why Japan is the perfect place to prove that mass work,

In fact, there’s a very interesting case, in Japan where they’re doing everything wrong but masks — they’re not testing properly, they’re not socially isolating, they’re still talking about should we shut down this or that, they tried for a long time probably to try to keep the Olympics, which is hopeless, it wasn’t going to happen — they do as a culture wear masks about 60 to 80% of the time depending on the estimates. And while I think because they’re not testing, they have a bit of an undercount, they have more cases than they know, but they’re not Lombardy, they’re not Italy.

In other news, Louis CK is releasing anew comedy special…

Louis CK releasing a special when no one can leave the room feels pretty on brand TBH

— Tiffany Stevenson (@tiffstevenson) April 4, 2020

Cases

1. World: Cases: 1,203,485 — Total deaths: 64,784  (up 3910 – a daily increase of -51%)
2. USA: Cases: 312,237 — Total deaths: 8,501 (up 1338 – a daily increase of 7%)
3. Marin: Cases: 137 (up 6). Deaths: 7 (up 1)

Home-schooling. Our online learning is sort of a joke. The teachers are just barely sending over what’s needed. We’re trying our best, but it’s hard. I can only imagine it will only get better as the teachers and staff figure it out.

Speaking of, this is a GREAT read about how higher ed (mostly colleges) will adapt post-COVID and how they and tech will merge. It will be fascinating to watch over the next 5 years.

Getting Out. Sasha and I are very similar. We both love to get out of the house and be active. If we don’t leave the house and do a walk or run, we’re crabby during the day and don’t sleep as well at night. We’re starting to combat this problem by taking long walks around 5-6pm, before dinner. Yesterday we took a nice 50 minute bike ride down the road. We’re both a bit nicer when we return.

Finally, NYC. The situation there seems exceptionally dire. There was an Amber Alert-like message sent to everyone in NYC asking if they know of any licensed healthcare workers.

A big thank you for the bday wishes – this year it’s all about fighting #COVID19 and healthcare workers are on the front lines.

So I’m asking anyone with a few extra $$ to donate to @NYCHealthSystem – below is a link to my fundraiser. https://t.co/41eKXRcs4f pic.twitter.com/bGnzMAlzW2

— errol barnett (@errolbarnett) April 3, 2020

and still the subways are packed with people…

The field hospital in New York’s Central Park is already at half capacity on its third day treating Covid-19 patients, according to the director of the facility https://t.co/iznk8Jb0G9

— CNN (@CNN) April 4, 2020

Not surprisingly, the cases are still climbing in NYC:

Other Stuff

For those of you who are Sandra Bulluck fans or fans of While You Were Sleeping will need to read the following (thx Lizzie):

delete everything on the internet except for this pic.twitter.com/XgQpsOMfq1

— Erin Ryan (@morninggloria) April 2, 2020

Happy birthday to my favorite chef, @Chris_Meloni.

— Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) April 3, 2020

Cases

1. World: Cases 1,139,207. Deaths: 60,874 (up 7,901 – a daily increase of 80%)
2. USA: Cases 278,537. Deaths: 7,163 (up 1252 – a daily increase of 62%)
3. Marin: 131 cases (up 13), 6 deaths

This is possibly the most accurate gif I’ve ever seen. pic.twitter.com/mbH9lvQ641

— Jon Green (@jon_m_green) March 30, 2020

Unemployment is just rampant. The number of people out of work is just staggering. I talked to someone I know yesterday who has 4 dollars in their bank account and one month left in rent. The aid can’t come fast enough.

6.6 million people filed for unemployment last week. That is after 3.3 million last week, 10 mil. in just 2 weeks! Some perspective: before last week the highest weekly total ever was 695,000. So last week was nearly 5x higher than the previous record, this week was 9.5x higher. pic.twitter.com/LIjFolnaVZ

— Ben Epstein (@benepstein55) April 2, 2020

Other countries continue to put us to shame. I’m glad we’re finally coming around on the masks, but it’s time to get the rest of the foundation in place – tests, temperature checks, and individual tracking. That’s how you beat it.

Meanwhile, South Korea is light-years ahead with telephone booth-style testing stations. No need for PPE.

This is Busanhttps://t.co/PnM721R4Kr pic.twitter.com/J5wYl8oIuN

— Raphael Rashid (@koryodynasty) April 1, 2020

As for me, I’m working on my Home Gym. If I’m stuck at home, I might as well be staying fit. I’m jealous of those with Peloton, Mirror, Tonal or any of the other new gadgets that let you work out at home.

Peloton and its rivals are seeing a spike in demand as millions of Americans self-isolate, but it may not last https://t.co/Nn2W4cehKD

— Businessweek (@BW) March 29, 2020

My latest attempt (Thanks MAL) is a weight vest. I’ve got a new 20 lbs vest. Wearing it turns air squats into real leg workouts, turns pushups into bench presses. My new vest just arrived and I tried it out for the first time last night and man my legs are shot after 100 air squats.

Other Stuff

On Wednesday, the singer Adam Schlesigner, a songwriter for films and stage died at age 52 from COVID-19. Quite a talented guy and sadly won’t be the last great talent to be taken during this time. From writer Matty Karas:

Adam’s eye for the detail of ordinary suburban strivers was every bit as sharp as the well-chronicled ear for criminally catchy hooks that he deployed over the course of six FOUNTAINS OF WAYNE albums, five IVY albums, one TINTED WINDOWS album, one unforgettable hit song for a fake ’60s rock band in a TOM HANKS movie, 157 songs for the TV series CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND, one Broadway musical, one off-Broadway musical, one MONKEES song and let’s just stipulate there was a lot of other stuff.

On a happier note, this was my favorite thing I saw yesterday (Thanks Dana P.). There’s a museum that asked people to recreate paintings with stuff they can find at home. Some great results. Some are below but click in to see all of them.

Ah yes, the time of evening when I wind down and move 8 feet to my right

— Emma Pettit (@EmmaJanePettit) April 2, 2020

Cases

1. World: Cases: 1,014,673, deaths: 52,973 (up 4,390 – a daily increase of -17%)
2. USA: Cases 244,678, deaths: 5,911 (up 774 – a daily increase of -27%)
3. Marin: 118 cases (up 10), 6 deaths

Food and grocery deliveries. My company, Onward, offers rides to seniors and those who needed extra assistance. Now, because getting older adults out of the house is a terrible idea, we are also offering food and grocery deliveries. I am surprised how popular this is. Literally everybody is trying to get the food from the grocery store to their house without them having to do it. It’s been interesting to see the requests we’ve been receiving.

It’s so popular that Instacart, the app that partners with grocery stores to deliver food to you announced they are looking to hire 300,000 new people. Three hundred thousand. This is a unique time in history when we all need the exact same thing.

Instacart plans to hire 300,000 more shoppers https://t.co/da3wv9gi7x

— Dan Primack (@danprimack) March 23, 2020

Yesterday, I wrote about asymptomatic people and how bizarre it is. I read this feed from an ICU doctor who, over 7 days, treated 50 COVID patients. Her patterns about what patients look like is interesting.

In my 7 days on one of our (now 12!) non ICU #COVID19 units, I admitted 58 patients for COVID rule out, of whom 50 tested positive. Two died (DNR), 2 went to hospice, and 5 went to the ICU. That is… not my typical gen med service week. Following, some clinical observations.

— Leora Horwitz (@leorahorwitzmd) March 31, 2020

A Tale of Two Americas. I work from home every day. When I look down my street, I see construction workers still working on homes. It does seem like the better-off are getting sheltered but the rest are getting shafted as it’s harder for some people to “go virtual.”

At My House

We’re powering through. Diane has taken the lead on home schooling and, in good Diane fashion, it making it super fun for the kids. There’s an amazing amount of playing, building and laughter coming from the house and yard.

Hunter has a lego Millennium Falcon that he just started yesterday:

Sasha has taken to FaceTiming her friends and showing them everything in our house. Yesterday her friend showed her how to do Memoji’s in FaceTime. I’m amazed that my 5-year old is now more savvy than I am with my phone. #DigitalNative

Other Stuff

this is my favorite thing on the internet pic.twitter.com/RQtGIHRjfg

— Anne Wheaton (@AnneWheaton) April 1, 2020

Respect

A 12-year old girl was having difficulty with her math homework during the lockdown.

So she emailed her teacher for help.

He came over, brought his whiteboard, and taught her through the window. pic.twitter.com/ubSbtobjOj

— Akki (@akkitwts) March 31, 2020

We all dress like Adam Sandler now.

— Jason Zinoman (@zinoman) April 1, 2020

Cases

1. World: Cases 956,588, deaths: 48,583 (up 5,297 – daily increase of 25%)
2. USA: Cases 216,722, deaths: 5,137 (up 1,056 – daily increase of 16%)
3. Marin: Cases: 108, deaths: 6

On Wednesday, Trump said that we should expect 100,000-200,000 deaths in the USA. Wow.

Under the best-case scenario, Trump will see more Americans die from the coronavirus in the weeks to come than Presidents Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard M. Nixon saw die in the Korean and Vietnam Wars combined. https://t.co/M41bUpIyH4

— Michael Barbaro (@mikiebarb) April 1, 2020

Asymptomatic people. It’s now come out that maybe 25% of all people infected show no symptoms.

Everybody should read/listen to @sclaudwhitehead‘s interview with @CDCDirector this morning. So much interesting stuff in there:https://t.co/yiAk9xRpJZ

— Geoff Brumfiel (@gbrumfiel) March 31, 2020

I have a friend who was doing great and isolating the whole family. They had an au pair who happens to have a boyfriend she was sneaking out to see. Well, the boyfriend got COVID and gave it her. She then passed it on to the whole family. The interesting and scary part is that she showed no symptoms the whole time and has never developed symptoms. Luckily everyone is okay.

I’ve never heard of a virus behaving this way. Nobody has the flu, pneumonia or a cold without symptoms. We seems to be totally new territory.

The shut down of the rest of the country.

We are not aligned. The rest of the country is still not there. 20 states still don’t have shelter-at-home orders. I do think it’s mostly because they haven’t seen the cases, but it also a bit political – note that all 20 states have Republican governors.

Speaking of not shutting it down, I was surprised to see this:

Right-wing evangelist Jonathan Shuttlesworth, a close friend of Rodney Howard-Browne, says he intends to hold a large Woodstock-like Christian gathering in defiance of stay-at-home orders. pic.twitter.com/sn5Pvt1NA5

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) March 31, 2020

Finally, it’s interesting to see that the peak of COVID will be different in different areas of the US. Here in California, it looks like we’ll be peaking in the end of April, four week from now.

Other

“Wow, this dude is finally showing up for this relationship in a real way.” – my cat

— Randy Rainbow (@RandyRainbow) March 31, 2020

Also, this is not good: Captain of aircraft carrier with growing coronavirus outbreak pleads for help from Navy.

Cases

1. World:: 874,081 cases, deaths: 43,291 (up 4,227 – daily increase of 7%)
2. USA: 189,633 cases, deaths: 4,081 (up 911 – daily increase of 37%)
3. Marin: 107 cases (up 9), 5 deaths (up 1)

First responders. My brother-in-law is a fireman and he’s going out there and seeing cases firsthand. Many of their calls are to homes where people are sick. They can’t get them tests but can just help them as much as they can. While I’m holed up safely in my house, praying to stay away from this virus, he’s are out there going head-to-head every damn day. It’s really something. I have tons of respect for him and all the first responders. Then I read that in NYC, 14% of the uniformed police force is out sick. Oh man, what a crazy time we live in.

On Friday, 11% of the NYPD’s uniformed officers were out sick. Today, that’s up to 14% (5,199). 930 NYPD employees have tested positive for Covid19.

— Ali Watkins (@AliWatkins) March 30, 2020

Setting up for the long term. Now that it looks like we’re going to be under quarantine for at least another month or more, I’d like to start taking on some bigger projects. I’d like something that that takes more than 3 weeks to complete and has a definitive finish line. I’d like to work on something a little bit a day for a few weeks. I find those projects super fulfilling and rewarding. I thought of a big Lego ship, or a big jigsaw puzzle, but there’s got to be more. Building some furniture or a tree house comes to mind. Anyone have a good suggestions?

Other Stuff:

A brief example of the layers of clothing and gear doctors and nurses are using to protect themselves every single day from the Coronavirus. Simply heroic.

