Adapting to the recent economic downturn, I’m brushing up on my rodent killing skills again. If this VC thing doesn’t work, I’ve just about earned my License to Kill Gophers…Moles…whatever.  Mole #2, Au Revoir! And for you animal rights activists, as soon as you start compensating me for the damage to my lawn, flagstone patio and path, I’ll listen to your complaints. At least I didn’t poison the thing and went mano y mano with the varmint.

]]> http://www.davidlstern.com/?feed=rss2&p=727 0 http://www.davidlstern.com/?p=715 http://www.davidlstern.com/?p=715#comments Tue, 25 May 2010 21:57:14 +0000 admin http://www.davidlstern.com/?p=715 At The Raging Insterno, we’re always trying to (and i’m paraphrasing) “create open, engaging interactions by providing a new layer of value for visitors to this site without sending them to Twitter.com”. With  @apture, I bring to you the Twitter account of the day! This must have been the work of The Onion. Too funny! And so sad too. Make sure to open the first video embedded in the Apture window for a horrifying video of the spill that will make your stomach churn.

]]> http://www.davidlstern.com/?feed=rss2&p=715 0 http://www.davidlstern.com/?p=711 http://www.davidlstern.com/?p=711#comments Wed, 19 May 2010 01:38:50 +0000 admin http://www.davidlstern.com/?p=711 If you have ever wanted to know how to introduce a speaker, check out Rahul Sonnad, CEO/Founder of Clearstone portfolio company Geodelic , introducing Dr. Deepak Chopra at our annual gathering. To date, and somewhat surprisingly, Rahul has yet to offer a Ukelele driven board meeting. Being on his board, I think it is about time!

In case you haven’t been paying attention, and by “you”, I mean all 5 of you readers of this blog, there have been two major happenings in the world this past week. Only two. The first, is obviously, Cornell University’s basketball team just slamming the Temple Owls 78-65, for the Ivy League’s first NCAA tournament victory since ‘98.  You can read the story directly from the Cornell Daily Sun, for you homers. It was particularly satisfying for Rubicon Project (Clearstone incubated portfolio company) superstar and ex-Big Red point guard Josh Wexler (#15), who must’ve been three sheets to the wind by halftime.  By the way, THAT Josh shouldn’t be confused with this Josh Wexler. Hopefully.

My favorite part of the game was the Big Red student holding up the sign reading “The Other Fans are Home Studying” by which I think he meant the rest of the Ivy League, who must’ve been jonesing for a Big Red Win….except for Harvard of course.

In a month where the news out of Ithaca has habitually been the hockey team’s ECAC success, and currently surrounds the amount of dramatic suicides happening at Cornell over the past year, winning and happiness were welcome theme, which too provided a wonderful opportunity to reconnect, albeit digitally, with so many classmates and friends.

Which brings me to the next big development. I’m so psyched Twitter announced the ambitious @anywhere platform last week at SXSW. According to the media that were able to take notes during the SXSW announcement, “Twitter has launched @Anywhere, a platform to pull Twitter feeds into sites that include Digg, eBay, Amazon.com and Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The idea is to find ways to discover good content on Twitter that users will want to subscribe to. Cofounder Biz Stone said the frameworks can add the Twitter experience “anywhere on the web.”

How cool is that? It is supposed to highlight people, and display hover cards over content that users might find interesting from twitter, like interesting subjects like Cornell or The Cornell Daily Sun . That’s amazing. So I can get real time updates on things important, like that the hockey team, as I write this, is up 2-0 on Brown in the ECAC semifinals. Or, if by chance I’m wanting to write about Cornell’s Jeremy Schaap , my friend and classmate from the great class of ‘91 (If he doesn’t respond, I have a nice graduation picture that we’ll be putting up here shortly instead of the “professional” one I added), I can add all this cool Twitter content. And readers can interact with it and follow him. FROM MY SITE. Seriously. Did you just read what I wrote?

Or, how cool is it that I can call out my little brother in the fraternity, Whit Watson, and Twitter’s @anywhere platform can provide so much more engagement off Twitter. Or even pal David Folkenflik, whose picture from graduation week, in what we’ll just call, NBA retro shorts….in ‘91 could also be displayed shortly–you can interact with him too.  All from my blog. Want to see it? (If I get 100 retweets, I just might post it, David!)

And the really cool thing, the coolest of all. I used Apture to do it all. Not only with Twitter media, but will all kinds of media types as well!  For those paying attention to this blog, all 5 of you, you knew that Apture launched the Apture Twitter Viewer last year at SXSW, as many comments in the press indicated. So if you haven’t tried Apture to enrich your site and truly engage your readers, you aren’t trying. And since you can’t use @anywhere yet, you might try Apture in the interim.  And yes, as an investor and board member of Apture, I’m CLEARLY biased.

So congratulations to Twitter for following what is an important trend. It surely is a strong trend, and one we invested in more than 16 months ago. And congratulations to the Big Red. My annual gift is in the mail.

PS: In case you are wondering, as you scrolled down, that search/share bar that keeps readers on your site, drives traffic, and gives you insight into what readers are doing on your site….that is from Apture too. You might want to try it, if you care about providing rich, engaging experiences on the web!

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.

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!