Welcome to Hawaii. These are some of my favorite restaurants and photos from my visit to Hilo, Hawaii in February 2019. Or jump down to my diary entry.

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Above my desk I have a cork board. It has collected random slices of my life. Photos, quotes, comics, art, ephemera, customer loyalty cards, unused stamps, and more.

Here are some of the things on my cork board in February 2019:

Photos

Museum Hack company party at the American Museum of Natural History. Fall of 2014, I think? Left to right is: Jess, Ethan Angelica, Mark Kennedy, Kate Downey, Lia Tamborra, Zak Martelluci, Michelle Roginsky, me, Jessye Herrell, Michelle Yee, Dustin Growick, Michelle’s boyfriend, and Nora Boyd.

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Indie.vc believes that the unicorn fundraising model has ruined a lot of businesses. “With each round of funding, you die a little bit more.”

I attended a presentation by Bryce Roberts on a rainy Friday morning in Manhattan to hear about an alternative way for startups to raise capital. We met near Grand Central Terminal at 8am, 8 February 2019. James Nord from Fohr would later make a guest appearance and offer a testimonial as a successful example.

Bryce started with a joke: “Are you all ready to trash some VCs?”

Bryce Roberts, the Founder of Indie.vc, looking up at slides during the NYC road show for v3 this morning

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The…

The Apollo Circle at the Metropolitan Museum of Art hosted a night with curator Randall Griffey on 16 January 2019.

We learned about the museum’s new exhibit, Epic Abstraction. It has gotten a lot of attention which is best described as “bumpy.”

Me near the back entrance to the Epic Abstraction exhibit on the 2nd floor at the Met Museum

Pollock to Herrera: This title of the show represents in Pollock the collection strength, and in Herrera the aspirational collection growth.

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These are a few interesting articles that I read over the weekend and this morning. I’m experimenting with sharing them in a digest on my blog. One of my goals for 2019 is to write and publish more — Nick

College and frats: Notes from the article “The Future of Frats is Female” that a new friend who is in one of these co-ed fraternities shared to me:

• Involvement in Greek life at American colleges has grown in recent years. “Nearly 400,000 men belong to fraternities, an increase of 50 percent in the past decade.”

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Everything from the best costume on Amazon, massage balls, cat scratchers, and NYC advice. This is a guest post by one of my best friends, Danielle Strle. She presented this list at my Birthday Conference Party 2018.

Danielle Strle and Nick Gray at my Birthday Conference 2018

Slides from Danielle Strle’s keynote at the Nick Gray Birthday Conference 2018

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Wim Hof yells a lot.

We are supposed to start our Wim Hof Experience at 9:30am.

But Wim can’t hold himself back from a ready audience. And at 9:17am he jumps out on stage. He cheers the crowd, runs around, and yells. The crowd cheers back.

As a public speaker, Wim Hof is incredible.

Not so much because of his perfect cadence or beautifully crafted narratives. In fact, his English is not perfect. And he is prone to losing this train of thought.

Wim Hof is an incredible public speaker because he speaks from his heart. He projects so passionately, and with more energy than most, that you think he just might self-combust one day and turn into a star.

He is just as likely to launch into a scientific diatribe about cholesterol as he is to pick up a guitar and lead the crowd in song.

We did both of those things. And we also sat in an ice bath for two minutes straight, much longer than I thought was possible.

Afterwards, I felt incredible.

These are my notes from the Wim Hof Experience, also called the Wim Hof Method Weekend, that took place in Brooklyn, New York on Sunday, 18 Nov 2018.

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