Thanks to Mark Suster of GRP for the shoutout on how to present… Clearstone incubated Geodelic’s Twiistup presentation has been in high demand. Imagine how much fun board meetings are!
The Google Borg cometh. One of my favorite videos poking fun at the power of the Google. You would think someone there would have already trademarked Streamline Advertising and Pissads
My parents recently celebrated their forty-something wedding anniversary. It would be an understatement to say that their commitment to their family and one another has impacted my life in a tremendously positive way. Thankfully, they were willing to come down and share it with us in Walnut Creek.
In honor of their big day, they permitted me to cook for them, meaning they also of course had to promise no complaints, which is important when you see the amount of fat these luscious pieces of la vaca render. And so it was that I fired up Muller Road Kitchen Stadium for the ”As Seen at Bistro Jeanty” Daube de Boef (Beef Cheeks) meal with creamy polenta, roasted baby carrots and peas. These are the cheeks before:
And if you can stomach it, these are the Beef Cheeks BEFORE being trimmed (Note to readers….this is highly disgusting and has a propensity to cause mass emesis! And these are the cheeks after 3.5 hours of tender love at 350 degrees:
Thanks Mom and Dad for sharing your days with us!
PS: The verdict came in. Guilty as charged. The meat was sinful and melted in the mouth and company “claimed” the meal was better than restaurant quality, which I take to mean that they didn’t have to pick up the tab and nobody vomited.
I watched Man on Wire last night, the compelling documentary chronicling the successful and criminal wire walking exploits of Phillipe Petit, his 6 years of planning for, and his crossing of the World Trade Center Towers in 1974. While watching the movie, which by the way I highly recommend, I was most struck by two things. The first was the clear and utter genius of Phillipe Petit. The second was the degree to which his “posse” would go to support his ambition.
To be sure, genius comes in many forms. But it is often much harder to define, than to just experience and know. For some, genius was the first time they listened to Beethoven’s Symphony Number 9 or watched Michael Jordan beat the Utah Jazz in the NBA Finals or Rafael Nadal beat Roger Federer for his first Wimbledon championship. For others, perhaps it was watching Steve Wiebe get to the kill screen on Donkey Kong. For Phillipe Petit, his genius, his extraordinary creative power, was in not only daring to believe that the seemingly impossible, was possible, not only daring to believe that the undoable was worth doing, but also in doing it.
While the documentary is a revealing insight into the capacity of the human mind to dream beyond, and the human spirit to achieve those dreams, it also got me thinking about genius in a more relevant setting, that of a venture capital investor on Sand Hill Road.
As someone who sees 10 new entrepreneurs per week on average, pitching new business ideas, I’m quite aware that genius is the siren song of the venture capitalist. They, or the companies they represent, stand out, like true works of art. And while many times it is hard to articulate why they stand out, like Justice Potter Stewart said about pornography, ”you know it when you see it”. And so we chase them, and fund them. And often, they work out fantastically well.
But that is only half the story. Yes, we often are attracted, like a moth to light, to genius, and we are often shackled by our own needs to believe–our own blind love for the genius. Like Petit, to accomplish the impossible, to scale the towers that had just been built, required immense surreptitious coordination and support. And coordination that would require its crew be both willing and able to take on the obvious legal risk involved, but also the immense personal risk knowing that their actions could quite possibly lead directly to the death of Petit. But therein lies the power of genius. It attracts and reels in sycophants willing to go to inordinate lengths ignoring fact and truth, to support the ambition of genius. Such is the power over its followers.
So what again does this have to do with venture capital? It has everything to do with venture capital. Because like the sycophants that helped Petit achieve his dream, however strange it was, Sand Hill Road is the sycophant of genius. And like Petit’s love interest in the movie, who subjugated her dreams to help Petit reach his, only to find him immediately abandoning her after his conquest, genius in Silicon Valley can also be the kryptonite of venture capitalists (no, i’m not implying in ANY way that VC’s are supermen!) if they don’t take great lengths to focus intensely on the realities of building businesses rather than the glare of the white hot light of the genius. And that, that is the genius of the best venture capitalists!