Humanity.pic.twitter.com/rdFhXhxP0k

— Rex Chapman (@RexChapman) March 30, 2020

Making sure I still remember how to hit trick shots #TennisAtHome pic.twitter.com/DKDKQTaluY

— Roger Federer (@rogerfederer) March 30, 2020

From an English sports announcer (thx Kesner) – turn on sound:

I was bored. pic.twitter.com/bVoC0hyNzC

— Andrew Cotter (@MrAndrewCotter) March 27, 2020

Meanwhile, in Connecticut… pic.twitter.com/HZz7vJ3Pvx

— Best of Nextdoor (@bestofnextdoor) March 31, 2020

Cases:

1. World: : 803,313 cases, deaths: 39,014 (up 3,995 – a daily increase of -4%)
2. USA: 164,719 cases, deaths: 3,170 (up 657 – a daily increase of 204%)
3. Marin: 98 cases (up 4), 4 deaths (up 3)

Never been more jealous of a curve in my life. Man they nailed it.
Via Time. https://t.co/sktEp8booM pic.twitter.com/soPhg4iceJ

— Ben White (@morningmoneyben) March 30, 2020

I am feeling optimistic about things today. It might be wishful thinking or just some of the latest news items I read but I’m hoping that we’re getting close to turning the corner. There’s a rumor that we might be flattening the curve here in the Bay Area. Man, I hope that’s true.

Some hopeful news. Exactly 2 weeks from Statewide shelter in place order it appears our new case numbers are starting to go down. ⁦@GavinNewsom⁩ Thank you! #COVID19 #StayHome pic.twitter.com/JQQJL46sIT

— Judy Melinek M.D. (@drjudymelinek) March 29, 2020

The Howl

There’s a thing where I live where everyday at 8pm, everyone opens their window or steps outside and howls at the top of their lungs. The dogs all jump in too. It’s loud. Apparently it was started by someone who wanted to send out a howl to honor the health care workers. It is nice and it’s good to hear the yell from all my neighbors to feel more connected to where I live. ABC News did a report on it too.

I tried to capture it in this video. It’s not great, but you get the idea

Some Good Stuff

This is what the people who bought all the toilet paper are doing right now pic.twitter.com/AKNsHYipdL

— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) March 29, 2020

In other news… the cat over the road is called Walter pic.twitter.com/loIHA2J4mH

— Sian Cosgrove (@sian_cosgrove) March 29, 2020

Cases

1. World: Cases 737,929, deaths: 35,019 (up 4,172 – a daily increase of 206%!)
2. USA: Cases 143,055, deaths: 2,513 (up 322 – a daily increase of -34%)
3. Marin: 93 cases (up 21), 1 death

This video give you a good perspective as to how the US is faring compared to the rest of the world…

Good lord this video. Like a thoroughbred making a late break in a horse race pic.twitter.com/EHdbTCviiU

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 29, 2020

Of course, it doesn’t really matter because you can’t buy a mask anywhere. Luckily we have some left over from the forest fires that ravaged our area last year. Whenever we go out (which is close to never), we put on the mask. We used to get looks but now I think people appreciate it.

I read today that the US has only about 1% of the 3.5 billion masks we need to combat coronavirus. In the US, we don’t manufacture them and both Europe and Asia have put a ban on mask exports. Soooo, we won’t be able to get new masks any time soon.

Our Weekend Activity

After maximizing our screen time in the morning, we did manage to do some good activities. We hit an empty parking lot for some exercise.

We ended the night with some ping pong and then made a fort in our living room and had a slumber party on the floor. Fun for everyone – except my back.

The Bad News

New York is totally overwhelmed. The 911 system in New York City typically gets 4,000 calls a day. Now they’re getting 7,000 – all related to coronavirus. Speaking of masks, the 911 responders are doing most cases without appropriate equipment to protect themselves from infection. NYC has become the epicenter of coronavirus, with more than 30,000 cases as of Saturday, and 672 deaths. If the rate of growth continues, NYC will suffer a more severe outbreak than those experienced in Wuhan, China, or the Lombardy region of Italy.

In Good News

James Dyson, the guy who’s made your amazing vacuum cleaner has focused on ventilators and has made an awesome one in 10 days. He’s now generated 15k of them. Love it.

and also, this guy:

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious with some #coronavirus inspired lyrics! pic.twitter.com/2KX1YmObuH

— Daniel Matarazzo (@dannymatz90) March 24, 2020

That time John McEnroe went out for Halloween as … John McEnroe.

I love John McEnroe. pic.twitter.com/qwmRvId47v

— Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) March 29, 2020

Cases

1. World: Cases: 664,695, deaths: 30,847 (up 2,024 – daily increase down 47%)
2. USA: Cases: 124,464, deaths: 2,191 (up 482 – daily increase up 18%)
3. Marin: 74 (up 5), 1 death

My kids and the silver lining in all of this madness. Even though I work at a company that’s 100% remote (we did it before it was cool. OG), I didn’t get to see my kids that much during the day until the schools shut down. Now, I see them all day.

Sasha comes into my office (aka the garage) about 4x a day and says “can I type on the ‘puter?” in just the cutest, heart-melting way. Playing with my kids, comforting them and being their dad is one of the great gifts in life, and I’m getting a strong dose of it now.

This paragraph from Prof G. really resonated with me yesterday

Caregivers live longer, and are happier, than anyone. I had kids late in life and never really comforted anybody until I was in my late thirties, when my mom was dying. And now with kids. The species chooses prosperity, and its foundation is people irrationally passionate about the well-being of someone else.

So true.

The Hospitals

I was also talking about the virus yesterday with a friend. While we still don’t know all the details of it, such as why there are some people who are infected but show no symptoms, or why some children experience it just as a mild cold, one thing we can all agree upon is that that the hospitals are scrambling. Those workers see the disease up front, not as a news story but as the person right in front of them. They try to protect themselves, but there’s no way the masks can stop it when you’re around it all day, every day. They put themselves at risk, for us.

And, they are panicking. They’re doing the best they can, but it’s madness. We hear story after story. My heart really goes out to them as it must be so uncomfortable and scary. If you work in healthcare and are going in every day, thanks you. Truly, thank you.

This pic was taken in Morristown, NJ, this week:

Also, we need to shut down America.

The middle of the country STILL isn’t shutting down to protect themselves. Here’s the chart. I’m not sure if this is a red state/blue state thing or if those areas legitimately aren’t as impacted as the others. I hope it’s the latter.

With this kind of activity, we’ll be inside longer and this disease will spread more than we’d like.

Some Fun Things

pic.twitter.com/lvzo45CnHU

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) March 27, 2020

I’ve now seen the virus more up close as I have some friends and family who are sick. I’m getting more scared about it. I’m scared of my family getting sick and people close to me dying. I know this isn’t a new concern to most but it continues to get more real for me.

It really makes me appreciate the family I have, my awesome kids, and how great it is to be with them every day.

If you’re scared too, just know that we’re all in this together. It’s crazy fucking times.

Other Items

This mayor totally lost his shit…in a great way. Pretty great:

This is the mayor in Walton Kentucky and I think we should put him in charge of everything pic.twitter.com/2TQn5649xQ

— Jessica Huseman (@JessicaHuseman) March 26, 2020

Different people respond differently to the isolation. This guy has it figured out (kid friendly):

This guy has just won the internet. pic.twitter.com/wQWvKw4jco

— Teeta (@anitamassey86) March 25, 2020

Also, following up on yesterday’s Triscuit’s post. A good thread…

The Triscuit saga is enormously frustrating for me because the electricity biscuit thesis is not well supported by available documents, but Nabisco–which has already said it has no documentation as to the name’s origin–is now “confirming” the thesis with no evidence.

— Charles Louis Richter (@richterscale) March 26, 2020

Cases

• World: Cases: 553,244. Deaths: 25,035 (up 2866 from yesterday – daily increase of 15%)
• USA: Cases: 86,012. Deaths: 1,301 (up 255 from yesterday – daily increase of 4.%)
• Marin: 65 cases (up 5 from yesterday)

We’re four people in a 1100 sq. ft house with one bathroom so things are getting tight. But, we’re getting creative. We did a group workout yesterday, and today, we did a team bike ride at a local church parking lot, which was fun for everyone.

Hunter loves riding his bike and Sasha is starting to come around.

Social Distancing

While at the church, we encountered a police officer. Super nice guy. He wanted to hand us some stickers and asked if the kids wanted to join him in the car and play with the dashboard buttons and turn on the lights. Really nice request, but WTF!!!??

Here’s my issue with that: we can get rid of Coronavirus. It’s actually pretty easy to do. All we have to do is, as a nation, take 14 days and not come in contact with anyone. That’s all. If we do that, this virus will disappear. It’ll be gone. Everyone just needs to take 14 days.

But if our police officers, who are on the front lines helping people, think it’s a good idea to invite others into their cars to touch all the knobs they’ve been touching, then this whole little plan just isn’t going to work. Oh man, we’re effed.

New York!
I was reading a lot about the scene in NYC yesterday. The NYTime has a good behind the scenes story and a video with the doctor.

The scene in Queens NY is crazy, an excerpt:

New York has become the epicenter of the entire world of the virus and they need not just thousands of additional beds but tens of thousands.

Finally, a Very Important Thread
In lighter news, this thread on Twitter was one of the best things I’ve read in months. A guy goes DEEP on
Triscuits

OK, buckle up. I wanna talk to you about Triscuit. pic.twitter.com/Tg7334OSbc

— Sage Boggs (@sageboggs) March 26, 2020

Cases

• Worldwide: Cases 491,623, Deaths: 22,169 (up 2,494 from yesterday – daily increase of -1%)
• U.S.: Cases: 69,210, Deaths: 1,046 (up 244 from yesterday – daily increase of 17%)
• Marin CA: 60 cases (up 7 from yesterday)

We’re hunkered down over here and enduring the storm. I am going a bit stir-crazy. Something about being around people and the energy they bring makes me feel good. Living in NYC and walking those streets was always energizing for me. I loved it. Here in Marin, I loved taking my kids to dropoff and being among all the kids and parents. It was hectic but fun to catch up with other parents and see the other kids talking and playing. I miss it. They probably can’t verbalize it but I think my kids miss it too. This will be a challenging period.

The government passed a $2 TRILLION dollar stimulus deal last night. We all will receive a one-time direct deposit of up to $1,200, and couples will get $2,400. The payments will be phased out based on income levels, before ending for those earning more than $99,000 annually. Families receive an additional $500 per child. That’s a lot of cash but people need it.

Related note, I called Wells Fargo yesterday and got a reprieve from paying my mortgage for 3 months, so that’s nice.

Other Items:

• This is a good read about what it’s like to live with someone suffering from COVID.
• The kid from spring break who was acting like a drunk moron, apologized to everyone

Cases

1. World: 438,749 — Total deaths: 19,675 (up 2,516 from yesterday – daily increase of 37%)
2. USA: 55,243 — Total deaths: 802 (up 209 from yesterday – daily increase of 71%)
3. Marin: 53 cases (up 6 from yesterday), 0 deaths

Thank you everyone for your incredible messages of support and encouragement.

Many of you asked what it was like in the ER right now. I want to share a bit with you. Please RT:

A Day in the Life of an ER Doc – A Brief Dispatch from the #COVID19 Frontline:

— Craig Spencer MD MPH (@Craig_A_Spencer) March 24, 2020

On a more positive note, my kids seem to be having fun at home. Sasha did a FaceTime call with another 5 year old. They two of them took the phones into their respective bedrooms and talked like teenagers. Sasha climbed up to her top bunk and turned to me and said, “Dad, can you go away. I’m talking with my friend.” Five going on fifteen.

On the other call, Sasha just set up her piano and played it for her friend. It was loud and annoying for her friend but cute for me.

Cases

1. 392,780 — Total deaths: 17,159 (up 1,831 from yesterday – daily increase of 5.4%)
2. USA: 46,481 — Total deaths: 593 (up 122 from yesterday – daily decrease of 7%)
3. Marin: 47 cases (up 9 from yesterday), 0 deaths

Is this still happening? The novelty has definitely worn off and now it is getting inconvenient. I went out of the house yesterday with my kids. We went bike riding around the neighborhood. At first I was really enjoying it and then when i saw my son get close to complete strangers, I got very worried.  Doing this one activity could be the one activity that gets the entire house sick.  Luckily, Hunter didn’t get that close but it I got the message.

