A Startup is like a Mosquito

3 comments

From an essay titled How to Make Wealth...

"A startup is a like a mosquito. A bear can absorb a hit and a crab is armored against one, but a mosquito is designed for one thing: to score. No energy is wasted on defense. The defense of mosquitos, as a species, is that there are a lot of them, but this is little consolation to the individual mosquito."

Wednesday night I-should-be-swimming-now updates

3 comments

First, a big THANK YOU to Scott Hurff for my blog design update!
And now, the random personal notes that make this blog famous...

A NICE NEW KING AIR 350

• More than 6,100 Beechcraft King Airs have been sold since the product line was introduced in 1964. It is the most successful series of turboprop aircraft in the world.
• From 2000 to 2005, there were 18 charter business jet accidents in the United States with 31 fatalities. None of these involved Wyvern compliant flights. (Wyvern is a type of certification that a private jet charter company can pay for. Generally speaking, your pilots just need to be much more experienced.)
• Funny line I read in the book 'The End of Medicine' by Andy Kessler -- "It's like smoking through your tracheotomy - don't knock it until you've tried it."
• I went to DC and NYC two weekends ago, it was great.

Upcoming travel to DC and NYC

2 comments

I will be in Washington, DC on Thursday - Sunday, then in Manhattan on Monday and Tuesday morning.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Special Bonus Random Notes ~ ~ ~ ~

I was looking through some old email drafts and found a note that I never blogged. This must have been from about six months ago and I wrote it after lunch one day.

I just overheard a conversation about the merits of fescue, caterpillar and bermuda grass. It was at lunch in the office. Someone asked, "What color is your fescue?" And the man thought for a second before saying, "Light green." I asked, "What color is caterpillar grass?" And everyone was quick to answer, "Dark, dark green." We talked a bit more about the importance of aerating your yard and what time is the best to water (4am).

What follows are some random quotes. You can agree or disagree with them - but extra points if you can name any of the authors.

1. Moving fast is not the same as going somewhere.
2. The seventh day is meant for rest.
3. Support our troops.
4. Early to bed, early to rise makes a young man healthy, wealthy and wise.
5. Well done is better than well said.

CollegeHumor.com, Connected Ventures and IAC

1 comments

It was announced today that Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp purchased a controlling interest in Connected Ventures, the parent company of CollegeHumor.com, BustedTees, Vimeo, etc.

I am very lucky to personally know the four founders of Connected Ventures. When you think about the company that my friends are joining... this is a REALLY BIG DEAL.

Now please allow me to brag about my friends for a few minutes. Let me state now that I had absolutely nothing to do with their success.

First, to all of the haters who think "I could have done that!" and "It's just pictures of beer cans and shamings.".... You're wrong. Just think about all of the things that you never see that come with running a website with 200 million pageviews per month. Things like DDoS attacks, content distribution deals, partnerships with other media outlets, investments from outsiders, lawsuits from sorority girls, and patents on merchandise.

I will make a bet that the founders spend upwards of 80% of their time on things that the public will never interface with. It happens all of the time in start-ups that blow up and nobody knows.

So for all of the things that everybody sees - like pictures that make me laugh and Vimeo friends that make my heart warm - I thank Josh, Ricky, Zach and Jakob. It is still a free website.

There is no way to characterize these guys, but I will do my best to give them each a little honest compliment below.

Josh Abramson has always been the elusive CollegeHumor co-founder. He has only written on CollegeHumor.com once or twice. Josh does not keep a web page on the public internet. I hardly know him - but he plays for keeps and he has actually punched someone from Zilo in the face (REDACTED).

Just like Jay Z used his hip hop rapping skills to open white-collar doors, Ricky Van Veen used his humor and email forwards to break the big time. Now Ricky manages a stable of talented writers. He also is in charge of the company's Hollywood movie production with Paramount. In 2002 Ricky produced a TV show with some interviews that I did with the cast of 'American Pie 2'. My interview with Eugene Levy, which was the best part of the whole weekend in Malibu, was entirely coached by Ricky. He has a good eye for what college kids enjoy. That is a compliment today.

