Month: March 2008

I’ve been a fan of David Wilcox for a long time. Maybe 15 years or so. In my opinion his older records were absolutely incredible. Lyrics and everthing. Seeing him live (5x) is a treat. One thing I tuned into when I first picked up his records is that this is a guy that had a long fight with personal pain. He wears it on his chest and tells you everything.

Then something happened. His life got better and his songs reflected that too. I was happy for him. His blog doesn’t tell his story like his songs or his live shows which is too bad (for me).

Today I received an email from him about his latest record.

Here’s an excerpt that I found absolutely amazing:

The stomping grounds of my past. I must admit, I got curious.  I spent so much time in that vague hopelessness as a kid that I thought the world was made that way.  But it was only the view from my personal black hole, or the emotional equivelant.  So recently, when I passed close to the edge of the old vortex with its own gravitational pull that lets no joy escape, I thought I’d stop in and see what time has done to the place.  The wild part is, that when I’m outside of it, I can’t imagine being inside, but when I enter back into that depression, I can’t imagine ever being outside.  I forget that there IS an outside. It felt like it had me. 

But now I have all these belay lines in the form of songs that are achored to experiences out in the bright light of the bigger world, so I can look around inside the blue abyss and still have some hold on reality.  Songs have saved my life that way in the past, and now I get to see they can still do that for me.  I hear myself sing: you’re just down inside yourself and the black hole loses some of its pull.  Maybe as a songwriter, it’s my job to be willing and able to go back into the poisonous swirling lies of ruin in order to write the travel guide for how to get out.   That is what I always wanted from music, and I’m so grateful to feel it working in my life.

Thanks for making it possible for me to work at what I love.

Dave

 Pure honesty. Nothing like it.

Recently I was given the opportunity to invest in a friends new company

I have become quite fond of this entrepreneur. He’s passionate, interesting, curious and he’s a good guy. I also consider him a friend of mine as well.

I wanted to make this investment and work with him.  I did a bunch of work on it, talked to other smart folks in the area but in the end I decided not to do it.

I have a strong feeling that he’s going to solve a bunch of problems and probably will end up making something quite special. While I really like him, I just wasn’t excited about the specific thing he’s going to build.

I know other venture capitalists (that have excellent track records) that are able to divorce themselves from the particular subject matter.  They just think about the team and try to answer the question if the idea could be big one day.

Startups are not for the faint of heart. Whether you are an early stage investor or entrepreneur. They can be fun, scary, stressful and amazing. And sometimes that all happens all in just one week :) But one thing I’ve learned is that I need to be super interested in the idea personally or it just doesn’t work for me.

It wasn’t an easy decision for me – but it was the right one.

About a month ago, Tumblr released a bunch of new updates. Numblr listed here them here.

One of the new features was a bunch of new variables including the ability to display the Tumblr users that you follow.

I thought this was very cool. Rob Go who works with me at Spark now has a Tumblelog roll and then Fred sent me a link to this tumblelog over the weekend which has it at the bottom.

Bill Israel, who orginally designed my custom theme, added it to my site today.  This is what it looks like:

So now on the left column of this site, I proudly display the Tumblelogs I follow. 

Thanks Bill and thanks David & Marco.