For most of my life, baseball has been my favorite sport. There’s something soothing about watching a game, especially in person. Baseball has strategy and data — things that I have loved since a young age. It also has cheating. Cheating has been part of the game for generations. Almost exactly a century ago, the…
It’s appropriate that the common symbolism of entrepreneurship among children is the lemonade stand. Even as adults, succeeding as an entrepreneur relies on turning lemons into lemonade — even if most of the time those lemons aren’t real. From the person who becomes an entrepreneur of necessity after losing a job to the startup setbacks…
There’s something enjoyable about pulling out a new year’s calendar — even if we now don’t grab an actual calendar but simply see the date flip over to a new year on the computer screen. Even though dates have no magical powers, it always feels a bit like a clean slate every January 1. That’s…
I’m torn about how to deal with Donald Trump. Part of me says that this is the same guy who demonstrated a clear lack of respect for many Americans, engaged in disgusting personal behavior, and expressed views that would present a clear and present danger to the United States if they were actually to become…
For many, the ability to drive represents a key milestone of freedom in America. The ability to grab the steering wheel and take your car across town or even across the country has been idealized as part of our society for more than three quarters of a century. Dan Neil of he Wall Street Journal explores…
The premise of this blog is to share disruptive ideas and opinions. Sometimes they can be controversial, as well, especially on the rare occasions that I choose to tackle things like politics or religion. So be it. In the United States, we had a tradition of presidents serving no more than two terms starting with…
I had the opportunity to spend some time in Boulder, CO yesterday after the Defrag 2011 conference came to an end. I have also had the pleasure to get to know some of the tech startups from that area over the past few years, and I must say I am impressed. As I walked through…
When I was a kid one of my coaches told me: “you run like you have a refrigerator on your back!” And that’s likely true. A speed demon I was not. As a baseball player, I suspect there were times when my coach and teammates wondered if I’d be the first player ever to be…
I had a conversation yesterday that spurred me to think back to the “old days” of the World Wide Web. You see, I’ve been at this game long enough to remember Yahoo before it was at Yahoo.com. Most of you probably don’t know that it used to live at http://akebono.stanford.edu. In any case, I took…
I get a lot of email. And a lot of that email reflects pretty poorly on the sender. Some of the emails I receive wouldn’t even make the cut as amateur ransom notes. They are often laden with misspellings or typos. Frequently they fail to make a succinct point. They routinely seem to be disorganized…