What Zach Klein and Jakob Lodwick did to CollegeHumor is like what the Miracle Grow commercials promise from plants. Jakob helped add a link exchange program, automated much of the back-end content integration, and most recently launched Vimeo. Today he is a project manager and keeps others in the company from over-engineering things.

Zach Klein knows me better than anybody else. He was my roommate for two years in college. Zach brings a sense of design to CollegeHumor - and he has been instrumental in launching BustedTees and growing the bottom line. Zach worked for the company out of his dorm room our senior year at WFU when all of the other guys were in San Diego. See the bevel and gradient in the CollegeHumor logo? Notice the nice rounded corners on the home page, the readable OnMouseOvers and the perfectly balanced DIVs? If you didn't notice those things, that's fine. Because like good architecture, sometimes the best design just looks natural.

Congratulations, guys. This wasn't luck and this isn't a bubble. You deserve it all.

Really Quick Friday Personal Notes

2 comments

Friday's Sunrise, originally uploaded by nickgraywfu.

• I got a cool SanDisk SD + USB combo card for my mom's new digital camera. The memory card folds in half so you can plug it directly into your USB port. It is definitely a big time-saver so she no longer has to use a docking station. $55 for the 1GB model, and you can also use it as a USB thumb drive. Search on Amazon.com for SDSDPH-1024-901.
• I thought I had a really great swim last night, but today my left elbow sort of hurts.
• My little sister (pictures) left for college yesterday. She will be at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas for the next four years. Emily is going to have so much fun, but of course we will miss her.
• Speaking of yesterday... It was crazy at the office! We are really getting a lot accomplished. My coworkers make me proud to be a part of a small American electronics company. They are smart and work hard.
• I tip my hat to all of my friends who live alone in a big city. Kudos to you.
• The two best hang-outs I have had with my sister have been our Thailand trip (July 2005) and our NYC trip (June 2006). She and I did some killer shopping in the JJ market in BKK and rode elephants up in the mountains near Burma and Laos with our parents. Then in NYC, Emily and I spent a lot of time talking and planning the trip beforehand to think of touristy things to do. And Zach had an awesome party that we loved.
• One of my sister's study abroad options is in Taipei, Taiwan. I hope she picks that.
• Random friend notes... Noah in California just got back from teaching summer camp in Korea for two weeks. Kaushal in Bangalore just quit his job at Microsoft and is taking an entrepreneurial sabbatical. Katey in Manhattan got a nice new apartment. Casey in Manhattan moved into his own co-op.
• If you are trying to get to know me by reading my blog, stop! Give me a call at 404-518-9842 so that I can make a proper introduction.

Hiccups after eating Waffle Fries

8 comments

I get violent hiccups every time I eat waffle fries. Sometimes the hiccups will not go away for ten or twenty minutes. It is strange, but it happens like clockwork whenever I eat waffle potato fries from Chic-Fil-A.

Does this happen to anybody else with certain foods? Any why does it happen?

Thursday morning personal notes - Cool Summer Edition

0 comments

• Whatever gets your time, for better or worse, gets strengthened.
• Those things that receive the greatest quantity, highest quality, most precious focus and greatest time grow the most.
• Whatever gets no time eventually dies.

If I had six hours to cut down a tree, I'd spend four hours sharpening the axe.
Abraham Lincoln

• I finished the book Den of Thieves. It made me damn proud to be an American. Some amazing people gave their careers to bring to justice the insider trading ruckus of the 1980's.
• I read Predator's Ball a few months ago and I used to be sort of obsessed with the idea of Michael Milken. Sorry if this is cliche for my older readers, but when Milken was the most popular financier in the world I was only three or four years old. What I liked about Mike was that he was someone who woke up at 3:30am every day and worked for 12 or 15 hours. Reading Den of Thieves put that idea in its place. After finishing the last chapter of the book, my heart was racing and I just went and sat in my car to think for a while.
• A quote from p408 said that one of the protagonists walked around the office with a big button that said,

  STRESS
  That's what happens when the mind overrides the body's need to kick the shit out of someone who justly deserves it.

• Part 91 - General Aviation (all aviation other than military or commercial)
• Part 121 - Major passenger airlines and cargo flights
• Part 135 - On-demand Charter operations, Scheduled flights with fewer than ten seats, and unscheduled cargo flights