Howard Lindzon was nice enough to have me on his Stocktwits.tv show recently. For those who don’t know Howard, he writes a fantastic blog. He writes in such an irreverent way it’s easy to overlook the wisdom behind what he says. My favorite recent Howard-ism was, talking about investing, “I like to look outside and see my [investments].” I take this to mean he likes to invest in things he understands, can touch, go visit, etc. This is probably the single best piece of advice in order to have survived the recent financial crisis. Fancy things like CDOs, Auction-Rate Securities, etc turned out to function much differently than advertised. Diversification across asset classes (CAPM etc) turned out to be useless: when things got bad, correlations went to 1. One reason I like investing in startups is you can go visit them – they are something tangible and understandable.
Howard is also the founder of Stocktwits. Stocktwits is potentially genuinely disruptive in that it dis-intermediates Wall Street. It is one of those things that some people think is a toy now but could end up being the next big thing.
I got my first computer (TRS-80 Model 1) in 1980 at the age of 8. I got my second computer – an Atari 800 – two years later. I was living in Springfield, Ohio. Very few people were interested in computers in that area then. The only people that seemed to be were engineers at the nearby Air Force base, Wright Patterson. Every month, I used to get my parents to drive me over to meet the engineers there for Atari “user group” meetings.
Like most computer enthusiasts back then, I wanted to program video games. This of course was pre-internet and before the PC boom, so information on computer programming was scarce. At the user group meetings we would trade information as basic as what memory locations performed what functions, or new techniques people had developed (vsync interrupt, page 6 techniques – old school readers will know what I mean). After a while I was increasingly frustrated by the lack of technical information so I decided to write a letter to Atari asking them for manuals. I got a hand written letter back from Alan Kay, who was already quite famous at the time and was working at Atari, along with a giant box full of manuals and technical documentation. I’ve never met the man but I give him a lot of credit for my lifelong interest in computers.
I was reminded of this yesterday when I had the pleasure to meet with Om Malik. Om took time to meet with me years ago when I was struggling to get SiteAdvisor off the ground. No other popular bloggers would meet with me, but Om spent over an hour listening to me talk and giving me advice. I was introduced to Om by Ron Conway who invested in my company despite the fact that the industry experts he introduced me to as part of diligence hated my idea.
People never forget who helps them when they are struggling. It’s a cliche, perhaps, but true – and a good thing to always keep in mind. Thanks Alan, Om, and Ron.
Like a lot of things we think are obvious today, financial options were first invented by a philosopher:
There is the anecdote of Thales the Milesian and his financial device, which involves a principle of universal application, but is attributed to him on account of his reputation for wisdom. He was reproached for his poverty, which was supposed to show that philosophy was of no use. According to the story, he knew by his skill in the stars while it was yet winter that there would be a great harvest of olives in the coming year; so, having a little money, he gave deposits for the use of all the olive-presses in Chios and Miletus, which he hired at a low price because no one bid against him. When the harvest-time came, and many were wanted all at once and of a sudden, he let them out at any rate which he pleased, and made a quantity of money. Thus he showed the world that philosophers can easily be rich if they like, but that their ambition is of another sort.
Back when we were building SiteAdvisor, one of the things we wanted to warn users about were websites that sold or traded your email address leading to spam (you can see some of the bad stuff we caught in our old blog posts). In order to do this we created bots that crawled the web and signed up for every form they could find. Tens of millions of forms.*
Some of these forms required a physical address, so we rented a post office box and gave that address. A few weeks after we started, we got a call from the post office saying “Um, you guys better come down here and get your mail.” What we found were crates and crates of junk mail.
As a result, visitors to our office were delighted to find a great magazine selection:
Eventually we had to build a magazine avoider algorithm into our bots because we started getting billed for all the signed ups!
This crazy little operation still goes on today. The guys currently at SiteAdvisor (now McAfee) told me they recently received a lamb carcass in the mail (from a hunting advocacy organization).
*Yes, everything is recycled, and the ultimate goal is to reduce spam/junk mail, so we think net it’s a positive service.
Be happy, dear hearts, and allow yourselves a few more weeks of quiet exultation. It isn’t gloating, it’s satisfaction at a job well done. He was a superb candidate, serious, professorial but with a flashing grin and a buoyancy that comes from working out in the gym every morning. He spoke in a genuine voice, not senatorial at all. He relished campaigning. He accepted adulation gracefully. He brandished his sword against his opponents without mocking or belittling them. He was elegant, unaffected, utterly American, and now (Wow) suddenly America is cool. Chicago is cool. Chicago!!!
We threw the dice and we won the jackpot and elected a black guy with a Harvard degree, the middle name Hussein and a sense of humor — he said, “I’ve got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I’ve got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher.” The French junior minister for human rights said, “On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes.” When was the last time you heard someone from France say they wanted to be American and take a bite of something of ours? Ponder that for a moment.
The world expects us to elect pompous yahoos and instead we have us a 47-year-old prince from the prairie who cheerfully ran the race, and when his opponents threw sand at him, he just smiled back. He’ll be the first president in history to look really good making a jump shot. He loves his classy wife and his sweet little daughters. He looks good in the kitchen. He can cook Indian or Chinese but for his girls he will do mac and cheese. At the same time, he knows pop music, American lit and constitutional law. I just can’t imagine anybody cooler. Look at a photo of the latest pooh-bah conference — the hausfrau Merkel, the big glum Scotsman, that goofball Berlusconi, Putin with his B-movie bad-boy scowl, and Sarkozy, who looks like a district manager for Avis — you put Barack in that bunch and he will shine.
It feels good to be cool and all of us can share in that, even sour old right-wingers and embittered blottoheads. Next time you fly to Heathrow and hand your passport to the man with the badge, he’s going to see “United States of America” and look up and grin. Even if you worship in the church of Fox, everyone you meet overseas is going to ask you about Obama and you may as well say you voted for him because, my friends, he is your line of credit over there. No need anymore to try to look Canadian.