People are continuing to suffer around the world, specifically those in small businesses.  This is proving to be faster than 2008 and more destructive:

The nurses and hospital staff are starting to feel the pain

Some of Italian nurses & doctors after long hours of work in intensive care. pic.twitter.com/YAG9oVcgrq

— Travelito (@Travelito24) March 22, 2020

Cases

• World: 350,536 — Total deaths: 15,328 (up 1,736 – daily increase of 3.8% from yesterday)
• USA:  35,225 — U.S. coronavirus case numbers now third-highest in the world. Total deaths: 471 (up 131 – daily increase up 200% from yesterday)
• Marin: 38 cases (up 1 from yesterday), 0 deaths

Finally, this is a funny read about cancelling your homeschool:

We know there are parents out there who can both love their children unconditionally and also teach them Common Core mathematics. If this global pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we are not those parents. Just because we chose to close our homeschool, it does not mean your mother and I do not love you. It means we love you enough to know we can either love you or teach you algebra, not both.

Quick note for the Weekend post: The new album from The Weeknd is good. I particularly like this song:

Our first weekend while under quarantine. It was pretty fun. We went bike riding with the kids, and I went for a run. Upon my return Sasha helped me stretch out and then both H & S did a little workout with me.

I’ve been worried about eating foods at restaurants and ordering food for takeout or delivery. This read about Food Safety  gave me some much-needed facts and is making me less worried. A good read.

In the “I’m not at all surprised department,” the kids in Florida partying are coming down with cases of COVID

College students in Florida test positive for coronavirus after spring break trip https://t.co/bCblpmh7jK pic.twitter.com/wQpb2IWL2y

— WKBN 27 First News (@WKBN) March 22, 2020

I get a weekly newsletter from Eugene Wei and I liked this metaphor he wrote about:

The Never-ending Bottle Episode
In the TV business, a bottle episode is the industry term for an episode that is severely constrained in order to be produced as cheaply as possible; usually, it refers to an episode shot entirely in one location, primarily with cast regulars. Without having to move the crew around and relight multiple locations, and without having to pay non-regular cast members, you can shoot the episode on the cheap.

Some shows have organic bottle episodes (for example, some serial killer show may plan for an episode where our lead profiler interviews the serial killer in his maximum-security prison), but more often it’s because a show has gone off-pattern (TV lingo for off-budget). When that happens, the showrunner announces that episode so-and-so will be a bottle episode, and the writer of said episode nods and then wanders to the bathroom to sob in a stall.

Writers usually hate to be assigned to a bottle episode; it’s like having your birthday on Christmas. You just feel swindled compared to other writers who have the budget to use multiple locations and high-profile guest stars. However, as in many creative endeavors, the constraints can summon untapped reserves of creativity. Such episodes often consist of a lot of people just sitting around and talking to each other. The one I remember most, because of what prompted it, was the “Isaac and Ishmael” episode of West Wing, its season three premiere. It was written and shot quickly and aired several weeks after 9/11, a stand-alone episode outside show continuity, consisting of a series of Socratic dialogues on terrorism and how to deal with it.

We’re living through a version of a real-life bottle episode now, many of us isolated at home because of the Covid-19 pandemic. This is that emergency episode that falls outside the overarching narrative continuity of our lives. I find it challenging to process how life might be forever changed, that while we were going about our daily lives, we missed the transition to a new season, the dark turn in the plot. Even as I bunkered down and haven’t left my condo for 11 days now, I’m not sure I’ve fully accepted that life might be changed quite drastically for the foreseeable future, if not forever. This isn’t a stand-alone episode, from which we’ll return to the core plot branch next week. This novel coronavirus is woven into the ongoing narrative now, forever.

Cases:

• World: 316,187 — Total deaths: 13,592 (up 1,671 – daily increase is down 12% from yesterday)
• USA: 26,747 Total deaths: 340 (up 65 – daily increase is down 7% from yesterday)
• Marin: 37 cases (up 0 from yesterday), 0 deaths

We’re worried about Diane’s medicine. She has bad asthma and needs her inhaler. She has only 1-2 weeks left and she’s worried there will be a run on that medicine as people get sick and she’ll be left without. It’s quite stressful. We’re looking to score some more. Stay tuned.

We are finding our groove a bit in home schooling. Hunter is dining great although he’s telling us that school at home is “way harder” than regular school, which I’m excited to hear

The standing “quaran-time” happy hour is pretty great to have every day.  While we don’t talk about much, it’s been great to see old faces and see how everyone is stressed out, the same as me.

Where we’re at:

The main thing on my mind is that this is going to last a LONG time and that it’s really going to impact a lot oF people. This is confluence of 3 things:

(1) The cases are going up. We’re on a higher trajectory than any other country

No other country has been this far into the pandemic and still had the number of cases growing at the rates the U.S. is seeing.
(https://t.co/yEPNzjICd9) pic.twitter.com/QjoGl0LDgT

— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) March 20, 2020

(2) The reports from hospitals are that they’re running out of supplies already. One hospital has already ordered to stop testing people coming in so they don’t waste the gowns and masks.

This is the parking garage at Vanderbilt Medical right now pic.twitter.com/SRaqoKgJxu

— Nationalize the Action Economy (@thepoeticgopher) March 20, 2020

(3) There are still many areas that are not taking this seriously and not isolating themselves. This all but ensures this is going to spread and that we’re going to be inside for a lot longer than we thought. We needed to get EVERYONE inside and that is just not happening. Yesterday the California governor predicted that 56% of all Californias will get infected.

Friend who lives in Fort Green, Brooklyn told me he walked by three house parties tonight so we are all definitely fucked.

— Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) March 21, 2020

Other Items:

Another crazy moment by our president where he lashed out a reporter:

Q: What do you say to Americans who are scared

TRUMP: “I say that you’re a terrible reporter, that’s what I say.”

Unreal. pic.twitter.com/RJ1aJXJUUh

— Pod Save America (@PodSaveAmerica) March 20, 2020

Cases:

• World: 287,239— Total deaths: 11,921 (up 1883)
• USA: 19,931 — Total deaths: 275 (up 70)
• Marin: 37 cases (up 12), 0 deaths

Countries w/ the largest increases in new #COVID19 cases over the past week:

Cases today [+% increase]

41,035 [+172%]
18,407 [+62%]
17,147 [+307%]
10,999 [+259%]
10,877 [+280%]
10,442 [+726%]
3,863 [+350%]
3,277 [+452%]
2,460 [+206%]
1,843 [+266%]

— Global Health Strategies (@GHS) March 21, 2020

I’m mostly thinking about all the businesses that will go under and fighting to keep Onward from doing so as well.  I had a part-time Onward reach out last night that her other work has all disappeared. I read an interview of some bar and restaurant owners who talked about only being able to survive for a month or two. The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits jumped to its highest level in two years. I don’t see how most businesses can survive for more than a few months. I keep thinking of the forest fire metaphor. It is a terrible and destructive thing but it clears out old brush and allows for new growth. There will be many new businesses that emerge from this and lots of entrenched businesses who go down. It might be a good thing in the long term, but when the fire is raging, it’s very painful and scary.

Physically, I’m a bit worn down. I’m used to moving around more and staying confined to my house isn’t great for me. I need to prioritize walks/runs out the house more.

No major news out of the rest of the world. The USA is getting more serious about the lockdowns with all of California and PA issuing lockdowns, meaning you can’t leave your house except for food and medicine. The rate of deaths in the world and US is increasing – up 36% day-over-day.

Cases:

• Worldwide: 246,275 — Total deaths: 10,038  (up 706)
• USA:  14,250 — Total deaths: 205 (up 55)
• Marin: 25 (up 9), 0 deaths

Where my head’s at:

I’m actually feeling pretty good today. There’s been a bunch of interesting, more positive news that i’ve read lately.

First, the big news is that China has no new cases. This is incredible. As you read from yesterday, my belief is that we have to get to a vaccine or full pollution infection before we can get back to normal. If the China news is true, then that’s NOT the case.

Also, there appears to be a drug in Japan that’s pretty effective in combatting the disease and Ford and General Motors are looking into making medical equipment, including ventilators.

At home, I’ve noticed that home-schooling two kids are at different levels is a challenge. Sasha (age 5) keeps interrupting Hunter (age 7). It’d be easier to just focus on one or have two kids the same age. And, I’m thankful to have a recurring Zoom happy hour video happening with my college friends. We had 13 people jump on a call and share their isolation experiences. For an extrovert like me, it’s nice to be able to chat with others.

Finally, I liked hearing about how pollution is improving around the world. China’s carbon output is way down and the canals in Venice are the clearest they’ve been in decades.

Some interesting things:

1. How not to hate the person you’re quarantined with.
2. Who knew? There’s a video filter to help you look better on Zoom calls.

Cases:

• Global:227,685 cases, 9332 deaths. (up 1,057 from yesterday)
• US:  9,332 cases, 150 deaths (up 35)
• Marin: 16 cases (up 5), 0 deaths

I was talking with various people about the end game today. When does this end? There seem to be 3 outcomes I can think of:

1. A vaccine developed and rolled out. When this happens, we can then begin to treat this like the flu and go back to regular behavior, and just stay away from those who are sick.  This seems to be 9-12 months out. There’s a good article about Moderna, the company who is leading the race to develop the vaccine. It was created by a VC firm and is now a public company.
2. Everybody gets it.  Once almost all people have had it, then a general immunity is there and we all can go back to regular behavior. This seems unlikely but it’s possible. This seems 12 months out too. In this case, the disease is still very dangerous so there would still be fear by those who haven’t gotten the disease yet.
3. Something new happens. I’m not sure what this is but many we develop enough tests that we do massive testing. Any time you leave the house, you test and then when you return, you test.  If there are tests happening daily we could accurately confine those who are sick and keep the public safe.

None of these are happening within 2-3 months. The new normal of social distancing and staying away from crowds seems to be here to stay, at least for a year.  I could see this having some good and bad effects on society. A few that come to mind…

• Bad: Those who are extroverted getting very stressed out and dangerously going out in public
• Bad: Those in bad relationships and marriages having tough times
• Good: People getting really good at video conferencing and FaceTime, and new systems emerging to be able to remotely converse collectively
• Good: Online learning gets way better.

Finally, i have no idea how i’m going to get a haircut.  Perhaps the male hairstyles of this time will all consist of long hair

What’s Happening: Lockdown is happening full effect

• A “shelter in place” order was place on all of California
• Canada-US border is now shut.
• Many schools are closing for the rest of the academic year. I imagine this will be ours too soon.  I’m hearing the first rumblings of closing for the entire CALENDAR year. That’s intense.

Apparently Some people in Florida haven’t gotten the message that this is happening and are hitting the beach

Clearwater Beach, Florida is PACKED today despite “social distancing” recommendations.

We Americans sure can be a dumb lot…pic.twitter.com/LRU06h2d03

— Rex Chapman (@RexChapman) March 16, 2020

Other Items

• Universal theater is now bringing movies to on-demand the same time as it comes to theaters. If this happens more broadly this will kill the windowing system. That hasn’t happened yet but it feels like the end is coming for movie theaters. I love seeing movies in theaters but I also love the convenience of staying home and in this environment, you might as well give films to people in their homes.
• The IRS pushed back the date you need to pay your taxes by 90 days
• Celebrities getting the virus: Idris Elba and Kevin Durant
• Amazon is hiring 100k workers as demand for packages are off the hook.

Stats:

• Worldwide: 207k cases, 8275 deceased
• US: 6436 cases, 115 deceased
• Marin: 11 cases, 0 deceased

Case stats are:

In my area: 9 cases in Marin and 0 deaths

What’s happening?

More and more cities and states are shutting down: New York City, Los Angeles, Illinois and Ohio closed all restaurants and bars.

We remain 10 days behind Italy:

Shockingly there are still people in my community and all around the country still going out, going to restaurants and bars. It hasn’t fully sunk in yet for everyone. 

My situation

I returned home from Toronto in the morning and have quarantined myself in a room. Because I’ve been around lots of people this past week, I’m going to take some precautions until it’s clear that I’m not infected. 

