The End of the Blockchain My personal history with blockchain began in 2014 when I was the Chairman of a new venture capital company called Green Visor Capital. It was started by a fellow Cornell MBA named Simon Yoo and I agreed to help him launch by signing on as a General Partner and, indeed, by serving as its first Chairman. That situation existed for about a year and then I passed the title over…
Kneeding Comfort When my kids were younger they fell into two categories. Carolyn and Thomas were forever rambunctiously scraping their knees and existing in a somewhat constant state of scabbed kneecaps from their falling. Roger, on the other knee, was s different sort of child. He was the child that at the age of one crawled to edge of the blanket on the lawn, touched the wet grass and recoiled back to the safety of…
Uninsurable Kim is running around the house singing Uninsurable to the tune of Unforgettable by Nat King Cole. I got a notice yesterday from my long-time insurer, Chubb, who advised me that they will not be renewing my homeowners insurance coverage in 2022 due to the California wildfire issue. It seems that they have struck some sort of reinsurance deal that precludes them for renewing us hard-case daredevil Californians who choose to live in harm’s…
Autobiography We went to go see Kenneth Branagh’s new film, Belfast. It chronicles the youth of a Protestant boy growing up during the strife of the religiously war-torn Irish city. The message is quite stark and clear, growing up amidst religious strife is no fun. The young boy is presumably Branagh at about age nine. His father and mother are Belfast natives who live on a street near where they were raised in working-class Belfast.…
Normal Is As Normal Does Yesterday, Kim and I decided at noon to go to see a movie at 1:50 in the afternoon. That’s the sort of thing we might have done two years ago on a Saturday while living in Manhattan. But yesterday was Thursday and we are still living under a COVID cloud. So, to begin with, we are retired and do not have jobs that keep us occupied Monday through Friday. We…
The Himalayan Plains Wedged between the Hindu Kush to the West, Tibet to the North and the mysterious Bhutan to the East lies the fifteen hundred miles of solid mountain range, the highest in the world, known as the Himalayas. The Himalayas are so vast that they encroach on a number of countries, but the bulk of the range and the alluvial plains that flow southward from them constitute the country of Nepal. This area…
The Reverse Commute On Wednesdays I drive down towards downtown San Diego, which is where the University of San Diego is located. I was a commuter in New York City for years, but have never been in that groove (a.k.a. rut) here in San Diego. I teach from 7pm to 9:50pm on Wednesday nights and will do so through May of next year (actually 7pm to 8:50pm in the Spring). That has me leaving home…
The Hallowed Halls I am once again sitting here in the hallway of a building on the campus of the University of San Diego, where I am an adjunct professor in the graduate business program. When I was at Cornell’s graduate business school for ten years, I was not alone as an adjunct professor, but it was not like here. I do not know, nor do I plan to investigate the exact balance between full-time…
Bootstrapping Bootstrapping is a complicated word. Much more complicated than I had imagined until I started looking into it. I would ask you to play along with me and make a note to yourself about what you think of when someone uses the term bootstrapping. I don’t want to bias your thought process by adding a context. The term derives from the small leather loop or tab at the back of a man’s boot that…
Traveling to Enlightenment We went to see the new Ridley Scott movie The Last Duel last night at the local Angelika Film Center. Once again, it was very lightly attended with a mere 8-10 people in the well-appointed theater. The film is set in 1386 or so and chronicles what was the end stages of the Middle Ages in Europe. The movie makes reference to the economic hardship to noblemen and their estates by virtue…