Remember Bitcoin? About six years ago I helped a fellow Cornell Business School alumnus launch a new venture capital fund. It was to be focused on Fintech or financial technology companies, an area that held a great deal of interest to me since the democratization of finance had been a topic of thought by me and those around me during my career for a long time. The penultimate Chairman of Bankers Trust Company, the formative…
Coping In 1997 I was on the Management Committee of Bankers Trust Company after twenty years of rising through the ranks and having taken on a wide diversity of roles in many different businesses. I had served in mostly line management capacities, but had also had a few staff positions, all with a growing breadth of responsibilities. In other words, I had risen through the middle management levels and was one of the firms leadership…
Working Stiff I have a strange feeling that 2020 was a buffer year for me, not so much by design, but by happenstance. After many years (I mark them as starting in 1966 at the age of twelve…so call it fifty-five years), the inertia of work has set in. People talk about “failing retirement” as a cute tongue-in-cheek way of bragging that they are so busy in retirement or see such a demand for their…
Going Beyond Perfect Vision Today is the first day of 2021 (or it will be when this publishes). I have rarely felt so much angst and anticipation for a new year as I feel this year. I suspect I am not alone in this feeling, but perhaps I am more inclined to elaborate on that feeling than others. To begin with and to get this out of the way, going beyond 2020 with one’s vision…
Consensus Construction I have gotten myself into a funny place…again. That funny place has to do with my deck renovation project. This is unlike any other project I have undertaken before. The fundamental reason is that I probably have too much time on my hands. Precisely speaking, I have both the time and am home-bound by COVID like we all are. That is proving to be a very expensive combination. I write 1,200 – 1,400…
Irresponsibility On Friday, I was in the second day of the administratively enforced blackout (as in total grid shut-down) from our local utility. The cause (excuse?) was the Santa Ana wind and its harsh dry gusts that could easily induce a wildfire that could quickly get out of control and create a liability for said utility. I had had the foresight to anticipate the possibility of this situation earlier in the year and put my…
Stop and Listen to the Wind This is a strange day in a constantly strange year. What is making this day so much more strange is that I was awoken at 6am, somewhat earlier than normal given that I was up until 11:45pm watching Brian Williams trying to once again recap the strangeness of the day yesterday in the news. The reason I woke up early was that I heard a strange sound that I…
Every Day is Special Yesterday was apparently Cyber Monday. Last Friday was Black Friday, whatever that is. Whatever it is, the marketplace seems to feel its necessary to advertise it excessively for two weeks before and a week after. Its like those old signs on the highway that said, “You just passed X, so turn around and drive back to find X”. And today is Giving Tuesday, which I imagine we are supposed to feel…
Deck The Halls and Haul The Deck Did I mention that I am playing contractor on my deck renovation? Even if I did, I need to howl at the moon over this and so this story is what comes out. Long ago I thought I wanted to be an architect. That morphed into wanting to be a structural engineer, which evolved into an engineer more broadly, and that drifted based on a nasty run-in with…
A Visit to TeslaLand When I was a kid in grade school, there were two things we spent all summer anxiously awaiting in September, and neither one involved the start of school. One was the new network TV show line-up from ABC, CBS and NBC. TV Guide would dutifully construct and publish a two-page weekly schedule. We would pour over that schedule and curse the network scheduling executives that purposefully matched up head-to-head the shows…