In related news:

Frank Drebin’s spirit is with us:

During a Coronavirus update/meeting this Mayor excused himself to the restroom but forgot to turn off his microphone — and I am now dead… pic.twitter.com/WZ18JQq7cO

— Rex Chapman (@RexChapman) March 16, 2020

Patton Oswald went on his lawn to do an impromptu session:

Watching the videos from Italy inspired me. Entertainers must offer hope & humor to their neighbors in this time of quarantine. pic.twitter.com/ohrsBtuqzu

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 16, 2020

Over the past 4 weeks or so, we all heard about Coronavirus (aka COVID-19) and it’s impact in China and Italy, but didn’t believe it was going to impact us that much in the states. That is, until Italy turned into a war zone.  Then 3 days ago, Rudy Gobert on the Utah Jazz tested positive, which resulted in all NBA games being cancelled. It followed quickly by other leagues, the NCAA, March Madness, the wife of the Canadian Prime Minister, and most shocking of all Tom Hanks!

pic.twitter.com/pgybgIYJdG

— Tom Hanks (@tomhanks) March 12, 2020

Why are in this mess?

Well, at the top of the list I blame Trump. Here’s what he’s done (or not done):

1. The World Health Organization had working tests that the United States refused
2. Researchers at a project in Seattle tried to conduct early tests for the coronavirus but were prevented from doing so by federal officials. (Doctors at the research project eventually decided to perform coronavirus tests without federal approval.)
3. The president reportedly ignored early warnings of the severity of the virus and grew angry at a CDC official who in February warned that an outbreak was inevitable.
4. The Trump administration dismantled the National Security Council’s global-health office, whose purpose was to address global pandemics; we’re now paying the price for that. “We worked very well with that office,” Fauci told Congress. “It would be nice if the office was still there.”
5. Day after day after day he denies reality – trying to do to the coronavirus what Attorney General William Barr did to the Mueller report: lie about it and get away with it. First, He claimed that it was contained in America when it was actually spreading.
6. Then, he claimed that we had “shut it down” when we had not.
7. He claimed that testing was available when it wasn’t.
8. He claimed that the coronavirus will one day disappear “like a miracle”; it won’t.
9. He claimed that a vaccine would be available in months; Fauci says it will not be available for a year or more.

So, where are we?

Current stats are:

What are we doing? 

We’re now attempting to “flatten the curve” by cancelling all schools, closing all workplaces and telling people to work from home, and banning all events over 100 people.

We may face a shortage of ventilators and medical supplies, and hospitals may soon be overwhelmed, certainly if the number of coronavirus cases increases at a rate anything like that in countries such as Italy.

There appear to be WAY too few tests. This thread about the shortage of tests and supplies in a hospital is scary:

THREAD: Yesterday, I spoke with doctors from one of the nation’s leading academic hospitals located in a state where #COVID19 cases are increasing quickly. This is what they told me: They’ve been seeing *many* patients with symptoms concerning for COVID19 who need testing (1/x)

— Vivek Murthy (@vivek_murthy) March 13, 2020

Day to day life is bizarre. Many people are rushing to grocery stores to stock up on essentials.  But the pictures i’m getting friends show the shelves bone-dry.

The borders are being shut. We have banned flights from Europe and Canada just announced they are closing the borders on Monday. We are all isolating ourselves in hopes to “flatten the curve”

What’s my Situation?

I’m currently in Toronto, but scheduled to get back tomorrow morning. That’s good because the borders in Canada close in 36 hours. Our kids are safe but the schools are closed for the next 2 weeks. All upcoming events (weddings, spring break trip) are no cancelled. We’ve stocked up on medicine, food and toilet paper. There’s no meetups happening with other families or groups.

A decision was made pic.twitter.com/qCSDU58BwS

— The Lone Reveler (@ThoughtsCigar) March 13, 2020

Why Remote?

There are lots of benefits to working remote. You can read all about it all over the web and on the Twitter-verse.  I’ve now been doing this over a year and the reasons that resonate with me the most are:

1. No commute. Knocking out the time it takes to drive to/from an office puts hours back in my day.  I never got stressed by the driving. In fact, I always enjoyed the time for podcasts and catching up with people on the phone. However, that lost time was a drag. Now my day is that much more efficient.
2. Autonomy. While I like being in an office and catching up with co-workers, it also has a downside of co-workers constantly interrupting me and my thoughts. It was hard to control my own schedule. Being at home gives me much more control over my calendar and my day.
3. Broader employee pool.  When we’re hiring and looking for a potential colleague, we can now look across the entire planet rather than those who live close by. This has already paid dividends as it’s allowed me to work with my good friend Nader and our awesome early employees who are in Pittsburgh, Texas, and Chicago.

The Challenges

It’s not all fun and roses though.  It took me 4-6 months to get used to working out of my house. It takes discipline to focus on the tasks and not be distracted by an empty messy house. Also, there’s a solitude that took some getting used to. Now that i’m in the groove, I do think it’s a better way to work.

Asynchronous is Key

One of the keys to successfully working with my remote colleagues is to be able to work without communicating in real-time. Because my colleague isn’t right next to me, I have no idea if they are working right now or planning on coming online later. This has lead us to use some new tools that are pretty cool.

Notion

The first, and by far my favorite. This is a combination of Google Docs, Asana and a wiki. Before we had Notion, we had a problem where we didn’t know where to post a home page of operations for our company or a division, or where to post decisions and goals for everyone to see and access easily. We tried Google Docs and also tied making an intranet on Google Sites. Both sucked.  This is exactly what Notion solves.

We now have home pages for the company which has a general company handbook, lists all the tools we use, policies and other generic info. We also have a home page for each group which houses the processes, goals, OKR’s, meeting notes, and more. There’s a good overview of how another business is using Notion here which will give you the idea.

Notion in generally is pretty sweet. As a product, it’s incredibly slick. There is so much complexity that’s displayed so elegantly and simply – it’s really beautiful.  It’s clearly seems to be working. In fact, talk about a fundraise that showcases your awesomeness. They raised $10 million on an $800 million valuation. That’s 1% dilution.  A good interview with the founder is here too.

Lots of geography changes. In 2009, I was living in Los Angeles and moved to Denver at the end of 2009. Since LA till now I’ve moved 5 times: to Denver (Cheeseman), within Denver (to Uptown), to Boulder (Quince Ave.), to Strawberry CA, and then to my current home in Mill Valley, CA.   That’s a lot of packing and unpacking.

Lots of personal relationships.  Diane and I had been dating for one year and had just gotten engaged at the end of 2009. Since then we’ve gotten married, had two awesome kids who are now in 1st grade and the last year of pre-school.

Lots of professional changes. In 2009, I had just left BuzzMedia and started up a company, Kapost, with Tony and Nader. At the time it wasn’t even called Kapost, it was called Collective Ink Systems and then Grogger.  Since then, Kapost grew to be an industry leader in B2B Marketing Operations software and was acquired. I also went to work at Airbnb and started their Airbnb for Work initiative as well as their Airbnb Luxe product.  In 2019, I left Airbnb to start Onward with Nader. It’s now almost a year old.

My health has changed quite a bit. From 2010 to 2017, I weighed between 180 and 195 lbs. and worked out at least 3x a week. Since 2017, I’ve reduced my workouts but have dramatically changed by eating and diet. I now weigh between 165 and 175.

Hello!

It’s been a few months since my last update. Here’s what we’re up to over here at Onward…

A reminder of what we’re doing

We started Onward earlier this year. We’re a new company focused on transportation for older adults or those who need extra assistance. Ever since our families started aging and needing more help, we realized there’s a huge need to have great services available to serve them.

About half of our riders are older adults over the age of 75. The other half are those who have a medical condition and need help getting to and from their appointments.

How are we different from Uber/Lyft?

They provide “curb-to-curb” rides whereas our service conducts “door-to-door” or “door-through-door” service. On pickup, our drivers come to the door and help the rider to the car, take them to their appointments, wait for them and then bring them home.

We also charge by the hour – $35/hour – which allows for us to make multiple stops and get out of the car and help.

What’s our plan?

2019 is a foundational year for us where we want to build out the marketplace of drivers and riders in the Bay Area. We also want to build out the technology platform needed to automate and maintain our service. We are measuring our progress by rides per week and have a goal of 120 rides per week by the end of the year.

How’s it going?

We’ve been busy. We’ve expanded our team to 4 people by hiring two others who focus on our operations and our supply. They are Sarah Pontier and Ben Estevez and both kick serious ass.

We’ve also started doing rides. Our first ride happened in April. Now that we’re in Q3, we’ve done over 900 rides!

Our main channels for finding rides is to partner with assisted living facilities and hospitals, and also many find us via Google and Yelp when looking for transportation.

To make these rides happen, we’ve signed on lots of drivers. Our typical driver persona is a retiree who is very compassionate, looking to help others in their neighborhood and looking for part-time work. They all have CPR certifications and drive their own car.

We’ve built and released our initial version of both the Driver App and the Rider App. These apps help automate our entire ordering and matching process. Rides come in via our Rider app (or website or phone) and then get exposed to our drivers via the Driver App. Drivers can accept or decline any ride they see. In theory, rides will then occur without our team touching them.

How can you help?

We’d also love your help getting the word out to people in the SF Bay Area who have parents or friends who are unable to drive or need a little extra help getting to their appointments.

We also are digging more deeply into the healthcare industry and how we can help out there. If you are knowledgeable about insurance carriers or healthcare providers or know anyone who is, please reach out to me.

Thanks for your support –

Mike

School starts every day 8:15am and I’m pretty happy to get our morning routine back.

Mckenzie and Tracey
Over the past 10-20 years it’s been tough to see Mckenzie during the summer as he spends a good chunk of it in Europe leading archaeological digs. This year he was able to join us after the dig but before the fall school session begins. It was really great to see him. As we get older it’s good to get a good number of days with someone to get a feel for their daily habits and lifestyle.

The big event that occurred was the proposal between the two. One beautiful Thursday night Mckenzie and Tracey went for a walk after dinner. While the dishes were being washed in the Glass House (thanks mom) Mckenzie presented Tracey with a ring he picked up in Florence and asked her to marry him!

We continue to get to know Tracey and she is really awesome. A highlight for me was arguing with her about the differences between Canada and the US and discussing the problems we have here in the US and what some approaches might be to fix them (not a quick convo, as you could imagine). I liked it because the conversation got heated in a way it can between people who like to argue and are family.

…and Georgia
Of course Georgia was in tow and it was really awesome to see Sasha and her (and sometimes Hunter) play together. Sasha and G are the same age (both 4) so they seemed quite comfortable with each other and their playing was incredibly cute.

Hunter did seem a bit left out sometimes but that’s to be expected when there’s only 3 (ahem, we need Reagan next time). But, the three of them did get some good play time in:

Kids and School
Now that our kids are getting older, we’re experiencing Summer break and the chafe that it is for two working parents. Hunter is between kindergarten and 1st grade and is off for the summer and we have to find things for him to do. We cobbled together a series of camps but this means that getting together as a family in the summer is much more logical than in years past

PLP
I haven’t been to my family’s cabin in the Poconos for almost a decade. It is so beautiful. The lake, the river and nature surrounding it are just awesome.

It’s also nice having my parents there and able to see and catch up with other semi-related folks. The cabins could be nicer (especially our Middle Camp) but it is great to have a place to go and have lots of family around.

Diane especially was a fan of the rustic nature of the cabins. Her childhood was spent traveling to Mexico every weekend and staying in half-built homes while they hung out with family and friends while enjoying the natural beauty of the ocean. She got the same feeling this past week, making the whole experience better for her.

We loved and plan on heading back again next year…

Average Uber rider takes 2.3 more rides per month than a Lyft rider. The average number of rides per month is below:

Lyft ave ride is more expensive ($13 vs 7.69). Below is the booking dollars per ride:

Lyft’s average rider spend per month is surprisingly the same as Uber’s

Because their rides are more expensive, Lyft’s take rate (margin) is much higher

In terms of profit per user per month, Lyft has surpassed Uber:

Given Lyft’s growth and lead on gross profit per user, can it grow its way into greater profitability than Uber? Nope. Its costs are increasing whereas Uber’s are decreasing. This is per active operating expenses per month:

And profit per ride has Uber in the lead…

The average driver on Uber takes home almost double the money they do in Lyft:

My general take is that Uber has much more of an international audience which drives down average price of trips. They also are more mature and have a better operating team (in my opinion) and thus are getting better control of costs, even though both are losing a ton.  If I was a betting man, I’d put my money in Uber’s camp although both will probably burn through cash at alarming rates for the next few years.

This year it was noticeable about how many of them were about female empowerment (including the winner of Best Ad of the Year), which makes sense as it’s a topic capturing everyone’s mind share, everywhere.

My favorites of the year were these 5. They are pretty hilarious, cool, strong and, to use the British term, brilliant.

My favorite of the year was strange, ackward and just so funny. I have no idea what the ad is for but it’s still fantastic:

This next one is probably one of the funniest of the bunch, and I never even knew what Marmite was or that it could be so divisive:

This next one is really cute and captured our entire group. Even though it was the first ad we say, we all remembered it at the end

This one is just really cute and in the world we different it’s a great message of how kids don’t see color, race, etc.. Really well done

This one is just so epic. A move (the “tornado”) in a FIFA video game goes viral such that Ronaldo actually does it himself in a game and then goes even more viral to get other athletes to do it also. Really cool idea.

This final one is about the women’s Euro cup. The girl in the video just does a great job and is shows some great skill. Really liked this one

Oh, and I do know that it’s ALSO because I live in the Bay Area. Even though all prices are on the up, the prices here are beyond ridiculous now. See how crazy they are here.

There was a good article in this week’s Business Week about how Uber is helping create “virtual restaurants” that have no in-person customers but exist only to deliver on Uber Eats. Uber brings some unique insight into the demand for existing restaurants.

Sundar says,

Our vision for our assistant is to help you get things done….A common theme across all this is we are working hard to give users back time. We’ve always been obsessed about that at Google. Search is obsessed about getting users to answers quickly and giving them what they want.

Google really wants to start doing things for you and Duplex was super impressive. It is, literally, a computer talking on the phone for you.

Check it out.

 

The move seems to be in response to the recent miss in Model 3 production targets and is very bold in a Musk sort of way.

It’s a great email and I love how he evens gets low-level enough to tell people to walk out of meetings or phone calls if they aren’t well structured.  So good.

Here’s the email:

Progress, Precision and Profit

Elon Musk

Everybody

Progress

First, congratulations are in order! We have now completed our third full week of producing over 2000 Model 3 vehicles. The first week was 2020, the second was 2070 and we just completed 2250 last week, along with 2000 Model S/X vehicles.

This is more than double Tesla’s weekly production rate last year and an amazing feat in the face of many challenges! It is extremely rare for an automotive company to grow the production rate by over 100% from one year to the next. Moreover, there has simultaneously been a significant improvement in quality and build accuracy, which is reflected in positive owner feedback.

Starting today at Giga and tomorrow at Fremont, we will be stopping for three to five days to do a comprehensive set of upgrades. This should set us up for Model 3 production of 3000 to 4000 per week next month.

Another set of upgrades starting in late May should be enough to unlock production capacity of 6000 Model 3 vehicles per week by the end of June. Please note that all areas of Tesla and our suppliers will be required to demonstrate a Model 3 capacity of ~6000/week by building 850 sets of car parts in 24 hours no later than June 30th.

Any Tesla department or supplier that is unable to do this will need to have a very good explanation why not, along with a plan for fixing the problem and present that to me directly. If anyone needs help achieving this, please let me know as soon as possible. We are going to find a way or make a way to get there.

The reason that the burst-build target rate is 6000 and not 5000 per week in June is that we cannot have a number with no margin for error across thousands of internally and externally produced parts and processes, amplified by a complex global logistics chain. Actual production will move as fast as the least lucky and least well-executed part of the entire Tesla production/supply chain system.

By having a Model 3 subsystem burst-build requirement of 6k by the end of June, we will lay the groundwork for achieving a steady 6k/week across the whole Model 3 system a few months later.

As part of the drive towards 6k, all Model 3 production at Fremont will move to 24/7operations. This means that we will be adding another shift to general assembly, body and paint. Please refer anyone you know who you think meets the Tesla bar for talent, drive and trust. Between Fremont and Giga, Tesla will be adding about 400 people per week for several weeks.

Precision

Most of the design tolerances of the Model 3 are already better than any other car in the world. Soon, they will all be better. This is not enough. We will keep going until the Model 3 build precision is a factor of ten better than any other car in the world. I am not kidding.

Our car needs to be designed and built with such accuracy and precision that, if an owner measures dimensions, panel gaps and flushness, and their measurements don’t match the Model 3 specs, it just means that their measuring tape is wrong.

Some parts suppliers will be unwilling or unable to achieve this level of precision. I understand that this will be considered an unreasonable request by some. That’s ok, there are lots of other car companies with much lower standards. They just can’t work with Tesla.

Profit

A fair criticism leveled at Tesla by outside critics is that you’re not a real company unless you generate a profit, meaning simply that revenue exceeds costs. It didn’t make sense to do that until reaching economies of scale, but now we are there.

Going forward, we will be far more rigorous about expenditures. I have asked the Tesla finance team to comb through every expense worldwide, no matter how small, and cut everything that doesn’t have a strong value justification.

All capital or other expenditures above a million dollars, or where a set of related expenses may accumulate to a million dollars over the next 12 months, should be considered on hold until explicitly approved by me. If you are the manager responsible, please make sure you have a detailed, first principles understanding of the supplier quote, including every line item of parts & labor, before we meet.

I have been disappointed to discover how many contractor companies are interwoven throughout Tesla. Often, it is like a Russian nesting doll of contractor, subcontractor, sub-subcontractor, etc. before you finally find someone doing actual work. This means a lot of middle-managers adding cost but not doing anything obviously useful. Also, many contracts are essentially open time & materials, not fixed price and duration, which creates an incentive to turn molehills into mountains, as they never want to end the money train.

There is a very wide range of contractor performance, from excellent to worse than a drunken sloth. All contracting companies should consider the coming week to be a final opportunity to demonstrate excellence. Any that fail to meet the Tesla standard of excellence will have their contracts ended on Monday.

Btw, here are a few productivity recommendations:

– Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short.

– Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved.

– Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.

– Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or processes at Tesla. In general, anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication. We don’t want people to have to memorize a glossary just to function at Tesla.

– Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the “chain of command”. Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.

– A major source of issues is poor communication between depts. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.

– In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a “company rule” is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change.

If there is something you think should be done to make Tesla execute better or allow you to look forward to coming to work more (same thing in the long term), please send a note to [redacted]

Thanks for being such a kickass team and accomplishing miracles every day. It matters. We are burning the midnight oil to burn the midnight oil.

Elon

1/ Apple has a software problem. Here’s how it plans to fix it. https://t.co/dJaikfRhs7 via @markgurman // Let’s take a step back and talk about the broader context and product development at scale. Lots follows…

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

3/ Scanning the landscape, it is important to recognize that in total the work Apple has been doing across hardware, software, services, and even AI/ML — in total — is breathtaking and unprecedented in scope, scale, and quality. Not saying that lightly or trolling. It just is.

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

5/ The pace of change has been remarkable. In the 10 years from when Apple acquired NeXT OS X was reinvented in a completely modern architecture. And in the next 10 years the iPhone went from that code to where we are today.

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

 

7/ Microsoft Office released ever 18-30 months from about 1990-2010 but had a shaky start so you could say that from 1995 it kept that cadence but today puts out mostly modest visible changes to be SaaS like.

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

9/ The only comparable project would be IBM System/360—the creation of IBM 360 hardware and software. The PC of course, but the scale (even at the time) was much less. Windows NT clearly had the scope/scale of software but had been done before (VMS) and built on PC h/w.

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

11/ What is lost in all of this recent discussion is the nuance between features, schedule, and quality. It is like having a discussion with a financial advisor over income, risk, and growth. You don’t just show up and say you want all three and get a “sure”.

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

13/ In practice when building Office (and later Windows) whenever someone on the team would panic and ask “are we date driven, feature driven, or quality driven” we would just roll our eyes and pull up a chair…This was so common we just called it conversation #37 and move on.

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

15/ Customers don’t care about any of that and that’s ok. They just look for what they care about. Each evaluates through their own lens. Apple’s brilliance is in focusing mostly on two audiences—end-users and developers—tending to de-emphasize the whole “techie” crowd, even IT.

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

17/ This approach is rather unique compared to other tech companies that tend to develop new things almost independent of everything else. So new things show up and look bolted on the side of what already exists. (Sure Apple can do that to, but not usually).

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

19/ There’s nothing magic about this. It goes back to a balancing act. Mature orgs just manage this the whole time. There are processes and approaches that you use so you never face the absurd notion that this is a zero sum trade off between quality, schedule, features.

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

21/ What I think it happening at Apple now is not more dramatic than that. What they had been doing got to a point where it needs an adjustment. Reality is that for many at Apple it feels dramatic b/c it might be first time they have gone through a substantial “systems” change.

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

23/ In my view the ‘moment’ is being manufactured a bit right now because of the perception that the Apple products have become less stable or…”buggy”. This is where the “signals” about the state of the world can get confusing.

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

25/ How does that explain general “buggy” feeling w/ so many super smart/skilled people saying products are suffering? It’s because of the depth and scale of usage that comes w/success. A responsibility.

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

27/ I can’t prove this but I’ve also worked on some really big projects where people said the same thing and we had tons of data. Apple has the same data. What is different is that at scale a bug that happens to 0.01% of people is a lot of people. A stadium full or more.

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

29/ The more a product is used the more hyper-sensitive people get to how it works. The human brain is extraordinary in how it recognizes even the slightest changes in responsiveness, performance, and sequencing of operations.

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

31/ But what happens to a team as complexity evolves is simply the challenge of coordination and more importantly consistency or leveling of decisions across a complex system. This is particularly acute if the bulk of the team has only known the previous few years of success.

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

33/ They have more data and understanding to make adjustments than anyone. The only thing I think is fair to say from the outside is that this is not nearly as dramatic as it is getting made out to be…

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

35/ The idea though that this is some massive shift to focus on one dimension of the overall product process: quality OR features OR date is just **nonsense**. Nothing of scale is thought of or executed that way.

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

37/ Big projects run poorly are “date driven” or “we’re getting this whole thing done (famously “second system syndrome”). Lame projects are “we’re fixing bugs” (used to call this “re-indenting all the source code”.

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

39/ Ultimately at MS used to have Conversation 37:
• Eng wants to do nothing but fix code // BUG BUG
• Sales wants new product every year w/new quotas
• Press would like a new thing each month
• Techies —revisit core UI, add options on demand
• IT—no change, ever

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

41/ Some people say “oh consumer products need yearly releases” or “enterprise need constant value for SaaS”. The only thing you need is to do good products when you have them. In the scheme of things market timing except for seasonal-only products isn’t how to scale for 1B.

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

43/ Growth hacking or “move fast break things” sounded great until it wasn’t. This especially doesn’t/never worked in enterprise. Again, adopting a methodology absent building a great product *always* fails. “Internet time” was kind of a bust the first time around.

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

END/ So to me on Apple, even as an outsider, I feel confident saying that this isn’t reactionary/crisis or a response to externalities. Importantly it isn’t a massive pivot/“student body left”. It’s a methodical and predictable evolution of an extremely robust and proven system.

— ??‍Steven Sinofsky ॐ (@stevesi) February 12, 2018

1. They connect to my phone every time, immediately and magically.
2. The charging mechanism is genius. Having the storage compartment be the charger is so smart.
3. Siri is nice on it. Every day, as i’m walking out of work, i pop them in my ear, hear a little noise that notifies me that they are on and connected. I then just double-tap the side of the earphone and say “Call Diane” and, having no idea where my phone is, a call is placed to Diane. It’s a big of magic.

Apparently, i’m not alone. The customer satisfaction surveys around these are off the charts – 98% from all customers with NPS of 75 and many people believing that this is the best Apple invention since the original iPhone.

• I have the LTE option so I don’t need my phone ever to get calls or texts or updates.  While that’s cool and I do leave my phone at my desk at work all of the time now, I am rarely that far away from my phone. So, i never get the chance to really test this feature.
• The battery life is great. I can go almost 3 days without a charge.
• I do wish the watch was smaller. It’s too fat. I want a version that’s slimmer and has half the battery life. I’d be okay with that
• The exercise app is the killer app for me. It keeps me putting it on every day as i want to see my steps, stands, and calories and how it measures up against other days. I’ve always been a sucker for gamification and motivates me.

Hunter
He’s really grown a lot of this year. He’s thoughtful and curious. He has a deep love of animals. His favorite animals this year, in order, were his 2016 favorites of the colossal squid, and then spent the bulk of the year idolizing bats (specifically the Somoan Flying Fox bat which has a wingspan of over 7 feet) and recently he’s super into dinosaurs. He continues to be more cerebral than physical. He’s much more content to sit on the couch drawing than kicking a ball or playing on the playground. We did get him riding a bike later this year. This is hard because it’s so hilly where we live that we can’t go out out front door and ride but rather have to drive to a school or area to do it. We had some issues potty-training him this year but he’s now past that and, in almost all ways, a big kid now.

Sasha
Wow, what a year for her. She’s now talking and convening her thoughts and emotions so well. From a personality standpoint, she’s a force. She’s very strong. She wants what she wants and like what she likes. She’s not afraid to speak up and lead. She often loves to step up and start telling Hunter what to do. She’s super active. From the moment she wakes up, she wants to get out the door and go running and play. She likes to try to keep up with Hunter and does so pretty well. She doesn’t like fruit or vegetables at all (sorry about those genes, sasha). She loves the color pink and is very particular of what she wears and picks out her outfit everyday (Hunter, by contrast, does not care at all). She’s still a total daddy’s girl but increasingly is all about mom too.

The Family
With Sasha getting to 3, we are emerging out of infant zone. The four of us can now take a drive and all talk in one conversation. We can sit at a table in a restaurant and get through the meal without disaster striking. Heck, we’re even talking about a road trip and feeling excited about it. We’re starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel and it looks glorious. I think 2018 will be a great family year.

Diane
She had a huge year. She started a new job at a startup (30 people) called Peerspace. Peerspace is a marketplace similar to Airbnb that offers locations for offsite and events. She’s responsible for host expansion and is loving it. She also crushed being a mom this year. Hunter and Diane have a special bond that is truly great to see and Sasha is typically Daddy’s girl, she currently obsessed with her.

My Job
At Airbnb, there’s a new business unit and I’m running the product group for it. The role was quite a change for me as I am being stretched in new ways. It’s exciting but also exhausting. We have a launch coming up in 2018 so stay tuned.

Diet and Exercise
I ended last year strong and running a lot. That ended almost immediately in 2018. I injured my knee again in January/February and decided to take some time off. I also decide to try a new weight loss tactic. Over the past few years i had been steadily gaining weight and found myself at the beginning of the year at over 195 lbs, the heaviest i’d ever been. I have always relied on running and working out as a way to lose weight and with that being removed due to knee problems, i decided to focus on my eating. I knew I could limit my portions as that’s very hard for me to do. But, i knew that i could limit the number of meals I eat. That seemed doable. So, i started skipping breakfast starting in March. Surprisly, it wasn’t hard to do and it was very effective in cutting calories and thus weight. You can see from the graph below that 2017 was by far my most successful year as i dropped 20 lbs this year and ended at 175.

Turning 40
This was the first year i started to feel old. My knee gave out at the beginning of the year and other aches started to manifest as I went on. There’s more grey hair. Heck, there’s more hair everywhere (hello, ear hair). 40 is an interesting number as I now no longer feel i’m on the upward swing of my life. I’m hitting a middle plateau, at least physically. I’ve peaked. I’m sure i could get back to running 7 min miles, but i’m never going to again run 2 miles under 12 minutes again. I also am getting the least amount of sleep ever. With the kids waking up early and the job going late, i’m burning it at both ends. It’s been an exhausting 6-12 months, and i’m finishing the year feeling old.

That said, we had a fantastic outing to Jackson Hole with the extended family.  Check out that video:

First, the timing on an acquisition is nuts. It takes forever. The process looked like this:
We first found Buzznet. We talk back and forth with Buzznet for months about price and process. Eventually we got an offer. That was a good offer but wasn’t a huge amount. We couldn’t accept until we talked to investors. The investors weren’t happy about it but we convinced them. Then 4 weeks of diligence. Then 3 weeks where Buzznet was squeezing us by not communicating with us at all. We thought the deal was dead. Then we ran out of money, so we got a bridge loan. Then the deal is back on. Before we close I move out to LA and start working there to show good faith. We close but put a good chunk of the money into escrow to protect Buzznet from lawsuits to Qloud. Then the deal closes on and money hits my account. From the day when they inquired to acquire us to the money in the account is almost 5 months.

The entire process was months. There’s not one specific time to celebrate. By the time it finishes, you’re more relieved than ecstatic.

In truth, there wasn’t much celebrating. A dinner with the investors was it. While it looks great on paper, the deal wasn’t that great for the team and Buzznet shut Qloud down anyway so it wasn’t good for the company.

Financially, it was good for me as it gave me a nestegg and compensated me for a few years of not making any money. I bought a condo in Santa Monica, but my life didn’t change.

However, it was an experience I’ll remember forever. The things that stick out in my mind were:

• The Qloud office in Silver Spring. It was bumping with music from Craig. The chatter from Delo and Noah was always hilarious. The swim competitions were amazing.
• Pedro and the Romanians figuring out with a Ukranian consultant how to scale Qloud so the plugin actually worked and could ingest millions of plays a day.
• Sleeping in Toby’s basement.  Standing in his kitchen in Frederick and thinking through the early versions of Qloud
• The feeling of hitting the wall of no users and failure and pivoting
• The fundraising.  Sitting in the car with Toby and blasting the Al Pacino “inches” speech. Also, the reality of getting only one offer and having to take what you can get.
• Facebook’s platform and the growth it enabled for us. You could do so much with them at the time. It was really the wild-west.
• The music. There was so music in my life at that time. We were discovering great tracks every day.

The latest one I’ve heard is that of 5-Hour Energy Drink with founder Manoj Bhargava. I’ve never had the product and frankly have always looked down on it, but the story was fascinating and I found a few great nuggets in the episode.  My favorite nuggets are:

The three best characteristics, according to Manoj, for someone wanting to start a business are (a) Common sense. Don’t get caught up in MBA-Speak.  If it makes sense, do it. If not, don’t do it.  (b) Determination.  Don’t confuse passion with determination.  Passion goes away but to be succussful you have to show up every single day. (c) Urgency. Don’t put off till tomorrow what you can do today. Don’t wait.

1. Qloud. We raised $3.5 million from Steve Case’s Revolution fund (sold for $8.5 to BuzzMedia)
2. Kapost. We’ve raised $20m from Salesforce, Floodgate (SF), Cueball (Boston), LeadEdge Capital (NYC), Tango (CO local), Highway 12 (Idaho fund), Fraser/McCombs (CO), and Access (CO).
3. Onward. We have just recently raised a $1.5m seed round from Matchstick Ventures, Royal Street Ventures and JPK Capital

From these experiences I have pitched (with Toby on the first two) to hundreds of VC firms and learned some non-obvious lessons. These only really apply to Pre-Seed, Seed and Series A.

Here we go:

The Size of Fund Matters
It matters more than you think. It’s probably the biggest indicator of whether or not you’ll be a good fit with your investor. Before you do anything, check out the size of the fund of the VC you’re meeting with. If your company is small and you don’t see how you’re getting to $100m in revenue, you’re way better off raising from a smaller fund. A general rule of thumb I use is: the size of the fund is equal to the minimum sale amount of your company that the investor would be OK with. For instance, you’ve raised from a $20 million fund and you get acquired for $20m. They’re ok with that. But if you’ve raised from a $400m fund and you’ve got an offer to get acquired for $20m, they view that as a failure and a waste of time.

The size of the fund triggers all of the VC’s behavior. At a $400m fund, they have only 4-6 partners and each partner needs to bring home at least $100m in returns (this is rough estimates) thus each company a partner invests in must be capable of getting there. Do the math.

When we were small at Qloud, we knew we were small and likely getting acquired for small amounts. Investors knew it too. That’s why they started throwing out liquidation preferences and things like that to block a small sale from happening.

Early in Kapost we weren’t going after a huge market so we targeted local smaller investors. Now when our market is huge and our opportunity is huge, we’re talking to bigger investors.

Don’t Get Excited
A “yes” and a great meeting still only means “maybe.” A VC never wants to burn a bridge. Their job is about relationships and access to startups. Saying “no” goes against that and will almost never happen. Thus, you’ll always feel like they love you, until they back out – and they’ll do that only if they have to. They’d rather they stay informed and involved indefinitely or until you hit profitability or until you’re a risk of going somewhere else.

Here’s a great quote from First Round Capital partner:

And here’s the deal on the VC side: both partners and associates are paid to get out there and build relationships with promising young companies, but there’s no commitment. Investors want to make sure they get “the call” from founders when they begin fundraising — so they’re motivated to send “happy vibes” in order to stay around the hoop. These happy vibes are heard by a founder’s “happy ears” — often leading the founder to draw false conclusions about the true level of potential VC interest.

So, how do you truly measure a VC’s interest? Look at time spent. That’s a VC’s most valuable resource and I find that they mainly spend time with new companies they truly interested. If you’re getting a lot of time, they like you. If not, then move on.

Finally, it’s not hard to get an initial meeting with a VC, but don’t think that a meeting validates anything or represents interest. It’s their job. Often they’ll take the meeting just to learn about the market.

You’re doing them a favor
This part is related to the attitude and frame of mind you need to have when meeting with a VC. This isn’t an issue for everyone but I see this quite a bit with people fundraising for the first time, and those who have heavy imposter syndrome.

If you go into a meeting with a VC thinking that you’re asking them for money or you’re lucky to be having the conversation, you’re dead. When pitching, remember, you’re not asking for money. You’re sharing with a potential investor your secrets, your hard work, your path for how you’re going to make them money. You’re presenting them with a chance to be a partner and get on board. That is the only way to frame it. If you act like they’re doing you a favor, you’re done.

Related: if you don’t fully believe that your venture will make money, you should solve problem that before pitching.

Intro’s Matter
Anyone can get in front of a VC, but if it’s a cold meeting at a conference or through office hours or something non-personal, you’re starting off in a bad place. You need to be vetted at least a little bit for them to listen. It’d ideal if you come in the door by a referral from someone already in their portfolio. If it’s from someone they like and respect, that’s good too. If it’s from someone they just kind of know, that can work. If it’s not from any of the above, it’s probably not going to happen.

How do you get this intro? Find a company who a VC has invested in and meet with the founder. Build that relationship or at least convince them about your idea. Then ask them to make an intro.

Keep in mind the big 3: Team, Product, Market
Every VC has a different way of evaluating you but it all boils down to team, market and product. When you meet with the VC, make sure you have great answers for those and you need to be great at one of them. If you’re a first time entrepreneur, I’d spend all my time getting my product to be awesome in a good market. That’s the best way to combat an inexperienced team. Mark Zuckerberg is the best example of this.

A good post from Marc Andreesen about why he favors market over the other two categories.

Your secret and your story matters more than the business plan
This is for seed and maybe ‘A’ rounds. You need to know how you’ll make money but more than anything you need a good story. That story should have a secret. Chris Dixon agrees. You’ve started this company for a reason and that reason is unique to you and your background. It’s should be a good story. It highlights why you’re better to capture this opportunity than anyone else. It’s also sheds light as to why nobody else has thought of it.

For instance, at Qloud, we pitched and had a story of that we had been working at the music startup Ruckus for years.  There we were talking to college students about how they consume and find music. From that experience we knew how to solve music discovery. VC’s were interested in what we had learned and how we were going to build that into a product. We were unique. We had a secret.

At Kapost, we saw how media companies were shifting their business technologies to WordPress and Drupal. We saw how the professional media and content business was evolving. We then saw how marketing departments were mimicking journalists. We had studied what worked in content marketing and what didn’t. We were experts. We had a secret. You need one too.

Venture Capital Might Not Be For You

It probably isn’t. As they say at First Round Capital, they are selling jet fuel.

Motorcycles are common (2018: Honda sold 18M motorcycles)

Jet planes are rare (2018: 806 Boeing planes)

VCs sell jet fuel, which doesn’t work in motorcycles

Bad stuff happens if VCs push jet fuel on a bike owner. Or if a bike owner thinks they can fly.https://t.co/cubYfKksGP

— Josh Kopelman (@joshk) January 11, 2019

They want to fund jets – business that are growing fast. You have to be one of these. If you not yet, you should be aware that if you take VC money, then you will need to become one.  Growing organically and methodically is not what most VC’s want. If that’s your plan, don’t partner with venture capital.  The media and the VC industry has led you to believe that raising VC is the correct and best path. That’s not always true. It’s possibly that your market isn’t big enough or your product hasn’t achieved product-market-fit yet.

Good luck!

Time disappearing
I thought we were time constrained when Hunter came along. Well, with two little ones this year, aged 1 and 3, time really got sucked away from me. Less sleep, fewer workouts, fewer books read. All the things I like to do just for me basically went out the door this year. But, they were replaced with more time with my family, which was just fantastic.

Hunter
He really became a full fledged person this year. He’s now funny and clever. He has a bit of trickery and deviousness in him, but he’s shaping up to be a very kind person. His teachers at school regularly remark about how genuine and kind he is. Also, his super power this year is his drawing. He’s very creative and can draw ridiculously well.

Sasha
Still isn’t really talking but is definitely communicating a ton. She is VERY social. This girl also has raw physical power, so much so that Hunter is sometimes frightened by her. She showed us that she’ll be quite a force in the future.

More than anything she is a constant ball of joy. She has a permagrin on her face that melts our hearts. She’s also a Daddy’s girl and i love it.

D
she crushed running the Lewhouse family this year. The kids love her to death. Hunter complains if anyone other than her puts him to sleep. We’ve been married for 6 years now and so far it keeps getting better. I feel incredibly lucky to have such an awesome wife.

New house
In March, we moved to Mill Valley. We love our new house. While it’s the smallest place we’ve lived over the past 8 years, we couldn’t be happier with the house and the
vibe it gives off. It’s nice to finally feel like we’re putting down roots. The house is right by Tam Valley High School and Diane gives us a 70% chance that Hunter goes to school there in 10 years.

Trump
Regardless of what you think of Hillary or Trump, you can’t deny that the craziness around this election was unique. It shouldn’t surprise me that someone who spent decades building a reality TV show was able to craft a story and capture news better than regular politicians, but I wasn’t expecting it to happen so soon or in the way that Donald did it. I also didn’t expect a major candidate to get busted talking about…all of the things he spoke about and live to survive the election, let alone win it. It is something I’ll always remember.

Musicians / Prince
Was a bad year. Prince. David Bowie. Glen Frey. George Michael. Prince was the biggest one for me. His songs were amazing. I love how he wrote songs for other artists and just sent them over. In my mind, behind Dylan he’s probably the biggest, most culturally important Minnesotan. How many people can claim an entire color?

Physical Activities
At the beginning of 2016, I started the year running more than ever. I ran early in the morning and was doing about 80 miles a month and really enjoying it. Then in May I injured my knee. I had surgery and the middle months were spent just recovering, and I hated every second of it. I’m now back to around 40-50 miles/month and wondering what my running future holds. I also have back problems. Probably from lifting/carrying a 1 and 3 year old every damn day. I see lots of yoga in my future.

Overall the year was fantastic and I feel blessed to have such a great immediate and extended family, great old friends and really interesting new ones. I hope to see as many of them/you as possible in 2017.

We decided to pivot the product to become a full-fledged music service.  We also decided to launch our new music service on Facebook before we took it to the main public.

Both decisions were correct and produced great results. 

Our plan was to launch on Facebook a month before our website launch so we could claim, “We already have 10,000 people using Qloud on Facebook” in our press release.  We launched on a Thursday.  That night several of us on the team all went to a baseball game in Baltimore.  At the game, i asked, “How many users do you think we’ll have on Monday?  How many would be a success and how many would be a failure?”  After some deliberation, we thought that if we had less than 1000 it’d be a failure.  If we had more than 5000, it’d be a success.  What happened? We had almost 100,000 users on Qloud by Monday.

After our two months we had 1,000,000 users.  After 4 months we had 5,000,000 users.  We were blowing up.  Lots of good press.

I’ve told this story many times. We completely underestimated how important Facebook would be and how easy it would be to gain users by using their platform.  Nobody in the industry saw that coming.  It quickly became the easiest, cheapest and fastest way to acquire customers.   Because we launched a product on the first day the platform launched we were able to fully capture that opportunity.

————
Read the next post about how we continued to grow —->

Here’s an article in Wired where the CEO and CTO recount how they talked about it.  Jon Badeen (The Chief Strategy Officer) came up with the idea after seeing it done in flash cards in Chegg.  He then showed the rest of the team.

Sean Rad (CEO): We had a five-minute conversation.  It was a cool idea, bt jon thought it would take two weeks to build.  So I said, eh, probably not a priority.  That was right after we launched.  We had a whole set of wings we wanted to do
Ryan Olge (CTO) chimes win with: We wanted to do read receipts, typing notifications, all these things

Then all of the sudden it showed up in the app.  Apparently Jon worked on it over the weekend because he really wanted it.

And now the world has the right and left swipe.

Apple announced the new iPhone 7 yesterday and announced that they are removing the headphone jack.  Some quick thoughts on that…

Short Term Pain

It’s annoying to have to live in a world where my phone does not have a headphone jack as I have many different headphones laying around and to use them I have to use an extra dongle that i have to carry with my phone.  Also, for people who want to listen to music and charge their phone at the same time – a common use for Uber and Lyft drivers, this is now impossible (although i did see this solution). For all of these reasons, I think it will be a pain in the ass for many people – including myself in the short term.

Moving towards the future

I do think that the wireless technology of headphones is underrated and way more advanced than we are aware.  By forcing the issue and making these headphones mandatory, Apple will bring more and more great wireless headphones available.  I can imagine a world in 5 years where everything is wireless.

From my use of the Echo, I does seem that the only thing between the cloud and my is voice. Having a sweet set of headphones that can access it all of the time seems like the right way to go.

The use of the word “courage”

This was totally ridiculous.  Apple, even if you think it, don’t say it.  When you’re causing so much short-term pain to your customer, don’t get up on stage and pat yourself on the back. That was a dumb move.

The Apple eco-system

Now all headphone manufacturers who build a lightning connector are married to the iPhone. Doing this will result in more lock-in than ever before.  This was definitely part of their thought-process when coming to this decision.  Apple loves the lock-in.

Then, disaster struck. A few weeks ago, I injured my left knee in a soccer match. I couldn’t walk at all and definitely couldn’t run. t went to the doctor about a week after the event and after an MRI, we had this conversation: 

Me: What are my options, doc?

Doc: You don’t have to do anything or your can have surgery

Me: What happens if I don’t do anything?

Doc: Well, it’ll just hurt like it does now and you probably won’t be able to run

Me: For how long?

Doc: Forever

Me: When can I schedule surgery? 

I had my knee operated on yesterday. On my way to the hospital, I was pretty nervous. I’ve never has surgery before and I know of people who have had some bad problems from routine knee operations. Being active is a huge part of how I live my life. I basically played soccer every day of my life for over a decade until I was 22 and since then have been working out at least 3 times a week. The thought of not being able to run or be active is very scary.

Here I am a day after the surgery and it seems to have gone well. I’m still on painkillers, so I don’t really know for sure, but I’m optimistic. I should be back up and running soon.  

The next steps is to do some rehab and get back on the road.  

 My goal is 80 more miles in the month of August. Looking forward to it 

Little did we know what would happen. In the morning, this would be the headlines from the papers:

The match started and our seats were fantastic. We were right on the left sideline with a great view of Martial. He was incredible and scored a great goal.

About 10 minutes before half, at 9:15pm, everyone in the stadium heard a massive BOOM. It was loud and I immediately said to Jon, “that sounds like a bomb.”  Even the players noticed.  However, everyone went back to watching the game and the players kept playing.  Here’s how it sounded:

About 5 minutes later, right before half, another BOOM. It was loud. Having never been to a soccer match in the French stadium, i thought that maybe it was something that happens regularly.  Nobody seemed to be miffed about it, so i thought it was just part of the scene.

At halftime, i was standing in line for the restroom with Jon. We saw all the security guards start to close all the gates to the stadium, locking us in. We thought that was pretty strange. We told our other friend Marc, who has lived in France before, about it. He said that it was typical so they can route everyone out a central exit when the game is over. Seemed like a logical answer. We went on watching the game. You can see from this picture that we weren’t yet aware of what was happening:

I really started to think things weren’t right when i noticed there were about 10x more security standing between the crowd and the field. At this point you would think we would be freaking out, but we weren’t. We asked the people behind us if they knew anything. Nothing. Nobody knew a thing and the game continued. Nobody knew that the two blasts were bombs exploding outside the stadium at a fast food restaurant and a brasserie.  Nobody knew that the French President who was at the game was secretly evacuated.

About 15 minutes into halftime, at 9:40, there was another BOOM.  Again nobody paid it any attention and continued to watch the game. When the game finished, we were walking out of the stadium when there was a general announcement that there was an incident outside one part of the stadium.  There was a collective “hmm, that’s interesting,” and they continued to the exits. It was calm but you could lots of sirens going on outside the stadium.

As we were exiting, you could see hundreds of police and hear lots of sirens.  Then, the stadium something happened. I’m not exactly sure what it was but the people at the front of the crowd turned around scared shitless and started running as fast as they could back into the stadium. Everyone else started doing that too. It turned into a stampede. Older people and kids fell to the ground and were getting trampled.  We ran too.  After getting away (about 400 yards) from the area that people were running from jon and I reconnected with Marc and walked the opposite direction. At this point, kids were bawling and sirens were blasting. It was clear that the world was not right. We were very scared, but still in the dark about what was happening.

We finally got out of the stadium and called an Uber.  Miraculously one got to us and we told him to take us home as fast as possible. We got a call from another colleague was at a hotel.  He was walking to dinner when he came across a man in the middle of the street waving a gun. He then saw someone who was shot pouring blood. He ran to a restaurant to get cover, but they weren’t letting people in so he kept running. Eventually he got inside and called us.  Our Uber arrived about 15 minutes later to grab him and we all continued back to our listing.

My night wasn’t nearly as scary as his or some of my other colleagues but it was still unnerving. Not knowing whats happening and seeing fear on the faces of everyone in the crowd is terrifying.

When we got back to our apartment, we got online and devoured the news for hours.  It was then that we learned the facts of the night. The scariest event being the massacre at the Bataclan music club.

At that club, a few gunmen entered with AK rifles and opened fire on the 1500 people.  Most people ran to the exits. Many fell to the ground and tried to cover themselves.  The gunmen continued to fire for 10-15 minutes on the people who were laying on the ground. They reloaded 4 times. Here’s a quote from one survivor,

Ten minutes … 10 horrific minutes where everybody was on the floor covering their head. We heard so many gunshots and the terrorists were very calm, very determined. They reloaded three or four times their weapons. They didn’t shout anything. They didn’t say anything. They were unmasked and wearing black clothes and they were shooting at people on the floor, executing them.

What we know now, the next day, is that there were killings in 7 different locations and about 160 people are confirmed dead. It’s still unclear how many are injured. We also learned that the stadium bombs were supposed to go off later, when we were exiting the stadium and not during the match.

We found out today that there were 3 terrorist outside the stadium.  The first tried to get into the stadium and when security discovered the bomb on his chest, he backed away and detonated. Then the 2nd one went off 5 minutes later.  The police then found the 3rd person and as they pursued him, he donated himself.   This is why the police at the stadium wanted us to stay in the arena. I’m so thankful that their plan failed.

My company picked Paris in November as the time and location for our big annual conference to send 600 employees. We also choose Friday night as the night to spend out exploring the city. Almost everyone spent the night in and around the areas of the shootings. Talk about bad timing. While many of them were next to the events, luckily nobody was harmed.

I feel extremely lucky and now all my thoughts are around getting home and getting back to my family.

The film composer Tom Holkenborg talked about how he keeps getting film work in this article. He says:

If you talk to other film composers and to people who work in the industry, the fact that you’re an original, talented musician is a given fact. What is left then? It’s, how are you as a person in a room? Do you deliver on time? Do you make the movie better? Do you understand what the director wants? Can you walk that really fine line of politics when things get sour and you help solve the problem?

– Tom Holkenborg, aka JUNKIE XL, composer of “Mad Max: Fury Road” and “Black Mass”

I love this.  This is how I feel about work too.  The fact that you’re talented and can actually do the work really well has become a given. You have to be able to go beyond that and be both great at what you do and good at actually working WITH people.

It seems that three trends are converging to shape our future:

1. Electric cars are becoming a real option.  This changes the game by making the hard part of building a car shift from making an engine to making a battery. This is a much different, and much easier, problem.  Opens the market to many more and different companies. 
2. Self-Driving cars.  This has been happening at Google for over a decade. Now Tesla has one, so does Audi and BMW, and Uber has said this is the future and is pouring resources into it. Apparently the only hard parts remaining for self-driving cars to figure out is how to drive in bad weather and how to see through fog and haze.  I’d say that lots of humans struggle in these areas too. 
3. On-demand cars.  You can call a car at the push of a button.  Uber and Lyft’s come to me  in under 3 minutes now.  They are everywhere and growing.

The mix of all three of these make for some interesting scenarios.  Some quick ones that i’ve been pondering about:

1. In the future, you own a self driving car.  You go to dinner in the city and it drops you off at the restaurant. It then can drive around the city and pick up people (like an Uber) and make some quick cash.  Will we allow just any self-driving car to do this?
2. What do the interior of these new self-driving cars look like?  You don’t have to face forward and you don’t have to have a dashboard. You don’t even have to sit up — you could be lying down and sleeping while they drive.  The extra sleep or productive time I would gain from a self-driving car is hours a day week and days a month.  The found time would be incredible. 
3. In the future, do people even own cars or are there just a lot of on-demand vehicles of them out there that are available on demand?
4. Self-driving cars have better collision detection that humans.  They can communicate with cars around them and decide on where they are going ahead of time. In that case, do we even have lanes on the road anymore? Do we have stop signs and stoplights?  Are there a lot more bicyclists because you know it’s 100% safe to ride your bike on the road?
5. Who makes all of these cars? The car industry is $1 trillion. To put that into perspective: the global advertising industry is $500 billion.  The 3 luxury car manufacturers of BMW, Lexus an Audi make up a market about the same size of the iPhone market.  There are very few things in this world that are as big as the car industry. So, you can see why it’d be enticing for Apple to get into this game.

It’s interesting that Uber thinks of the driver as a major cost issue in their platform and getting rid of the driver gets rid of 70% of the costs of a trip.  This is why they are aggressively exploring “smart routes” and Uber Pools as 1.0 version of driverless cars. 

I’ve noticed that some of the people I talk to about this are hesitant or resistant to this future. People love their cars. I know that i do.  But i have to imagine that people use to love their horses too.  In fact, i’m guessing that people liked horses back in the day more than we like cars now.

The problem was that they didn’t really have a good idea for their company.  After a few weeks of discussing what to do with mentors, they decided to make smart hotel room keys.  Keys that could be controlled by your smart phone.  It was a huge market and seemed destined to be a successful company.  There was one issue with their plan: they totally weren’t into it.  One of their mentors asked them “What do you guys do in your spare time?”  They replied that they played games.  He responded, “why don’t you do that instead?”  And thus the robotic ball, the original Sphero, was born.

Five years later the balls are better, faster and in more styles (check out Ollie, he’s awesome).  They just yesterday released the coolest version yet, the Droid BB-8 that will be featured in the upcoming Star Wars film.

These two guys went from nothing in the basement in Boulder to producing with Disney the coolest toy in the world. A huge congratulations to them. Well done!

Towards the end of 2007, we knew we had great growth but an unsustainable business model. We also knew that we were running out of cash. Both Toby and I felt that we had to exit this company or raise a big round of funding. We didn’t think the big round was possible, so we started looking for an exit.

One company that we thought would be interesting was Buzznet. This was a new music-oriented social network that was part social network and part blog network. It was growing quickly and had Universal Music as a main investor. They seemed like a good candidate. Our board member, Jim Bankoff, knew their CEO well and made an introduction. Nothing happened.

Then a fellow named Happy Walters came into Revolution’s offices (where we worked). We met him and he said he also knew Tyler and could make a connection. Nothing really happened.

A few weeks later we were in Los Angeles for some reason and we were talking about Buzznet and Toby and I decided to do a tactic that is unconventional but always works. We stopped by unannounced in person. We just went to their office and asked if Tyler Goldman was available. If you show up, you at least will have them come say hi and tell you in person that they aren’t available. That’s what happened, but that got us on his radar and started the conversation.

When we talked to we flat out told him that we would amenable to an acquisition. He thought that sounded interesting and followed up a week or two later that he had talked with the board and they would like to pursue what it looks like also. A few meetings later (including a trip I took to Happy’s ranch in Montana) and we had an offer from them to get acquired for $10 million. We were also going back and forth with MTV/Viacom about an acquisition so we had some competition that kept it interesting.

This would be a good outcome for us as we had raised only $3 million and would land us in a place where we could really grow the business.

We also had to convince Steve Case and Revolution about the deal. I’ll never forget a meeting we had in his office once the offer came. He sat Toby and I down and said something like,

“I started America Online in the 80’s. It took us years to get traction. We built little by little and it was hard but steady. During that time I had many offers to get acquired. I turned down all of them and built AOL up to be worth over a hundred billion dollars. You guys get your first offer and you want to sell?”

Toby’s response was classic. He replied, “Steve, I sincerely appreciate your success at AOL. But, I’m poor. I’ve been building a startup with no salary for two years. I have 3 kids. This deal changes my life. I understand what you’re saying, but we want to sell.”

To Steve’s credit he immediately said, “Okay, then let’s do it.” And that was that.

The story doesn’t end there. Tyler Goldman is killer and he’ll squeeze blood anyway he can. Through the diligence he saw our bank account and knew that we were running out of cash. He then went silent. He refused to return emails and phone calls from anyone. He waited weeks for us to burn through cash. Then when he finally re-emerged, knowing we had no cash in the bank, he said there’s a new deal on the table for $9 million. Take it or leave it. It was a dick move but we had no other options so we took it. I truly think he would have kept bleeding us if he didn’t have to work with us afterwards.

Of course the deal was all cash, which is what we wanted because we were doubtful of Buzznet’s success. But Case wanted “some skin in the game” in case it did great so we switched the deal to be have stock and half equity. Of course, Tyler ran Buzznet into the ground just 3 years later and its stock became worthless. So, that “skin in the game” decision was really painful.

The sale happened in Spring of 2008. We all moved out to Los Angeles except one of us. I was now SVP of Product for all of Buzznet. Qloud now had a home and licensed music. But, when the financial crisis hit later that year, Tyler shut Qloud down and the service was killed. We went on to work on the rest of the Buzznet business. All in all, the actual service that had 10’s of millions of users only existed for maybe 9 months.

The idea is that people in open networks have unique challenges and perspectives.  Because these curious folk are part of multiple groups, they have unique relationships, experiences, and knowledge that other people in their groups don’t.  These views lead to more and better opportunities. 

 The chart for this is:

It also interesting to see how this played out with Steve Jobs. He always advocated for diversity of experiences. In a Wired interview in 1995, he said: 

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.
It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences.
So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

I love this position. The experiencing of different industries, different cultures and different perspectives is a great goal to have. 

Once we launched, we grew extremely fast. I have to say that being part of a company that is blowing up is really really fun. Everyone is constantly happy. As a product person, this is what you work for and when it happens, it feels great.

We did some things that were shady and other things were legit and very smart. Some things we did:

1. We wouldn’t let you use the application unless you invited 25 friends. We had a nice UI that let you quickly select 25 faces and then it would open. While extremely annoying, it worked really well.
2. We integrated deeply into the new feed. We knew all of our users play history, including from iTunes and we’d launch really interesting news feed items to friends that read, “Of all the songs played last week by your friends, here are the 3 not in your library. Click here to play.” This is great music discovery, right in your news feed.
3. We started understanding and using the link sharing networks. Lots of other apps were selling the ability to recommend users download other apps. You could buy space there and buy installs. We experimented a lot with all of them.  Some were pretty cheap and effective.  Interestingly, Steve Case really dug into this too. For someone with his success, we was not afraid to get into the weeds. I also give a lot of credit to our lawyer and BD guy here, Jim Delorenzo (now head of Sports at Amazon), for this success as he really figured it out.

I give Noah R-S (now Chief Product Officer at DailyMail) a lot of credit for hacking Facebook. He understood it at a level that probably only a few dozen in the world did.

We also started exploring a business model by selling links to ringtones.

Our growth was so fast that we’d get lots of calls from record labels and lawyers asking to shut us down. They saw the streams happening on Qloud and wanted it to stop. It took them a while to realize that we had co-opted YouTube for the streams.

—————————–

The next post is about how we sold to Buzznet. Read it here.

That is, until i met Luxe.  They are an on-demand valet service.  About 10 minutes before you arrive somewhere, you open the app and drop a pin at where you’re going.  They will then have someone meet you there who will then take your car and park it for you in one of their lots.  The valets cruise around on little foot scooters which they put into your trunk when they take your car.

Also, you can have them bring your car to a different spot than where you dropped it off.  So, on a friday night if I meet my friend at his house and then we walk to dinner and then take a Lyft/Uber to a movie/show somewhere, i can then have my car delivered to me once we’re all done so I can drive home.

The price is what makes it doable.  It’s $5 an hour or $15 daily max. It’s less than most garages in the city but with more convenience.

They also have a $300 monthly unlimited use rate which is also cool if you want to use it for work or if you don’t have a parking spot at home.  I somehow doubt that it’s that profitable, or profitable at all as a business, but if VC’s want to fund my convenience, i’ll take them up on that offer.

Note: they just switched all of the employees to be W2 workers.  Interesting.

The year is 2007 and we’re building as fast as we can our new music service.  It’s going to be a full-powered music streaming service on top of a collaborative music search engine and it’s going to be sweet.

Before we launched I went out to lunch with Sean Parker (known by many of you as Justin Timberlake in the movie The Social Network).  At the time he had left Facebook and was about a year into his new VC gig at Founders Fund.  We sat down to lunch and the subject immediately turned to our upcoming launch. He asked, “Hey, do you know about Facebook’s platform?”  I didn’t and he went to explain it to me.  Basically FB needed a way to expand and what better way than have companies build their product in to Facebook.  While the 3rd party companies would provide the development, Facebook would allow you to message and add their users as your users.  It sounded cool.

I went back to the team and explained this upcoming launch.  I got in touch with Dave Morin (yep, the Path founder used to be head of Facebook platform) and he gave us access to the platform.  Our plan was to build a subset of our service on Facebook and gain some early users.  Then, when we launched our new website we could make a claim that says, “We already have 10,000 users on Facebook.”

It did not go that way at all.

Launching on Facebook right when the Platform was launching was probably one of the best things we did. Because it was new, it had a bunch of early adopters.  It also had a bunch of loopholes that allowed us to market and message millions of users.  If you remember getting a ton of requests to join some stupid game, that was the platform.  We used to do things like “You can’t install our app unless you invite 30 friends.” and people did it.

Of course Facebook wasn’t happy about this, but we weren’t going to stop.  Kudos goes to our colleague Noah who really figured out how to growth hack the crap out of it.

Lessons learned: at both Kapost and Qloud, we grew because we attached ourselves to a tidal wave in the industry. In Qloud it was the Facebook platform and Kapost it was Content Marketing.  Facebook eventually would shut down the platform but not until much later.  Heck, even Zynga used it to become a billion dollar company leveraging Facebook’s platform. Sometimes the bright and shiny new thing in the industry is worth going after.

The next post is about the actual launch. Check that out here.

Here’s my logic. What do you do most on your computer?  You read web pages from top to bottom.  Because of this, your page is maximized from top to bottom and you spend most of your time scrolling.  There is usually extra space to the sides of the page. 

Why then, do you take up extra space on the bottom of the page with a dock?  You are constrained vertically but have surplus horizontally.  It makes so much sense for you to have your dock on the left or the right. 

If you have it on the bottom and set to hide that solves most of the problem, but because you scroll so much up and down, you can hit your dock by accident a bit.  But it works.   

My rant for the day. 

The article states that there are 4 types of businesses in the world: 

• Asset Builders: These companies build, develop, and lease physical assets to make, market, distribute, and sell physical things. Examples include Ford, Wal-Mart, and FedEx.
• Service Providers: These companies hire employees who provide services to customers or produce billable hours for which they charge. Examples include United Healthcare, Accenture, and JP Morgan.
• Technology Creators: These companies develop and sell intellectual property such as software, analytics, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology. Examples include Microsoft, Oracle, and Amgen.
• Network Orchestrators. These companies create a network of peers in which the participants interact and share in the value creation. They may sell products or services, build relationships, share advice, give reviews, collaborate, co-create and more. Examples include eBay, Red Hat, and Visa, Uber, Tripadvisor, and Alibaba.

And of those four, the Network Orchestrators are rewarded the most in the market: 

Because they actually generate better business numbers:

It makes sense as these businesses can scale faster and more efficiently than any traditional business.  I’m always a bit amazed that eBay isn’t more recognized as the leader and pioneer in this category.  What they did 15 years ago is what many of the marketplaces are trying to replicate today.  Kudos to them. 

That’s it.  Just wanted to share the article…